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men and women cannot be understood exclusively without the interaction with history.
D. Wertenbaker’s Concept of Gender
Both White and Scott are historians, so what they are more concerned about is historiography. Their new historical approaches prove to be illuminating when we transform their ideas of history into a history comprehension or a reading strategy to read literary works. Since White affirms history has a literary form, then history must be consumed by the reader. History has been textualized by White to liberate our perception of history while literature could be historicized to deepen and broaden our percipience of literature. Similarly, since Scott declares gender as a useful category of historical analysis, then gender is also useful to re-read all historical works. White’s theory legitimates Wertenbaker’s rewriting history and her history plays; Scott’s theory further justifies the significance of gender in history and Wertenbaker’s emphasis on gender in her history plays. The following is going to explain
Wertenbaker’s concept of gender along with the same three plays as illustrations in order to generate a further understanding of gender and to set up the theoretical background for the next two chapters.
1. A Constitutive Element of World Relationships
As suggested by Joan Scott, gender is not independent from social relations;
instead, gender is “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” (Gender 42). According to the conventional sexual differences that men are superior to women, gender constitutes all the social
relationships in a nation, and gender, rather than exclusive, is highly relative to other social institutions. However, Credible Witness, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and
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The Break of Day further show that gender is not only an important constitutive element in society, but it is also an element of reorganizing world relations, especially when a nation deterritorializes in a globalized age. The above statement is not only expressed in these three plays, but it runs through most of Wertenbaker’s plays, including the other seven plays that are going to be investigated in the next two chapters.
Credible Witness exposes that gender is one of the foundations in a nation, and it is interrelated to politics, political asylum in particular. Macedonia is also
established by patriarchs like many other countries, and Macedonian society and history are based on the superiority of sons and men. However, when Petra questions history, she simultaneously doubts the traditional gender relationships. She expresses,
“When we give birth to our sons, we hold them more tightly than our daughters [. . .]
Our history tells us to make sons that will fight—if that’s not right, what have we been doing for hundreds of years?” (226). Gender relationships are the basic unit in society, teaching men to be warriors and women to be housewives. They organize a country and establish a national history. Nevertheless, when Alexander rejects Macedonian history, Petra wonders, “Nothing’s solid any more” (Credible Witness 226). Even so, her action of helping Ameena to claim political asylum reveals her feminist awakening. Ameena’s body is a credible witness; by implication, women’s body or maternal body inscribes and conveys the production of nation because of the ability of having children. Women’s body then becomes a credible witness that exposes the unfair gender relationships in society. At the end, when Petra asks Simon to accept asylum seekers by declaring, “Look at us: we are your history now” (236), the meaning of “us” includes different races, classes, nations as well as different sexes, including women. Interpreted in this way, the discussion of nation and transnational world relations cannot be exclusive of gender.
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Like the same argument that gender is a constitutive element in society in Credible Witness, Wertenbaker in Three Birds Alighting on a Field shows that gender relations in the business world are challenged with the increase of many successful career women. Women are no longer confined to the house, and their success in career threatens the traditional male-center business world. For example, while Julia, leaving Jeremy’s company, is able to run her own gallery, Jeremy, threatened by her leaving, ridiculously asks Julia to marry him in order to save his company. In addition, Biddy’s process of learning to be an art collector is also a process of understanding herself and her country, England. Afraid of a second divorce, Biddy helps her social-climber husband by collecting works of art. She at the beginning loses words to articulate herself and to describe art, but at the end she turns into a speaker who is going to be invited to give a lecture on art and on England (444). As a woman traditionally regarded as inferior in relations of gender, Biddy has a different insight into things.
She presents, “Sometimes I feel I have two pairs of eyelids. The first pair are like everyone else’s, but behind them, there’s a kind of clingfilm, and if I could open those too, I would see the world differently” (414-15). Her gender identity gives her
different perspectives and her “two pairs of [female] eyelids” empower her career as an art collector. Julia and Biddy’s successes reveal that the business world cannot exclude women because gender relations are also changed within it. With more and more women involved in the business world, gender issues are getting more and more relevant to economics.
Moreover, gender is not independent of class and race issues in Three Birds Alighting on a Field. Because Biddy is an upper-class English woman, Yoyo, a Greek who hates Greek tradition, marries her in order to raise his social status. He complains that Biddy is not English enough, and his house should be more English. Under a threat of a divorce by Yoyo, Biddy becomes Yoyo’s “tool” to help him to climb to a
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higher social class; that is to say, the gender relation is the fundamental oppression when it is compared with the class relation. Furthermore, their unfortunate interracial marriage also reveals that women are inferior to men even though she is an
upper-class white English woman. The gender relation is not only the relation
between men and women, but it is complicated and problematic involved with power that exercises in class and race. It is this kind of power inside the gender relation that constitutes social as well as world relations.
In The Break of Day, through the theme of motherhood, gender is highly relative to science, especially the reproductive technology. Tess, unlike Nina who prefers to adopt, is unable to conceive, and decides to accept infertility treatment.
