SHERRILL GRACE
This essay is a study of Sharon Pollock's artist characters. Using concepts drawn from contemporary autobiography theory with Butler's theory of performativity, I examine three plays in detail—Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and Moving Pictures—to show how Pollock develops an artist's power to produce identity, to articulate the meaning of a life in performance, and, in some instances, to resist those scriptings of life which limit or erase individuals. While I conclude with observations about these three plays, I also suggest that the paradigm Pollock explores through the artist character informs other of her plays and non-artist characters.
Dans cet étude, on examine les portraits des artistes présentees par Sharon Pollock dans ses pièces, mais avec attention particulièr a Moving Pictures, qui raconte l'histoire de Nell Shipman, actrice et realisatrice. Pour creer la character de "Shipman," Pollock a utiliser l'autobiographie de Shipman et, dans mon analyse, j'applique les théories contemporaines d'autobiographics et performativity pour explorer comment Pollock monte l'enquete autobiographique de son "Shipman."
I
This essay is a preliminary investigation into what I have increasingly come to believe is a pivotal issue in Pollock's theatre: her fascination with and frequent representation of the artist.1 Although Pollock's portrayal of the artist figure is primarily located in the characters who are professional artists, her concept of the artist extends well beyond such characterizations to inflect many other character types and to problematize our interpretation not only of nonartist characters, but of human identity in its social, political, inter-personal, and psychological dimensions. There are many ways of approaching the significance of Pollock's theatre or of defining the parameters of her art, and this is only one of them. However, the artist figure constitutes an especially rewarding avenue of exploration because it illuminates so many other aspects of her work.
Underlying my approach to Pollock's artists and their significance in her plays are some theoretical premises that must be acknowledged from the start. I will be drawing upon two feminist theories, both developed outside theatre studies, to help me explore the significance of Pollock's artists: the first is Leigh Gilmore's concept of "autobiographics"; the second is Judith Butler's concept of "performativity"—or, to be more precise, aspects of Butlerian performativity. Autobiographics enables me to examine those Pollock characters who insist upon telling self-representing stories that may or may not bear any resemblance to Pollock's own autobiographical stories; performativity allows me to locate the production of self within the play by troping on the metaphor of performance.
The practice Gilmore calls autobiographics enables the critic to identify "those elements of self-representation ... that mark a location in a text where self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation emerge within the technologies of autobiography [of an 'I' telling the stories of its self] through which the subject of autobiography is produced" (42). "Autobiographics," she continues, "allows us to recognize that the I is multiply coded in a range of discourses" (42). Without pausing longer over what is a subtle and complex idea, I want to stress the following points about autobiographics. First, it begins by assuming that a self has sufficient agency to invent itself anew, while recognizing that the self is already invented by/sedimented in other discourses (legal, social, racial, gendered, and so forth). Second, the identity invented by the self and represented through autobiographics is multiple, in process, interrupted (see Gilmore 45), and always resisting foreclosure and objectification. Gilmore is writing against the dominant western philosophical tradition that posits Self as stable, coherent, internally consistent, and separate from the autobiographical story, a tradition that has served to celebrate white males and to install the masculine unitary Subject as both the universal ideal and the cultural norm. She goes on to explore the uses of autobiographics for reading women's texts, whether they take the expected form of non-fiction, prose autobiographies or other, overtly fictional, forms, such as novels, poems, plays, and video art. It is this flexibility or adaptability that I appreciate about her theory. After all, to ask the fundamental ontological question—who am I?—and to attempt an answer, can be done in almost any art form or any mode of representation.
