May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essyas on the Drama of August Wilson

August Wilson’s Women

HARRY I. ELAM, IR. August Wilson's Women The significance of August Wilson in contemporary American theatrical practice and African American cultural discourse is unparalleled. In his dramatic cycle, Wilson has reexamined American history, foregrounding black experience and moving it into the subject position. Wilson perceives history not as a fixed point but rather as a site for inquiry, reexamination, and even revision. He challenges and critiques the past choices blacks have made as his black male protagonists press the limits ofprejudice, poverty, and racial oppreSSIon. Wilson's black female characters also challenge orthodoxy and press against historical limitations, recognizing and confronting the additional burdens placed upon them by gender. Limited by their subordinate position within the patriarchy, the women in Wilson's dramas attempt to establish relationships with men on their own terms. Black women in Wilson's dramaturgy, however, function largely in secondary roles and act often in reaction to men. Even in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Ma Rainey, the female title character, is not the focus. The representation of black women by August Wilson, thus, offers a complex and intriguing dialectic. He presents independent women who assert feminist positions, but who, either through their own volition or as the result of external social pressures, ultimately conform to traditional gender roles and historical expectations. Before the action begins in Wilson's play ofthe 1960s, Two Trains Running, the one female character, Risa, has engaged in a radical and intensely personal protest against the objectification of women. Frustrated by men who deny her humanity by observing her body as a sex object, Risa takes a razor and scars her legs, seven scars on one leg, eight on the other. Holloway, an older black man and a daily visitor to the restaurant where Risa works, interprets her self-mutilation for the other male characters: I know Risa. She one of them gals that matured quick and every man that seen her since she was twelve years old think she ought to go lay up with 166 AUG U S T W I L SON'S W 0 MEN them somewhere. She don't want that. She figure ifshe made her legs ugly that would force everybody to look at her and see what kind of personality she is. (50) Risa later reiterates Holloway's contention: "That's why I did it. To make them ugly" (69). Risa's ostensively irrational revolt against objectification lends itself to interpretations based on recent feminist theory and theatrical criticism. Feminist theatrical criticism has reacted against traditional gender categories and questioned the construction of women on stage. In Feminism and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes: Overall, feminist semiotics concentrates on the notion of"woman as sign." From this perspective, a live woman standing on the stage is not a biological or natural reality, but "a fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but congruent discourses in dominant western cultures." In other words, the conventions of the stage produce a meaning for the sign "woman," which is based upon their cultural associations with the female gender.} Because traditional theater is constructed from and intended for the "male gaze," feminist theatrical criticism and practice attempts to "deconstruct" traditional "signs ofwoman" onstage. In Two Trains Running, Risa literally "deconstructs " herself as woman. She defies traditional expectations and exists outside cultural cod.es of femininity. Her employer, Memphis, with disdain proclaims: A man would be happy to have a woman like that except she done ruined herself. She ain't ~ight with herself ... how she gonna be right with you. Anybody take a razor and cut up herself ain't right.... Something ain't right with a woman don't want no man. That ain't natural. If she say she like women that be another thing. It ain't natural but that be something else. But somebody that's all confused about herself and don't want nobody I can't figure out where to put her. (50) Although unintended, Memphis's words support the effectiveness of Risa's political strategy and feminist deconstruction. No longer is she viewed simply as a sexual object or a possession for "some man to lay up with." Her scarification and the corresponding reaction by men emphasize the interlocking systems of women's oppression and objectification noted by Patricia Hill Collins in her book Black Feminist Thought.2 AUG U S T W I L SON'S W 0 MEN...