渥騰貝克戲劇中的歷史與性別 - 政大學術集成

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(1)國立政治大學英國語文學系博士班博士論文. 指導教授：姜翠芬教授 Advisor: Dr. Tsui-fen Jiang. 立. 政治大. 渥騰貝克戲劇中的歷史與性別. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. History and Gender in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Plays. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. 研究生：施懿芹撰 Name: Yi-chin Shih 中華民國 99 年 6 月 June 2010. v.

(2) History and Gender in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Plays. 立. 學 ‧. ‧ 國. 政治大. A Dissertation Submitted to Department of English, National Chengchi University. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. by Yi-chin Shih June 2010.

(3) Acknowledgements It is impossible to accomplish my dissertation without many people’s support. My deepest gratitude first goes to my dear advisor, Dr. Tsui-fen Jiang. She always encourages me and supports me. Dr. Jiang’s great knowledge of drama inspires me a lot. Not only does she guide me to academic research, but she also teaches me things about life. In addition, I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Chieng-chi Liu, of Shih Hsin University, Dr. Eva Yin-I Chen, of Chengchi University, Dr. Hsiu-chih Tsai, of Taiwan University, and Dr. Li-ming Yang, of Chengchi University, for their reading of my dissertation and providing me with advisable questions and. 政治大. helpful suggestions. My gratitude also extends to Dr. Chun-Yi Shih, of Taiwan. 立. University, who gives me precious advice on Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays and my. ‧ 國. 學. dissertation.. Also, I would like to thank all the professors who taught me in Chengchi. ‧. University for instructing me in literature and training me to be a researcher. My. y. Nat. io. sit. special thanks go to National Science Council, which offers me a financial support for. n. al. er. one year. Because of the grant, I may concentrate on my dissertation without worrying about living expenses.. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. My sincere gratitude also extends to my dear parents, my brother, and all my friends. Their unselfish love and strong support always comfort me when I am in trouble. Thank you. All of the errors within are mine.. iii.

(4) Table of Contents. Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….....iii Chinese Abstract…………………………………………………………………….....v English Abstract………………………………………………………………………vi Chapter One Introduction……………………………………………………………...1 Chapter Two History as Narrative: The Possibility of Writing Gender into History...17 A. History as a Literary Artifact……………………………………………….17 B. Wertenbaker’s Concept of History………………………………………….24 C. Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis………………………..56 D. Wertenbaker’s Concept of Gender…………………………………………..63 Chapter Three Rewriting History: Gender in Wertenbaker’s History Plays………....72 A. Cross-Dressing and Identity in New Anatomies…………………………….73 B. Crossing the Spatial Division in The Grace of Mary Traverse……………..94 C. Crisis of Imperialism and Colonial Resistance in Our Country’s Good…...122 D. Crisis of Masculinity and Evolutionary History in After Darwin…………157 Chapter Four Retelling History: Gender in Wertenbaker’s Oral History Plays…….188 A. The Love of the Nightingale: A Modern Revision of the Philomele Myth...195 B. Dianeira: A Revisionary Myth about Anger……………………………….223 C. The Ash Girl: New Cinderella in the New Millennium……………………252 Chapter Five Conclusion…………………………………………………………....274 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………279. 立. 政治大. ‧. ‧ 國. 學. n. er. io. sit. y. Nat. al. Ch. engchi. iv. i Un. v.

(5) 國立政治大學英國語文學系博士班博士論文提要論文名稱：渥騰貝克戲劇中的歷史與性別指導教授：姜翠芬教授研究生：：施懿芹論文提要內容：本論文由性別的角度切入討論渥騰貝克的歷史劇與口傳歷史劇，強調歷史與性別兩者都應該重新被檢視，以挑戰傳統的封閉線性的歷史觀與刻板印象的男女特質，如此才能對歷史與性別有重新的認識。本論文論證渥騰貝克在戲劇創作上. 治政的特點即是指出歷史中兩性的動態權力關係。此研究包含五個章節，第一章介紹大立論文架構、渥騰貝克的多文化的成長背景、與她的戲劇特色。第二章是本論文的 ‧ 國. 學. 理論基礎，認為唯有將歷史視為敘述的形式，才能開啟重新撰寫歷史的可能，而. ‧. 從性別寫歷史也才可行，進而達到對歷史與性別的同時批判。第三章討論四部歷. sit. y. Nat. 史劇，《解剖新義》(1981)、《瑪麗．崔維斯的美德》(1985)、《為了國家的利益》. io. er. (1988)、《達爾文之後》(1998)，並論證歷史不再是建立在男性的高壓統治與女性的絕對服從之上，再者，將性別視為社會建構的產物才能夠打破傳統對兩性限制. al. n. iv n C 的男子氣概與女性特質的刻板印象。第四章研究三部歷史劇，《夜鶯之愛》 hengchi U. (1988)、《黛安妮拉》(1999)、與《灰姑娘》(2000)，因為都是採用口傳歷史的緣故，本論文命為口傳歷史劇以區別第三章的四部劇作。從性別角度閱讀以男性為中心的口傳歷史如神話與童話，渥騰貝克批判了傳統的性別關係，企圖與傳統男性沙文的口傳歷史做切割，並從中賦予過去與當代女性自我意識，期許未來有一個平等的兩性關係。論文最後一章強調渥騰貝克由性別重建歷史是成功的，尤其是重建歷史的動作本身就是重要並且是刻不容緩的工作。關鍵字：渥騰貝克、歷史、性別、女性特質、男子氣概. v.

(6) Abstract As traditional immobilized history and gender are confining, Timberlake Wertenbaker in her (oral) history plays argues that both history and gender should be reread radically to challenge closed linearity of history and stereotypical images of femininity and masculinity so as to reconstruct new visions of history and gender. This book aims at discussing mainly seven of her plays from the perspective of gender, especially how the playwright rewrites gender into history, and it proposes that Wertenbaker’s contribution to drama is to expose the unstable power relations between the sexes in history. Chapter One introduces the structure of the book,. 政治大. Wertenbaker’ cosmopolitan background, and the characteristics of her plays overall. Chapter two is the theoretical foundation, and it claims that just as Hayden White sees. 立. narrative nature of history and just as Joan Scott finds social formation in gender,. ‧ 國. 學. Wertenbaker also believes that both history and gender are constructed and should be reread to offer new visions. Analyzing four history plays, New Anatomies (1981), The. ‧. Grace of Mary Traverse (1985), Our Country’s Good (1988), and After Darwin. Nat. sit. y. (1998), Chapter Three asserts that by rewriting gender into history, Wertenbaker. er. io. asserts that history is no longer based on the model of men’s coercive domination over. al. iv n C the stereotypes of masculinity and h efemininity. i U Four, focusing on three oral n g c hChapter n. women and only the acknowledgment of gender as a social construction can destroy. history plays, The Love of the Nightingale (1988), Dianeira (1999), and The Ash Girl (2000), claims that by rereading against male-centered oral history of myth and fairy tales from a gender-oriented perspective, Wertenbaker criticizes the traditional gender relation and proposes a break from male chauvinism in oral history and to have self-awareness for women in the past and the present so as to have a new mode of gender relations in the future. The final chapter affirms that Wertenbaker’s history rewriting from gender is successful and the act of reconstruction of history itself is important and necessary. Key Words: Timberlake Wertenbaker, history, gender, femininity, masculinity vi.

