Phyllis Nagy's Fatal Women

Phyllis Nagy's Fatal Women! CLAUDIA BARNETT Phyllis Nagy's fascination with The Scarlet Letter might at first seem odd. After all, the surrealist, political, displaced- New York playwright (whose work is produced mostly in London), known for staging an intense lesbian sex scene, could hardly be more contemporary. Yet her concerns with morality and feminism anachronistically align her with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne 's novel, like Nagy's plays, explores female sexuality as criminality. Nagy's central characters are enigmas, transgressors who, like Hester Prynne. will not confess. "I think people would be surprised," says the playwright, "to find that what they think Hester Prynne is, is very different from what Hawthorne actually wrote. Hester is thought of as a victim, or some kind of standby -your-man sort of woman, loyalty at all costs, and that isn't what she is.'" Throughout her writing, which includes an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, Nagy challenges the preconception of woman as victim, complicating the stereotype with women characters who are more likely to kill than to be killed, to dominate than to yield, and to feel culpable than to feel blameless. Western drama's legacy of fatal women, from Medea and Clytemnestra to Lady Macbeth, has, in the twentieth century, been continued and adapted by women playwrights who focus on female murderers. Susan Glaspell's Trifles, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House, Sarah Daniels's Masterpieces, and Pearl Cleage's Flyin' West are examples that read as feminist cases for justifiable homicide: these plays typically exonerate their female murderers, portraying them not as brutal villainesses (even when they bludgeon their husbands or push strangers in front of trains), but as frail heroines who attempt, in the only way they know how, to free themselves from an oppressive patriarchy. Nagy challenges this tradition, exploring, in her drama, interdependent issues ofcrime, sexuality, and social responsibility. Lynda Hart traces an implied equation between sexuality and criminality in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark ofAggression. Lesbianism has Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 28 Phyllis Nagy's Fatal Women 29 been seen as a badge of transgression since late nineteenth-century studies in criminal anthropology, according to which, Hart states, ... a female was always a woman, "fallen" thoughshe might be. unless she transgressed acerrain sexual boundary or perfonned extraordinary acts of violence. These transgressions were not discrete but rather coupled in the cultural formation of categories that fell outside the bounds of "womanhood" altogether. The congenital invert and the born female offender marked the limits of cultural femininity. And they did so as a couple. not separately. but together,) Violence and lesbianism are thus variations of an unfeminine impulse that leads to sexual and societal "transgressions" without distinction. Han's argument about lesbian sexuality may be extended to include any sexual transgression (such as Hester Prynne's adultery). Hart studies Caesar Lombroso's The Female Offender and concludes that the '" father' of criminal anthropology'" outlined femininity for a very specific reason: "The exemplary characteristics of his culture's idea of Victorian white womanhood - piety, maternity, absence of sexual desire, weakness, and underdeveloped intelligence - keep the 'latent' criminality of all women in check.'" The guidelines for femininity are strict, and Hart summarizes succinctly: "Women do not kill.,,6 When they do kill, they are no longer "women," but females, acquiring deviant labels that isolate them. Lynda Hart methodically explores and subverts historical lesbian stereotypes , thus providing a theoretical backdrop for understanding Phyllis Nagy's fatal women. Nagy undennines audience expectations throughout her drama, presenting fully realized characters rather than types even when she approaches cliches. Her Hester Prynne defies feminine submission and is fierce in her emotional extremes. To Roger Chillingworth she says: "I hate you. But I won't betray you";? but to the daughter she adores she says, "I should have drowned you at birth" (65). Hester's hatred is the sort that inspires loyalty, while her love could drive her to murder. This perversity is caused by her impotence: she has little control over her life, but she is strong enough to commit murder. When she finds out that Chillingworth has already booked passage on the Spanish Main...