Because of advanced technology, having a baby is just like choosing a product. As the doctor explains, “Before we get to that we would suggest different sperm, we have very nice donors, all nationalities, Jewish, anything you need. And once we don’t have to deal with your eggs, Tess, there’s no age limit. We can go on for years” (70).
The doctor’s name ironically is “Dr. Glad,” which contrasts sharply with Tess’s negative result. April believes that “IVF is a male conspiracy to sell women drugs”
(64), but Tess would rather lose everything to do the treatment a second time to have a baby. Aston asserts that Wertenbaker’s purpose is “to politicise (rather than to
personalise or ‘emotionalise’) reproductive technology” (Feminist Views 157). She further expresses that “if formerly feminism was concerned with contraceptive
technology, it now has to address the issue of how, or indeed whether women can take advantage of the new reproductive technology” (157-58). On the one hand, as April suggests, the reproductive technology is male-dominated and it grants men’s power to decide motherhood. On the other hand, biotechnology offers women chances to decide their own body and especially it helps women who cannot conceive.
Wertenbaker asks a good question, whether science helps or is an obstacle to women’s
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autonomy of their own body, but she offers no answer in the play; her purpose is to force women to rethink their identity. After all, no female identity can be thought thoroughly without a consideration of motherhood (Carson, “Language and Identity”
146). As Carson affirms, “Mothering, then, is not a biological issue here, but an economic, cultural, and political one” (146). Hence, from this perspective, the gender issue cannot be separated from science, economics, cultures and politics.
Aston claims that the gender of the adopted child is important (“Geographies of Oppression” 248). At the time when The Break of Day was performed, “the issue of overseas adoption” or “transracial adoption” was headline news in England (248).
Aston explains, “The issue of unwanted female children in China received widespread publicity in the UK [. . .]” (248). The unwanted Chinese girls reveal that the gender issue does not only constitute social relations in a country as Scott suggests, but it also becomes a constitutive element of international world relations. Hence, the
cross-border child in the play as a little girl is especially crucial because she,
symbolizing a hope for a multicultural and transnational future, passes love on to the next generation owing to her maternal ability of having children, and because
adopting a girl challenges the patriarchal value of the superiority of boys over girls.
The unwanted Chinese girls and the ill Eastern European girl in the play leave their own countries, and then grow up in England to reorganize a new system in a new country, and to re-construct new world relationships.21
Understanding gender from the perspective of Nina and Tess reveals that gender is closely related to science and other social issues. However, reading the play from the perspective of the Eastern European mother of the cross-border girl uncovers
21 At the beginning of the play, Wertenbaker quotes a popular nursery rhyme, and names the title of the play after it: “Hark to me, / Listen what I say, / Little girls are important / At the break of day” (The Break of Day 6). Indeed, little girls are important especially for a new start, and Wertenbaker also implies that the gender issue is still going to be important especially in a new millennium.
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another hidden issue. Komporály argues that Nina and Hugh in a way buy the
cross-border girl with their superiority of western capitalism (134), while Aston points out the “unequal positions” between the absence of the mother of the cross-border girl and Nina’s effort to be a mother in the play. This Eastern European mother is outside the text, but her disappearance indicates that gender is not only relations between men and women; it also complicates the relations among different women, including different races, classes and nations. If gender constitutes social and world relations, then it also problematizes the statement that all women are oppressed without differentiation.
2. The Possibility of Reconstruction of Gender
Rubin’s definition of gender as “a socially imposed division of the sex” (179) shows gender is not natural but rather is socially and culturally constructed. However, since gender is constructed, then gender has the potential and possibility of
reconstruction. Characters in most of Wertenbaker’s plays suffer from the
stereotypical images of men and women; with the exposure of gender as a social and cultural construction, some of them reconstruct their gender identities. In Credible Witness, Aziz is feminized by his own country because he does not join the civil war (205). Alexander’s crying lessons are criticized as feminine by Petra because she thinks “[l]amenting is for women” (219) and because Petra is trained by history to teach her son masculinity (226). In Three Birds Alighting on a Field, Biddy does not want a second divorce because she cannot stand the comments on divorced women by society (378). Fiona is sorry for the two ugly stepsisters in Cinderella because they cut off parts of their feet to fulfill the idealized femininity (Three Birds 443). In The Break of Day, Robert’s and Jamie’s masculinity is in crisis for the reason that Robert has been unemployed for one year (18) and Jamie’ s hospital is going to be closed
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(25). Tess’s and Nina’s femininity is also in crisis because they lose the ability of having children. Although most characters suffer from the stereotypes of gender, some of them, such as Alexander, Petra, Biddy, Robert and Nina, recover from their identity crisis by the experience of exile, working, and adopting children respectively. In other words, Wertenbaker intends to deconstruct their gender identities first and then to reconstruct them as fluid and changeable ones in her plays. More importantly, similar with Stuart Hall’s cultural identities, Wertenbaker’s reconstruction of gender is always in process without an end, and endless deconstruction and reconstruction of
characters’ identities also remind us of Scott’s statement that men and women are both
“empty” and “overflowing.”
