"They are well together. Women are not": Productive Ambivalence and Female Hom(m)osociality in Fefu and Her Friends

"They are well together. Women are not": Productive Ambivalence and Female Hom(m)osociality in Fefu and Her Friends PIPER MURRA Y Participating in your economy. I did not know what I could have desired. Made phallic, whether by procuration or by delegation, I forgot what my jouissance could have been. - Luce lrigaray, Elemental Passions (61) Maria Irene Fornes's Fefll and Her Friends leaves us with a vision that is nothing if not ambivalent. Coming as the climax of eight women's efforts to throw off "the stifling conditions" (45) that have brought them together, Julia's sympathetic death - apparently the result of a shot fired by Phillip's unsympathetic gun - shocks and confuses. In an effort to explain this strangely ambiguous ending, many critics have looked to onc of its most obvious roots: the conflicted psyches of Fefu and her friends. In such an interpretation, Julia's real and hallucinated struggle, however dramatic, becomes just an extreme example of the pain and paralysis that all the women experience. All of these women, it would seem, have internalized the kind of judges Julia hallucinates in her Part Two monologue. All of them must strive to create an identity not dependent on men (or "man") for its definition, one that celebrates both the plumbing that women can call their own and the fact that women can do 311 their "own plumbing " ( 13). Besides identifying this "common denominator" (29), as Cecilia might put it, critical discussions about how all of these fractured identities finally add up tend to fall into two camps. The first, less sanguine approach tends to focus on how thoroughly the psyches of Fefu and her friends have been inscribed by maJe dominance. Read as a dramatization of the effects of that dominance, Fefu and her friends come to represent the psychic fragments that, when pieced together, give us a reflection ofthe male structure that literally surrounds them. According to this reading, the most significant bond that exists between the play's all-female cast would seem to be their common interest in making a place for themselves within that structure. W.B. Worthen, [or example, has Modern Drama, 44:4 (200 1) 398 Fe/u alld Her Friends 399 attempted to show how, despite the fact that no men actually appear on stage, "ltJhe authority of the absent male is everywhere evident in Fe/II" (176). It is the male (or his absence), in other words, that holds the women - and each woman - together. Other critics, on the other hand, have de-emphasized the absent presence of the men, opting instead to see Fefu and her friends as a positive presence in their own right. Penny Farfan, for example, suggests that "Fefu alld Her Friends posits postmodem feminist theatre practice as a constructive response to the psychic dilemmas of the play's female characters" (443). Even more celebratory , Deborah Geis has argued that Fe/u represents the successful formation of a "transgressive [...Jcommunity of listeners [...J capable of generating enormous power" (298). In this view, it is not solely the men's power that bonds these women to one another but also a power they can call their own, resistant to but not solely defined by the men's. So much power do they generate on their own, in fact, that Julia's conflicted psyche must be sacrificed in order to baptize this community'S capacity to, as Geis quotes Fefu, "blow the world apart" (298). Apocalyptic as that sounds, however, both readings tend to elide much ofthe ambivalence that I find at the heart ofthis play's production. To celebrate theirs as an unambivalent "joining together," I would suggest, ignores many of the limits of identity and desire that, individually and together, Fefu and her friends perform. After all, the female characters who do make it outside the house to stargaze on the lawn must finally come running back inside, where they stand over Julia's violently (yet imperceptibly) murdered body. And even earlier in the play, it becomes gravely clear that whatever power has been produced by these women's performances depends on more than their individual psyches; it also depends on how their performances...