Before I turn to Butler, however, there are a few more aspects of autobiographics to consider and use in my analysis. According to Gilmore, discontinuity particularly characterizes women's discourses of self-representation because that representation "interrupts (or is interrupted by) the regulatory laws of gender and genre," and the selves that emerge are discontinuous and fragmented; such discourse involves rhetorical violence, as indeed do "totalizing theories of identity" in the first place (45). By reading Pollock's plays through autobiographics, then, I am reading for the interruptions, discontinuities, and rhetorical violence within the stories that produce self-representation as a shifting, multiple, resisting I. Such a reading involves watching for the ruptures within discourse that are the marks of conflict and resistance—the traces, as it were, of identity being negotiated before our eyes. One caveat: with autobiographics it might be tempting to equate or elide Sharon Pollockas- artist with the artist figures in the plays, but to do so would be to miss the point. I am not looking for the self-representation of the woman or artist called Sharon Pollock; that is a perfectly legitimate endeavour, but not mine here.2 I am looking for the production of identity in self-representation as a performance, where performance must be understood in two senses—as acting a part/ playing a role/performing on stage and as the enactment of Butlerian performativity.
Butler's theory of performativity, developed in Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and the essay "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," has nothing per se to do with theatre or drama; Butlerian performativity is an epistemological concept, an explanation of how we come to know who we are, and an ontological premise that posits a way of coming into being who we are. It is an explicitly feminist practice only insofar as it works against the binaries inscribed by western philosophy in order "to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy" (Gender Trouble 13). Identity, Butler argues, is "performatively constituted," be it the identity of gender, race, class, profession, or social function (Gender Trouble 25), and the "performative" names "a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning" (Gender Trouble 139). To perform, in Butler's thinking, is analogous with playing a role on stage, as long as we recognize that, in real life, as it were, there is no pre-performed identity to return to outside the role and no fixed inside identity to express.3 On this point, Butler provides her own warning by reminding us that:
Performativity is not a singular "act," for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated [and a] full disclosure of its historicity [is impossible]. (Bodies That Matter 12-13)
In other words—and not merely in metaphors—all the world is a stage on which we perform identity by reiterating/acting out a set of norms, by conforming to an "iterable model" (Derrida qtd. Butler, Bodies That Matter 13), by performing a "script" ("Performative Acts" 277). If this performance sounds utterly prescriptive and abjectifying, it is not; as I understand Butler, agency is preserved in at least two ways: through the activity of citation itself (the norms, laws, styles) and through the "rearticulatory" practices of the body in time. As Butler might put it, culturally produced scripts can be resisted and changed when their historicity and contingency are exposed, and Gilmore's autobiographics enables me to identify sites of potential resistance and change by locating the interruptions, fractures, or cracks in Pollock's use of culturally- scripted performances of identity and then to isolate and critique those fragments of resistance that signal her continuous creation of artistic selves.
II
Whether I define the artist narrowly as writer, filmmaker, or actor (Catherine, the writer, Nell, the filmmaker, Scott and Zelda in Angel's Trumpet, and the actresses in Blood Relations and Saucy Jack), or more loosely as performer/ enforcer of a script (TS in The Komagata Maru Incident, Walsh in Walsh, Eme in Getting It Straight, Eddie/Emily in Fair Liberty's Call, Mr Big in Whiskey Six Cadenza, and Janet in End Dream), it is the scripting and performing that interest me and the epistemological or ontological questions posed by performing the script that I want to examine. However, for reasons that will become clear, it is Pollock's artist-characters who most effectively, because consciously, perform, enforce, resist, and re-write the scripts of their lives.
The three plays I will consider closely are Blood Relations (1980), Saucy Jack (1993), and Moving Pictures, which premiered in March 1999 at Calgary's Theatre Junction.4 All three plays centre on artist figures; all three explore role-playing and scripting; and all three demonstrate what I call, after Gilmore and Butler, the performativity of autobiographics. Moreover, there is a progression in these plays, from a playing with performativity and autobiography in Blood Relations, to a questioning of the power politics and ethics of such role-play in Saucy Jack, to a clear confrontation, in Moving Pictures, with the ontological challenge made to accepted ideas of Self when the meaning of one's life is understood to depend upon performing one's autobiography. From Actress playing Miss Lizzy to actress playing murdered women to actress/filmmaker playing herself, Pollock uses artist figures to show us, in carefully crafted scriptings drawn from the documented record (one can scarcely say from real life), what it means to represent the self and how much is at stake when we do this.
