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New Anatomies records how Isabelle is silenced and erased from history, but it also describes how she struggles for her identities through cross-dressing. Séverine describes that those women who are cross-dressers or those “weird” women, such as lesbians like her, are “labelled as the weird mistakes of nature, the moment of God’s hesitation between Adam and Eve, anatomical convolutions” (39). Wertenbaker sympathizes with those “weird” women; therefore, while she rewrites Isabelle’s story, she leaves an open ending. Séverine is always fond of Isabelle and Colonel Lyautey always helps Isabelle. After Séverine reports to the Judge that Isabelle is dead in a flood and after the Judge decides to close the file of Isabelle, Colonel Lyautey invites Séverine to see some journals, Séverine replies, “With pleasure” (57). They “walk off, arm in arm” (57). This suggests that maybe they will help Isabelle to escape from the French government and now that since Isabelle is officially dead, she is completely free. With the excellent skill of masquerade, Isabelle may successfully survive in the desert, which is where she rightly belongs.9 Moreover, the flood represents not only destruction or death but also reconstruction or rebirth. That Wertenbaker dramatically re-writes the ending also shows that history is never the only truth and the women who disappear in history do not vanish.
B. Crossing the Spatial Division in The Grace of Mary Traverse
Wertenbaker in New Anatomies highlights cross-dressing of Isabelle Eberhardt, a real historical woman who traveled to Africa alone at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. By using particular real historical figures, events, and situations, the dramatist gives us an alternative history of French colonization in North Africa
9 Depending on the reader’s interpretation, the ending of New Anatomies is various. David Ian Rabey considers the ending to be positive by asserting, “Finally she [Isabelle] escapes, under cover of a thunderstorm . . . and is officially presumed dead . . .” (522). In an unpublished interview with Susan Carlson, nevertheless, Wertenbaker comments that the play ends with “a dark note” (“Language and Identity” 141), which implies Isabelle dies at the end.
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through Isabelle’s journey with masquerade; therefore, it is not difficult to define New Anatomies as a history play. The Grace of Mary Traverse, however, is problematic;
especially Wertenbaker refuses to see the play as a history play by saying, Although the play is set in the eighteenth century, it is not a historical play. All the characters are my own invention and whenever I have used historical events such as the Gordon Riots I have taken great freedom with reported fact. I found the eighteenth century a valid metaphor, and I was concerned to free the people of the play from contemporary
preconceptions. (Mary Traverse 66, emphasis added)
What the playwright emphasizes is that the play is a metaphor for our age, which functions as a criticism for our contemporary society rather than a re-estimation of the past. Wertenbaker expresses that when the Brixton riots happened in 1981, where she was living, someone told her about the 1780 Gordon riots (Introduction, Plays One vii). Apparently, The Grace of Mary Traverse is the dramatist’s reflection upon the Brixton riots as well as her comments on Thatcher’s government,10
Regarding Wertenbaker’s opinion, Ruby Cohn declares, “She is wrong” (192) by explaining, “Any period of history may be a ‘valid metaphor’ for our time” (194).
In other words, one of the functions of history plays is a metaphor that indirectly judges the present and the past at the same time; accordingly, it is needless to
emphasize that instead of being a history play, The Grace of Mary Traverse is a “valid metaphor” because the play itself is both a history play, which retells the Gordon riots
but
Wertenbaker’s refusal to consider the play as a historical play nonetheless arouses some disagreements.
10 Because of Wertenbaker’s emphasis on The Grace of Mary Traverse as “a valid metaphor” to reflect her contemporary society, reading the play as Wertenbaker’s judgment on Thatcher’s government, some critics draw a parallel between the Gordon riots and Thatcher’s government. Martha Ritchie is one example in her “Almost ‘Better to be Nobody’: Feminist Subjectivity, the Thatcher Years, and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse.”
