Aborted Rage in Beth Henley's Women

Aborted Rage in Beth Henley's Women ALAN CLARKE SHEPARD Beth Henley's tragicomedies study the effects of the feminist movement upon a few, mostly proletarian women in rural Mississippi, who are more likely to read Glamour than Cixous and Clement's The Newly Born Woman.' We are invited to sympathize with isolated heroines whose fantasies demonstrate the difficulty of conceiving female subjectivity while entrenched in patriarchal epistemes, whose resilience is expressed in their canny, survivalist compromises with the codes of passive southern womanhood.2 Their compromises may be precisely located in the recurring imagery of homicide and suicide that pervades Henley's scripts. Take Elain in The Miss Firecracker Contest (r979),3 for example, an aging beauty queen in flight from a suffocating marriage and motherhood. When her estranged husband worries that she may kill their children in a fit of fury, Elain answers him by quashing the idea of her repressed rage spiraling murderously out of control: "Oh, for God's sake, Franklin, no one's going to bake them into a pie!"4 Franklin, borrowing from classical tragedy, baits Elain to circumscribe, even to annul her anger and her flight. One subtext of his inflammatory trope of filicide is that Elain's bid for greater autonomy threatens to incite a domestic "tragedy" (50). Yet the word "tragedy" is Elain's own assessment of impending doom. Though Franklin makes her "ill" (24), without him she is "feeling nothing but terror and fear and loneliness!" (50). And so, after a few minutes of "reckless" infamy under the wisteria bushes with an alcoholic carnival hand, she expects to return to her "dreary, dreary life" (rOI). No Medea she, Elain occupies the periphery of Miss Firecracker, but the arc of her brief rebellion illuminates a paradigm of female surrender running through Henley's plays. The southern heroines populating her tragicomedies frequently erupt in anger toward those (including themselves) who engineer or sustain the emotionally impoverishing circumstances of their private lives; and just as often, they retreat from the schemes Modem Drama, 39 (1993) 96 Beth Henley's Women 97 of violence bred by that anger. They'relish murderous and suicidal fantasies, they repudiate them. The problematics of their rage is my subject. The shadow of violent death is diffused across Henley's landscapes At times it is treated with the sprezzalura of black comedy. Accidents of nature abound, wacky in their studied randomness: Carnelle's father has died chasing "the Tropical Ice Cream truck" (Firecracker, 12), her Uncle George fell "to his death trying to pull this bird's nest out from the chimney" (12); Popeye's brother has been fatally bitten "by a water moccasin down by the Pearl River" (12); Lenny's horse Billy Boy has been "struck dead" by lightning;5 Jamey Foster has been fatally "kicked in the head by a cow";6 an orphanage has burnt, blood vessels burst, cars and pigs exploded. Katty observes that "life is so full of unknown horror" (Wake, 8). But at other times the half-baked threats of homicide and suicide swerve toward the rant of revenge tragedies. Unlike accidents of nature, these threats have knowable if not justifiable causes, reactions to betrayals and injustices made visible as the plays unfold. Yet the fantasies of murder entertained by these heroines signify no commitment to the principle that drives revenge tragedies, namely that revenge is an heroic prerogative of the wronged party, for traditionally revenge has been a masculine mode, from which these heroines moslly draw back. The fantasies secreted in Henley's texts are indeed not so much retributive as palliative. They are strategies of coping with the residual scars of emotional abandonment, or with a fresh crisis of the same, a recurring motif in Henley's art. Consider those of the widow Marshae ! in The Wake of Jamey Foster (1982). Estranged from her husband Jamey, who eventually dies from being filliped in the head - by a cow during a pastoral tryst with his mistress Esmerelda, Marshael is abandoned a second time in a thunderstorm by family friend Brocker Slade, to whom she has turned in her grief, as they are travelling home from the hospital bed of her then...