Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

10. Margaret Fuller on the Stage

One, none, and a hundred thousand [women] is the protagonist of Susan Sontag’s play Alice in Bed, written in 1990, published in 1993, and widely performed at academically related theatrical institutions both across the United States—Cambridge, Chicago, Seattle, and New York City, among other places—and Europe.1 The singular in my previous sentence is as ambiguous as it is intentional in that Alice in Bed features but one woman, who disguises as one, another, or yet another woman, thus exhibiting several identities—those of every single female character in the play. Each character, in turn, displays diversity, thus multiplying the possibilities for each different self to be “other” than one’s own self. The “house of difference” (to speak in contemporary feminist terms) emerges, therefore, from a plurality of women’s identities.2 The play—which is “about the grief and anger of women; and . . . about the imagination” (AB 117), as Sontag explains in a note following the text—had been “dreamed” by the author ten years earlier while she rehearsed, as director, a production of Luigi Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me) in Rome (1980). In the playbill, she had criticized oppression with a feminist statement: “Being created by somebody else’s 221 10 Margaret Fuller on the Stage    What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century desire is a feature of the human condition, but it is emphatically so for women. The cultural construct of women’s oppression can be understood given the assumption that women, differently from men, are created by their being desired.”3 Both Pirandello’s play and her own are centered on the problem of identity; both plays expose man’s power over women; both plays present the feminine condition in theatrical terms, according to which the characters are created or dismantled. Alice and “her friends,” however , unlike the female protagonist of Come tu mi vuoi, L’Ignota (The Unknown One), resist being exploited by the playwright or director, thus exposing, and reducing to zero, the pretense of theater of constructing and defining. By playing with the nonsensical and the theatrical, Sontag defies both Pirandello as author and herself as conniving director, and lets the fictional character Margaret Fuller come alive to oppose the construction of herself by man’s, or indeed anybody’s, desire. Alice in Bed Through eight scenes Alice James, the lifetime invalid, brilliant sisterwriter of the famous American novelist, interacts with several personae on stage, entertains a mental social gathering, and utters a long monologue occupying a whole scene. Alice—her own character a combination of bitterness, wit, indifference, resignation, curiosity, and longing— articulates, whether tentatively or provocatively, her own place in her family and in society, her vocation as a woman, her inner strife with herself, and her own desires. In the play, she goes through a series of encounters : with her nurse, who presents her patient’s inner conflict as a crisis of the will; with her demanding father, who rationally submits his daughter’s wish for death to her friends’ distress; and with her brother Harry, who suffers for her condition yet simultaneously appropriates her pains to shape those of his fictional heroines. After her (mental) party with several Victorian female figures including her mother, Alice travels again (mentally) to Rome to recover, in her imagination at least, her lost mobility. She finally meets, in her own home, a young burglar man, who unaware as well as unexpectedly raises her spirit and awakens her will to move; but “Out there it’s so big” (AB 106), she thinks, so she soon retreats to the isolation of her real and imagined illness. 222    In scene 5 Alice James’s mind is the stage for three historical characters and two fictional ones to participate in the tea party set up for herself by a number of women: the poet Emily Dickinson; Kundry, the mysterious woman from Wagner’s Parsifal; Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis; and Margaret Fuller, “the first important American woman of letters” (AB 115). Another historical character, also dead, makes her appearance at the party: it is Alice’s mother, in real life an...