Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights ed. by Enoch Brater (review)

Book Reviews ENOCH BRATER, ed. Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. New York: Oxford UP 1989. Pp. xvi, 284. $35.00. During the past decade, literary critics have been engaged in an intense deb~te over the terms of their practice. A consequence of this debate is that the critic's stance of objectivity no longer seems tenable because it is now generally accepted that all criticism is shaped by the ideology of the critic. If all criticism is ideological, it isn't much of a stretch to claim that all criticism has a political dimension. In this context, the publication of Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, a collection of flfteen essays with an introduction by the editor, Enoch Brater, raises some difficult questions about criticism and drama. My focus in this review is Bcater's introduction which defines the ideological basis for his inclusions in this collection. Brater is an eminent critic who is perhaps best known as a Beckett scholar and as the editor of Theatre Journal. In Feminine Focus, he includes essays by both men and women all of whom, with the exception of Jeannette LalIiou Savona and Katharine Worth, are affiliated with American universities. Many of the contributors (including. among others, Linda Ben-Zvi, Sue Ellen Case, Ruby Cohn, Elin Diamond, Timothy Murray, Austin Quigley and Katharine Worth) are names familiar to those interested in contemporary drama, although not all are critics who previously I would have identified as having a particular interest in issues related to women and theatre. The essays within the volume represent a range ofapproaches from Cohn's methodologically conventional history ofTheatre du Solei! to Worth's measuring of the achievements ofcontemporary British women playwrights against those of Shaw to Diamond's critique of Benmussa's work as a dramatization of representation itself to Case's consideration of the intersection of sexuality and class as determinations of subjectivity in the work of Splil Britches. As a result of the diversity of approaches, the volume's cohesiveness comes from its focus on the work of "new" women playwrights, all of whom are either American, British or French. It should be noted at this point that the use of "new" to Book Reviews 323 describe pJaywrights like Caryl Churchill, Marguerite Duras, Maria Irene Fornes and Ariane Mnouchkine is problematic given the sustained body of work which these women have produced. [n short, whatever the merits of individual essays - many of which are excellent contributions to the study of contemporary theatre - the range of critical approaches inscribes a liberal politic which has particular implications. In theory, a liber~l politic is laudable inasmuch as it represents a certain generosity. a willingness to entertain the merits ofa range of positions. The phrase "in theory" points to a difficulty with the politics because ours is not a world which exists solely "in theory," although admittedly this point often seems belied by the decade's debates over literary theory which frequently assume an esoteric quality. Ironically. it is not despite, but because of, these debates, that many of us have come to see gender. class and race as shaping our readings of texts because these ideologies detennin~ who we are as reading subjects. Arguably, it is the force of these debates which facilitated the various strains of feminism within the academy and thus opened the market ow:ithin literary criticism for a book like Feminine Foeus. But, even as the range of feminist thinking opens the market for Feminine Foeus, its theoretical apparatuses provide the tools for querying the project. In his introduction, Brater quotes Caryl Churchill: "'[O]nce you've become conscious of gender it's hard not to be always aware of what gender you've chosen for a character'" (xiii). I can only assume that Brater, in choosing this project, is likewise conscious of gender. Presumably, then, he must be aware that one issue at stake in this project is the significance of having a volume of eassays dealing with women's writing e,dited by a man. This raises the thorny question: what is the impHcation of having men write about women? In theory, I can't see a particular problem with men...