KATHY K.Y. CHUNG
This essay uses theories of narrative to examine how Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations reflect and resist the ability of narratives to construct identities, create moral meanings, and impose truths. It also explores the dramatisation of experiential knowledge as a means of building communities. Blood Relations' meta-theatrical self-consciousness, resistance to moral meaning through a refusal of narrative closure, and ambivalence towards the representative nature of personal experiences, in contrast to Trifles' naturalism, narrative conclusion, and confidence in the assumption of shared women's experiences reflect changes in feminisms, theoretical understandings of experiential knowledge, and strategies for the stage representation of women.
L'essai fait appel aux théories de la narration pour examiner comment Trifles (Susan Glaspell) et Blood Relations (Sharon Pollock) correspondent aux capacités de la narration et y résistent à la fois en vue de construire des identités, créer des sens moraux et imposer des vérités. Il examine également la dramatisation de la connaissance expérientielle comme moyen de construction des communautés. La conscience de soi méta théâtrale faisant partie de Blood Relations, la résistance à la signification morale par le refus d'une fermeture sur le plan narratif et l'ambivalence à l'égard de l'aspect représentatif des expériences personnelles contrastent avec le naturalisme que propose Trifles, sa conclusion narrative et la confiance en la supposition voulant que les expériences partagées par les femmes correspondent aux changements du féminisme, aux compréhensions théoriques de la connaissance expérientielle et aux stratégies de représentation sur scène de la femme.
Trifles, by American Susan Glaspell, and Blood Relations, by Canadian Sharon Pollock, are both based on murder trials in nineteenth-century America. In each work, a woman is accused of parricide[1] and each playwright uses an investigation, by women characters, into the murder to present a feminist exploration of the condition of women's lives in a patriarchal society. Each investigation involves acts of narration, re-constructions of past events as well as past subjects, in an attempt to discern not only "what happened" but social and moral meaning. Each drama is significant within the career of its author and has an interesting history in itself. Trifles, a one- act play, was Glaspell's first independently written drama. It has remained in performance since its première in 1916 and become a staple of amateur companies in North America. It was adapted by Glaspell in 1917 into a short story, "A Jury of Her Peers," which was interpreted by the literary establishment in the 1970s as a "small feminist classic" (Hedges 49). The short story in turn became a 1981 Academy-Award nominated film (also titled A Jury of Her Peers) adapted and directed by Sally Hackel. Trifles, along with Glaspell's other dramatic works, has received growing scholarly attention in the past twenty years. Blood Relations (1980) was Pollock's sixth full-length play but the first in which women assume major roles. Its degree of complexity in terms of meta-theatrical form and the multiplicity of figures playing figures also marks it as a departure from her prior works. Winner of the 1981 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama,[2] it is Pollock's most well-known work and has been performed and anthologised internationally. It continues to attract critical attention both as a feminist and a meta-historical, as well as meta-theatrical, work.
I am interested in these two plays because they form an ideal pair with which to explore three inter-related issues: the nature of narratives and their power to prescribe the course of women's lives and to construct their identities; women's inter-relationships; and feminist approaches towards experiential knowledge. I will consider how these issues are dramatised differently by Glaspell and Pollock, and what these differences reveal about changing understandings of subjectivity and of the possibilities in their stage representation. Since my own research interest focuses on Canadian theatre in general and Sharon Pollock in particular, I hope that by examining the two plays together, in the light of the issues mentioned above, I can also better discern, in relief, how Blood Relations achieved its success and continues to fascinate its audiences.
