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Realizing Gender: The Space for a Gaze and Aggression in Women’s Theatre

Whereas cinema is associated with the pre-Oedipal look, and the desire to see oneself seeing, theatre replaces the desiring eye with the blinded eye g(l)azed over. Theatre is an Oedipal affair, the scene of the cut or the wound, of the crown that burns its wearer. Theatre enacts the costs of assuming the displacing image returned back by society – the mask which alienates as it procures entry into society. In short, theatrical looking assumes a gaze which is a looking back, if not a staring down.
Barbara Freedman

Several theorists have pointed out the similarity between the etymological roots of gender and genre – both are a manifestation of the human society’s tendency to taxonomize the available variety in any given cultural aspect. While feminism attempts to problematize the notion of gender as a given reality; to highlight the mechanisms of power relations that seek to subjugate women; and to understand the ways in which certain spaces are claimed by women’s subversive strategies as sites of resistance, it also strives to expose the masculinist bias in several social spaces/relations and in diverse artistic and social conditions. Several perspectives on literature and aesthetics put forth by feminism have discussed the ways in which this very masculinist bias has rendered women writers and artists invisible, also pointing out many other factors in play. Theatre is one such domain where women playwrights are not very prominent - in the history of literature and theatre, we hardly notice any names of women. It is towards the twentieth century that we witness a rise in the number of women dramatists – both in India and in the West. Critics like Tutun Mukherjee and Helene Keyssar talk about the general scenario which has made this possible – there are even major theatre groups dedicated to encourage women dramatists, staging their plays. What is now being scrutinized is not the mere presence of women in the scenario, but the difference that presence makes in terms of projecting women’s issues and problems, the difference in their discussion of sexuality and desire, the difference in the gaze they assume and encourage – the ways in which they position women as subjects, along with their contexts. Against the background of an understanding of such a schemata existing in feminist praxis/theory of theatre, this paper attempts to reflect on rise of women playwrights in India, with a focus on two plays written by Swarnakumari Devi and Rasheed Jahan – not to celebrate them as women playwrights but to understand the way their plays represent women (and their subjective self), the way they problematize the association of hegemony and domesticity with their women characters and their perspective as it emerges (or as they emerge) on the same.

To begin with, theatre is highly characterized as a social art – as Tutun Mukherjee points out, it is an art form that makes its author more visible and accessible to public scrutiny. It also belongs to an explicit public gaze (which is essentially male) since it is a form of a performed discussion of any issue/content. Also, since it is meant for viewing, any criticism of the same must consider its tripartite dimension of text-author-spectator for a better understanding of the semiotics of its message. Mukherjee points out, “…drama belongs to author, theatre belongs to people” (3). She goes on to discuss various factors that could have been responsible for marginalization of women in theatre – denial of education to woman and exclusive male control in print culture being the two most obvious of all. She also points out that the oral culture or the ritual system which are devalued (after the advent of writing culture and the printing press) are known to be the roots of any theatre system. Also, women are generally associated with rituals, oral and folk culture and the domestic space they are characterized by. Theatre stands out to be a public space and given the understanding of the way women have been isolated from many domains that fall into public space, the lack of presence of women in theatre does not come as a surprise. Even as actors/performers, women haven’t been a part of theatrical performances. Though a play like Shakuntala cannot claim to be a representative specimen of the way women have been (re)presented on the stage, it definitely points out the ways in which women characters (or even protagonists) were more a sexual commodity exhibiting their bodies – though Shakuntala is described in celestial terms, the language is loaded with eroticism, her body being described graphically, the language exclusively sexist articulating a (sexual) male gaze. With the expansion of colonial control on India, women characters were being dealt with as an entity or community that needs to be reformed. Under the conflicting influence of the reform system introduced by the British on the one hand, and the rise of Indian nationalism on the other, women’s issues and problems became one of the highly debated concerns of Indian national (male) leaders and (male) writers and playwrights. (Mukherjee, 9).

