Laying Blame: Gender and Subtext in David Mamet's Oleanna

Laying Blame: Gender and Subtext in David Mamet's Oleanna THOMAS H. GOGGANS "The Bitch Set Him Up" - that's what Daniel Mufson thought the working title of Oleanna could have been, after he appraised the critical responses to the play's 1992 New York production, adding that "one can expect few other reactions when Carol is such a viper.'" Marnet's presentation of the conflict between a professor and his female student is marked by ambiguous discourse, troubling physical contact, and subsequent charges of sexual harassment.' Mufson found, in the seventeen reviews of the play he considered, two typical responses: some critics, including John Lahr, seem to defend the play's political message because they "[loathe] what Carol represents,"3 while others, Elaine Showalter arnong them, larnent the construction of a play which "targets a woman as an ugly representative of the group that chaUenges the white masculine ruling class.'" Each condemns Carol, some feeling that Marnet went too far in creating such a harridan in order to support his misogynistic views. As Deborah Tannen wrote, "we don't need a play that helps anyone feel good about aman beating a woman."5 Mufson shares Tannen's view. remarking that "Oleanna's aesthetic merit, if it has any, has become parenthetical to its polemics.,,6 Significantly, none of these reviewers seems to have found any justification for Carol's actions. Mufson mentions "the annoying little problem . that one of the two characters in Oleanna is a cardboard cut-out, a nightmarish phantom conjured by the paranoid fantasies of a patriarchy peering over a cliff to see ... egalitarianism.'" He quotes approvingly Tannen's observation that Carol is "aU surface: just a stereotype that audiences can join in hating," and David Richards's remark that Oleanna is "rigged" so that its action "slips out of control without our reaUy understanding how or why."s Mufson also cites John Simon, who voices three possible interpretations: "Was [Carol's] near imbecility in Act One ... an elaborate act of entrapment? Or is she a genuine idiot savant whom the Group has coached in some fancy lingo? Or is Mamet simply playing fast and loose with authorial responsibility?"9 Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 433 434 THOMAS H, GOGGANS The failure of these critics to uncover any dramatically consistent subtext for Carol within this "rigged" plot recapitulates Carol's plight within the play; Marnet achieves a wonderful irony in constructing a text which the audience must decode just as the characters are required to do, In fact, Carol's critics have ignored the behavioral motivations implicit in the play, Christine MacLeod notes this absence in her study of gender and power in Oleanna, focusing on the fruitlessness of imposing a Manichean gender interpretation onto the text. She observes, "the consensus is that the play has constructed Carol in such one-sided negative terms that no genuine debate about the merits of her position is necessary or even possible...10 MacLeod instead sees questions of power within the pedagogic relationship as the central concern in Ofeanna, noting that "the gender difference between student and teacher is not the crux of the matter.,,11 In heranalysis, gender becomes a factor merely as a tactic Carol can employ to change her position within her power relation with John, the sort of pragmatic strategy also employed within the power relationships in Mamet's other plays, such as Glengany, Glen Ross," MacLeod is sensitive to the significance of popular culture and contemporary sexual politics as the interpretive field in which Carol maneuvers, yet she fails to recognize a series of transparent "hints" within the play which call to mind certain cliches within pop psychology that permeate tlte contemporary American consciousness, The reading I propose offers a subtext for the apparent contradictions in Carol's personality which appear throughout the play, Such a reading honors the play's dramatic complexity without resorting to polemics on either side of the struggle Carol wages with John, Without undermining valuable analyses of power and sexual politics in the play, and without diminishing the oppressive implications of John's patriarchal assumptions, an awareness of the clues offered as a subtextual context for Carol's actions frees...