Lesley Ferris

Acting women : images of women in theatre

Part 1 Theatrical history and the sign of the female: the power of women on stage - the gender enigma in Renaissance England cross-dressing, the Greeks and the Wily Phallus historical precedents - women unmasked Goethe, Goldoni and woman-hating masques and masking. Part 2 Archetypal images of women in theatre: the penintent whore the speechless heroine the wilful woman the golden girl women as men.

THE CHALLENGES OF ARCHIVING AND RESEARCHING CARNIVAL ART

The fact that live performance is unrepeatable is both its greatest attribute and a constant worry to theatre historians. How is it possible to study an art form that is fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral? Nowhere is the challenge more acute than with Carnival, a popular art form that comes from the grassroots and is acknowledged as an art of resistance. Initiated by newly emancipated Africans in British colonies in 1834, Caribbean-derived Carnival struggled against endless confrontations with governmental authorities for its survival. In 1962, when Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence from Britain, the countrys first prime minister, Eric Eustace Williams, recognized Carnival as the national art form. Despite this recognition, Carnival artists continue to struggle because of lack of funding, misrepresentation in the press, and lack of appropriate credit for their role as artists. So it is particularly gratifying to find the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago leading the way by making the work of Carnival artists available digitally on its Web site. This essay examines this new online resource and considers issues related to studying and researching Carnival.

Incremental art: negotiating the route of London's Notting Hill Carnival

This essay provides a brief overview of Londons carnival and its beginnings in the late 1950s. Claudia Jones committed herself to both the culture and political underpinning of Caribbean carnival when she founded the event. Londons West Indian community embraced carnival as an important source of celebration and cultural identity in the face of racist intimidation in Britain. The essay explores various difficulties that black British artists face gaining recognition, particularly those who work in carnival. Clary Salandy, the artistic leader of Mahogany Arts Ltd., in London, is considered one of Londons leading, vanguard carnival designers. Her creation of a mas camp and her focus on community development to pursue carnival as a collective enterprise is examined. Salandy insists that ‘Carnival is art’ and her work exemplifies the tension between her desire to establish carnival as a viable art form in Britain and the social, political and cultural barriers faced by carnival artists today.

Women acting men

This final chapter differs radically from the previous four chapters. Until now I have explored images of various kinds of femaleness, to show that male playwrights throughout history have continually defined women by their dress and by a variety of constructed archetypes of Penitent Whore, Wilful Woman, Speechless Heroine and Golden Girl. In several of these images—most notably the wilful woman and the golden girl—women are criticised and condemned for daring to appropriate aspects of masculinity. In this chapter, by wearing male clothing, they actually do appropriate an aspect of masculinity. This practice of women dressing as men clearly gives the lie to the old maxim ‘we are what we look’, at the same time it exposes gender as socially constructed and not innate, eternal or biologically ‘natural’.

The golden girl

The American West has been mythollogised as a particularly male domain—a filmic horizon of flat plains, rugged hills, treacherous mountain ridges and commanding precipices in which cowboys, ranchers, gamblers, bandits and sheriffs create a human existence that parallels the variety and rawness of the landscape. Within this world the men are actively mobile, whether on horseback, stagecoach, wagon or train. Indeed, mobility and movement are often definitive of the ‘lone western hero’. The women, if they exist, are peripheral figures, for the most part stationary and static: in a home as a ‘good’ woman, or in a saloon as a ‘bad’ woman. If they move at all—such as in a stagecoach or in a wagon train—they are shown to be fragile and in need of male protection, always potentially ‘at risk’.

The speechless heroine

In 1606 an edition of Libanius’ Sixth Declamation was published in Paris with Latin and Greek translations in parallel columns of text. Libanius was a fourth-century Greek scholar who conducted a school of rhetoric in Constantinople, and his work declaims the downfall of a man fooled into believing his bride to be soft-spoken and self-effacing. After the wedding, his illusion of a gentle feminine silence is shattered; not only is his new wife loud but insatiably talkative, and he pleads desperately for legal permission to commit suicide.

The penitent whore

Hrotsvit’s tenth-century play Paphnutius proposes possibly the earliest theatrical representation of the penitent whore with the role of the popular and wealthy prostitute Thais. The monk Paphnutius approaches her to repent and give up her evil life. Overcome by the monk’s fervent aura of sanctity and righteousness, Thais publicly burns all the objects of her profession—jewellery, clothing, gold—in full view of her many lovers as her first step towards Christian transformation. She then isolates herself in a convent for three years, after which her soul leaves her body and soars heavenward to join Christ, her ‘heavenly husband’, in paradise. Several elements of this story recur in most, if not all, of the harlot/saint narratives. The first is that the woman is both beautiful and evil and her transgressions are entirely sexual — she sells her body to men. Secondly, once she repents and asks forgiveness, she willingly accepts, indeed embraces, physical suffering and deprivation. In the case of Thais, she exists in solitary confinement in a filthy cell, lives on bread and water, and speaks to no one for three years. The third recurrent narrative feature requires that the woman must die, and that her death be viewed as a release from physical torment and pain, a mortal resolution to a life of decadence and decay.

The wilful woman

Autocratic and immature, the term ‘wilful’ has a certain double edge: applied perjoratively to a child, it conveys headstrong, obstinate, self-willed. But used in a wider context it also implies strength, autonomy, decisive action. A person who performs ‘wilful’ actions intends them deliberately, not accidentally. In this chapter I argue that the ‘wilful woman’ is a central female image in our theatrical canon; an image riven by its own double edged meaning of adult strength and childish obstinacy; a source of anarchy, an attack on the status quo, and therefore traditionally presented as an ‘evil woman’. Additionally, there is a subtext to the term ‘wilful’ in the world of the theatrical patriarchy which views women simply as children, at times uncontrollable and destructive, incapable of maturity and adultness.