The first of the plays we are concerned with here – The Wedding Tangle by Swarnakumari Devi (1855-1932) belongs to this ambit of influence of colonialism. Swarnakumari Devi was an elder sister of Rabrindranath Tagore and she wrote quite a few plays and novels. The Wedding Tangle was published and performed in 1904 (Mukherejee, 31). Largely anchored in a small Bengali household, the play is about a marriage proposal for a son (Binode), who loves a young, widowed maid (Soshi) of the house, while his father (the Master) wishes him to get married to a daughter of a rich associate (Hari Babu) who is ready to give him good dowry and forgo the loan given to him earlier. The Mistress of the house, unaware of this loan, is adamant that she would give away her son in marriage only when she is offered the double amount as dowry. She is largely influenced by and attached to Soshi. Soshi, who knows that Binode is in love with her, is attracted towards another servant of the house, Chandra, who reciprocates her love. Though the end marks the marriages between Soshi and Chandra on the one hand, and Binode and Hari Babu’s daughter on the other, the play is otherwise occupied largely with the conflict or tangle of the validity of each decision of marriage. To add to the conflict, the Master is a public figure, a progressive man, who, it is assumed by others, would not ask for dowry, and is known to strongly champion the cause of widow marriage. The Mistress who is against the marriage between Binode and Hari Babu’s daughter because of the issue of dowry, readily agrees for their son’s marriage with the maid because she is dependent on her for the household work – she refuses to accept the ethical /socially responsible dimensions of not taking dowry (and insists on having more of it) and begins to convince her husband on the very same grounds of his prestige and activism at a later point.

The play does not have a list of characters and an elaborate stage direction when it opens. As is obvious from the brief discussion of the content above, it largely surrounds the domestic space – the decision of a marriage, pertaining to the choice of a daughter-in-law who would be a companion for the Mistress all her life. The Mistress stands out as an interesting figure with all her hypocrisy and the way her character is delineated. She comes across as a stereotypical, nagging wife with exaggerated gestures, someone who cribs most of the time, begins to cry with every issue and slaps her forehead (such stage directions are scattered throughout the play) most of the time – “The mistress enters wailing loudly” (39); “Slaps her forehead”(40); “In a nasal tone” (40); “Angrily” (47) and so on. She is an exaggeratedly loud figure, very “fickle”, who does not stay with one emotion and one state of mind for too long. Her anger for her husband is also interspersed with seemingly loving gestures – “Pushes him away laughingly” (41). Interestingly, she consistently addresses him in the third person – “He’s already accepted five thousand without letting me know!” (41). Or “Listen to him!” (41). All her utterances are very dramatic; she is somebody who draws attention to each thing she thinks is important: “Look at the way she has served…” (45) As if trying to arrest everybody’s attention to herself, her agency to attach importance to things. As a termagant, she stands out as a person who exerts a lot of power over here husband – and it is precisely this that marks out the household in the play as a site of subversion (of patriarchal control) – it is not through a direct revolt that she manages to exert some kind of control over her husband – the way she sobs, wails and cries also gives her some space to influence her husband and his decision. Crying, she demonstrates, becomes one strategy of resistance, though it is seen as a weakness, as an essential feminist feature. She emerges as “a wise woman” (rather, an opportunist) who knows when to change – since Chandra helps to get the family out of public shame, she agrees to get him married to Soshi towards the end. Her language is interspersed with the trope of threat, especially targeted towards her husband – one of the instances being her threat to leave the house if any of the wishes concerned is not fulfilled. However, it would be erroneous on the part of the reader/spectator to see the reversal of domination as a strategy of success, as the mere end of feminist agenda and perspective on gender or family relations. What the play tries to project is the way some situations lend themselves towards voicing of women’s concerns, the way certain circumstances give some scope to the articulation of women’s ideas and the way they are articulated. The Mistress, in one instance, points out, “You men pretend to be blind with eyesight and dead when alive, when it comes to dealing with us. Small girls hardly ten or twelve years of age are widowed the day after their wedding, and it becomes a social taboo to even mention their remarriage. But if I die today, then tomorrow you…” (56). And at another point she says to her husband, “Must you become so emotional even at such dire moments?” (66) and thereby reverses the association of sentimentality from femininity to an attribute possibly applicable to men as well.

