A Feminist Absurd: Margaret Hollingsworth's The House That Jack Built

A Feminist Absurd: Margaret Hollingsworth's The House That Jack Built CELESTE DERKSEN Theatre scholars with an interest in absurdism are likely to find the name Margaret Hollingsworth oddly out of place on a list including such canonical representatives as Samuel Beckett, Eugene IaneseD, Harold Pinter, and Vaclav Havel. This is particularly the case given that the playwright is a contemporary Canadian woman and afeminist. The profits of this inclusion are found in its very disjunction: to consider Hollingsworth as absurdist is at once a challenge to the male exclusivity that is a defining feature of absurdism and an argument for revitalizing absurdism as a contemporary critical tenn.' Indeed, I contend that much of Hollingsworth's drama draws from, and is illuminated by, consideration of absurdist technique, philosophy, and subject positions. Further, she deploys absurdism in a manner that foregrounds gender concerns and so points to the exclusion - or incomprehension - of gender as a controlling framework of meaning in the established tradition. As such, Hollingsworth 's dramatic vision presents the potential for an enlivening new critical conception: the "femin~st absurd." Hollingsworth's plays have a tendency towards experimentalism and variety ; thus, any alignment of her work with a single writerly position/style or philosophical stance should be provisional and experimental. Caveat in hand, I argue that many of her plays - particularly her early work' - are clearly layered with seams of absurdism. This essay focuses specifically on The House . That Jack Built, one of four short plays in Hollingsworth's 1988 collection Endangered Species, in which the effects of gender become ludicrous and ominous, to the point of comic absurdity. The House That Jack Built features Jack and Jenny, a married couple who sit onstage in rocking chairs through virtually the entire play. While the character notes state that they are only twenty-four years old, the rocking chairs ominously suggest that the couple has prematurely aged for some reason. The rocking chairs also create an effect of repetitive motion with no progress - visibly and acoustically - onstagc.' Modern Drama, 45:2 (Summer 2002) 209 210 CELESTE DERKSEN Hollingsworth's settings allude to George Toles's description of "Beckett's eternal waiting room, where one is condemned to speech and repetitive activity simply because one cannot leave" (162, original emphasis). In this play, Jack and Jenny are entrapped in preconceived gender and marital structures. Throughout the play they rock, moving backwards and forwards in time, each relating their separate version of how they reached their current condition. Jack's story tells of his Herculean effort to make his wife happy by building her a home in the country; Jenny's narrative exposes her attempts to gain autonomy within the confines of marriage, her resistance to the house, and her eventual containment in that structure and what it represents. The House That Jack Built takes its name from a traditional nursery rhyme that employs a repetitive type of word play knows as accumulation: This is the hOllse that Jack built. 2. This is the malt That lay in the house that Jack built. 3. This is the rat, That ate the malt, That lay in the house that Jack built. 4. This is the cat, That killed the rat, That ate the malt, That lay in the house that Jack built. The rhyme continues, accumulating a dog, a cow with a crumpled hom, a maiden all forlorn, a man, a priest (who marries maiden and man), a cock, and a farmer. Like other nursery rhymes of this type, the accumulative pattern conforms to recognizable social patterns and hierarchies. These include the ascendancy of larger mammals (which culminates in the human male), the desirability of material accumulation.and consumption, and the inevitability of heterosexual marriage. Still, there is a trouble-spot in the rhyme's comfortable wor(l)d order. Jack appears to represent its apex, since his name is repeated as the agent of the cumulative action. But lack's action is silly, even ignorant: he leaves malt in the house for the "lesser" animals to find. In other words, while Jack appears to be the pivotal character, he is less than dependable and certainly less than heroic. He is, in short...