Blood Relations is the best-known of Pollock's plays. It has also received some astute critical attention, and no critic is inattentive to the play's focus on role-playing and identity developed through the play-within-a-play structure (see Clement, Kerr, Knowles, Miner, Saddlemyer, Stratton [Stone-Blackburn], Wylie and Zichy). Miss Lizzy eases her Actress-friend into playing Lizzy's part in the events of 1892 at Fall River, and she is always watching and directing the Actress in her role. When the Actress/Lizzy appears to be about to murder her father, she could be said to have entered so fully into Lizzy's life that she performs the autobiographics that answers the haunting question: Did you, Lizzy? However, Blood Relations does not end with the blackout as the Actress is about to use the hatchet (67) or just after the blackout, when Miss Lizzy reaches up to take the hatchet from the Actress (68). The play ends with the Actress returning to her pre-existing self, stepping out of her role as Lizzy, and doing exactly what Butler says makes performativity non-theatrical. However we read (or perform) the closing lines—as Lizzy accusing the audience or as Lizzy disavowing her guilt by blaming the Actress—the brilliant ambiguity of that "You did" reminds us not only that identity is scripted and performed but also that the script can be changed (70). The narrative of one's life is not fixed, stable, accessible, or true. It is a story, a script; we can buy into, accept, and enjoy it, or we can resist and struggle to re-write it. By performing Miss Lizzy's autobiography or, at least, a possible version of it, the Actress enacts, puts into play and practice, Lizzy's autobiographics—not the truth about her life, but a script.
Both Gilmore and Butler pay close attention to scripting. Butler insists that gender identity is socially scripted, prescribed, and learned. Building on that idea, Gilmore argues that life stories are also socially prescribed (usually to the disadvantage of women in life and in story). However, both maintain that scripts can be resisted and changed, that the individual has agency and can act beyond, or in excess of, the script (see Butler "Performative Acts" 281-82, and Gilmore 25). Given the strategic importance of script to the performativity of autobiographics, it is necessary to further examine just how script is evoked in Blood Relations. Ideas about scripts and scripting pervade the play: the play opens with the Actress-as-artist rehearsing her lines from A Winter's Tale and closes with her exit from another script. But I have other moments in mind. For example, the first time we see Dr. Patrick he is reminding Lizzy (the Actress) that she has "got it all wrong" because she is not playing her proper role in the socially produced and sanctioned script of her life; she is meant to be a demur, compliant, middle-class, feminine, good girl (31). Shortly after this scene, Miss Lizzy (who is Brigit by this point in the action) clearly articulates her awareness of and guilt over this script: "Do you suppose," she asks the Actress/Lizzy, "there's a magic formula ... for being 'a woman?'". Ironically, as the trial recall shows, it is society's investment in precisely this script, or "magic formula," that exonerates Miss Lizzy, yet it is this very same script that Lizzy (as the Actress performs her) rejects when Mr. Borden tells her how she should live her life (37). She quite simply refuses to perform that life story; instead she fragments, interrupts, shatters that script to attempt something different —or so the artist-as-Actress would have us believe. That something different, however, is partial, still in process, a possible script for becoming (not being) a woman. Moreover, it takes an artist to show us how scripts work on stage and in life.
Saucy Jack revisits some of the same issues, albeit from a sharply different perspective. In this play it is the women who have been murdered, but those murders are only the beginning—the donné—for Pollock's study in the performativity of an autobiographics that the artist can best understand. According to Pollock, who might almost be quoting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "the objective or motivation for the re-enactment of the women's deaths in the play is not to achieve the death of the women, but to achieve some other end or objective that relates to the relationship between men" (Saucy Jack 5).5 "Kate [the actress]," Pollock tells us, is "an avenue of survival" because she performs "the woman's evolution from a silent, unknown, nameless figure ... to the only vital or potent figure or force in the play" (6). Saucy Jack stages the envoicing of murdered women through Kate's performance in a work of art that rescripts a familiar story of misogyny, class privilege, sexual violence, and gender prescription, into a defamiliarizing experience of autobiographics. As readers or watchers, we come to understand the lives of the murdered prostitutes, who are usually known only as Jack-the-Ripper's victims, as threedimensional human beings—as subjects instead of objects.
