Almost "Better to Be Nobody": Feminist Subjectivity, the Thatcher Years, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse

Almost "Better to Be Nobody": Feminist Subjectivity, the Thatcher Years, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace ofMary Traverse .MARTHA RITCHIE As a preface to The Grace of Mary Traverse, Timberlake Wertenbaker includes a quotation from George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle stating that although the "definition of culture in the age of the gas-oven, of the arctic camps, of napalm ... may belong solely to the past history of hope ... [w]e must keep in focus its" hideous novelty or renovation,"1 Written during Wertenbaker's 1985 stint as resident writer at London's Royal Court Theatre, The Grace ofMary Traverse focuses on culture through the young, well-bred Mary and her quest for knowledge and experience in late-eighteenth-century London. However, Wertenbaker cautions in an author's note that Mary Traverse is not a historical play and that the eighteenth-century setting is a metaphor for contemporary times. Of the contemporary issues Wertenbaker's work addresses, feminist themes often stand out. In fact, along with Mmy Traverse, plays such as Case to Answer (1980), New Anatomies (1981), Inside Out (1982), and The Love of the Nightingale (1988) feature female characters whose articulation of sexual desire, resistance to patriarchy, and/or transgression of conventional gender boundaries demonstrate this playwright's interest in staging feminist sUbjectivities. Wertenbaker's concern with the "definition of culture" in The Grace ofMary Traverse strongly links this play's feminist subjectivities to British culture and politics in 1985. In the play's opening two scenes, set in the London drawing room of the affluent Traverse home, Mary is seen hard at work trying to become an "amiable woman," an eighteenth-century construct (62). In the first scene Giles Traverse coaches his daughter in the art of conversation; in the second, striving to become virtually invisible, Mary practices "weightless" walking. Despite these efforts, Mary, a protected ornament decorating her father's life, remains unfulfilled and longs to experience the outside world. She comes to realize that, in fact, identity tends to be little more than a "pose" (98), and that nature itself is not fixed and intrinsic but simply a "matter of practice" (84). Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 404 Almost "Better to Be Nobody" As Mary adopts many poses throughout the text, Wertenbaker creates a roleplaying heroine whose identity continually shifts and changes, depending upon her circumstances. Initially, when Mary moves out of her sheltered drawing room and into the streets of London, Wertenbaker uses the mistaken-identity device to destabilize Mary's construction as the affluent, amiable woman. She begins to suggest , at the same time, that Mary is a character whom one can perceive as many different persons and roles. As Mary and the servant who enticed her into taking this journey, appropriately named Mrs. Temptwell, wander the streets, Lord Gordon mistakes them both for members of the lower classes. When Mary takes no interest in Gordon, he is angered that "someone like you" should ignore him (67). Gordon, still mistaking her for a lower-class woman, prepares to rape Mary, only to exchange her for the actual lower-class character, Sophie. This class confusion continues with the entrance of Mr. Manners, a politician, who mistakes Mary for a beggar, informing her "I only give money to organized charities" (69). Just as Mary appears to cross class boundaries, she seems able to cross the lines of sexual difference as well. When Mary and her guide are forbidden entrance to the eighteenth-century male world (represented by the Universal Coffee House) in Act One, Mrs. Temptwell has a plan for giving Mary knowledge of this world and its experiences. Mary agrees to Mrs. Temptwell's price, the inability to ever return to her old life, and in Act Two, Mary does gain entrance to a gaming den where, gambling with the men, she engages in typically masculine activities and seems in many respects "one of the boys." Through Mary's punning word play, Wertenbaker attempts to have her protagonist "traverse" conventional gender boundaries. Mary, hoping to start a cock fight, asks, "How's your cock, Lord Gordon?" (87). Unable to find any challengers, she wonders, "Who will fight my cock?" and does not know...