Suicide across the waves: On the feminist possibilities of dramatic suicide in plays by Susan Glaspell, Marsha Norman, and Naomi Wallace
Suicide has been integral to theatre from its early days. Classical drama, such as Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone, popular Renaissance plays, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, and modern drama, such as Miller’s canonical Death of a Salesman, have taught us that self-sought death can be...
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| Formato: | capítulo de livro |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2022 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid |
| Repositorio: | Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/710123 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10486/710123 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69392-3_3 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Filología |
| Resumo: | Suicide has been integral to theatre from its early days. Classical drama, such as Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone, popular Renaissance plays, such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, and modern drama, such as Miller’s canonical Death of a Salesman, have taught us that self-sought death can be preferable to a life of grief or shame or even to accusations of lack of patriotism. Significantly, a closer look at plays that deal with suicide and their reception reveals a consistent gender bias as to the ways and reasons male and female protagonists commit suicide. The aim of this chapter is to bring this discussion to contemporary theatre and discuss the possibilities that self-sought death can have for feminist purposes. To do so, three plays are used as case studies: Susan Glaspell’s psychological play Bernice (1919), Marsha Norman’s polemical ‘night, Mother (1983), and Naomi Wallace’s prison play And I and Silence (2011). Placed within their Feminist Waves, this chapter examines the reasons that lead female protagonists to commit suicide and how this can be transferred to wider political claims that women were/are making at the time. Necessarily, this essay takes into account the theatrical and dramatic techniques employed to make audiences see suicide not just as the conflict, climax or end of the plays, but as a personal phenomenon with enormous political implications, a phenomenon that in theatre invites the audience to have an active role to reflect upon and amend social ills that prompt such suicides |
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