The resisting escape artist in Saucy Jack is not Jem, who has cast and directed the play we will mostly see, and it is not Eddy, who carved his perverse desires in human flesh, but Kate, the actress. Kate begins as a mere hired hack, but quickly moves to challenge Jem's script for the evening rendezvous in the Thames-side house in Chiswick and the dominant scriptings of Jack-the- Ripper in which Jack is the mysterious autobiographical subject and his victims are mere objects of desire. She begins by being a good girl, doing what she is told, sticking to the socially sanctioned script that Jem invokes: "I'll soon get me doss money," she parrots right on cue (24). However, as she moves into her role as prostitute and grasps what Jem has plotted, she disrupts this script, first to give the dead, voiceless, identityless women a fragmented, but nonetheless powerful, voice and story, then to assert her agency by performing a woman who fights back ("she turns on Jem pointing the knife at him aggressively" 38), and next to refuse her role in Jem's and history's script altogether by warning Montague about the trap that has been set for him (56-57). When the play ends, Jem, Eddy, and Montague are still fully scripted and unaware that they need not be trapped inside this plot of their own patriarchal devising. Only Kate has shown us the contingent exteriority of the script, and the life and death stories it prescribes, by moving beyond its "perimeters" and out of the plot altogether (37). We do not, however—and this is crucial—see her return to a defined preexisting identity, to some essential stable Self; instead, she leaves not as she entered, but as a person transformed by art, as the creator of another script. She announces the men's (known) future and "leaves the room with no sense of fear" (60). Who Kate is does not matter. She has performed the autobiographical script of "Catherine Eddowes! Sometimes Kate! Sometimes Jane! Sometimes Mary Ann! Sometimes Kelly!" within the interstices of the dominant script, while resisting any prescribed identity for her self. Kate gives us the performativity of autobiographics (38).
Blood Relations flirts with complex issues of identity, of ontology and of epistemology, but, in the last analysis, stops short of performativity. Saucy Jack pushes further to ask not just 'did you?/didn't you?' of Jem or Eddie, but 'who were the women?' and 'what, in fact, is a woman?' To pose these questions, Pollock creates artist characters who have greater insight into social, ethical, and philosophical issues than the non-artist characters (or, to put it more cynically, where Jem has a vested interest in a particular script, the artist, like the philosopher, has a vested interest in scripting). The artist characters in these two plays work with the scripts they are given, but resist and move beyond them. They force us to contemplate far more terrifying questions than whether Miss Lizzy Borden axed her parents or whether the heir to the British throne was a serial killer and cannibal. The artists in these plays challenge us to ask how we know who we are and what constitutes being or, more unsettling still, becoming. Implicit in this challenge is the possibility that our identities are socially produced scripts, heavily sedimented through reiteration and thoroughly interpellated by various regimes of power.6
Moving Pictures pushes the performativity of autobiographics to its logical conclusion. This play is about the life story of Nell Shipman, neé Helen Barham (1882-1970), the Canadian-born, silent film actress, who first gained attention in the 1915 version of James Oliver Curwood's God's Country and the Woman (Armatage 20). However, it was the feature film Back to God's Country (1919), filmed partly on location in northern Alberta, at Lesser Slave Lake, and set in the Canadian north and high Arctic, that made her a star and inspired her to make her own films. After having her first child and failing to make a comeback as an actress, she formed Nell Shipman Productions in 1921 before moving, with her menagerie of wild animals and the second of four husbands, to the wilderness of Idaho, where she wrote, directed, and starred in two more feature films (Armatage 21). However, Nell's "cottage industry" style of independent production was doomed because, as biographer Kay Armatage explains, Nell's "career trajectory [...] parallels [...] the history of the silent cinema [... and] the history of women's participation in the industry," which saw the introduction of sound coinciding with the rise of monopoly control over production and distribution by a few big film companies (23). After two more disastrous marriages and several failed attempts to succeed in film-making, she died alone and broke "with the manuscript of her autobiography waiting for publication" (Armatage 23). This autobiography, The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart (1987), was released by her son seventeen years after her death in 1970, and Pollock has drawn from it extensively for her interpretation of Nell.7
