Gender And Power Relations In Samuel Beckett's Theatre

By Ava Carpzov

The feminist debate about theatrical and televisual audience pleasure (who gets it and how) has opened up a territory of discussion concerning different sources of power and authority within these media. In this study I investigate two different kinds of power interactions: The relationships between the characters within the texts of Beckett’s plays and also those which occur between the lookers (the audience) in the auditorium and the looked at on stage (the actors).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ava Carpzov
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005281717

Ava Carpzov

Ava Carpzov was born in England in 1967. She lived in Athens, Greece for six years after moving there to teach English as a foreign language. She has a degree in English Literature and also writes short horror and science fiction stories.

Book preview

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GENDER AND POWER RELATIONS

IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S THEATRE

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Gender And Power Relations in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre. All rights reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, documentary, film or in any other format without prior written permission of the author. The author can be contacted via The Society of Authors, 24 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4EH. This e-book is for personal educational use only. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The author’s website is at: http://www.carpzov.uk.

Copyright Anne-Marie Norman 1990

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE : Not I On Stage: The Absence of the Female Body

CHAPTER TWO :Not I On Screen: Televisual Effects in Relation to the Viewer

CHAPTER THREE : The Text and Female Speech in Not I

CHAPTER FOUR : Happy Days: Winnie, The Epitome of Womanhood?

CHAPTER FIVE: Happy Days: Winnie as the Dependent Spectacle

CHAPTER SIX: Female Identity in Rockaby and Footfalls.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Catastrophe and the Return of the Gaze

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION

"…when clearly intended to be having pleasure…she was in fact…having none…not the slightest (2)

The feminist debate about theatrical and televisual audience pleasure (who gets it and how) has opened up a territory of discussion concerning different sources of power and authority within these media. Pleasure is linked to power in the arts because in contemporary patriarchal British society most published plays are still geared towards male viewing pleasure. According to E. Ann Kaplan in her seminal work Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, (3) women’s bodies on stage and screen are often objectified and female sexuality is perceived as existing for the purpose of male pleasure. Kaplan questions the idea that films address both a male and female viewing position, suggesting that women are encouraged to partake in the spectacle from a male point of view, leading to a more limited amount of pleasure on the woman’s part:

The gaze is not necessarily male (literally), to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious is to be in the masculine position. (4). Kaplan terms this masculine standpoint the male gaze and uses the work of film maker Laura Mulvey (Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema) (5) to reinforce this view. The terms voyeurism and fetishism are used by Kaplan to describe:

…the mechanisms the dominant cinema uses to construct the male spectator in accordance with the needs of his unconscious. (6).

In this study I will be discussing the theatre and television rather than cinema, but I will retain Kaplan’s use of the word voyeurism to mean the scopophilic instinct and her use of fetishism to mean the rendering of the female form phallus-like so as to mitigate its threat to man. I will also draw on the work of Laura Mulvey and Peter Gidal (7) in this respect. Their research is highly relevant to a feminist reading of Beckett’s plays for the following reasons: By controlling the point of view of the camera (in television plays) or the focus of the lighting (in a stage production) men both encourage voyeurism and become voyeurs, because the choice of how the woman is looked at and the context in which she is seen is determined by men. The woman, therefore, becomes the object of male fantasy.

Theatre and television may be inherently voyeuristic because of the satisfaction of watching without being watched oneself. In the case of Beckett’s television plays the spectator is watching a framed, two-dimensional event which is relayed electronically and thus the pleasure of looking is a completely one-way experience. In Beckett’s theatre, the actor can look at the audience but the metaphorical distance between them is such that on one level the actor must sustain the illusion set up by the fictional world of the drama so that the actor stares back at the audience only through the eyes of the character.

The two different kinds of power interactions with which I will be concerned in this study are: The relationships between the characters within the texts of Beckett’s plays and also those which occur between