The play, thus, is more a way to position the agency of a woman character in changing situations within a larger theme. Though it is explicitly about a domestic situation, it is located within the debates of class struggle (in the form of power relations between a maid and a mistress) and of widow marriage (corresponding to the attitudes of men and women towards the same). It is not about an individual woman winning the situation, but about the processes that lead to privileging of one position over the other, and it is by no means, a representative of all the women playwrights writing at that time, of their vision of gender equality (if at all) and of the situations faced by women across the region.

Rasheed Jahan’s (1905-1952) Woman is about Fatima, none of whose children has survived, and therefore, her husband Atiquallah (a maulvi and a hypocritical quack) seeks to marry again. He is totally dependent on his wife since he does not even have a house of his own – it was what Fatima had brought as her dowry. He is more of a beggar who survives on his quack treatments, vociferously criticizing the colonial/Western knowledge of medicine. Fatima’s relatives are relatively progressive – her aunt wears a sari, and her cousins are lawyers. They advise her to revolt against her husband when he slaps her for talking back. The play ends with the way she threatens her husband about his second marriage. Published in 1937, the play points towards a later point in the colonial period and another perspective on a different community along with the status of women within it. Unlike The Wedding Tangle, Woman has a disciplined stage direction to begin with. It is more explicitly aggressive, with an aggressive woman (Fatima) as the protagonist. Hers, too, is a language of questions and threats – it is about her powerful rhetoric that questions her husband’s “knowledge” and calls it hypocrisy. She uses very explosive language abusing him, threatening to expose his treatments as false. Atiq emerges to be a person with no agency of his own – for instance, he does not seem to have anything to do with his marriage with Fatima: “I didn’t have to do anything. Your father was very close to my father and he implored that I marry you” (522). This positions him in a vulnerable situation, the disinterested way in which he marries her. It turns into helplessness when he says to his wife, “You argue about everything and want to go against my wishes all the time” (523). He clings to religion as a support system which sanctifies secondary status to women. He says, “You are a disobedient and a sinful woman of the worst kind…. Have you no fear of God or Prophet or your husband who is like God for you?....your status will be lower than that of a dog in this house” (525). His words resonate with the prophesying nuances, an exaggerated estimate of the harm he thinks he can cause to his wife. Fatima, on the other hand, is very assertive, “Why only you, not even your jinns can make my tenants leave!” (529) when he wishes the tenants to leave. Fatima is a woman who knows her rights and is aware about the legal dimensions of inheritance. However, she feels she has to depend upon a male guardian to take care of her, as she admits to her cousin. She prides herself on her father’s name, “May I be called the daughter of a scavenger if I don’t expose your hypocrisy before the world!” (526). This need not be seen as a regressive comment highlighting her dependence on a man; she is a woman of her times and largely conditioned by the way people tend to associate with their parents as a support system. On the other hand, she is courageous enough to question God: “Why have you made us women so helpless?” (527). Though she externalizes her problem and directs them towards God, does not forget about the necessity of a pragmatic approach towards a solution to her problem. She recognizes that she is not a “homeless destitute” (526) and seeks to challenge her husband. The conversations in the play discuss various dimension of women’s issues and problems – the Mamani or the aunt says, “His right is that he is a man” (529), highlighting the way rights “naturally” belong to men. Furthering the discussion of what is “natural”, comes the comment from Aziz (a cousin), “It is indeed women who have to live with soutens and not cows and buffaloes” (529), pointing out that the institutions like marriage (and polygamy) are a human construct. Mamani also says, “There’s nothing new in that. This is the way men always treat women. They think that by providing food and clothes, they have done enough and that their duty is over. If the husband is extremely devout, he deigns to spend one night with one wife and the second with the other! As if women were mere playthings! Where lies the fault? If the two wives join hands then what would the man do?” Aziz retorts, “Oh the man can promptly leave the two wives and marry again!” Mamani replies: “I’m not talking about two wives in terms of number; I mean the women in general…”(529). The cousins help Fatima realize that she should not expect any support from others without initiating any action herself or else she would remain as helpless as a child. Associated with all this is the conflict of private and public space – a household quarrel cannot be taken to the court to be settled. The play does a lot to scrutinize Fatima’s marriage with Atiq as a situation too common – Aziz points out the fact that Atiq’s profession of a maulvi does not exempt him from having multiple sexual relationships and therefore, is susceptible to any sexually transmitted disease which could have possibly infected Fatima as well.