(7) Chapter One Introduction As traditional immobilized history and gender are confining, British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker in her (oral) history plays argues that both history and gender should be reread radically to challenge closed linearity of history and stereotypical images of femininity and masculinity so as to reconstruct new visions of history and gender. This book aims at discussing her plays from the perspective of gender, especially how the playwright rewrites gender into history, and it proposes that Wertenbaker’s contribution to drama is to expose the unstable power relations between the sexes in history.. 立. 政治大. Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of the most important female playwrights in the. ‧ 國. 學. contemporary British theatre. Critically and commercially popular, Wertenbaker’s. ‧. plays have won her several awards and solidify her reputation and status in the history. y. Nat. of British theatre. 1 As a prolific playwright, her works include plays, translations, a. er. io. sit. screenplay and a television play. 2 This book intends to focus on seven of. al. Wertenbaker’s plays: New Anatomies (1981), The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985),. n. iv n C Our Country’s Good (1988), The (1988), After Darwin (1998), hLove e n ofgNightingale chi U 1. The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) won her a Plays and Players’ Award for most promising playwright. Our Country’s Good (1988) was the winning play for Laurence Olivier Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Love of the Nightingale (1988) won an Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama Award, and Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwrighting. 2 Wertenbaker has published twenty-three plays: This Is No Place for Tallulah Bankhead (1978), The Third (1980), Second Sentence (1980), Case to Answer (1980), Breaking Through (1980), New Anatomies (1981), Inside Out (1982), Home Leave (1982), Abel’s Sister (1984), The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985), Our Country’s Good (1988), The Love of Nightingale (1988), Three Birds Alighting on a Filed (1991), The Break of Day (1995), After Darwin (1998), Dianeira (1999), The Ash Girl (2000), Credible Witness (2001), Galileo’s Daughter (2004), Divine Intervention (2006), Jenufa (2007), Arden City (2008), and The Line (2009). Wertenbaker has translated eleven plays, including: False Admissions (1983) by Pierre Marivaux, Successful Strategies (1983) by Pierre Marivaux, Mephisto (1986) by Ariane Mnouchkine, Léocadia (1987) by Jean Anouilh, La Dispute (1987) by Pierre Marivaux, Pelléas and Mélisande (1989) by Maurice Maeterlinck, The Thebans (1992) by Sophocles, Hecuba (1994) by Euripides, Filumena (1998) by Eduardo de Filippo, Hippolytus (2009) by Euripides, and Phedre (2009) by Jean Racine. Wertenbaker also wrote a screenplay, The Children (1990), and a television play, Do Not Disturb (1991). 1.

(8) 2. Dianeira (1999), and The Ash Girl (2000). 3 I divide them into two categories, history plays and oral history plays, which means plays based on oral history, for two reasons. First, these seven plays directly use historical materials. Second, they present a strong manifestation of the deconstruction of the traditional idea of gender. Because how the playwright rewrites history to review gender and history is the main object in the book, the seven plays are good examples to illustrate Wertenbaker’s concepts of history and gender. Although Three Birds Alighting on a Filed (1991), The Break of Day (1995), and Credible Witness (2001) are not history plays, they serve as supplements due to the relevance of their historical and gender concern. 4. 治政 Wertenbaker in an interview claims, “There are 大four things I do not talk about: 立 my name, where and when I was born, and what I am working on at present” (qtd. ‧ 國. 學. Wilson, “Forgiving History” 146-47). Although she refuses to mention her private. ‧. reference, we still can know some of her background from interviews and papers.. sit. y. Nat. Born in 1951 in the United States (“Timberlake Wertenbaker”), Wertenbaker was then. io. al. n. 3. er. raised in the Basque region of France and educated in France and the United States.. i Un. v. Wertenbaker’s two collections of plays are the major sources in this book: Plays One: New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good, The Love of the Nightingale, Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1996) and Plays Two: The Break of Day, After Darwin, Credible Witness, The Ash Girl, Dianeira (2002). 4 Studies on Wertenbaker’s plays in Taiwan are just in the beginning stage. So far, by 2009, no thesis or dissertation on Wertenbaker has been published, and only two journal papers are printed. Professor Yih-Fan Chang publishes a Chinese paper on Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, and she argues that British identity, through “othering” and “worlding,” justifies its legitimization of colonization, and language becomes the tool for defining and erasing national identity (109). Professor Chun-Yi Shih, in her Chinese paper on The Break of Day, analyzes the play from the perspective of motherhood, and concludes that Wertenbaker suggests the 21st century is better for women as long as they may have more control over their own bodies (34). Unlike few papers on Wertenbaker in Taiwan, there are many papers, theses, and dissertations abroad. Among numerous journal papers, topics about Laurence Olivier-winning play Our Country’s Good, myth-revising play The Love of the Nightingale, and the controversial play The Break of Day are the most popular. Furthermore, most journal papers deal with one or two of Wertenbaker’s plays, but none of them discusses the dramatist’s major plays from the perspectives of history and gender together. Maya E. Roth received her Ph. D. degree in 2001 with a dissertation on five of Wertenbaker’s plays entitled Open Civic, Feminist and Theatrical Spaces: The Plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker. In Roth’s dissertation, she argues that different practices of space constitute different selves and identities, and she analyzes how Wertenbaker utilizes space to create a feminist geography. Her dissertation is so far the only one which deals with Wertenbaker’s plays without comparing her with other playwrights. All these academic researches reveal a lack of research that treats Wertenbaker’s plays from an overall point of view. Unlike Roth’s approach, which reads Wertenbaker’s plays from space, this study focuses on history and gender.. Ch. engchi.

(9) 3. After Wertenbaker graduated from college in the States, she used to work as a journalist in the States and England, and as a French teacher in Greece. It was in Greece where she first found her passion for theatre. When an interviewer asks her what makes her write plays instead of fictions or poetry, she replies, “It happened by change. I was in Greece teaching French and surrounded by people working in the theater, and for fun, we all sat down to start writing a play” (“A Conversation” 55). From then on, Wertenbaker first wrote for children and then she became a successful professional playwright. It is difficult to define Wertenbaker’s identity. Her first name, Timberlake, is. 治政 usually seen as a pseudonym, but she claims that “my 大great-grandmother was named 立 Timberlake and I was named after her” (“Interview,” A Search 265). While she is 5. ‧ 國. 學. called “British playwright,” “Canadian playwright,” “Franco-British playwright,”. ‧. “Anglo-French playwright,” “Basque/Canadian background,” Susan Carlson. sit. y. Nat. expresses that she is most identified as “Anglo-French American” (“Issues of. io. al. er. Identity” 267). However, Wertenbaker declares she is a “European.” An interviewer asks her if she is American by birth, the dramatist responds, “French-American,. n. iv n C actually, and I was educated in France. I think of myself as a European now, though heng chi U I’ve lived here in London for a long time” (“Interview,” A Search 265). Because of Wertenbaker’s cosmopolitan background, she in her plays always deals with the issue of identity, which from her point of view is fluid, unstable and cannot be defined by only one factor. In New Anatomies, Isabelle Eberhardt’s search for gender identity is highly relative to her cultural, religious and national identities. In The Grace of Mary Traverse, Mary has to cross the spatial division back and forth in order to redefine herself. Learning to be a good guest in England, Alexander in 5. It is interesting to notice that the storyteller in Dianeira is also named Timberlake. The playwright blurs the boundary between reality and fiction while she is Timberlake, while her great-grandmother is Timberlake, or while the storyteller is made up..