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in 1780, and a metaphor, which comments on the Brixton riots in 1980. Akin to Cohn’s idea, D. Keith Peacock also asserts that instead of merely a depiction of the past, history drama always conveys the comments on the present and reflects the contemporary society; he states that “no matter how assiduous is the collection of historical facts or how objective the dramatist may set out to be, in historical drama the past will always in some measure be refracted by the present” (Radical Stages 11).
Therefore, Peacock claims that “all history was to become contemporary history”
(179 emphasis in original). As a result, Wertenbaker’s interpretation of the Gordon riots in The Grace of Mary Traverse reveals her contemporary viewpoint on the past, and simultaneously the play fulfills the definition of history plays. It is without question a history play.
That The Grace of Mary Traverse is a history play could also be confirmed by the usage of historical materials in it. Richard Palmer from the perspective of how history drama utilizes historical materials, mentions that one type of history plays is,
“Characters and situation are largely fictional, but the style of the play mimics that of a play from an earlier period,” such as “Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse” (9). Palmer especially observes that the play has the style of
eighteenth-century drama, such as characters’ names reveal their personality (154-55).11
11 People’s names in the play symbolize their personality or characteristics. Mary represents the virtue of Mother Mary, and her last name “Traverse” means transgression. Sophie is wisdom. Mrs. Temptwell indicates that she tempts people well. Mr. Manners implies that he is a person who emphasizes manners and order. Mr. Hardlong expresses his oversexed behavior. Lord Exrake means he is an extraordinarily rich and fashionable person with low moral standards.
Jay M. Gipson-King further explains that in addition to “allegorical character names” (225), the linear story, actions mainly on the stage, and several soliloquies fulfill the characteristics of the English drama in the eighteenth century (225), so that the audience and the reader immediately sense the style of the history play is in The Grace of Mary Traverse.
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All in all, despite the dramatist’s opinion, to categorize The Grace of Mary Traverse as a history play, no matter from the perspective of form or content, is suitable and acceptable. In this history play, Wertenbaker retells the Gordon riots through the inclusion of a fictional character, Mary Traverse. Like Isabelle in New Anatomies, who transgresses the social conventions of femininity, Mary, as her last name suggests, “traverses” gender, class and sexual boundaries. Nevertheless, unlike Isabelle, who dresses herself as a man and travels to Africa alone, Mary wanders in the city of London, where “good women” are not supposed to go in the eighteenth century, with her housekeeper Mrs. Temptwell. In the name of searching for
knowledge, Mary leaves home, degrades herself by living on the streets, works as a prostitute, and then becomes the leader of the Gordon riots. Wertenbaker explains that the causes of the Gordon riots are not merely politics or religion, but, with the
inclusion of a female protagonist, the issue of gender becomes one of the reasons.
Thus, understanding political events, such as the Gordon riots, without considering gender is not complete. As a consequence, the inclusion of the gender issue changes our perception of history.
Gayle Rubin’s sex/gender system is “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity” (159). “A full-bodied analysis of women in a single society, or throughout history, must take everything into account” (209), says Rubin, “Equally important, economic and political analyses are incomplete if they do not consider women, marriage and sexuality” (209-10). Since politics, religions, and riots are all “productions of human activity,” the sex/gender system cannot be comprehended in isolation and requires the others. Obviously, with the same point of view, Wertenbaker in this play stresses the gender issue in the political riots, and examines the inter-relationships between politics and gender.
Offering us an alternative history different from the male-centered and
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politics-centered history, the dramatist rewrites the historical event from the
perspective of gender and supplements the understanding of the political riots with the inclusion of women. Nevertheless, reading politics from the gender point of view is particularly difficult owing to two reasons. Joan Scott claims, “First, the territory is virtually uncharted, since gender has been seen as antithetical to the real business of politics. Second, political history—still the dominant mode of historical inquiry—has been the stronghold of resistance to the inclusion of material or even questions about women and gender” (Gender 46). Since the role of gender in politics is a difficult issue, the play becomes more special because Wertenbaker challenges and tackles this hard theme. In what follows I assert that Mary Traverse, restricted within femininity, is excluded from the political realm because of the conventional spatial division that confines women to the house, but she crosses the boundary of the spatial division back and forth to redefine gender identification during the period of the historical event of the Gordon riots.
