Death and Desire, Apocalypse and Utopia: Feminist Gestus and the Utopian Performative in the Plays of Naomi Wallace

Death and Desire, Apocalypse and Utopia: Feminist Gestus and the Utopian Performative in the Plays of Naomi Wallace SHANNON BALEY Capitalism plunders the sensuality ofthe body, - Terry Eagleton (qtd, in Gornick 31) Some labor destroys the body r..II/your hands are damaged, it doesn'tjusl mean you can no J onger work and earn a living. it also means that you will no longer be able to touch someone you love. 1 / your body is destroyed alld exhausted, then how can you desire? - Naomi Wallace (qld. in Gardner5) Icould touch myselfat night and Ididn' I know If it was her halld or mine. Icould touch myself· I could put my hand. Jcould. Maybe I was asleep. I don't know bw sometimes J put my hand. Inside myself - Dalton Chance (The Trestle ar Pope Lick Creek 310) In the final scene of Naomi Wallace's Depression-era play The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (1998), the two youngest characlers - Dalton Chance, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, and Pace Creagan, the seventeen-year-old young woman whose presence literally and figuratively haunts the play - engage in a highly erotic sex scene without touching. This scene, like the prologue, bookends the play in a kind of "no-space," which is neither the place of memory (the "when" of the majority of Trestle) nor the present moment, as indicated by Wallace's opaque stage direction: "{Dalton] is ill a place that is both the past and the presellt at the same time" (340). During the course of the scene, Pace completes her arm's-length seduction of Dalton from beyond the grave, commanding him to lie down upon her dress (a material presence that complements - and complicates - her own ghostly presence), and to "touch" her by touching himself. Dalton complies, and audience members watch both characters climax, a charged and complicated "looking" that, for audience and actors Modern Drama,47:2 (Summer 2004) 237 SHANNON BALEY alike, balances on the thin edge between radicalism and voyeurism. Pace's last line, and the last line of the play, is particularly lyrical and complicated, apropos of Wallace's writing throughout Trestle. After a few "quiet moments," she observes: "There. We're something else now. You see? We're in another place" (342). What they have been transformed into, and what or where that other place exactly is, whether it is apocalyptic or utopian, a place of redemption or a place of loss, are the open questions of the play. A similar scene takes place in Wallace's One Flea Spare (1995), set in plague-ridden seventeenth-century London. Trapped in a quarantined home, Morse, a mad servant girl, Bunce, an escaped conscripted sailor, and William and Darcy Snelgrave, the elderly, wealthy lord and lady of the house, wipe the walls with vinegar and mercilessly enact physical and emotional torture on each other while waiting out the disease. Near the climax of the play, Darcy, who had been horribly scarred in a fire when she was much younger, asks to see Bunce's wound, an unhealed hole in his side. Obliging, he takes her hand and guides her finger into the hole; her reaction echoes Dalton's experience with Pace in Trestle as she comments with wonder: "My finger. I've put my finger. Inside. It's warm. (Beat) It feels like I'm inside you" (53). Afterwards Wallace's stage direction dictates she "looks at her hand as though it might have changed" (54). The much younger Bunce then begins slowly, almost scientifically , to explore Darcy's body while relating the horrific details of life as a conscript in the Royal Navy, searching for places where she can feel through the layers of scar tissue. Wallace juxtaposes Darcy's slow sexual re-awakening and Bunce's own digital penetration of her with his bleak, jarring narrative of a young man vomiting his "stomach into [his] hands" and gulls whose wings "caught fire, so close did they circle the sinking masts" during a sea battle (55-56). Darcy's sexual climax, like Dalton's, occurs in an odd, liminal "someplace else," a space in which intimacy and physical desire can subsist with war, immolated birds...