First, a brief background of the events which form the historical kernel to the dramas. Glaspell's Trifles is based on the December 1900 axe murder of sixty-year-old, farmer John Hossack in Indianola, Iowa and the subsequent trial of the accused Margaret Hossack (herself near-sixty in years), who claimed to have slept through the murder of her husband beside her. Pollock's Blood Relations is based on the 1892 Lizzie Borden murder case. Thirty-two year old Lizzie Andrew Borden was accused of the axe murders of her wealthy father and stepmother, Andrew and Abigail Borden, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden, like Margaret Hossack, was present (in the house or the nearby barn) during the murders but, like Hossack, she claimed to have noticed nothing.[3] Margaret Hossack was eventually found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour, while Lizzie Borden was found not guilty and acquitted.[4]
Since witnesses could not be found for either crime, both court cases were based on circumstantial evidence and offer glimpses of how women's circumstances were viewed by society. In both cases, there were possible motives for the accused to commit murder: Margaret Hossack lived on an isolated farm with a physically abusive husband (Ben-Zvi 152) and Lizzie Borden, a socially ambitious woman, lived with a strict and miserly father who threatened to strip her of the property and money she felt to be her proper inheritance. Lizzie and her sister Emma would receive an inheritance of a quarter of a million dollars from their parents' deaths, money which would have bought Lizzie "independence, self-determination, a larger life" (Jones 219). However, neither trial explored these motives, for to do so would have required the all male court[5] to admit that which patriarchal society must deny to maintain its status quo: its abuse of women (through such means as the denial of women's autonomy, domestic violence, and the restriction of women's options for redress or escape) and the resultant possibility of women's violent retaliation. This issue of motives is what both playwrights, through differing means, articulate.[6]
The ideas of historian Hayden White are relevant for my analysis of Trifles and Blood Relations. In his writings about history and narrativity, White differentiates between "real" events and "true" events. He states: "the very distinction between real and imaginary events, basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction, presupposes a notion of reality in which 'the true' is identified with 'the real' only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity" (10). White argues that one of the key standards against which the "conventional wisdom of the modern historiographical establishment" (9) evaluates which historical record constitutes "history proper" (9) is the degree of narrativity, the degree to which the record displays qualities of narrative form such as: plot (a clear beginning, middle, and end), a central subject, representation of temporality, events having an order of importance, and, ultimately, moral meaning. He points out there are forms of historical representation other than the narrative (for example: the annals, the chronicle, the meditation) but these are less valued by the discipline precisely because they lack narrativity. White suggests that, most importantly, narratives organise events around a "social centre" which endows them with "ethical or moral significance" (15). Citing Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History, White then argues that the reality best represented by narratives is one of conflict between a subject's desire and the restrictions of the law. He writes: "this raises the suspicion that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized 'history,' has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority" (17). White concludes that "morality or a moralizing impulse" (26) is inherent in narrativity and that the "value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary" (27). Both Trifles and Blood Relations clearly make problematic the determination of truth ("the true") and its link with narratives and the authority of the law (in its many guises). They also demonstrate their creators' and audiences' (both within and without the drama) desire for narrativity, for closure, and for moral meaning.
I am interested in the interaction between three types of narratives: social (or historical), fictional, and personal. Social narratives are those which circulate in society, to which society subscribes, and which in turn prescribe social behaviour. They are often attributed to historical fact, and understood and enforced by the status quo as real or natural. For example, the nuclear family may be seen as a social narrative. Fictional narratives are those stories generally understood and acknowledged to be imaginative: fairy tales, parables, folk tales, romances, novels, etc. Finally, personal narratives are those which an individual feels she has created or chosen to describe and give structure to her own life. Personal narratives, though often composed of personal experience, may incorporate social and fictional narratives or modifications thereof.
The basis of my distinction lies in the degree of subjective autonomy. Social and fictional narratives are those which the individual perceives as existing prior to her entry into society and culture. Personal narratives are those which she feels originate from her and are subject to her direction. In reality, these divisions are not discrete but any one narrative can consist of an inter-weaving of the many and I distinguish between them here only so I may speak more specifically about the two plays.
The descriptive and prescriptive powers of narratives and the competition between differing narratives are crucial issues in Glaspell's Trifles and Pollock's Blood Relations. Trifles begins with an act of story-telling. A group of men and women arrive in the kitchen of an isolated farm house where a farmer, John Wright, has been murdered as he slept next to his wife. The County Attorney, George Henderson; the Sheriff, John Peters; and Mr. Wright's neighbor, Lewis Hale are there to search for evidence which might determine whether or not Mrs. Minnie Wright murdered her husband. The women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, accompany their husbands and are to bring a change of clothes to the recently incarcerated Mrs. Wright. Minnie Wright herself never appears in the play.