Further consideration of Shipman, her autobiography, or Pollock's uses of that text are beyond my present scope, but it is important to note that Moving Pictures relies on an autobiography as its primary source and develops an autobiographical play from this material. To the degree that the play represents a feisty artist who acts, directs, and writes, the autobiography is Pollock's as well as Nell's, and it most certainly demonstrates Pollock's interest in the practice of autobiographics and in the artist as autobiographer. In her prefacing comments to the play, Pollock explains:
There are 3 Nells in Moving Pictures, the woman at different stages of her life and work. The woman plays for and against herself in the reconstruction of a life dedicated to the creation of play on stage, on screen, and in life. She creates fiction in order to experience being. She transforms her life experience into fiction in order to determine how well she lived, why she lived—in order to know [that] she did live and that her life has meaning [, which] the fiction reveals to her[, but] that the actual living of her life did not [reveal]. (Moving Pictures 2)
The three Nells are "Helen," as young actress, "Nell," as director/writer/actress/producer in mid-life, and "Shipman" (the name she kept from her first husband, Canadian entrepreneur "10% Ernie" [Ernest Shipman]), "towards the end of her life" (3). Through the interactions of these three Nells, Pollock stages the performativity of autobiographics in which the created fiction of a life-story produces an "experience of being," complete with the "meaning," that actual living blurs or even occludes. Throughout this process of representation, Pollock keeps her theatrical focus on the competing stories and perspectives, which constitute the living of a life, and, as a result, the story-line is multiple, disrupted, fragmented, and on-going, resisting closure right up to the final words, which signal the beginning of a new story. Equally significant—and absolutely inextricable from this story-line—is the artists' performativity. At no point does "Nell Shipman"— neé Helen Barham, mother of Barry, wife of Ernie and Bert (only two husbands appear in Pollock's play), star of Back to God's Country, writer/director/producer—step outside of her roles in order to step inside, as it were, and return to an essential core of a Self that she is merely expressing. Shipman's life, as Pollock's presents it, has no such essentializable inside; it is these Moving Pictures performed on the screen of memory and accompanied by the voices over or embodied voices of her various men, from Thomas Edison, who made motion pictures possible and reminds us of the governing trope of the play, to the husbands, Hollywood moguls, and her son.
Two examples will suggest how the performativity of autobiographics works in Moving Pictures. The replaying of life is cued throughout by the command, "Play," which is pronounced by one self to prod the others into contributing to the action and story. But at a particularly fraught and poignant crisis of performance, "Nell" demands of "Shipman": "So is it content or form you're complaining about? Don't you know your own life?" (80). "Shipman's" reply—"Not the way you tell it!"—only escalates the argument. "Helen" interrupts the other two to reassure "Nell" that "Shipman" appreciates "Nell's" effort to perform her life, but "Nell" remains angry:
NELL. So we have toured with the Gilmores, we have married Ernie, we've made movies, we've had Barry, we have lost mummy and daddy, we are The Girl from God's Country, we have turned down Sam Goldwyn, we have produced with Ernie, we have been screwed by Universal and we have screwed Bert! Does any of this ring a bell?
SHIPMAN. I find it painful you know.
NELL. (to HELEN) She finds it painful—while I struggle on, trapped by the burden of bad teeth, failing eyesight, clogged arteries, stomach problems with spicy food which I've always loved, and never remembering where I've left the keys, she finds it painful? Who is this old woman? I can't believe it's me. (Moving Pictures 80-81)
"Nell" has no sympathy for "Shipman," whose body she must support, whose self she has become.
But as we can see from this fragment of dialogue, the life stories are discontinuous, overlapping, and contradictory. They constantly disrupt, by interruption, any unified, stable, coherent construction of a Subject to leave us with the subjectivity of living-as-playing. This crucial point about life as performance is further emphasized when "Helen"/"Nell"/"Shipman" perform within the performativity that constitutes their identities. A stage instruction tells us that "although the three are unified, working together, the strobe-like effect of the flickers ["black and white" film images projected on the women] fragments their unified actions" (120). When this acting is interrupted by an implied question from the audience, a question that is not performed but can be inferred from the response as challenging a woman's right to act outside the socially prescribed script of her life as a woman, "Shipman" answers in terms that resist and confound the very notion of prescriptions of gendered identity: "Yes," she comments, "some people do believe that a woman's place is in the kitchen and nursery—but that's like saying the natural habitat for a parrot is a cage because you've never seen one anywhere else" (121).
