Sarah Daniels' Hysteria Plays: Re-presentations of Madness in Ripen Our Darkness and Head-Rot Holiday

Sarah Daniels' Hysteria Plays: Re-presentations of Madness in Ripen Our Darkness and Head-Rot Holiday CARINA BARTLEET One of the most intriguing features of the oeuvre of playwright Sarah Daniels is the high incidence of female characters who have madness ascribed to them. Best known as a dramatist whose work engages with contemporary themes, primarily from a feminist perspective, Daniels writes plays that are predominantly realist and combine darkly comic humour with frequently polysemic word play. Her interest in mental illness is one that mirrors wider feminist attention to the subject and especially the identification of madness as what Elaine Showalter famously describes as the "female malady." The concatenation between women and madness has provided fertile ground for feminist inquiry, with the labelling of women as mad seen as a manifestation of misogyny. For Jane Ussher, "the discursive practices which create the concept of madness mark it as fearful, as individual, as invariably feminine, as sickness [...J [IJf madness is shameful and fearful, as it is within our current discourse, the woman is stigmatized and made an outsider" (12). The examination of hysteria. its clinicians, and its patients is a distinct and thoroughly examined strand of this area of feminist analysis and reassessme. nt. In the words of Mark Micale, "From its alleged origins in the writings of ancient Egypt and Greece to present-day psychiatric writings, hysteria may be interpreted as a key medical metaphor for /0 condition feminine [...J The wildly shifting physical symptomatology of the disease was thought by many observers to mirror the irrational, capricious, and unpredictable nature of Woman" (68). As women and madness became a familiar critical theme during the latter half of the twentieth century, the etymological links between hysteria and women's reproductive function became almost a cliche. Furthennore, some feminist readings have linked both the disease and its female sufferers with rebellion against the narrow roles that middle-class women were expected to occupy at the end of the nineteenth century.' For these reasons, hysteria has Modern Drama, 46:2 (Summer 2003) 241 242 CARINA BARTLEET often been the default framework through which to view the connection between women and madness. Nevertbeless, some recent analyses in the areas of theatre and performance studies have sought to formulate hysteria in terms of performance and the performative act. Identifying hysteria as both mimicry and a performative act, Schutzman posits the existence of similarities between the iconographies of hysteria and images of women in advertisements (3, 5, 12). In so doing, she glimpses what she tenns "the possibilities of embracing hysteria as a feminist strategy by consciously duplicating the duplicity [that] it rails against" and "pose[s] ways in which the performative aspects of hysteria may be cultivated as forms of nonoppositional resistance - resistance intimate with what it resists" (15). While Schutzman uses hysteria as a trope for women's relation to the symbolic order in a consumer society, Elin Diamond uses it to inform her readings of realist theatre. Specifically, she .contends that "realism and early psychoanalysis are both theatres ofknowledge - sites charged with the pleasure of positivist inquiry. Both share a similar object (the hysteric/fallen woman), a common claim to truth (the discovery of her secret), and a common genealogy (nineteenth-century melodramatic and clinical spectacles) [...] [I]n exploiting the signifiers and medical models of the hysteric, realism catches her disease, that is, produces the malady it is supposed to contain and cure" (xiii- iv). The subjects of Diamond's inquiries, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robbins' Alan's Wife, are both plays of the late nineteenth century. The trope of hysteria is hardly exclusive to the nineteenth century: nevertheless, these plays share with Daniels' plays of the 1980s and 1990S the combining of negotiations of theatrical realism with the depiction of women's madness. Diamond's thesis that realism has the potential to "catch" the hysteric 's disease - that. in representing hysteria, the structures that realism is supposed to contain are replicated in the drama - informs this discussion of Daniels' work. In each of Daniels' later plays, specifically, Head-Rot Holiday (1992), The Madness .of Esme and Shaz (1994), and the radio play PlIIple Side...