(10) 4. Credible Witness maintains his ethnic identity and accepts his new cultural identity at the same time. Characters in Wertenbaker’s plays do not identify their multi-cultural backgrounds easily, such as the English officers and convicts suffer from their double-identity in the British colony in Our County’s Good. In fact, they feel painful from the stress and from being “hybrid.” Wertenbaker expresses, “I don’t know why you can’t be many things at once;” she further explains, “I am interested in various cultures, and I also think it’s wrong to get stuck in only one culture and to identify yourself completely with it” (“Interview,” A Search 267). Due to the playwright’s multiple identities, Carlson argues:. 治政 Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ambiguous大 personal status is representative. It 立 is representative of critical obsessions with the self, obsessions with ‧ 國. 學. questions of stability, multiplicity, fracture. And it is representative of a. sit. y. Nat. world. (“Issues of Identity” 268). ‧. late twentieth-century theatre increasingly the product of a multi-cultural. io. al. er. Wertenbaker was educated in France and the United States. She believes that her education in France is crucial in her life because she learns the pain of being. n. iv n C silenced. “I was brought up in the country, in the southwest corner of h eBasque ngchi U. France—brought up by a mixture of my parents and a Basque family. That upbringing was very influential, because it was at a time when the French authorities weren’t allowing Basque to be spoken in the schools” (“A Conversation” 54). Owing to the fact that she has the experience of being silenced for a certain language, Wertenbaker is sensitive to language and the relation between language and identity. This is the reason why in her plays she cares much about the women in history who are silenced and forbidden to show their emotion and opinions. In Our Country’s Good, the powerless convicted men and women learn proper English to reestablish their identities and to react against the British authority. Besides, Wertenbaker transforms.

(11) 5. the women in myth from stereotypes of voiceless women to the people who are conscious of their language and their anger. Philomele in The Love of the Nightingale is good at asking questions to set up her identity from the other; Dianeira in Dianeira displays her anger through saying “the things she cannot say.” “Growing up in a generation that could not talk to its parents in their native language,” Wertenbaker states, “started an obsession with language” (“A Conversation” 54). Wertenbaker’s eagerness about speaking for the minority, who usually are the silenced and the hybrid people in the multi-cultural society, motivates her to review history from their points of view. Reshaping the stereotypical images of women in. 治政 history is the dramatist’s purpose, but she also believes 大 that men as well as women are 立 confined to the traditional sexual roles. Rejecting the sexist conventions in society, ‧ 國. 學. Wertenbaker deems, “I don’t think men have been very happy in their roles, and I. ‧. think the competition among men is lethal” (“Interview,” A Search 270). The. sit. y. Nat. playwright cares not only about women’s inferior status in history but also men’s. io. al. er. restrictions within gender hierarchies, and that is the reason why she claims her plays are more humanist rather than feminist. She argues, “I see feminism as humanism,. n. iv n C and the questioning of authority,hand authority, and e n g c h i Utherefore male authority since most authority is male” (270).. Hence, while Wertenbaker reviews history in her plays, she does not intend to create a women’s history; rather, she re-examines history from the perspective of the gender relation to see how a society is built up. Many scholars caution that the emphasis on women as victims in the past puts women to the margin in the present because this stress only reinforces that women have no power or rights in history (Hannam 303). Therefore, in order to obtain fair treatment of men and women, women who are excluded from history must be revealed so that the history of women can be uncovered and their existence in history can be affirmed. “Her-story” or.

(12) 6. “women’s history,” versus his-story, intends to recreate a history that is different from phallocentric history. However, the possibility of writing her-story without men is questionable because history, after all, describes all human beings, not just one sex. June Hannam thinks that understanding the unequal power relationships between two sexes is more important than the emphasis of the divisions of two sexes for “an understanding of the historical process” (310). Joan Scott also suggests that instead of proving women indeed have history, it is the time to re-evaluate “standards of historical significance” (Gender 17).The importance of her-story should turn its focus from searching for the female documents to the discussion of “gender.” In light of. 治政 such new outlook on gender discussion, Scott suggests 大 “that relations between the 立 sexes are a primary aspect of social organization,” “that the terms of male and female ‧ 國. 學. identities are in large part culturally determined,” and “that differences between the. ‧. sexes constitute and are constituted by hierarchical social structures” (Gender 25).. sit. y. Nat. Therefore, this book focuses on how gender is constructed socially and. io. al. er. culturally in history through analyzing Wertenbaker’s plays. Not only do we understand history from gender, but we also understand that the inclusion of gender in. n. iv n C history indeed changes our perception It is definitely not enough to simply h e nofghistory. chi U emphasize women as victims in history, so the recognition of gender differences and the relations between gender and history help to lead us to rethink and reconstruct. history. Also, reading history from the perspective of gender is different from reading history from feminist perspective because some feminists focus on women only and exclude men’s problems (Lieske, “Gender” 179). 6 In Wertenbaker’s words, reading. 6. Many critics have observed a lack of men’s studies in feminism and they suggest that feminists are supposed to turn their focus on women only to gender, which means to study men and women together. bell hooks in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984) states that overlooking men’s studies in feminism is “a declaration of war between the sexes” (33), and she even believes, “If feminist movement ignores his predicament, dismisses his hurt, or writes him off as just another male enemy, then we are passively condoning his actions” (74). bell hooks in Feminism is for Everybody (2000) further states that the failure of feminism is the limited studies on men, and she asserts, “If feminist.

(13) 7. history from the viewpoint of gender is more like “humanist” since both women and men need to question the authorities and since they both are restricted to the traditional sexual roles. Hence, gender no longer merely refers to “women” 7 but a complicated relationship with historical discourses. The seven Wertenbaker’s plays this book discusses are categorized as “history plays.” The term, history plays, as M. H. Abrams defines, “is often applied more broadly to any drama based mainly on historical materials” (37). In other words, Wertenbaker in her plays uses historical materials for not only a review of the accepted history but also a reconstruction of history based on historical materials. 8. 治政 Wertenbaker’s rewriting history exactly reveals that大 history is essentially a narrative 立 form, which can be rewritten, retold, and re-arranged, and in this way, different ‧ 國. 學. interpretations of history are welcome, so that to reread history from the perspective. ‧. of gender is possible and necessary.. sit. y. Nat. In order to justify the legitimacy of Wertenbaker’s rewriting history from the. io. n. al. er. standpoint of gender, Chapter Two claims that just as Hayden White sees narrative. Ch. i Un. v. theory had offered more liberatory visions of masculinity it would have been impossible for anyone to dismiss the movement as anti-male. To a grave extent feminist movement failed to attract a large body of females and males because our theory did not effectively address the issue of not just what males might do to be anti-sexist but also what an alternative masculinity might look like” (69-70). From hooks’ perspective, we may understand that there is indeed a lack of men’s studies in feminism. Like what Pam Lieske puts it, “both male and female gendered identities come under study” (“Gender” 179). Hence, gender studies of both women and men are now important and necessary. 7 The original meaning of gender is not like what we think now, but it was “an analytical category to draw a line of demarcation between biological sex differences and the way these are used to inform behaviours and competencies” (Pilcher and Whelehan 56). It was a term to designate the differences between two sexes, seeing the differences are biological, essential and natural. Feminists, before the 1980s, used gender as a synonymy with “women, sexual difference, or sex roles” (Lieske, “Gender” 178). Even so, gender was more like a descriptive term than a complicated concept. It was also used with “women” interchangeably. 8 This book takes the broad definition of history play in order to observe how Wertenbaker uses historical materials to reconstruct gender. However, some similar terms with history play are supposed to be mentioned, they are history in drama, historical drama, and chronicle drama. According to Richard H. Palmer’s survey, historical drama is another name of chronicle drama, which is in contrast with history in drama, and the distinction between chronicle drama (historical drama) and history in drama lies in the different ideas of chronicle and history (6). However, M. H. Abrams designates “chronicle plays” as “dramatic works based on the historical materials in the English Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others” (36), whereas “history plays” as “any drama based mainly on historical materials” (37).. engchi.