1. The Spatial Division Confining Women to the Private Space
The reason of women’s political exclusion has been an important topic for feminists. From Plato, philosophers believed that men were more rational so that they were suitable for politics and public life. In contrast, women were seen as irrational beings so they belonged to private home (Freedman 26). As a consequence, “the division between public and private” (26) becomes the main reason that women are excluded from the political realm; furthermore, these separate spheres also reveal that space is gendered and categorized into two opposite parts: “the masculine public sphere of politics and the marketplace, and the feminine private sphere of home and family life” (Lieske 119). This spatial segregation excludes women from political areas and confines them to home; more importantly, it is “a universal occurrence”
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(119). Some feminists observe that “the extent to which women are subordinated in a given society is directly related to the degree to which the domestic and public realms are separated” (Wells 366). In other words, the more strictly separate spheres are, the more sexist that society is.
Although the spatial division causes women’s inferior status, the boundary between the public and the private is still controversial. Many critics offer different boundaries from different perspectives to draw the distinction.12
12 “In the context of liberalism,” Alison Jaggar infers that the distinction of the two spheres is that
“those aspects of life that may legitimately be regulated by the state constitute the public realm; the private realm is those aspects of life where the state has no legitimate authority to intervene” (34).
However, Jaggar comments that this distinction is still “a chronic problem for all liberal philosophers”
(144). In order to draw a line between the public sphere and the private sphere, Lawrence E. Klein distinguishes several different public spheres, including the magisterial public sphere, the economic public sphere, and associative public sphere (103-05). Besides, Mimi Sheller and John Urry conclude four approaches to distinguish the two spheres: the liberal-economistic model, the republican virtue mode, the sociability or dramaturgic approach, and feminist critiques (108-13). In short, the boundary between the public and the private spheres is multiple.
Alison Jaggar provides a general and commonly acceptable border, explaining, “Wherever the distinction has existed, the private realm has always included sexuality and
procreation, has always been viewed as more ‘natural’ and therefore less ‘human’ than the public realm, and has always been viewed as the realm of women” (127-28).
While the private space is related to nature and emotion, the public space is associated with culture and artificiality. Moreover, what politics concerns is justice, freedom, collectivity, and citizenship, which are seen as rational, impersonal, and cultural issues that connect or organize different people objectively (Jaggar 254). Hence, space is not only masculinized or femininized, but it is also split into two parts: the public space symbolizes culture while the private space nature. In addition, for feminists, in order to release women from the house, Sheller and Urry claim that “everything outside the household” is the public, which is “including economic institutions such as the workplace or corporations, and political institutions of the state and public spaces” (112). Therefore, it is for sure that men are aligned with public and politics
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and women with private and home. History, however, only records things which happened in the public space, especially political events, so women are “naturally”
excluded from history. The spatial distinction, hence, becomes the main reason why women disappear in history, particularly in the political realm.
2. Mary in the House
Spatial segregation not only confines women in the house, but what is worse is that it further limits women to gaining knowledge. As suggested by Daphne Spain, “In homes, schools, and workplaces, women and men are often separated in ways that sustain gender stratification by reducing women’s access to socially valued
knowledge” (137). What she means is that while women stay in the house, they learn household knowledge, instead of “socially valued knowledge.” As a result, women do not have enough knowledge to survive in society, so that they are willing to stay at home. This vicious circle confines women’s behavior as well as their knowledge.
Reading the beginning of The Grace of Mary Traverse from this perspective, we find that Mary is coached by her father, Giles Traverse, at home for the art of conversation because “a young woman must make the other person say interesting things” (Mary Traverse 68), as Giles suggests. Mary is limited to certain knowledge in a certain place.