As the play opens, Henderson asks Mr. Hale to tell him what happened. Mr. Hale responds with a narrative of the events leading to his discovery of the murder, particularly his conversation with Mrs. Wright, whom he found in the kitchen apparently heedless of her dead husband upstairs. What is relevant in Hale's narrative is his emphasis on what did not happen. He tells Henderson: "I was surprised; she didn't ask me to come up to the stove, or to set down, but just sat there, not even looking at me, so I said, 'I want to see John.' And then she-laughed" (37). After Mrs. Wright told him her husband was dead and lying upstairs, she "just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin' back and forth [in her chair] [...] and just went on pleatin' at her apron" (37). In other words, Mrs. Wright ignored Hale and, worse, she laughed at his demand to see her husband. Given the murdered body upstairs, she also displayed no behaviour of feminine hysteria. Mrs. Wright was simply not living up to either of the male-centred social narratives prescribed for her: the subservient home-maker greeting a male visitor or the bereft and frightened wife.
A little later, Glaspell dramatises the conflict of male and female narratives in establishing "the true." After the men have made a cursory search of the Wright kitchen determining that there was nothing of importance, "[n]othing here but kitchen things," (38) Henderson, the County Attorney, washes his hands at the sink. Glaspell then writes:
COUNTY ATTORNEY: ( . . . [Henderson] washes his hands. Starts to wipe them on the roller-towel, turns it for a cleaner place.) Dirty towels! (kicks his foot against the pans under the sink.) Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?
MRS. HALE: (stiffly) There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: To be sure. And yet (with a little bow to her) I know there are some Dickson county farmhouses which do not have such roller towels. (He gives it a pull to expose its length again.)
MRS. HALE: Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be. (38)
Henderson then asks Mrs. Hale about her relationship with her neighbour, Minnie Wright, and why they seldom visit each other. Was it because Mrs. Hale did not like Mrs. Wright? Hale answers:
MRS. HALE: I liked her all well enough. Farmers' wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then-
COUNTY ATTORNEY: Yes-?
MRS. HALE: (looking about) It never seemed a very cheerful place.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: No-it's not cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the homemaking instinct.
MRS. HALE: Well, I don't know as Wright had, either. (38-39)
Henderson, the actual and symbolic agent of the law, prescribes a patriarchal social narrative of farmers' wives with "homemaking instinct[s]" while ignoring the actual conditions the women often work under and his own double standard. He dirties his hands, then criticises Mrs. Wright for having a dirty roller-towel in her kitchen. He kicks the pans beneath the sink, disturbing their storage, then observes that Mrs. Wright was a poor housekeeper. Mrs. Hale, drawing from her own experience, challenges Henderson's narrative construction with her own. She points out that husbands are equally responsible for the cleanliness and cheerfulness of a home. Henderson ignores her alternative narrative. In fact, it is important to note that the men consistently ridicule the women's concerns and trivialize their work-and the women are acutely aware of this.
Henderson's remark about women's "homemaking instinct" has further ramifications. An instinct is an innate impulse, an intuitive and unconscious skill, a natural aptitude. Minnie Wright's inability to fulfil the social narrative of the instinctual home-maker may serve as a sign of her unnaturalness. In the context of the murder, an even more powerful social narrative and prescription of feminine behaviour comes into play, what Jeffner Allen calls "heterosexual virtue." Allen writes:
The ideology of heterosexual virtue forms the cornerstone of the designation of women as nonviolent. The ideology of heterosexual virtue charges women to be 'moral,' virtuously nonviolent in the face of the 'political,' the violent male-defined world. The ideology of heterosexual virtue entitles men to terrorize-possess, humiliate, violate, objectify-women and forecloses the possibility of women's active response to men's sexual terrorization. Women, constrained to nonviolence, are precluded from claiming and creating a self, a world. (qtd. in Hart 137)
Thus, on the level of social narratives, women, heterosexual women (this will become important when I discuss Pollock's Blood Relations), by patriarchal definition, do not kill. Minnie Wright, by Henderson's allusion, is an unnatural woman, and because of her unnaturalness (not because of any abuse she might have suffered at the hands of her husband), she can be and is suspected to be, a killer.