(14) 8. nature of history and just as Joan Scott finds social formation in gender, Wertenbaker also believes that both history and gender are constructed and should be reread to offer new visions. White’s and Scott’s arguments are the theoretical background in the book. As “the first to construct a detailed theory of history as a tropic exercise” (Munslow 149), White solidifies his reputation by metahistory, and his comment on history as narrative authorizes different versions of rewriting history. 9 Rejecting to see history as linear, objective, and rejecting to see it as the only truth, Wertenbaker in Credible Witness, like White, asserts that history is not only established by scientific truth or official records on historical events but also personal narrations.. her history becomes chauvinistic.. 學. ‧ 國. 治政 Problematizing the theory of historical narratives, Wertenbaker furthermore questions 大立 who has the right to narrate history and what happens when one’s insistence on his or ‧. Moreover, Wertenbaker’s concept of history is colored with her concern of the. sit. y. Nat. gender issue, and Chapter Two then adopts Scott’s gender theory to supplement the. io. al. er. limited discussion of the relationship between history and gender. Gender normally was a synonymy with “women.” Nevertheless, it is not until Gayle Rubin, who. n. iv n C systematically draws a line to distinguish as a social construction from sex as a h e n g gender chi U biological designation, that gender is no longer used as a descriptive term to show the biological differences of the two sexes. The discussion of gender instead moves into 9. White is not the first person who finds the narrative form of history, but he is the first one to theorize it (Munslow 149). Before White, Foucault has observed the narrative element of history although Alun Munslow in Deconstructing History (2006) emphasizes that both Foucault and White follow Giambattista Vico’s concept of history (186-88). This book is also aware of many different theories and criticisms of history and the relation between history and narrative. For example, Fredric Jameson also proposes a similar opinion as White’s, stating that history “is not a text,” but “history is inaccessible to us except in textual form” (82). What Jameson means is that history exists in textual forms, but history is not a text. In his opinion, the meaning of history should be accessed only by interpreting the textual forms. Combining psychoanalysis with Marxism, Jameson’s history is “the Lacanian Real” (Roberts 98), which means that the Real as well as history cannot be directly apprehended, but only known by symbolic expressions. Besides, Michel de Certeau in The Writing of History (1975) also discusses the relation between history and literature. De Certeau asserts, “History is not an epistemological criticism. It remains always a narrative” (43). History is a narrative, and history and fiction are in fact “quasi-identical” to de Certeau (Tom Conley xi). However, since White is the first person who theorizes history with an essential narrative nature, the book appropriates his theory mainly..

(15) 9. cultural and social areas, studying how women and men are constructed as what they are thought they should be. After Rubin, Scott’s explanation of gender based on Foucault’s power/knowledge theory is commonly accepted now; that is, the definition of gender is “knowledge about sexual difference” (Gender 2). Based on the discussion of Credible Witness, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and The Break of Day, Chapter Two argues that Wertenbaker regards gender as a constitutive element of world relationships and a social construction that can be deconstructed. Chapter Three discusses four of Wertenbaker’s history plays, New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good, and After Darwin, and it argues by. 治政 rewriting gender into history, Wertenbaker asserts that 大 history is no longer based on 立 the model of men’s coercive domination over women and only the acknowledgment ‧ 國. 學. of gender as a social construction can deconstruct the stereotypes of femininity and. ‧. masculinity. Femininity and masculinity are two important terms in this chapter as. sit. y. Nat. well as the next, and they are also targets that Wertenbaker intends to unsettle.. io. al. er. Femininity means “the social and cultural characteristics associated with being female” (Barker 68), whereas masculinity means “the cultural characteristics. n. iv n C associated with being a man” (115). are a set of characteristics defined by h e They ngchi U society and based on biological determinism; for example, women must behave feminine, which signifies “[p]retty, dainty, fragile, soft, nurturing, caring, healing, passive, narcissistic, duplicitous, irrational, powerless” (Stern 151), while men must identify with masculinity, which refers to “strength, power, stoicism, action, control, independence, self-sufficiency, camaraderie and work amongst others” (Barker 115). In feminist theories, there is a debate “between essentialists (who argue that femininity resides in the female body), and constructionists (who argue that femininity is socially constructed and hence detachable from the body)” (Stern 151). The book asserts that Wertenbaker obviously follows constructionists who believe.

(16) 10. femininity and masculinity are both constructions, and she regards the current concepts of femininity and masculinity should be deconstructed to expect a better and fair gender relation in the future. The discussions on both New Anatomies and The Grace of Mary Traverse center on femininity and claim that women are confined to the arbitrary sex/gender system. Isabelle Eberhardt challenges gender norms by cross-dressing while Mary Traverse does so by crossing the spatial division. The discussion on both Our Country’s Good and After Darwin targets masculinity and reveals that men are also the victims of the concept of ideal masculinity in the society based on biological determinism. The English convicts are feminized while the. 治政 English officers suffer from the unfulfillable masculinity. 大 Both Robert FitzRoy’s and 立 Charles Darwin’s masculinity is threatened, and their conflicts in the play are derived ‧ 國. 學. from the individual insistence on each manhood. Through deconstructing femininity. ‧. and masculinity, Wertenbaker in her history plays suggests that history is based on an. io. al. er. will liberate our understanding of history.. sit. y. Nat. unstable gender hierarchy and a more open and flexible concept of gender relations. Chapter Four focuses on three of Wertenbaker’s history plays, The Love of the. n. iv n C Nightingale, Dianeira, and Theh Ash Girl. However, e n g c h i Usince the three plays are based on oral history materials, myth and fairy tales to be exact, this chapter proposes to categorize them as “oral history plays” in order to distinguish them from the four history plays in Chapter Three. 10 These three plays are revisionary plays, which review oral history with a strong intention of changing it. Adrienne Rich regards the. 10. To define Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, Dianeira, and The Ash Girl as “oral history plays” does not mean to historicize Wertenbaker’s literary creations or to assert that myth and fairy tales are real historical events. By the same token, to define Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good and After Darwin as “history plays” does not mean to see every literary creation as history. In fact, I argue that Wertenbaker in her plays intends to offer a historical fact or figure different interpretations and her strategies are to read history and oral history from the perspective of gender and through literary intrigues. Thus, in order to assert the inclusion of gender indeed changes our perception of history, Chapter Four suggests that Wertenbaker’s oral history plays provide us an alternative comprehension of oral history through rewriting myth and fairy tales..

