"A Population [and Theater] at Risk": Battered Women in Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Shepard's A Lie of the Mind

"A Population [and Theater] at Risk": Battered Women in Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Shepard's A Lie of the Mind JANET V. HAEDICKE ''The weeping of women who are wives - what is more bitter?"l Oft-castigated for its preponderance of family drama, American theater seems unprotestingly to cede stature to British theater, which has moved from "kitchen-sink" realism to presumably more universal and political plays. Yet the charge of lIiviality levelled against American "diaper drama'" in the theater dissipates in the face of the domestic drama currently being played on the cultural stage: statistics indicate that "An American resident is 'more likely to be physically assaulted, beaten, and killed in the home at the hands of a loved one than any place else, or by anyone else."'3 That many such residents are women led former U.S. Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop in 1989 to decry wife-battering as "an overwhelming moral, economic, and public health burden that our society can no longer bear" and to identify battered women as U a population at risk."4 Current Surgeon-General Antonia Novello.in 1992 backed a surprising American Medical Association declaration of domestic violence against women as an epidemic requiring intervention by health officials.5 Should they escape their kitchens for the theater, those four million women assaulted annually ·would hardly find American family plays lIivial or apolitical. This is not to imply, however, that any such play is by nature politically progressive, even if it directly addresses the issue of family violence. Ironically , Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, widely lauded as a breakthrough since its 1981 Pulitzer was the first for a woman in twenty-three years, emerges as ultimately regressive compared to Sam Shepard's 1985 A Lie of the Mind, vehemently attacked by feminist critics as exemplifying the playwright 's macho vision6 Prompted by the ever-suspect politics of the Pulitzer, which has since rewarded female escape through suicide and meaning through maternity,? this treacherous stance finds theoretical ground in the location of Model'll Drama, 36 (1993) 83 JANET V. HAEDICKE Henley's play within a modernist, albeit feminist, epistemology and Shepard's within a postmodernist, more politically feminist, bne. Further outcry from feminists who attack postmodern theory's decentering of the subject as a negation of agency may be deflected by Wendy Brown's cogent response to the current critical (in every sense of the word) debate. Brown argues that "postmodernity signifies a pervasive condition'" as distinguished from postmodern theory, which signifies, like the current modernist position, a response to that condition. Thus it is epoch, not theory, which poses a threat to fannulating an effective alternative politics. The cultural-spatial disorientation of postmodernism has produced an identity politics and a strategic fundamentalism "rooted not [conservatively1 in a coherent tradition but [reactionarily] in a fetishized, decontextualized fragment or icon of such a narrative - 'the American flag,' 'the great books,' 'the traditional family.!"9 Insisting that even an issue from the Left, such as feminism, can become just such "reactionary foundationalism" when it poses as a necessary good, Brown contends that modernist feminism's rejection of postmodern theory as apolitical actually reflects an antipolitical preference for reason over power, truth over politics, security over freedom, discoveries over decisions, and identities over pluralities. It is such reactionary modernism which renders Henley's Crimes of the Heart Pulitzerly palatable and, not coincidentally, precludes encouragement of a feminist alternative politics to counter familial and social violence. Literalizing both the "kitchen-sink" disparagement of domestic drama and the historical relegation of women to the private sphere, Crimes of the Hearl takes place entirely in the kitchen of the MaGrath family home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Moreover, Henley specifies the time as "In the fall; five years after Hurricane Camille,"'o thereby associating the turbulence in the lives of the MaGrath sisters with the turbulence of a Nature constructed as feminine. Indeed, these women seem to spawn turbulence, since the central crime of the play and the catalyst for their reunion is the youngest sister's shooting of her husband Zackery, the town's most prominent lawyer. The play opens on the oldest sister, Lenny...