CYNTHIA ZIMMERMAN
Sharon Pollock's Doc is a watershed play not only because it is her most intensely personal work to date, but also because the protagonist-daughter confronts her ambivalence on yet another front: the relationship to the maternal. After the play ends with what seems a tidy resolution, the ghost of Bob, the mother, lives on to inhabit the character of subsequent mothers: Eme in Getting it Straight and Joan in Fair Liberty's Call. The treacherous stepmother in Blood Relations and the complicit adoptive mother, Mama George, in Whiskey Six Cadenza, are supplanted by more complicated and more sympathetic maternal figures. In Doc, Pollock bravely raises ghosts from her own past. Once summoned, they bring with them new challenges.
La pièce Doc de Sharon Pollock est une ligne de partage, non seulement parce qu'elle est jusqu'à présent son oeuvre la plus intensèment personnelle, mais encore parce que la protagoniste-fille confronte son ambivalence sur un autre front encore: la relation avec la filiation maternelle. Après que la pièce a pris fin sur ce qui semble une résolution convenable, le fantôme de Bob, la mère, hante les personnages des mères suivantes: Eme dans Getting it Straight et Joan dans Fair Liberty's Call. La perfide belle-mère de Blood Relations et la mère adoptive complice, Mama George, dans Whiskey Six Cadenza, sont supplantées par des figures maternelles plus complexes et plus sympathiques. Dans Doc Pollock fait bravement surgir des fantômes de son propre passé. Une fois appelés, ils amènent avec eux de nouveaux dèfis.
Every writer knows that his or her own biography is an important resource. Personal experiences and lived memories exist like photographs, ever ready to become the site where imaginative fiction can begin. In the programme note to her most overtly biographical play, Doc, Sharon Pollock commented on her approach to personal or documentary sources: "My father is Ev but Ev [the character] is not my father... [These characters] aren't really the people I know any more. They started out that way but now have grown past them" (Zimmerman, PW 84). The story and the characters develop beyond the strictly personal or the documentary. As Pollock said, "If it was just my story, I would have put it in a letter and sent it to my family" (PW 84). Moreover, the writing of fiction deeply rooted in biography can yield discoveries for the artist too. According to Pollock, "self discovery is why plays are written" (Zimmerman, CTR 69: 38). In Doc, Pollock bravely raised ghosts from her own past. Once summoned, they brought with them new challenges.
In an interview in 1991, I asked Sharon Pollock if there was anything left unfinished when she completed Doc (prod.1984). She replied that there was, that the tragic figure of the mother, Bob, had overshadowed the main character, Catherine: "Central to the play is Catherine's journey, the discovery which allows her to accept the responsibility that belongs to her and to lay the rest aside without guilt. It frees her from the past" (38). Yet Catherine's story seems less compelling because Bob's presence is so haunting. According to Pollock, "because Bob is more present, more active even though she is acted upon, I don't think the audience sufficiently realizes what has happened to Catherine. Catherine is the figure that has learned from the tragedy" (38). Bob dominates the play even though it is named for her husband, the doctor, and even though Pollock intended the focus to be on Catherine. The truth of this is apparent when one finds that the critics also emphasize the fate of the mother, a point I will return to. However, the spirit of Bob has not been easily put to rest by the playwright either. This paper argues that the spectre of Bob inhabits all of Pollock's mother figures, and most especially those created after Doc (1984): Eme, the protagonist of Getting it Straight (1988), and Joan, the mother in Fair Liberty's Call (1993). These women are related. The portrait of the maternal figure evolves through the course of these plays and, as it is altered, Pollock reconfigures not only the image of the maternal, but also that of the other participants in the family plot: father and daughter.
Pollock's semi-autobiographical play Doc makes it clear how close to home many of her earlier plays are, not always in the details of theme or exposition, but in the force which drives the work. For example, Pollock herself has spoken of having trouble with authority (PW 93). A troubled relationship with authority has provided the central conflict in numerous plays. The struggle takes a critical turn in Blood Relations (1980), a play Diane Bessai calls a "turning point." The first play with an "entirely feminine point of view," Blood Relations is also the first to have the locus of its political and social issues completely in the family home (PW 73). The daughter's trouble with her father, the undisputed authority, leads to murder. It is not surprising that the father is not only dominating and unyielding, but also charismatic—or that his daughter, who challenges his authority, is deeply attached to him. His inspirational source is clearest in Doc, Pollock's most intensely personal play to date.