III
At the beginning of this discussion, I suggested that the Pollock artist- figure could be extended well beyond those characters designated as artists to include others of her characters. Eme in Getting It Straight is a fine example of the Pollock autobiographer/artist as a clear-sighted, suffering fool. Eme is a mad woman; in the play she has temporarily escaped her incarceration and is telling us her life-story from her hiding place amidst the detritus strewn beneath a bleacher. Her life story takes the form of a fragmented, discontinuous autobiography, which she performs in the breaks of a dominant narrative, of which she is fully aware, that classifies her as wife/mad woman and from a place that exists beyond the bounds of that script, which is to say, outside the house, where a good wife resides, and away from the institution, where the mad wife is kept. She says, "they say / I'm mad I say / you know what I say," and in a sense we do (90). What Eme says out loud is what most of us refuse to hear or speak—stories of war, of domestic violence, of coercive identity scripts, of bombs, obligatory sex, loaded briefcases, mass destruction, oppressive marriage, and the theatre of life. She also tells us how to escape these scripts, to move beyond them, to say, and hear, and be something other:
I say
go to the ladies
go beneath
go under
you'll find others there. (90)
But you can only go there by taking responsibility, as Eme has, for performing your own life, whatever the cost. And, judging from Eme's physical position and mental state, the performativity of autobiographics can exact a very high price indeed.
Getting It Straight is a difficult play to grasp because Eme's life story is anything but straight. It is her performance, in anguish and rage, of an autobiographics that she is trying to wrench into a new shape, a shape that defies, if only for the duration of the telling, the norms of gendered obedience and coherent genre. She speaks from within those ruptures in self-representation that embody such an extreme resistance that making a new script seems virtually impossible. To write a new script requires the sanity and control of the artist, and for images of that control and glimpses of that performative power one must look to Blood Relations, Saucy Jack, and, especially, to Moving Pictures.
On the basis of these three plays, I can offer the following conclusions about the role of the artist figure in Sharon Pollock's work, at least in terms of the artist's representation through autobiographics and performativity. First, there is a development in the portrayal of performativity, from theatre to philosophy, from a dramatic device in Blood Relations to an epistemological, ethical, and, ultimately, ontological process in Moving Pictures, with Saucy Jack pointing the way from the one to the other. Second, the performative function of the artist raises major questions about utterance, the body, gender, and subjectivity (all of which are important vectors of identity) and how these engage with regimes of power operating through the state, or in various social practices, in historiographic codes, in the structure of the patriarchal family, in the individual psyche (however we define that), and in the theatre, or, for that matter, in any medium of artistic representation. And third, this problem of power—Who has it? How do they get it? How is it used? How is it resisted?— deeply implicates Pollock and her artists in the process of scrutinizing aspects of that god-like power she and they wield.
Artists in Pollock's oeuvre are not nice people or good girls who lip-sync the assigned script, endlessly reproducing the status quo. They are tyrants, manipulators, visionaries, ruthless survivors, clear-sighted (hence suffering) fools, shit-disturbers, moral registers of our times, and creative philosophers who force us to think about identity, freedom, and the construction of meaning. Moreover, the Pollock artist (and Pollock-as-artist) is an autobiographer: Pollock uses autobiographics to stage performances of life-stories that allow us access to the power (for good and ill) of storying, which she construes as the constitutive process of life. And, finally, because such storying is fundamental to the construction of meaning, it is not an activity exclusive to artists. We all do it, Pollock suggests, all the time, and in so doing we perform our selves.
