Whom Else: Gendered Consciousness and Wholeness in Krapp's Last Tape and Rockaby

Whom Else: Gendered Consciousness and Wholeness in Krapp's Last Tape and Rockaby time she went right down was her own other own other living soul DEBRA MALINA Rockabyl . .. with certain other plays ... I could possibly bullshit my way through a scene. . .. But you can't do that with Beckett. You actually have to be these women . .. Billie Whitelawl Girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another's needs or feelings as one's own (or of thinking that one is so experiencing another's needs and feelings). Nancy Chodorow3 Being one's "own other," being "these women," "experiencing another's needs or feelings as one's own" - all describe a merging of the Self with the Other. Not coincidentally, the self undenaking all three unions is female. Samuel Beckett's "subject" has been described as consciousness ("the malignant disease called consciousness. ... a rather solipsistic consciollsness"4), the human condition. But it seems increasingly clear to psychologists lhat consciousness and "selfhood" are not experienced the same way by women as by men, that the human condition is gendered. As the first quotation suggests, Beckett renders a distinctly female consciousness in Rockaby - a fact which would seem to recommend the playas a key siarting point for an examination of "Women in Beckett." Oddly enough, in the important new book by that title, the only essay on Rockaby proposes three versions of a feminist reading that interprets the play through Freud-inspired conceptions of woman as incomplete man, rather than casting it in the light of recent feminist psychological theory. An analysis infonned by this theory, which Moderll Drama. 35 (1992) 395 DEBRA MALINA restores to woman her own separate-but-equal mode of development, arrives at a radically different image of the Rockaby woman. Moreover, application of the same theory to the title character of Krapp's Last Tape' highlights some key differences between Beckett's men and his woinen, leaving the laller in a far better position to face the facts of the human condition. or course, all humans have mortality in common, and Beckett's men and women all confront the fact of death: the woman in Rockaby (W(V, as I shall call her) and Krapp, nearing the ends of their lives, are keenly aware of age and death. And, in Beckell's world, the human condition seems equally solitary for both sexes. But even these essential elements of human existence are experienced differently by the two characters: Krapp is wracked with remorse for having arrived at his presenlloneliness, and, as unable as ever to justify his existence, rejects his inevitable death. W(V, by contrast, has accepted death and is at peace in her solitude. But curiously, it is the Rockaby woman's merging with the Other - as opposed to Krapp's rejection of the Other in favor of aspirations to individual achievement-that brings her peace even in solitude. As "her own other," W(V is far more whole than her male counterpart. In Rockaby, Beckett has created "not only the female body but the female experience on stage.'t6 He has, moreover, shown that experience to be one of ultimate integration, the opposite of Krapp's male experience of anguished fragmentation. And he has, through his use of language in the two plays, invited the audience to experience the fragmentation of the man and the integration of the woman. According to the conception of identity formation explored by such feminist psychologists as Jean Baker Miller, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan, because of mothers' divergent experiences of their relationships to inale and female children, girls' sense of self becomes linked to affiliation with another, whereas boys' sense of selfdepends on separation from that other.' This theory ofgender-specific development, whose concept ofwoman differs fundamentally from the Freudian concept embraced and revised by such psychoanalysts as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, may provide a key to the distinct consciousnesses of the two sexes as they are embodied in Krapp and W(V. W(V has built her self-concept on allachment to the m/other, as her mother built hers on potential allachmentto "another creature like herself." Krapp, rejecting attachment , built his selfhood on the creation...