Sharon Pollock's father was Doctor George Everett Chalmers, a vibrant personality who, like Ev, was a tireless and dedicated family doctor. He pioneered polio treatment in the province, was an active member of the provincial legislature, and in 1974 had a hospital named in his honour. In his book Gentlemen, Players, and Politicians, Dalton Camp describes Everett Chalmers as "impressive on sight, exuding confidence [...]. Clothed in an impeccable white suit, he looked [...] like Clark Gable" (71). More importantly, Camp comments on Chalmers' "commanding presence, his terrible candour, and [his] personal authority and prestige" (72). He was a man, says Camp, "worshipped by legions of patients" and "celebrated for his compassion," a "remarkably fearless [and] combative man" (75). He was, in fact, "the ablest practitioner in New Brunswick" and "He looked it" (84). Chalmers's mother did commit suicide and he did marry a nurse named Eloise Roberts (nicknamed Bob) who became an alcoholic and committed suicide in 1954, when their daughter was a teenager.1
The handsome and commanding Doctor Everett Chalmers provides a blueprint for Pollock's authoritarian males, a figure at once idealizable and infuriating. One could argue that a number of Pollock's plays map a kind of "working-through" of this complicated connection. Young Katie suggests as much when she speaks of how she "figure[s] things out" (Doc 49), and when looking at her notebook, she says, "I write it all down. And when I grow up, I'll have it all here" (Doc 83). When Catherine, a writer in her thirties who no longer uses the name Katie, returns to the family home, her father Ev is no longer as formidable. Although still angry and combative, he has mellowed, having just suffered a heart attack.
Doc is a watershed play not only because of its complicated bending of time and space, its inwardness, and its use of highly personal material, but also because it presents a kind of closure on what has been a central preoccupation to this point: the struggle with authority. At this juncture, the adult daughter is not beholden; the aging patriarch is simply her father. So, at the end of the play, to mark the change in his character, Ev is able to give his daughter the unqualified support he was unable to give his wife, and Andrew Borden in Blood Relations was unable to give his daughter. Recalling a photograph of her mother, Catherine says,
CATHERINE. [...] she looked as if she was waiting. Just waiting.
[...] whatever it was [she was waiting for], she couldn't grab it.
EV. Do you know what you want?
CATHERINE.... Yes... Yes, I do.
EV. Then you grab it. (125)
Father and daughter then burn the unopened letter from Ev's mother, which they assume is an accusing one. There is a sense that they have both come to an understanding about the limits of responsibility and the limits on choice. Extinguishing the accusation becomes a pact to stop assigning blame. Perhaps now they can forgive themselves and each other. As the stage lights go down on the dying flames from the letter, "CATHERINE looks at EV and smiles" (126). Some critics have found this reconciliation scene disturbing because it seems to diminish the mother's tragedy:
[... I]n accepting the sacrifice and silencing of the dead mother [...] the daughter pays too high a price for her own peace. Perhaps even more unsettling is the satisfaction Catherine seems to find in this resolution of the oedipal triangle [...] she and Doc share a smile of complicity in her being, at the end, daddy's only girl. (Wasserman 32-33)
Wasserman says Catherine "lets her father off the hook" because she feels herself implicated in her mother's death. She "must [...] forgive her father so that she might forgive herself " (32).
The problem, I think, is that Wasserman forgets the child Katie in this story, as does Rosalind Kerr in her excellent article, "Borderline Crossings in Sharon Pollock's Out-law Genres." By focusing on the mother as victim, they marginalize and minimize the daughter's traumatic experience, which leads me back to Pollock's important comment: "I don't think the audience sufficiently realize what has happened to Catherine" (CTR 38). And so it is that in Doc Sharon Pollock reaches closure on one front (the struggle with the authoritarian father) and reveals unresolved conflicts on another (the maternal connection). The mother in Doc is a haunting presence; her spectre remains long after the lights on her go out.