(17) 11. importance of re-vision as “an act of survival” (18) because we need to know the past differently in order not to convey wrong and sexist social norms to the next generation (18-19). Also, Alicia Ostriker claims that female writers’ revisionary works are an act of “revisionary mythmaking,” and she explains: Whenever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural. they review the past at the same time.. 學. ‧ 國. 治政 change possible. (317) 大立 Revisionary works mean to change and challenge the accepted sexual norms while ‧. In The Love of the Nightingale, Dianeira, and The Ash Girl, by rereading. sit. y. Nat. against male-centered oral history of myth and fairy tales from a gender-oriented. io. al. er. perspective, Wertenbaker criticizes the traditional gender relations and proposes a break from male chauvinism in oral history and to have self-awareness for women in. n. iv n C the past and the present so as tohhave a new mode U e n g c h i of gender relations in the future.. Wertenbaker’s strategy to rewrite oral history is to give voices to the voiceless, so that the tongueless Philomele becomes sensitive to language, the emotionless Dianeira is angry, and passive Ashgirl becomes active to search for her own happiness. Wertenbaker also likes to give the flat characters psychological developments to complicate and deepen them. By doing so, Procne is not a cruel child-killer; Iole is not a senseless object-like gift; the stepsisters in the story of Cinderella are not naturally evil girls. While reversing the stereotypical images of women in myth and fairy tales, the dramatist reviews the traditional gender relations from modern feminist and humanist viewpoints..

(18) 12. Overall, these seven plays by Wertenbaker manifest that the playwright is good at using historical materials to reconstruct the past, to criticize the present, and then to look forward to a better future. More crucially, she exposes the unstable gender relations in history, which is to say that she uncovers the power relation between the sexes. By emphasizing the reconstruction of gender, she allows us to see that the powerless in history may re-establish their identities, whereas the powerful may no longer possess superiority forever. Wertenbaker’s writing strategies can be discussed from two aspects. As far as the form is concerned, the dramatist prefers to use the device of a play-within-the-play. 治政 and an episodic narrative line. In Our Country’s Good, 大 After Darwin, The Love of the 立 Nightingale, Wertenbaker arranges the theatrical device of a play-within-the-play ‧ 國. 學. while in Dianeira, she sets a storyteller to create a form of a story-within-the-story.. ‧. This device in both Our Country’s Good and The Love of the Nightingale functions as. sit. y. Nat. “an artistic agency of self-reference and self-reflection” (Fischer and Greiner xii).. io. al. er. While the English convicts perform and discuss The Recruiting Officer in Our Country’s Good, Wertenbaker’s play itself becomes the reference that reflects the. n. iv n C criticism of the play; in this way, hWertenbaker i Uprovide her value of theatre as e n g c h may “the redemptive power” in it (Introduction, Plays One viii). Similarly, Phaedra in The Love of the Nightingale reflects that some audiences in theatre believe every word on the stage, such as Tereus who thinks he is Phaedra, and some judge the play critically, such as Philomele who clearly realizes she is watching a play. The play-within-the-play in The Love of the Nightingale is a device of self-reflection on the abuses and functions of theatre. This theatrical device in After Darwin and Dianeira works as “a special mode of perception that allows for different ways of presenting perspectives of appropriating and placing itself in relation to the world at large” (Fischer and Greiner.

(19) 13. xii). The play-within-the-play in After Darwin deals with the perception of history directly. While Tom and Ian are rehearsing their performance about the friendship between FitzRoy and Darwin, the audience sees how history is constructed and deconstructed again and again in front of them. The totality of history is loosening gradually, so different perspectives of history are permissible. In Dianeira, Wertenbaker also uses a story-within-the-story as a special mode of perception of history. The storyteller Irene links the ancient Greek story with today’s Balkan wars to reveal that history will be full of male violence as long as men’s coercive dominance remains. In brief, no matter whether the function of the play-within-the-play is. 治政 self-reflection or a special mode of perception, it aims 大at creating an alienation effect 立 to force the audience to think critically. ‧ 國. 學. In addition to this theatrical device, Wertenbaker’s plays are usually. ‧. characterized as an episodic narrative form without a clear major character, especially. sit. y. Nat. in Our Country’s Good, After Darwin, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and Credible. io. al. er. Witness. Because Wertenbaker intends to let characters talk about their own stories and to interpret history in their own words, the multiple interpretations by different. n. iv n C characters make a play lack a clear narrative line and a center character. Max h elinear ngchi U Stafford-Clark, the director of Our Country’s Good, expresses his opinion toward this trait of Wertenbaker’s plays by stating, “Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays are also sometimes criticized for lacking a narrative line, for lacking a principal character. And sometimes those criticisms are also a critic’s limitations to come to grips with a new from which is a strength as well as a weakness” (qtd. in Buse 161). From the director’s point of view, the “weakness” instead is why Wertenbaker’s plays are so special. In Our Country’s Good, we hear not only The Aborigine’s counter discourse of imperialism, but also different interpretations of the colonial history in Australia from the perspective of the English convicts and the English officers. In After Darwin,.

(20) 14. we cannot decide which character is the protagonist or which character speaks for the playwright. This special theatrical device, like the device of a play-within-the-play, means to baffle the audience so that watching plays needs an active participation. As far as the form is concerned, Wertenbaker’s (oral) history plays are special for the device of a play-within-the-play and episodic narratives without a central character. Moreover, as far as the content is concerned, these plays have the characteristics of feminist history defined by Richard H. Palmer, but this book argues that these plays are more colored with the characteristics of gender history. 11 Containing eight qualities of feminist history, 12 Wertenbaker’s plays are distinguished. 治政 for the power relation between the sexes, so men as大 well as women are also the 立 dramatist’s concern. Although women are still the main objects in gender history, ‧ 國. 學. Kathleen Canning pronounces that the study of gender history highlights “relations. ‧. between the sexes and a new attention to masculinity” (11). While some feminists. sit. y. Nat. reject taking men’s problems into their concern (Lieske, “Gender” 179), many gender. io. al. studies and the power relation between the sexes.. er. theorists, such as Canning or Scott, call attention to the inclusion of men in women’s. n. iv n C Rather than stable and fixed, hierarchy in Wertenbaker’s plays is h egender ngchi U. 11. In Richard H. Palmer’s The Contemporary British History Play (1998), he gives a short discussion of Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale under the category of “gender-based feminist history play” (152-55). Moreover, he also suggests that not all Wertenbaker’s plays belong to this category; for example, “the primary thrust” of Our Country’s Good “is not feminist” (155). I agree with Palmer’s category of “gender-based feminist history play,” but I propose to include Our Country’s Good because Wertenbaker’s history plays all intend to reread history from the point of view of gender and because feminist purposes are obvious through her recreation of women in history. Besides, Palmer’s term of “gender-based feminist history play” is derived from his observation of the development of feminist history plays in the 20th century, which contains four phases from “compensatory,” “contributory,” “social,” to “gender-focused” feminist history plays (134). Unlike Palmer’s historical approach, this study is based on Hayden White’s and Joan Scott’s theories to discuss Wertenbaker’s history plays with a special emphasis on the gender issue. 12 Richard H. Palmer in The Contemporary British History Play concludes eight characteristics of feminist history. First, “History is depicted from a woman’s point of view” (157). Second, “Incidents depicted are more likely to be personal or domestic than public or political” (157). Third, “A woman’s reliance on a man is usually self-destructive” (157). Fourth, “The plays value women’s learning to rely upon one another” (158). Fifth, “most feminist histories show women who represent the dominant male society betraying those who rebel against that patriarchy” (158). Sixth, “Gender differentiates character traits” (158). Seventh, “Female protagonists often flout conventional sexual conventions” (158). Eighth, “Women, both characters and performers, often dress in men’s clothing” (158)..

