"Swallowing the Lie" in Betty Lambert's Jennie's Story

"Swallowing the Lie" in Betty Lambert's lennie's Story ROSALIND KERR Tragedy comes olll ofriwal. II regenerates the land and brings fertility, But as tragedy became increasingly secularized, the emphasis was placed more and more on the lonely male individual defying inexorable jote. [.. .j I wanted a newform oftragedy. I wanted to barrIe { ..} Aristotle in traditional classic tragedy. when Oedipus tears out his eyes, that's it. Even thollgh Sophocles is going to write Rerum to Co!onus, you've got this tragic momelll. Women know something that maybe men don'l know. We know that after the death. somebody cooks bacon and eggs. And that suicide is not an answer, because life bloody goes on. And on some fundamentallevel l wanted to break the tragic code. Belly Lambert, "Battling Aristotle" 66, 63--64 In the interview with Bonnie Worthington from which the above quotations are taken, Belly Lambert describes the new "female tragic fonn" (65) that she tried to model in Jennie's Story. Claiming that women have been ill-served by the classic Aristotelian modeJ, she proposes that her more accurate ref1ection of female experience will show women the futility of sacrificing themselves in the manner of the "lonely individual making that final lofty statement" in "an act of defiance against the forces and the fates" (65). Such heroics, when perfonned by women, according to Lambert, have no power to change the world. Women who choose to kill themselves to defend their principles only make it easier for other women to step into the place they have vacated (65). This is the tragic vision that Lambert wanted to bring to the stage as a new mimetic fonn, capturing "female reality" in order to instruct women to view their lives through a different lens. In its desire to tell the truth about women's lives, Lambert's play can be identified as one of "the ubiquitous feminist critiques of representation in the 1980s" that Elin Diamond has flagged in Unmaking Mimesis as proof of the seductive appeal that realism has exerted Modern Drama, 47" (Spring 2004) 98 "Swallowing the Lie" in Betty Lambert's fenllie's Story 99 on feminist expression (xiii). Diamond's analysis of the problematic relationship that faces feminist playwrights trying to expose the limits of realism sheds considerable light on Lambert's attempted intervention. Diamond explains: A feminist mimesis, if there is such a thing. would take the relation to the real as productive, not referential, geared to change, not to reproducing the same. It would explore the tendency to tyrannical modeling (subjective/ideological projections masquerading as universal truths), even in its own operations. Finally, it would clarify the humanist sedi-mentation (sic) in the concept as a means of releasing the historical particularity and transgressive corporeality of the mimos, who, in mimesis. is always more and different than she seems. (xvi) In its proto-feminist way, fennie's Story tries to do each of these things. In fact, the dramatic merits of fennie' s Story arise directly from the way it challenges the vaunted ability of the stage to offer a reliable mirror of some external reality. For although fennie's Story appears, on one level, to be simply a representation of an actual incident, intended to demonstrate to us how insignificant and non-tragic the lives of women are, it also encourages the spectator to interrogate the validity of such beliefs by destabilizing the conventions that have created them. On the most obvious level, Lambert's realistic representation of all the seamy details of a true story seems to fall into the category of naturalistic, slice~of-life drama. complete with the determinism that Zola associated with that category. However, Lambert upsets this supposedly objective portrayal of her heroine's sad demise by having her undergo a series of reversals and recognitions that leads her to the realization that. unlike the Aristotelian tragic hero, she is not responsible for the misfortune that has befallen her. Instead of using the naturalistic stage set to teach Jennie and the audience about an external objective reality that its props and furnishings are supposed to refer to, Lambert marks each of Jennie's moments of enlightenment...