NOTES
1. This study has grown out of my interest in questions of theatre in general and of
Pollock's theatre in particular. It is based upon my preparation for a graduate
seminar in 2000, itself an early stage in research for a Pollock biography, and it
owes much to the lively debates among members of the group and to discussion
at the 2000 ACTR/ARTC conference, where it was first presented. My thanks to
the students, to Sharon Pollock for her guest performance in the seminar, to my
ACTR/ARTC colleagues, and to SSHRC for the funding that supports my
research.
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2. If one were to pursue Pollock's own autobiographical representation in her
work, the best place to begin would be with Doc. From there it would be possible
to move into a consideration of her artists as, to some degree, representations
of her own life.
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3. In "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," Butler insists on the exteriority
of gender identity: "gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses
or disguises an interior 'self ' [...]. As a performance which is performative,
gender is an 'act' [... that] constructs the social fiction of its own psychological
interiority" (279). "I am suggesting," Butler continues, "that this self is not only
irretrievably 'outside,' constituted in social discourse, but that the inscription of
interiority is itself a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication"
(279). In Blood Relations, the Actress/Lizzy recognizes this "essence fabrication"
when she wonders if she missed being stamped with the "magic formula"
that identifies her as feminine (36). In Saucy Jack, we watch the actress
fabricate the interiority of the murdered women, and in Moving Pictures the
"outside" takes shape before our eyes in the debate over what conceivable
"essence" might be labeled "Nell Shipman."
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4. My thanks to Sharon Pollock for giving me a copy of her playscript for Moving
Pictures to use in this study; all quotations are from this script. The play will be
published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2003. I have not considered Doc here
because that play functions differently: Catherine is less intent upon telling her
own life story than she is in forcing her father to relive and face his; she is not
so much an artist performing autobiography as a daughter scripting biography
—her father's and her mother's. This dual role of biographer/autobiographer
(which in Doc is split or shared by Ev and Catherine) is examined by Susanna
Egan, who calls this fundamentally dialogic process "mirror talk"; see Egan, 23-
25.
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5. Drawing upon Gayle Rubin's work with Claude Levi-Strauss's theories,
Sedgwick argues that "in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship
between male homosocial ... desire and the structures for maintaining
and transmitting patriarchal power" (25). That "special relationship" is represented
by "the traffic in women; it is the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps
symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men
with men" (25-26). The actress (and the murdered women) in Saucy Jack, like
Lizzy in Blood Relations, exists to embody desire, which in the former might be
construed as misogynist homosexuality and in the latter as the prohibition on
incest.
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6. While the strategy of disruption/resistance/re-scripting may be feminist,
Pollock's men struggle with analogous dilemmas and challenges: Walsh feels
forced to conform to a professional, racist script that he comes to abhor; TS revels
in the dominant script and insists that Hopkinson accept this script as an
internal, given, stable definition of his identity, which Hopkinson will finally
reject in favour of what he blindly thinks of as his true identity; in Whiskey Six
Cadenza, Mr. Big, who acts as if he were god, thinks of his script as the only
one that matters and tries to force others to conform; and in Fair Liberty's Call
Pollock questions the stories of identity we tell as a nation and as individuals.
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7. Pollock was commissioned to write this play, but grew impatient with Nell
Shipman; for her comments on the biographical Nell and on how she adapted
her treatment of Nell's life, see Nothof 173-74. Many parallels exist between
Pollock and Shipman. Both women were pioneers in fields dominated by men;
both fought to preserve a non-commercialized art; both seem to have felt guilt
over their consuming commitment to art at the expense of husbands and children;
and both identified closely with beloved fathers whom they escaped in
order to become themselves. In her autobiography, Shipman describes idolizing
her drunken father and being profoundly influenced by what he taught her about
animals and nature (76). His death was traumatic, but it did not pull her away
from the film she was making, and Pollock chooses to foreground this episode
in Nell's life as a moment of personal crisis in her play. I have discussed Moving
Pictures in relation to Nell Shipman's The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart at
greater length in "Creating the Girl from God's Country."
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WORKS CITED
Armatage, Kay. "Nell Shipman: A Case of Heroic Femininity." Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema. Eds. Kay Armatage et al. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 17-38.
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