In Doc, young Katie is adamant that she does not want to be like her mother or her grandmother (83). "I'm not like them," she claims. "I'm like you, Daddy" (124). She even changes her name from Katie to Catherine so as not to have the same name as her gramma2. In Katie's eyes, her mother and grandmother are losers, and victims because they surrendered. Her mother's situation especially infuriates her: "You all say she's sick, she isn't sick," she yells at her father. "She's a drunk and that's what we should say!" (119). This is extremely important because to young Katie, "not sick" means her mother has a choice. To her, being an alcoholic is a wilful indulgence. So, when her mother complains, the adult Catherine asks the logical question: "why couldn't you leave?" (94). Katie knows that Oscar's mother "had the good sense to get out" (35). She also knows that Oscar is in love with her mother and would help Bob leave her marriage, if that was what Bob wanted. Catherine will herself get out. So, why is Katie so enraged? Why does the mature Catherine have difficulty summoning sympathy? It is not only the wish to identify with the idealized achieving father; it is also because this child was abandoned, neglected by both of her narcissistic parents. And this is my point: both put their own needs before their daughter's. Her father's neglect amounts to his never being home and being oblivious to the fact that he is leaving her alone with a suicidal, alcoholic mother. The non-nurturing, unempathic, and totally self-absorbed mother is even worse. She isn't there for her daughter either; she leaves the scene by entering an alcoholic haze and then calls on her little girl for help. Bob fails Katie completely. Still seeking the approval of a husband who is no longer paying attention to her, she does not take care of her children. Ev says, "she'd let the kids starve to death if it weren't for the maid!" (106). "I hate you and I wish that you were dead!" Katie screams (118). The rage is not simply Katie's inability to empathize with the one who succumbs; it is also that she believes she was, and remains, an unwanted child (121).
So, the adult Catherine comes home as chief investigator and it is as if Ev is placed on trial. Was his success worth it? Whose fault is Bob's alcoholism and suicide? Whose fault is it if a "strong, capable woman degenerates into alcoholism," as Wasserman describes her (32)? It is too easy to read her simply as the neglected wife. She had been an achiever like Ev, but now she tells Katie: "There is nothing I can do" (97). She is talking about her own lack of resources. As in the photograph that Catherine recalls, the one Oscar took of Bob "looking up at the camera" where "she looked as if she was waiting. Just waiting," Bob waits for rescue (125). It is Katie who will prove resourceful, who will do it by herself (84). Now, as Pollock puts it, the daughter must "take control of her life in a positive way" (PW 93). After the writing of Doc, Pollock moves away from such surrenders and suicides, from figures as trapped as Bob.
Pollock's plays, then, have consistently presented a preoccupation not only with authority, but also with the spirited protagonist who struggles against it. The main theme is not the oppressive situation, but the protagonist's considered reaction to it. This is true whether one is referring to Walsh, Whiskey Six Cadenza, or Doc. And Bob does not struggle sufficiently; she does not fight back like Pollock's other protagonists. She relinquishes significant choice. That is hard for her daughter to forgive; her daughter will become the self-reliant fighter.
The mother figures in Pollock's earlier plays bear a striking resemblance to Bob; they, too, have failed their daughters utterly. In Blood Relations, Lizzie has three mothers and they all abandon, desert, or betray her. Her birth mother dies when she is born; her stepmother is totally merged with the patriarchy and resents Lizzie's spirit; her surrogate mother, her sister Emma, opts out when the going gets tough. Complicit in the incestuous exploitation of Leah by Big Daddy, the adoptive mother in Whiskey Six Cadenza is even worse. All these mothers fail to nurture and protect their daughters; they are not mothering.
I have spent some time on Bob's culpability and her failure to resist because I want to turn to the transfiguring of the maternal. By that I mean how the image is reconstructed, so that it becomes a more desirable one—to the daughter. Bob reappears in Getting it Straight and in Fair Liberty's Call, but her worst faults—those traits most damning to a child—have been conspicuously modified. In Getting it Straight, Pollock returns to the trapped woman. Bob was angry, and in that sense mad. In Doc, we witness her surrender to alcoholism and forgetfulness. We hear of her suicide attempts. The play does not develop the delusional aspect of her behaviour that Ev refers to when he says, "Every statutory holiday your mother's killin' herself or seein' things crawlin' on the walls or some goddam thing or other" (16). Bob could not get out of her situation. In contrast, Eme, the protagonist of Getting it Straight, has escaped the asylum. She is the solitary occupant of the stage. There is no one to hear her. But she is not "shut up" in either sense of the word. Pollock had anticipated this creation: "I know there's a play that follows Blood Relations about what happens to the woman who is unable to kill either her father or her mother or, indeed, even herself. Obviously it's about women and madness" (PW 90). Eme, like Katie before her, is trying to "figure it out," to "get it straight" (Doc 91). She has escaped during a group outing and is now hiding under the bleachers of a rodeo arena. This location, like the title, is metaphoric. The game is over, the crowd has gone, and Eme has been left behind. She is out of the game. She has broken the rules (Getting it Straight 115). She does come out from under, but she is not free from what haunts her: in her associative ramblings, she tries to piece together meaning. Her monologue is a swirl of fragmented memories and stories, unconnected fears and paranoid feelings, snatches of news and media horrors, all communicated in the frantic voice of one close to the edge. She is guilty of an undisclosed crime, for there is a red stain on her skirt and she says repeatedly, "I'm afraid for the children." Did she harm the attendant or murder her husband? Like Lizzie in Blood Relations and Catherine in Doc, she may be guilty; she says she is (117). But she proclaims proudly, as did those daughters,
... to have known and done
nothing? that is the crime of that I am not guilty
not guilty of that! (126)
Hers is the poetry and pain of one who does not shut down her feelings or restrain them; she does not repress them as young Katie had to do so that she would not cry (115,116); nor does she lose herself in Bob's alcoholic haze. Rather, like Lizzie Borden, she refuses passivity; she fights back: "I am not mad," Eme says. "I am / Getting it Straight" (119) and "I blame him" (118).
