Beth Henley: A Casebook (review)

In Julia A. Fesmire's introduction to this volume of essays on the work of Beth Henley, she likens Henley's reputation to that of a "one-hit wonder" in the music industry (xii). Fesmire goes on to lament this label and regrets the fact that, "Despite the quantity and range of Henley's [later] works, critical scholarship is, until now, somewhat limited" (xiii). The project of this casebook is to complicate the narrative commonly assigned to Beth Henley's career: a bright southern writer whose initial promise in Crimes of the Heart has gone unfulfilled in later works (44). The seven contributors to this book of essays work to excavate Henley's plays by questioning her marginalization as a realistic Southern writer.

The first essay, "Dancing on the Edge of a Cliff: Images of the Grotesque in the Plays of Beth Henley," by Miriam M. Chirico, traces Henley's use of the grotesque over the course of her career. Chirico argues that Henley's use of violence and dark humor, paired with images of beauty and lighter comedy, not only serves as a social critique, but works to create a juxtaposition that "demonstrates a truth central to human existence" (4). These contrasts, although on the periphery of Henley's earlier works, take center stage in the later plays. As the grotesque imagery moves to the forefront of Henley's repertoire, Chirico capably argues that it serves as social critique and evidence that Henley's plays should be considered experimental, not realistic.

Gary Richards, in an essay entitled "Moving beyond Mississippi: Beth Henley and the Anxieties of Postsouthernness," looks at the contrast between Henley's early plays, all set in southern locations, and her later work, geographically placed elsewhere. Richards convincingly argues that in these later plays, Henley parodies traditional notions of southern gender and narrative. Richards concludes that Henley's own interest in escaping her label as a Southern writer to explore postmodern and "postsouthern" themes is in part to blame for her misrepresentation by critics: they can no longer categorize her comfortably, and are therefore hesitant to praise her work.

Three pieces in the volume are close readings of different Henley texts. In her essay "The Lucky Spot as Immanent Critique," Rebecca King uses Henley's 1987 play to analyze her critique of Southern social conventions. Using the theories of Hobbes and Locke, King reasons that The Lucky Spot serves as a critique of Western culture where "capitalism and liberal meritocracy often result in social and economic dislocations, in homelessness and unemployment" (65). Although Henley bases healthy familial relationships in love, these relationships, as they exist in the nuclear family, cannot survive in the existing capitalist Southern aristocracy. The critical eye Henley turns on Southern conceptions of stable relationships, for which King argues in her essay, also works to further demonstrate Henley's intention to distance herself from her label as a Southern writer.

Karen L. Laughlin's "Abundance or Excess? Beth Henley's Postmodern Romance of the True West" discusses Henley's Abundance in relation to Sam Shepard's True West and argues that Henley "reworks the myth of the American West through the genre of romance" (90). Laughlin explores Henley's attempt to reposition the role of women in the history of the American West, while questioning the historically mythic seduction of the Western frontier. Laughlin deftly argues that Henley uses a postmodern pastiche of unstable identities and narrative clichés to highlight the artificiality in her excessive use of romance. This intentionally disingenuous strategy reveals femininity itself as an artificial construction, and allows Laughlin to question the very "truth" of women's experience in the West, and the "constructedness" of history, while she points out the error in identifying Henley as a strictly realistic writer.

Crimes of the Heart receives the last close reading of the casebook in Gene A. Plunka's "Existential Despair and the Modern Neurosis: Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart." Using Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Plunka discusses the three sisters in...