Wertenbaker in her plays emphasizes “how” men and women recreate their identities, such as Alexander through learning to be an exiled guest in England, Petra through the experience in the liminal, hybrid and in-between detention center, Biddy through learning to be an art collector, Robert through the power of theatre, and Nina through adopting a cross-border girl. Although breaking the stereotypical images of men and women does not mean that the sex/gender system is broken or reversed, the possibility of reconstruction of gender suggests the dignity of human beings to find a way forward in the existing unfair society. Chapters Three and Four further discuss this statement with an emphasis on “how” characters, including women and men, challenge social norms to deconstruct and reconstruct themselves.
3. Reshaping the Traditional Perception of History
Wertenbaker in her plays stresses that human beings in history are active agencies. Rather than being objects that are determined by history, they fight for their chances to articulate, to question the male-dominated history, and to re-identify themselves. Therefore, interpreting history in the light of gender reshapes the
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traditional perception of history, which is stable, linear, phallocentric and
politics-centered. Credible Witness exposes that women, like Petra, are usually the conveyers who pass down the history of a nation, but history is not supposed to be fixed and unchangeable. Petra’s transformation represents the change of the
traditional perception of history. Like Petra’s change, Biddy’s enlightenment of art in Three Birds helps her career and changes herself into an independent woman; more significantly, she realizes that the position of England in the global age is not
supposed to be isolated. The “two pairs of eyelids” of her see history from a different point of view, so when Constantin asks her to go to Romania, she rejects it by saying,
“I love England at the moment” (425). Also, Nina’s cross-border child in The Break of Day suggests a multicultural future, in which history is always interconnected with others. Thus, we find that the reconstruction of gender and the perception of history have a closed relation, and from these three plays, we also realize that chronicle history needs to be reconsidered with space, and this reconsideration involves the reconstruction of gender.
In short, Wertenbaker regards gender as a constitutive element of world relations, and to know the interaction between gender and other social institutions is to know how gender is exercised in history. Although gender is imposed by society arbitrarily, to understand the construction of gender is to understand the possibility of reconstruction of gender. Furthermore, owing to the potential of reconstruction, reading history from the perspective of gender reshapes the existing, traditional and phallocentric historical perception. How characters in plays reconstruct their gender identity and how their reconstruction influences our acknowledgement of history are the dramatist’s major investigations in her plays. While Hayden White’s theory has provided Wertenbaker the right to rewrite history, the following two chapters explore the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender and how gender influences our
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acknowledgement of history.
Chapter Three is going to discuss four of Wertenbaker’s history plays, which use historical materials as the backgrounds of the plays, and to examine how characters reshape their identities and our historical perception. Wertenbaker adapts real historical figures, such as Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) in New Anatomies (1981) and Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in After Darwin (1998), and she also creates a fictional character Mary Traverse in The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) to review the historical event of the Gordon riots in 1780. In Our Country’s Good (1988), Wertenbaker rewrites colonial history in Australia with a true event when the First Fleet transported convicts from England to Australia in 1788 and with real historical figures, such as Captain Philip, the captain of the First Fleet.
The playwright uses these historical materials to retell her own stories and to provide an alternative history different from the official description. Thus, through rewriting history, Wertenbaker emphasizes history as narrative and multiplicity and gender as a constitutive element of world relations.
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Chapter Three
Rewriting History: Gender in Wertenbaker’s History Plays
The previous chapter has explained that history as narrative opens possibilities of writing and rewriting gender in history. While Hayden White’s metahistory justifies Wertenbaker’s rewriting history in her history plays and while Joan Scott’s gender theory provides a useful perspective to reread history, this chapter focuses on four of Wertenbaker’s history plays and emphasizes the inclusion of gender indeed helps us to perceive the gaps in history. New Anatomies (1981) and The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) both describe how women break the stereotypical image of women by cross-dressing and by crossing the spatial division individually. In the former, Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), a real historical woman at the turn-of-the-20th-century, travels to Africa alone, revealing that traditional femininity could be reinvented. In the latter, the Gordon riots (1780) in the late 18th century are rewritten through a
perspective of a fictional female character Mary Traverse, who traverses conventional spatial segregation to challenge the idealized femininity that confines women to home.
Our Country’s Good (1988) and After Darwin (1998) are both male-centered plays, describing the crisis of masculinity respectively in 18th-century imperialistic England and in 1990s England. The historical event of the First Fleet sailing to Australia in 1788 is based on the expansion of masculinity and imperialism; however, the ambivalence between the masculine colonizer and feminine colonized causes a crisis in imperialist masculinity. Also, masculinity is in serious danger in the 1990s when the role of men changes a lot in work and family. Through the device of a play-within-the-play in which two actors perform Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), After Darwin exposes that masculinity has never been a stable quality that any man can really possess.
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