Pollock has explained that in Getting it Straight the "discovery was that, for her, it is better to be open to the pain of the world and lose [her] mind, in some respects" (Zimmerman, CTR 69: 38). Eme also embodies the Laingian idea that the one deemed mad may be the one who feels most keenly; in a world which denies the inner life, the one in touch with it becomes the outsider. In the reconfiguring of the maternal blueprint offered by Bob, Eme is a mother who breaks out of the straitjacket, who fights for her truth even if it costs her everything.
Problematically, however, the maternal figure is separated from her children and more marginalized than ever. Eme gets out; she has neither complied nor surrendered. But she is totally alone and, regardless of the power of her truth, no one listens. It is Joan, the mother in the historical play Fair Liberty's Call, who speaks openly and is heard. She is the one who has gotten it straight; her values are clear. She does not have Bob's sense of injured merit. Cherished and protected by her daughters, she is an empathic and nurturing maternal presence. Bob, the unavailable mother, is replaced by Joan, the one who puts home and family first. Joan's identity is mother, not wife.
Fair Liberty's Call takes place in a New Brunswick forest in October 1785. The family of merchant George Roberts is hosting a Loyalist Legion reunion to commemorate the final battle of the American Revolution. Burned out of Boston, the once prosperous Roberts family has been devastated. They have lost everything, including their two sons who fought on opposing sides. Their daughter Emily cropped her hair, changed her name to Eddie, and put on battle dress to fight in her twin brother's place. The mother, Joan, is half-crazed by grief and the other daughter, Annie, is haunted by ghosts of her own. To make matters worse, what they have met in New Brunswick is a more insidious form of tyranny than anything the Americans rebelled against: the "fiefdom of a few."
The play opens with the women entering the clearing first—Joan, Annie, and Eddie, followed by the men. Joan has the first speech. Speaking in fragments, she voices her disorientation, the strangeness she feels: "[this is] like nothing I know ... This wasn't home, isn't home" (20). Her next words are of family: "Four Children, Father, Mother, Richard, Annie, Emily, Edward, Home!" (21). Home for Joan is family; her family decimated, she is in mourning, maddened by grief.
"Open to the pain," her thoughts often confused and obsessive, Joan shares some symptoms of madness with Bob and Eme. But unlike them, she is also something of a seer, a mystic. She intuits what is unspoken, she notices what no one else does, she senses danger in the stranger, and she will be the one who can connect to the land and to the Indian woman, "the red woman with the baby on her back" (79). Unafraid, perhaps protected by her madness, she accuses her husband. She "blames him," as did Bob and Eme before her. Joan accuses George of destroying their family, of driving out his own son, of being totally unyielding. "I begged," she says, "and he wouldn't." "And when Edward died, [he made] Em'ly go! [...] Three of them gone! Murderer!" (25).
In this play, the men retain the real political and economic power (as historically they did), but they are of diminished stature. Though George was clearly an authoritarian—and perhaps charismatic—patriarch in Boston, the equivalent to Mr. Borden in Blood Relations or Ev in Doc, in Fair Liberty's Call George is not an idealized father figure. Furthermore, to show the change in his character, much like she did with Ev at the close of Doc, Pollock has George break down. When the stranger demands that one of them volunteer to be executed, George says, "Choose me! ... I left my life in Boston and I turned my back ... on my oldest son ... I turned my back on Richard ... and Edward, I ... Choose me" (73). In this breakthrough, just as the dawn light is growing, George poignantly confirms the values Joan espouses all along.