Mary’s practice of the art of conversation in a drawing room through a form of monologue starts the play while her father stands behind her, and her speech about nature is an irony to satirize the unnatural gender norms. “Nature” (67) is the first word of the play and the topic on which Mary chooses to practice her conversational skill. Mary’s femininity expressed through the art of conversation is socially and culturally constructed, but it is seen as “natural” in the patriarchal society. Besides, she has trained her unnatural femininity of conversational art in a drawing room,
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which is regarded as a private and natural space. The spatial division generates a dichotomy: public space/men/politics/culture and private space/women/home/nature, so a drawing room symbolizes the natural area compared with the cultural public space. Unable to realize the socially constructed spatial segregation, Mary practices her skill of conversation on the topic of nature in order to fulfill the femininity expected by patriarchy, so the irony comes from the unnatural skill of conversational art about nature in the natural space that the man-made spatial division categorizes.
While Giles teaches Mary the art of conversation, he symbolically puts Mary into the sex/gender system; in other words, Giles transforms Mary’s biological female sex into a social and gendered woman, and the house provides him a good place to guide Mary into this system. Giles teaches Mary not only conversations but also feminine behavior. As what he says, a good woman should not express “desire” but make conversation (68); a good woman should not talk about “reason” because reason makes women ambitious (69); a good woman is not allowed to study “politics”
because it is useless (69). Besides, because feebleness is a good way to show a woman’s femininity and a good chance to display a man’s masculinity, Giles wants Mary to practice “fainting” in order to create chances to let men save her (68).
Moreover, the ideology of spatial division prohibits the appearance of good women in the public space (Wolff 35), but for Giles, Mary is even forbidden to look out of window to see the world outside. He proposes, “Why gape out of the window when I’ve given you so much to see in the house?” (69). When Mary asks him to allow her to leave the house, Giles refuses, asserting that Mary is his “brightest adornment” (70).
By implication, Mary is his property and is supposed to be collected and stored in his house.
In order to fit in the femininity that society expects her to have, Mary practices her “feminine walk” even without the gaze of Giles, who is a representative figure of
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patriarchy in the play. In Act One, Scene Two, she walks carefully and gently on the carpet and stops occasionally to see if she leaves any trace. Mary talks to herself,
I’ve done it. See the invisible passage of an amiable woman [. . .] It was the dolls who gave me my first lesson. No well-made doll, silk-limbed, satin-clothes, leaves an imprint. As a child I lay still and believed their weightless mine [. . .] Air. You must become like air. Weightless. Still.
Invisible. Learn to drop a fan and wait [. . .] Later, dare to walk, but leave no trace. Now my presence will be as pleasing as my step, leaving no memory [. . .] I may sometimes be a little bored, but my manners are excellent. (Mary Traverse 71)
Mary practices walking without imprints. She is not only coached by her father but also her dolls, which are ideal female figures for women. Like dolls, “an amiable woman” is supposed to be like air, weightless, still, and invisible. Ann Wilson well explains that Mary’s walking without trace on the carpet symbolizes women’s invisible trace in history (“Forgiving History” 148). Demanded by society, Mary as well as other women is trained for good manners in order to become an adornment in her father’s or her future husband’s house, and then she will be further invisible in history.
Wertenbaker in the play reveals that the sexist space segregation confines all so-called good women to the house and to some feminine behavior. More importantly, she, through describing Mary’s mother, emphasizes that not only the generation of Mary is restricted within this norm, but also the generation of her mother and all generations of women to some extent are confined, too. Mrs. Temptwell tells Mary that her mother makes Mary’s dream come true; that is, Mary’s mother fulfills Mary’s dream to become air, weightless, and invisible. When Mary expresses that she tries not to breathe to become air, Mrs. Temptwell answers that her mother is so good at