When others disagree over the issue of Atiq’s character, Aziz says, “How do you know? Have you followed maulvis around?” (533), which says a lot about the way religious figures are looked at as naturally “virtuous”. Towards the end, Atiq curses Fatima and it is an interesting bit:

Atiq: …you luckless woman. You will never learn. Nothing can change you nature. But you don’t know yet what I can do to you. (He rushes towards Fatima and raises his hand to hit her.)
Fatima: (Faces him in an angry stance) Be careful and sit down. If you want to keep your self respect intact, then take care. I warn you, if you try to hit me again, be ready to face the consequences.
(She advances threateningly)
(Atiq hesitates. He slowly lowers his raised hand. He takes a few steps back and sits heavily on the takht.)
Fatima: (Scornfully) He pretends to be a man…wants to marry a second time!
(She walks away towards the inner door.)
(p. 536)

The play thus ends with conflicting forces – the husband wants to pin down his wife as a static being who would always remain the same and the wife surpasses his expectations and demonstrates her anger, her aggressiveness to question his manhood. Fatima reflects that bitter anger and frustration and the play becomes a platform to (en)act, to implement the desire to hit back, to stage equality and to perform that equality even in violence – not to leave the area of physical abuse exclusively to men.

Writing a poem, or a novel, and reading them remain personal acts and the same applies to the acts of appreciation of the same. Feminist theatre criticism is not a mere analysis of a work of a woman dramatist but a perspective on the plays by men, and the way women have articulated women’s space. Ordinarily, the mainstream theatrical approaches dismiss the presence of author and therefore any analysis of a text against the background of the author’s gender tends to be looked at as outdated. That approach seems to contain the very idea of feminist/female authorship and the possibility of feminist theatre criticism. Helen Keyssar problematizes the way in which Barthes declared the death of the author – something which suppressed the possibility of projection of any kind of perspective by a woman. Keyssar goes on to discuss the evolution of drama from the mimetic and representative dimension of realism to Brechtian non-realism. Many critics uphold the idea of (classic) realism as a strategy to maintain the status quo of power relations, (as suggested by Catherine Belsey) – realism is increasingly seen as a n opiate invitation into the represented event that deadens one’s ability to change that static situation. Therefore, Brecht’s “alienation” method is thought to offer better opportunity to struggle with the offered view of reality and to change the same. Keyssar also points out the way realism is also gradually being seen not merely as a style or content, but also as a mechanism that can have its own subversive spaces – realism itself can invite different perspectives to scrutinize the given reality and the way it promotes a better comprehension of the ways different situations and characters become open to vulnerability. What feminist theater criticism can borrow from such an approach to realism is it ability to examine the male and female roles given to characters (including the implication of the social roles they re-present), and also to examine if a text/performance simply reverses these roles to articulate feminism, and if these roles are loaded with nuances of subtle questioning strategies in order to depict power relations in a new light. Jeanie Forte, in an attempt to look at feminist theatre from the perspective of realism, also refers to Belsey’s association of “illusionism” with realism – for Forte, a classic realism is not always a reinscription of the dominant order, a strategy to perpetuate ideology f gender. The two plays discussed above come close to realism as their explicit style suggest, and the discussion of feminist perspective of realism would be in place here. Forte asks, “Can we assume solely on the basis of an intra-textual reading that a realist text will never engender a political response on the part of some or any readers?” (27) And later, “… can we assume that feminism, or even a readiness for feminism, is a condition of (the female spectators’) consciousness? And if not, what performative measures are necessary to awaken that consciousness in political terms and how do we measure it?” (28). This is one of the areas any feminist reading of any play could seek to address and locate the responses within the idea of realism as a strategy to suggest an alternative viewpoint, or an alternative understanding of the reality. Keysaar associates marginalization of women’s theatre with the marginalization of alternative theatre. Any attempt to project an alternative perspective would be attempted to be sidelined – hence the subversive scope of realism can be seen to offer a political step though concealed as an ordinary style “containing” ordinary content. The quote, with which this paper begins, helps to understand the psychoanalytical/subconscious dimension of cultural investment in a visual culture as open to public gaze as drama and cinema. Freedman, in her essay elaborates upon the perspective of psychoanalysis on the act of performance and the act of viewing. She relates the idea of male gaze to he origin of theatre in the play Oedipus Rex and scrutinizes the ways, which this gaze comes to be formed.