What follows next is a process in which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters observe key domestic details, infer a group of past events of which these details are material signs, and then construct a narrative which orders and gives meaning to these events. The half-wiped kitchen counter, the cold rooms, Minnie Wright's shabby clothes, a broken bird cage, a dead bird with a wrung neck,[7] and erratic sewing stitches become signifiers of a harsh and lonely life, housework interrupted, sudden violence, and emotional distress. With the added knowledge that John Wright was a harsh and cold man who kept his wife in isolation[8] and an empathy for the circumstances of Mrs. Wright's life, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters deduce that Minnie Wright did commit murder and that it was a justifiable response to the emotional, and possibly physical, abuse she suffered from her husband.
Having come to this conclusion and in solidarity with Mrs. Wright, the women finish cleaning the counter, hide the dead bird, and unravel the erratic sewing, erasing the signs so that their female narrative would be unavailable to the men and the law. In concert with the narrative process described by Hayden White, the women have arranged the events around a social centre, men's trivialization of women's experiences and the unlikelihood of a fair trial for Minnie Wright (since the two women's immediate experience with Henderson and their own husbands shows them that their sense of the terms of reference upon which to base legal and moral judgment are different from those of the men). This, in turn, has endowed them with an ethical or moral significance, their own obligation to protect Mrs. Wright from the judgement of an unjust system.[9] The women are not the only ones to recognise the importance of narrativity. At the end of the drama, Henderson converses with Mr. Peters, bemoaning their inability to discover any useful evidence against Minnie Wright: "But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing. Something to show-something to make a story about [emphasis added]-a thing that would connect up this strange way of doing it--" (44).
What is interesting is the degree and immediate ease with which Mrs. Hale, and then Mrs. Peters, empathise with Minnie Wright. Their construction of Minnie Wright's identity, their narrativising process, depends upon their confidence in two things: the ability of experiential knowledge to determine truth and the possibility of extrapolating from their own experiences to those of another woman.
Mrs. Hale, a neighbour who knew Minnie Wright in her youth, clearly transfers her own subjective experience to the absent woman and vice versa. For example, the men had ridiculed her concern, while in jail, for the jars of preserve in her kitchen. She had feared they would freeze in the cold of the empty farmhouse and indeed this was so:
(The COUNTY ATTORNEY, after again looking around the kitchen, opens the door of a cupboard closet. He gets up on a chair and looks on a shelf. Pulls his hand away, sticky.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY: Here's a nice mess.
(The women draw nearer.)
MRS. PETERS: (to the other women) Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. (to the LAWYER) She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire'd go out and her jars would break.
SHERIFF: Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.
HALE: Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.
(The two women move a little closer together.) (38)
For Mrs. Hale, the men's intrusion into Minnie's kitchen becomes an intrusion into her own kitchen ("I'd hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around and criticising"), and she feels an element of unfairness in Henderson's judgment about the roller-towel because it "[s]eems mean to talk about her [Wright] for not having things slicked up when she had to come away in such a hurry" (39). Because she is disturbed by the men's trivialization of Minnie Wright's hard work, work so similar to her own, she envisions the absent Minnie Wright being similarly disturbed were she there to witness the scene herself. In the men's absence, Mrs. Hale confides to Mrs. Peters: "She'll [Wright] feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer" (39). Note also that the above passage is a prime example of Glaspell carefully portraying the men's systematic construction of a social narrative about women in general. Each observation about Minnie Wright becomes a comment about "the women." Glaspell's stage directions for Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, their movement towards each other, demonstrate the women's awareness of the men's encompassing critique. It is important to recognise that it is not the process of generalisation which Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters (and, I believe, Glaspell) find problematic. Rather, it is the chauvinist unfairness of the men's observations and the inaccuracy of the men's generalisation which they challenge.
Mrs. Peters also empathises with Minnie Wright through her own experiences. Discussing their discovery of Minnie's dead pet, a bird whose neck they believe was broken by John Wright, Mrs. Peters draws upon an early experience of male cruelty which reveals her own capacity for violent retaliation and confesses to Mrs. Peters: "When I was a girl-my kitten-there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes-and before I could get there-(covers her face an instant) If they hadn't held me back I would have-(catches herself, looks upstairs where steps are heard, falters weakly)-hurt him" (43). Similarly, remembering her own loneliness as a homesteader and the death of her first child, she empathises with Mrs. Wright's isolation and loneliness saying, "I know what stillness is" (44). Glaspell's inclusion of Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peters' personal testimony and her presentation of their immediate experience (their recognition of the men's ridicule) emphasises that Minnie Wright's condition is representative of a continuum of men's cruelty towards women and their neglect of women's experiences.