In Fair Liberty's Call, it is the women who provide the play's emotional centre. The three of them determine all the important events. They begin the play, and they conclude it. This is fitting since the play's real subject is not the past battles, which preoccupy the men, but how to create a "place" here, a home. Significantly, it is Joan who has the first word, as well as the last. She tells us that the red woman came out from under the trees and offered her a bowl full of earth. "'Eat,'" she says. "'Swallow. And I do'"(80). Uttering the marriage vow, "I do," ingesting the earth, Joan marries this new country, this new land. She is home.
One can see that Bob's ghost has undergone a sea change. Unlike Bob, Joan has tenacity and hopefulness, compassion and courage, and her children are her first priority. These features can all be seen as correctives to Bob's tragic deficiencies as a mother. In Fair Liberty's Call the family plot concludes with the father humbled, the mother revered, and the daughters empowered. Pollock brings us to an end, which suggests a return, a new beginning. One could even say that, by transfiguring the maternal, she effects a reconciliation with the rejected part of self.
* * *
The plays produced since Fair Liberty's Call in 1993, Saucy Jack (1993), Moving Pictures (1999), End Dream (2000), and Angel's Trumpet (2001), do not include a figure whose role as mother is important to the plot. However, it is interesting that in End Dream, the striking image from Doc returns: the beautiful unhappy woman in an elegant dressing gown who always has a glass in her hand or a cigarette. An alcoholic or drug addict, she is an incompetent mother. Doris is fully aware of her husband's illegal drug smuggling and unconflicted about her involvement in the exploitation of her young employee. Keeping the family secret, a central plot device in many of Pollock's plays, will necessitate sacrifice. The significant difference is that in End Dream the young woman, Janet, feels no special rage at the maternal figure. Hired to be nursemaid for baby Rosemary, she has no expectations of Doris. Of course, Doris is not her mother or her stepmother; more significantly, Doris is depicted as totally trapped by her circumstances. She is powerless. Janet, another young female protagonist who "acquires knowledge by listening and observing" (Pollock, SJ 6) just as Katie does in Doc, will understand that completely. Young Katie could not. Janet does not survive, but she is a fighter and concludes the play empowered. Echoing the struggle in Doc, Janet is "Able to Leave" as Pollock puts it (SJ 5). Janet is a surrogate daughter of Bob, another Katie / Catherine who would defiantly say, "I'm not like her! I would never do that!" (Doc 42).
NOTES
1. The play does include alterations to suit dramatic ends. For example, Dr.
Chalmers remarried in 1956; Pollock's grandmother's death came after her
mother's; Katie is a young girl, rather than a teenager; Bob is in her mid-twenties
to mid-thirties, and so on. Making Katie and Bob younger increases their
vulnerability and the play's pathos.
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2. The concern over inherited character traits is not only Katie's. Ev, Oscar, and
Bob also refer to the impact of their respective parents on their personalities and
on their lives. Ev mentions his disappointing father and his doting mother (52,
79). Oscar refers to his overbearing father who he likens to Ev (37). Several
times in the play, Oscar mentions "my mother in me" in reference to a side of
himself both his father and Ev reject (35, 37, 40). It is interesting to note here
that whether or not Oscar's mother is "soft", she still found the strength to leave
her marriage (35). When Ev says Katie is like her mother, Catherine's reply is
quick: "She always said I was just like you" (82). Fearful of her roots,
Katie/Catherine is determined to be her own person.
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WORKS CITED
Camp, Dalton. Gentlemen, Players, and Politicians. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970.
Kerr, Rosalind. "Borderline Crossings in Sharon Pollock's Out-law Genres." Theatre Research in Canada 17.2 (1996): 200-215.
Pollock, Sharon. Angel's Trumpet. Unpublished.
—. Blood Relations. Blood Relations and Other Plays. Eds. Diane Bessai and Don Kerr.
Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981.
—. Doc. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1986.
—. End Dream. Unpublished.
—. Fair Liberty's Call. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995.
—. Getting it Straight. Heroines: Three Plays. Ed. Joyce Doolittle. Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1992.
—. Saucy Jack. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1994.
—.Whiskey Six Cadenza. NeWest Plays by Women. Eds. Diane Bessai and Don Kerr. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1987.
Wasserman, Jerry. "Daddy's Girls: Father-Daughter Incest and Canadian Plays by Women." Essays in Theatre 14.1 (Nov. 1995): 25-36.
Zimmerman, Cynthia. "Sharon Pollock: The Making of Warriors." Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1994. 60-98.
—. "Towards a Better, Fairer World: An Interview with Sharon Pollock." Canadian Theatre Review 69 (Winter 1991): 34-38.