Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage

Notes

notes INTRODUCTION 1. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 160. 2. Feminist theater rose to prominence in English-language theater in particular with the careers of Pam Gems and Caryl Churchill in the United Kingdom, spawning a host of young, avowedly feminist playwrights in the late 1970s through the last years of the twentieth century. In the United States, the success of Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein on Broadway mirrored the more radical feminist and lesbian work in small performance spaces around New York by Split Britches, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and many others. These rich years in feminist and lesbian theater and performance were mirrored by early and influential studies in feminism and theater that began in earnest in the late 1970s with Janet Brown’s Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979) and reached prominence with the 1984 founding of the journal Women and Performance and the publication of Helene Keyssar’s Feminist Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1984), Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1988), and Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). Throughout the 1980s, feminist performance praxis and scholarship both insistently worked at questions of women’s identities in performance , from active advocacy for specific women’s rights to explorations and explosions of traditional gender roles. Elaine Aston, writing about American scholarship while inaugurating a transatlantic scholarship of feminist theater in An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), writes that “the work of American feminist theatre scholars has, therefore, raised the profile of feminist practitioners working in a variety of performance contexts, and has, for example, given attention to American lesbian performers, female performance artists, the theatre created by women of colour, etc.” (7–8). At the same time, feminist autobiographies and feminist theories of autobiography saw a similar growth as second-wave feminism crested. Beginning with Adrienne Rich’s confessional poetry in the late 1960s and 1970s and continuing through feminist autobiographies such as Audre Lourde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982), Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), and bell hooks’s Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), women’s autobiographies troubled the waters of 215 autobiographical form while establishing the imperative to write women’s lives. Building from the notion that “the personal is political,” such work represented an overtly politicized notion of telling life stories that at once laid bare the local details of women’s experiences and gestured outward to the broader fabric of women’s lives and the material and discursive conditions that circumscribed them. In an early gesture in the study of women’s biography , Estelle C. Jelinek, in “Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition,” in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, edited by Estelle Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), stakes out the distinctive character of women’s autobiography in such terms: “The emphasis by women on the personal, especially on other people, rather than their work life, their professional success, or their connectedness to current political or intellectual history clearly contradicts the established criterion about the content of autobiography” (10). In response to such an approach, work by Leigh Gilmore, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Sidonie Smith has laid out a more complex basis for a feminist criticism of life writing, which, as Smith writes, “must grapple with the formal constrictions and rhetorical presentations, the historical context, and psychosexual labyrinth, the subversions and the capitulations of woman’s self-writing in a patriarchal culture that ‘fictionalizes’ her” (Poetics of Women’s Autobiography [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 18). See Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). 3. Such a critique begins with the epistemological underpinnings of a canon of life writing that is populated almost entirely by male writers, whose lives are presented (by themselves or others) as coherent, unified narratives of a concrete, discrete self. Commenting on the classical tradition of autobiography that begins with Saint Augustine’s Confessions and extends through Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and the bevy of biographies of great men that currently line bookstore shelves, feminist critics identify first, as does Jelinek, the dearth of women’s voices. Of course, much has changed...