(21) 15. dynamic and fluid. By cross-dressing and crossing the spatial division, Isabelle in New Anatomies and Mary in The Grace of Mary Traverse transgress the traditional femininity to challenge the arbitrary sex/gender system. By taking gender into consideration in the colonial history, Wertenbaker uncovers the double-marginalized positions the male colonized hold in Our Country’s Good. Also, by revealing multiple masculinities and femininities in After Darwin, the playwright suggests that the identity and security that gender hierarchy offers men and women collapse. Wertenbaker in her oral history plays rewrites heroines in myth and fairy tales in order to expose that history is no longer based on women’s silence and submission to. 治政 society. Like the characteristics of feminist history 大 plays, Wertenbaker’s plays 立 emphasize rereading history from the perspective of women and questioning the ‧ 國. 學. patriarchal society; however, they also reveal that men, like women, are the victims. ‧. who are restricted within the fallacy of biological determinism, and show that history. sit. y. Nat. is the production of the tension and power relations between the sexes. Wertenbaker’s. io. view of gender.. al. er. contribution to drama exactly lies in her reconstruction of history from the point of. n. iv n C While Wertenbaker rereads from the perspective of gender, she h ehistory ngchi U. simultaneously criticizes the traditional closed concept of history that silences other voices. The characteristics of feminist history plays, as Palmer suggests, focus on how playwrights use historical materials to assert their feminist purposes, but Wertenbaker in her plays directly judges history itself. Confronting with history directly, Wertenbaker describes how a woman is officially edited out of history in New Anatomies, why a woman is excluded from the history of politics in The Grace of Mary Traverse, how the native people’s voice is repressed in the colonial history in Our Country’s Good, how history is constructed and deconstructed in After Darwin through the device of a play-within-the-play, who has the right to tell and create.

(22) 16. history in The Love of the Nightingale, why history is full of anger in Dianeira, and what the silence in history is in The Ash Girl. The dramatist’s critique on history is radical for she rejects viewing history as linear, coherent, self-sufficient, and stable cognition; instead, she “genderizes” history to expose the unstable history built on the dynamic relations of sexual differences. In a nutshell, the book aims at reading Wertenbaker’s (oral) history plays and asserts that only when gender is taken into consideration of history does it open our conventional perception of both history and gender. Before the analyses of seven (oral) history plays, the next chapter first provides a theoretical background of the book with. 治政 Wertenbaker’s other three plays, Credible Witness, 大 Three Birds Alighting on a Field, 立 and The Break of Day. After the introduction of the theoretical background, Chapters ‧ 國. 學. Three and Four will focus on Wertenbaker’s history plays and oral history plays. ‧. io. sit. y. Nat. n. al. er. respectively.. Ch. engchi. i Un. v.

(23) Chapter Two History as Narrative: The Possibility of Writing Gender into History This chapter argues that just as Hayden White sees narrative nature of history and just as Joan Scott finds social formation in gender, Wertenbaker also believes that both history and gender are constructed and should be reread to offer new visions. Wertenbaker’s plays are characterized by rewriting history to highlight gender issues; therefore, this chapter first analyzes White’s metahistory to justify Wertenbaker’s writing history in her history plays and then Scott’s gender theory to re-examine history from the perspective of gender. In this chapter, Credible Witness (2001), Three. 治政 Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) and The Break of大 Day (1995) are the illustrations to 立 explain Wertenbaker’s concepts of history as narrative and multiplicity and gender as ‧ 國. 學. a constitutive element of world relations.. ‧ sit. y. Nat. A. History as a Literary Artifact. io. er. Hayden White’s theory of history as a form of literature blurs the relation between history and literature, but their distinction did not appear until the 19th. al. n. iv n C century. In the very beginning, there only tales of the legendary past. Not until h e nwere gchi U the invention of writing and calendar did history become written stories that dated events (Korhonen 9). In ancient Greece, Aristotle put down a well-known distinction between history and literature in Poetics, claiming, “The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. [. . .] The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen” (55). History and literature were both rhetorical arts, but history described the events that actually happened while literature the imaginative events that might possibly happen. Due to the larger and more complicated dimension that poets deal with, Aristotle asserted, “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the 17.

(24) 18. universal, history the particular” (55). Nevertheless, even though history and literature dealt with different events, they both belonged to the rhetorical tradition (Korhonen 10; White, “Historical Discourse” 25). Raymond Williams also explains that history contained both real and imaginary events in the earliest uses of the term. History was “a narrative account of events” (146), and in the early English usage, “history and story (the alternative English form derived ultimately from the same root) were both applied to an account either of imaginary events or of events supposed to be true” (Williams 146). However, from the 15th century, history meant “an account of past real event” while story referred to “less. 治政 formal accounts of past events and accounts of imagined 大 events” (146). Especially, in 立 the 19 century, historians started to emphasize the scientific accuracy of historical th. ‧ 國. 學. events, so they disregarded the rhetorical elements of historical writing (Korhonen 10);. sit. y. Nat. regarded as an objective and scientific discourse.. ‧. in other words, from then on, history, opposite to rhetoric and fiction, has been. io. al. er. Because of the emphasis of the events that actually happened and the documents that were proved scientifically, historians prefer to describe wars,. n. iv n C diplomacy or great men, who are or warriors. In this way, many human h usually e n g kings chi U experiences, such as the dreams and life of minority people, are neglected in historical writing (Korhonen 10). Joan Scott points out a contradiction in historiography, asserting, History is a chronology that makes experience visible, but in which categories appear as nonetheless ahistorical: desire, homosexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, masculinity, sex, and even sexual practices become so many fixed entities being played out over time, but not themselves historicized. (“The Evidence of Experience” 778) In order to describe and emphasize what actually happened, many other important.

(25) 19. issues in history have been overlooked. Due to the limitation of traditional historiography, people then start to challenge scientific-motivated historians and to break the boundary between history and literature in the 20th century. Nevertheless, it is not until Hayden White’s Metahistory was published in 1973 that the relation between the two is shattered again, and his theory causes an overwhelming influence in many academic areas (Korhonen 10-11). He develops a theory called “metahistory” in order to affirm history as literary artifact. In his book, White “treat[s] the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (Metahistory ix). Understanding. 治政 history is to understand a narrative structure for the大 reason that we know history 立 through narrative since we cannot encounter the past directly. Therefore, in order to ‧ 國. 學. expose the poetic nature of historical works, White highlights principal modes of. ‧. historical consciousness based on four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and. y. Nat. irony (x-xi). These dominant tropes control the metahistorical basis of every historical. al. er. io. sit. work. 1 In other words, the works of history are rhetorical constructions with forms of. n. literature; hence, the value or the meaning of history depends on narrative, rather than on historical data.. Ch. engchi. i Un. v. From this standpoint, White proposes that a good historian is a good storyteller, who has an ability of narrating a story with several historical facts (Tropics 83). Without historians’ storytelling, facts do not have any meaning. Historical facts are always fragmentary and incomplete, but historians have to tell stories to make those senseless facts sensible. “Constructive imagination” facilitates historians to answer what indeed happened and what the facts mean (Tropics 83-84). These historians’ 1. Following these four tropes are three kinds of “explanatory affect”: the explanation by formal argument, by emplotment and by ideological implication (x). Each is associated with four possible modes of articulation: for emplotment, there are Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire; for argument, there are Formism, Organicism, Mechanism, and Contextualism; for ideological implication, there are Anarchism, Conservatism, Radicalism, and Liberalism (x)..