The Wedding Tangle and Woman, “gazed at” in this light of realism, psychoanalysis, male spectatorship, “visual pleasure” and desire, emerge to be texts/performances loaded with diverse possibilities of being experienced by men and women, across their affiliations with feminism and identification with women’s issues. The quote from Freedman opens up our understanding of receiving texts. To reiterate her words, theatre offers us a space for a kind of spectatorship that is possible once since on live performance is alive to one kind of response – the liveliness of the gaze responding to a spontaneous emotion in any performance. While The Wedding Tangle seems to be about a gaze that sees the Mistress as another typical illiterate housewife, detached from the broader concerns of nationalism, modernity and progress, it also disrupts threat gaze when it attempts to reveal her self as an individual who knows how to adjust one’s priorities to accommodate certain changes in changing situations. The play is not a tragedy that invites any kind of cathartic look with a gaze of identification with the protagonist who asks for a look of sympathy, towards a helpless situation – it is itself a gaze that directs the spectators attention to the act of acting helpless. On the other hand, Woman isn’t an intended performance that turns gender inequality into a spectacle, but becomes a gaze at a man who is then reduced to a diminished murmur, looking down, shrinking into nothingness. In other words, both the plays extend the viewer’s gaze into a perspective of “looking back”, a literal gaze at inequality in gender relations, especially of that of a marital relationship. The two plays are a challenge to a composed one-way meaning-making viewership that would only consolidate direct exhibition of a realist staging of domination and a hegemonic response to it. Rather, they become a gaze at that hegemony which cannot be inscribed into a specific gender role – one ends with the question – are the Mistress and Fatima a recurring trope of an embodiment of aggression (that has exchanged gender positions – from male to female) or they are a dissent from the ways in which aggression is processed or conditioned in a “realistic” setup?


References

1. Freedman, Barbara “Frame-Up: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Theatre” in Feminist Theatre and Theory: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Helene Keyssar (Macmillan, London: 1996)
2. Forte, Jenie “Realism, Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright – A Problem of Reception” ” in Feminist Theatre and Theory: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Helene Keyssar (Macmillan, London: 1996)
3. Keyssar, Helene “Introduction” ” in Feminist Theatre and Theory: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Helene Keyssar (Macmillan, London: 1996)
4. Mukherjee, Tutun Staging Resistance: Plays by Women in Translation (Oxford University Press, New Delhi: 2005) (All page referenes are from this text)