Female Victims and the Male Protagonist in Václav Havel's Drama

Female Victims and the Male Protagonist in Vaclav Havel's Drama JUDE R. MECHE Vaelav Havel's recent rise to political power in the now-dissolved Czechoslovak Republic has only confinned some critics' contentions that Havel's dramatic works are all basically political in origin and theme. These critics' beliefs are supported by some striking similarities in many of Havel's plays; the bureaucracies that are.often seen as thinly veiled representations of totalitarian regimes, for example, are present in or alluded to in all of Havel's major works beginning with The Garden Parry (i963) and ending with Temptation (1985). But while the existence of these bureaucratic systems and the protagonists ' struggle to retain their personal identity in their dealings with such systems may suggest a political theme, they by no means limit Havel's plays to political matters. The appeal of Havel's plays in the West - especially in the United States, where threats of totalitarianism are distant - seems to suggest that these works hold within themselves something beyond their political content , something capable of capturing the attention of a large portion of the Western hemisphere. Martin Esslin offers perhaps a better perspective to Havel's plays (or at least one that is better able to explain the playwright's international popularity ) when he identifies Havel as an absurdist. Esslin's absurdist playwrights strive to express "the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought";' and indeed, Havel injects a multitude of contradictions and paradoxes into his plays, seemingly to express this very idea. And alongside these paradoxes and contradictions, Havel's works also mercilessly employ repetitions of words and actions. The end result of these techniques is a world - often centered around scientific or business affairs where the human is remote or even alien; and it is in such a world that Havel's protagonists confront the absurd in the guise of bureaucracy and inner-office power struggles. For Hugo Pludek, Josef Gross, Leopold NetModern Drama, 40 (1997) 468 Female Victims in Havel's Drama ties, or any of Havel's other heroes, the seemingly-arbitrary rise and fall of fortune is akin to Sisyphus's meaningless but interminable struggles to roll a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down. Unfortunately, the protagonists in these dramatic works fail to face the absurd with the heroic acceptance that Camus attributes to Sisyphus. In The Garden Party, for instance, Hugo's "swift career is ... realized at the expense of his personality,'" and Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz describes this loss of individuality as a fall from humanity: "Hugo has become a talking machine, a robot, repeating language which has become independent of its user. He has become a well-functioning particle in a system."] Havel's other protagonists, like Ionesco's rhinoceroses, also abandon their humanity or compromise themselves to become more easily assimilated into the inhuman bureaucracy that surrounds them. However, if Havel's heroes 3Te not representative of the human in these plays, questions concerning whether such a representative exists and who such a figure would be follow logically. In searching for answers to these questions, Havel's viewer quickly finds that the only figures who consistently stand in contrast to the absurdity of the dramatist 's bureaucracies are his female characters, particularly his secretaries. In his own life, Havel seems to find an element of innate humanity in women. Certainly. his wife serves almost as an anchor, in Letters to Olga, to keep him connected to the normal, human world outside of his prison routine of work and interrogation.4 And Phyllis Carey identifies as the climactic catharsis of Letters to Olga one moment when, while Havel is watching television in prison, the television studio'S sound equipment fails and "[a]n anonymous television weather-woman realizes with great embarrassment ... that her words are not being heard." Carey notes that The woman's vulnerability bespeaks naked human existence, which evokes compassion from those who are no less vulnerable. The picture of the mute human trying futilely to make contact from the machine-prison becomes a remarkable image for a great deal that...