(26) 20. special ability is like the keen observation of detectives because historians and detectives both find meanings beyond the surface structure. As long as historians with their constructive imagination successfully tell a reasonable story which is hidden from senseless historical facts, then they can offer plausible explanations for events (84). History, in this way, is able to be understood and facts are comprehensible. In other words, neither objective nor innocent, facts essentially are meaningless. Historians provide them meanings by storytelling, and any historical event is just a story element. The ways that make those elements become a story are “the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play” (84).. 治政 That is to say, history is a literary artifact that needs大 historians’ imagination and 立 narrative techniques. ‧ 國. 學. The statement of the fictional element in historical narratives establishes White. ‧. as an important historian as well as literary critic. Owing to the fact that historical. sit. y. Nat. events are “value-neutral” (Tropic 84) per se, different historians write different. io. al. er. versions of the same historical events. According to historians’ arrangement of historical events and their ability of storytelling, which White calls “emplotment,”. n. iv n C meaning “the encodation of theh facts contained in U e n g c h i the chronicle as components of. specific kinds of plot structures” (83 emphasis in original), the same set of events can be described both as tragedy and comedy. To put it in another way, no event is inherently comic or tragic, but emplotment makes them comic or tragic. White asserts, “The term ‘tragic’ describes or refers to a structure of meaning, not a factual situation. Lives may be described as tragic, but it is the description that makes or makes them appear to be tragic, but the lives that justify the description” (“Historical Discourse” 31). However, while White asserts history is a literary artifact, his statement does not mean that history then is not real or history is a lie. Moreover, the distinction.

(27) 21. between “rhetoric versus history” or “fiction versus history” is improper. It is often seen that “rhetoric” and “fiction” are the opposite of history for the reason that rhetoric cannot provide evidence and fiction is imaginary and illusory (White, “Historical Discourse” 25). White, nevertheless, points out the rhetorical nature of history by asserting history as a form of literature. Also, fiction does not mean deception; rather, it refers to creative literary works no matter whether they are based on real or imaginary events (Korhonen 16). 2 The opposite pair is neither “history versus rhetoric” nor “history versus fiction”; instead, for White, the contrast is between “the imaginable and the actual” (Tropics 98). History is supposed to be. 治政 understood through the differences and similarities大 between imagination and reality 立 because history manifests its value by two modes: “one of which is encoded as ‘real,’ ‧ 國. 學. the other of which is ‘revealed’ to have been illusory in the course of the narrative”. ‧. (98).. sit. y. Nat. Besides, there are several approaches, for White, to make the fragmentary. io. al. er. historical events reasonable, and historians tend to “familiarize the unfamiliar” (Tropics 86). While historians deal with facts that at first are incomplete and illogical,. n. iv n C they arrange all facts to tell a sensible so as to be accepted by the reader. h e nstory gchi U. Therefore, facts, through emplotment, are no longer strange but they become familiar to people. White further explains, “They [facts] are familiarized, not only because the reader now has more information about the events, but also because he has been shown how the data conform to an icon of a comprehensible finished process, a plot structure with which he is familiar as a part of his cultural endowment” (86 emphasis in original). 2. The Latin word of fiction is fictio, which means “molding and shaping pre-existing material” without a meaning of lies (Korhonen 16). By the meaning of molding and shaping, fiction refers to literary techniques that are used in literature and historiography. Fictio, during the Roman times, refers to “lies and inventions” (16), standing for the things or events that never exist in the physical world or cannot be proven. In modern time, it refers to novels and short stories (16)..

(28) 22. Comparing the therapeutic process in psychotherapy to writing history, White emphasizes the importance of familiarizing the unfamiliar. Patients suffer from their past which is strange, unfamiliar and mysterious for them. Unable to make all their past events sensible-connected, they are threatened and haunted by their past, or they may arrange a certain form of their horrible past by themselves. White believes that helping patients to re-arrange their past events familiarizes the unfamiliar in their memory, and further eases their illness. Says White, “The problem is to get the patient to ‘reemplot’ his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that. 治政 make up his life” (Tropic 87 emphasis in original). 大 Hence, in this light, White reveals 立 the significance of the narrative structure of history for people for the reason that how ‧ 國. 學. to narrate history represents how to create subjectivities and identities, and. ‧. understanding the narrative element in history comforts and eases the strangeness of. sit. y. Nat. personal past events.. io. al. er. This process of familiarizing the unfamiliar, nevertheless, is male-centered for two reasons. First, before the rise of feminism, history writing has been dominated by. n. iv n C men; as Deirdre Beddoe observes, has been, and continues to be, as male h e“[H]istory ngchi U. dominated as our society” (9). White emphasizes that historians arrange facts, which means to edit facts, to leave some and abandon some, and we observe that those facts that are discarded outside history, however, are usually references about women. Consequently, even though phallocentric historians have the ability of storytelling to familiarize historical events, which White describes as “strange, enigmatic or mysterious” (86), those familiarized events are still male-centered. Historical events about women are not “strange, enigmatic or mysterious,” but what is worse is that they simply disappear in history. Following this, what phallocentric historians familiarize is not familiar to women, so the familiarized historical events still make.

(29) 23. women feel “strange, enigmatic or mysterious.” No matter how good the storytellers are, it is difficult for these male-centered historians to escape the patriarchal ideology to familiarize the unfamiliar for women. From this point of view, White’s theory of metahistory provides a fundamental ground for scholars, especially feminists, to rewrite history. History, under White’s interpretation, is a literary artifact with a narrative form, and it is no longer a fixed monolith that conveys the only truth without other interpretations. Based on the value-neutral historical events, feminists may rewrite history to provide different versions of the same historical events. In addition, the interpretations of historical. 治政 events, instead of historical events per se, are the meaning 大 of history, so a feminist 立 perspective of historical events is legitimate and necessary. In this way, the realization ‧ 國. 學. of history as literary artifact “liberates” our construction of the past by accepting. sit. y. Nat. the past (Munslow 163).. ‧. different interpretations of historical events, rather than limit our perception toward. io. al. er. White’s insistence on history as a literary artifact opens a possibility of rewriting women into history although his metahistory does not take women into. n. iv n C serious consideration. If historyhis narrated by storytellers e n g c h i U as White suggests, then history could be re-narrated by other storytellers. Her-story, consequently, is not impossible to achieve. Some male-centered historians use value-neutral historical events to tell stories to familiarize the unfamiliar facts and to use them to control women by editing some facts. With the same strategy of familiarization, writing women into history may help women to eliminate the strangeness of the historical events for them and to recreate their perception toward history and toward themselves. As White mentions, the narrative form of history does not mean history is a lie; by the same token, her-story, with the same historical facts but without the same narration and interpretation, is not a lie, either..

(30) 24. History, in this way, has several different versions due to different ways of storytelling, but the historical facts are not changed. White explains, “The events themselves are not substantially changed from one account to another. That is to say, the data that are to be analyzed are not significantly different in the different accounts. What is different are the modalities of their relationships” (97). White emphasizes the multiple interpretations to the same historical event, but he, as a historian, does not assert that history is totally equal to literature because history after all needs to take into concern events that actually happen. A classic historical work will not be denied by any new explanation or data discovered by the next generation (97). What White. 治政 intends to propose is that the overemphasis of scientific 大 dimension of history limits 立 our perception of history and the knowledge of history as a literary artifact liberates us ‧ 國. 學. to create and accept different interpretations of history. Hence, White’s theory indeed. al. B. Wertenbaker’s Concept of History. er. io. sit. y. Nat. literary authors, and readers.. ‧. provides a significant theoretical background for re-writing history for historians,. n. iv n C Comparing British theatrehwith American theatre, e n g c h i U Richard Palmer observes that. the history play is more popular in British theatre (2), and the tradition of the history play in Britain may even be traced back to the 16th century (2). Nevertheless, the tradition of the history play transforms immensely in the 20th century, especially owing to the question of the objectivity of history (Palmer 1-2). Palmer attributes this change to the difference between Old History and New History (12-13). Obviously, Palmer’s distinction between the two concepts of history echoes Hayden White’s assertion of history as a literary artifact different from scientific and objective history. Historical facts may be rearranged and retold for different purposes by different people; in this way, the playwright of the history play has multiple strategies in using.

(31) 25. historical materials, and Palmer concludes eight methods. 3 Chapters Three and Four will have a further discussion on how Wertenbaker uses historical materials in all her history plays. Before that, the following analyzes Wertenbaker’s concept of history in general in three plays, Credible Witness, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and The Break of Day, for three purposes: to illustrate White’s statement by Wertenbaker’s plays, to legitimate Wertenbaker’s rewriting history, and to describe Wertenbaker’s concept of history as background to the following two chapters.. 1. The Narrative Element in History. 治政 From Hayden White’s point of view, “history大 as a discipline is in bad shape 立 today because it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest ‧ 國. 學. of appearing scientific and objective, it has repressed and denied to itself its own. ‧. greatest source of strength and renewal” (Tropics 99, emphasis in original). In order to. sit. y. Nat. pursue the scientific accuracy and objectivity of history, history writing loses the. io. al. er. power of literary imagination and the possibilities of different interpretations. Like White’s point, Wertenbaker in Credible Witness (2001) describes an immigration. n. iv n C officer and a guard, who are both h historian-like e n g c h iandUboth insist only on a “credible witness” to judge whether asylum seekers may stay in Britain or not. Their emphasis on evidence blinds themselves, showing a wrong judgment in deciding not to permit asylum seekers to stay. Ironically, with the assistance of refugees, they at the end 3. Palmer distinguishes strategies of using history into eight types: first, “Characters and situation are largely fictional, but the style of the play mimics that of a play from an earlier period” (9); second, “Plays based on legendary sources, that may or may not have historical foundation, contain characters known to the audience, who possess some degree of historic validity for the audience” (9); third, “Even with fictional characters, some plays have their setting, characterization, and action determined by a historical period” (9); fourth, “Fictional characters react to a background of actual historical events in plays” (9); fifth, “Plays that depict specific historical characters and situations, but in a recognizably exaggerated fashion, include travesties of history” (9); sixth, “In many plays historical figures interact with fictional characters, sometimes in real, sometimes in imaginary circumstances” (9); seventh, “Recognizable figures from the past appear principally in private and therefore largely imaginative circumstances” (9); eighth, “A play may depict, as accurately as possible, the behavior of historical figures in reported events” (9)..

(32) 26. realize scientific evidence is neither the only source of making history nor the only way to reveal truth; rather, everyone’s narrative and they themselves are “credible witnesses.” Credible Witness premiered at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2001, telling a story about a Macedonian mother, Petra Karagy, who flies to Britain in pursuit of her son, Alexander Karagy. 4 Because of using a false passport, Petra is detained and locked in a detention center, where she meets some asylum seekers, including Aziz, Shivan, and Ameena. Simon Le Britten is the major immigration officer in charge of all asylum seekers. Lacking the historical knowledge of. 治政 complicated relationship between Greece and Macedonia, 大 Simon does not believe 立 Petra’s words that her son is persecuted by Greeks simply because of teaching ‧ 國. 學. Macedonia history. Without evidence and official papers, Simon doubts Petra’s words. ‧. and the existence of Alexander. He describes his job, “Now I’ll tell you the facts of. sit. y. Nat. this case,” and states, “The challenge of this job is to find the truth of a story and it’s a. io. al. er. challenge I relish. I’m like a historian myself, sifting the evidence” (Credible Witness 199). Like science-disciplined historians whom White and Wertenbaker criticize,. n. iv n C Simon claims for the authority of the only truth and the priority of the credible he ngchi U. evidence he sifts from the false. Deciding which evidence is true, he is an authority on explaining facts. Simon intensely depends on official records to judge the legitimacy of asylum seekers. Therefore, without any paper record of Alexander, Simon declares Alexander “vanishes” (199). In other words, Alexander disappears, becoming “no one,” in both histories of England and Greece due to a lack of official records. Simon is like one of those historians who only care about the scientific 4. According to Credible Witness Resource Pace published by Royal Court Theatre, Wertenbaker and the directors, actors, actresses all went to detention centers to interview asylum seekers. During a period of two weeks, they talked with asylum seekers and then shared their discovery when they went back to the theatre. About two and a half years later, Credible Witness was finally completed (Royal Court. n. pag.)..

(33) 27. accuracy of history, so he relies on official papers a lot. Official evidence becomes the only way to decide whether asylum seekers may stay or not. Aziz lacks any official evidence so he is restricted within the detention center. He, a refugee from Algeria, comes to England for political asylum in order to escape a civil war in his own country. Horrified by the civil war, he declares that Algerian history makes his head come off, so he sees his head everywhere. However, his fear is not a piece of official evidence. He expresses, “When I came here I told them I was running away because my head was going to be torn off. We don’t accept fear of the future, they tell me, only what happened: were you officially threatened? Officially? There’s a civil war in. 治政 Algeria, I say. It’s not officially a civil war, they say” 大(206 emphasis added). 立 According to the 1951 United Nation Convention on Refugees, which Britain is one ‧ 國. 學. of the signatories, refugees are people who are forced to leave their countries for. ‧. security owing to “a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion,. sit. y. Nat. nationality, memberships of a particular social group or political opinion” (Royal. io. al. er. Court. n. pag.). Britain has an obligation to obey the convention and to accept refugees. However, refugees are often regarded as criminals and locked in detention. n. iv n C centers while waiting for examination Court. n. pag.). The most effectual way h e n(Royal gchi U to prove refugees’ claim is official records, so Aziz’s fear of losing his head off and an unofficial civil war in Algeria are not reliable evidence. As a result, Aziz, like other refugees, is detained as a prisoner. 5 Without any aid from the English government, Petra, providing no official record to prove herself and the existence of her son, decides to go on a hunger strike. 5. Compared with many other European countries, the UK takes far fewer asylum seekers even though it has the obligation to follow the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees (Royal Court. n. pag.). Asylum seekers are not welcome in Britain, and with the increase of the population of refugees and their problems, the asylum issue becomes one of the crucial subjects in contemporary Britain. Theatres also reflect this political and cultural issue and perform several plays on the relevant subject (Aston, “The Bogus Woman” 5)..