However, the women's empathy is based on a non-problematic use of experience as legitimating evidence. Joan W. Scott, in her critique of experience as a foundational (i.e. unquestioned, primary, transcendent) element within the discipline of history, writes:
Making visible the experience of a different group exposes the existence of repressive mechanisms, but not their inner workings or logics; we know that difference exists but we don't understand it as relationally constituted. For that we need to attend to the historical processes that through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences. It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. (25-26)
What Scott points out about the use of experience to construct different identities applies equally to the construction of similar identities, as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters demonstrate in Trifles. However, I would argue that while the women, as characters within the frame of the drama, treat experience as a foundational discourse, Glaspell, the dramatist, does provide evidence of the "historical processes that through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences."
Recall, for example, the encounter between the men and women in the farmhouse kitchen. Glaspell demonstrates how the men's discourse systematically devalues women's domain, their labour, and their experiences, excluding them from what constitutes the socially significant. In the men's eyes, Minnie Wright's kitchen, the domestic centre of the home, can contain no important clues to the murder because there is "[n]othing here but kitchen things" (38). Mrs. Wright and the two women's concern about the exploded jars of preserves are "trifles" because the men do not see as significant the hours of women's labour required to make those preserves (38).
Glaspell also demonstrates how language, in its expression of experience, can elide differences and construct subjectivities. Speaking to Mrs. Peters of Minnie Wright's absence from the Ladies Aid, Mrs. Hale says: "I suppose she [Wright] felt she couldn't do her part, and then you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby" (40). Mrs. Hale's web of pronouns ("I," "she," and "you") connect the three women into a community with shared experiences and personal narratives; they construct a new, communal, female subject. Mrs. Hale expresses to Mrs. Peters her new sense of community: "We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things-it's all just a different kind of the same thing" (44). The stage absence of Minnie Wright focuses our attention on her condition, her subject position, rather than her person. It also lends strength to Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peters' narrative of events and construction of Minnie Wright's identity through the absence of any contradiction Wright might offer herself.
Another way to approach the issue of Wright's absence and the women's shared experience is through two important and related aspects of the narrative process: authorship and entitlement. Donald Brenneis notes that conflict-related narratives can alter the relationship between produced knowledge and its creators, audiences, and subjects in terms of authorship and entitlement. He writes:
One recurrent feature of the role of narratives over the course of a dispute is a transformation of entitlement to the experiences being represented. Privately held stories become more or less public; one's sole right to recount one's own activities or grievances is often lost. [...] When others gain legitimate access to such stories, however, personal experience becomes public record, serving as explanatory information, moral example, or informal precedent. As such, these tales redefine one's relationship to others and one's moral and political stature. (48)
Trifles illustrates such a transformation of personal experience and narrative into a gendered public realm of women's narratives. In this case, not only is the inferred narrative of Minnie Wright transformed into a "public" story but so too are the stories of Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. It is important to note that the women's narratives are not fixed but evolve. Mrs. Hale initially subscribes to the same social narrative of non-violent domestic femininity as the men. She tells Mrs. Peters, "I don't think she did [commit murder]. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit" (40). What Glaspell shows us is a process of the women's dawning consciousness, mutual construction, and growing acceptance of an alternative "public" narrative which they interpret as more accurate than the social narratives of patriarchy: that of a woman's violent response to domestic violence, a violence which they link to a broader base of social, patriarchal, oppression. In the process, the women become more sensitive to their own participation in social narratives that constrict women's lives and they transform their relationship to each other as well as their moral and political stature.
In addition, the move from a personal narrative genre to a more public one may affect general perceptions of the character of its author and hence the validity of the story: private narratives (such as gossip or personal accounts) tend to involve individual narrators who are assumed to have their own agendas while public testimonies from which "truths" are determined (such as judicial inquiries) tend to involve a joint telling which is assumed to be unrelated to personal goals (Brenneis 48). Of course, this difference, this claim of objectivity made by discourse within the public sphere, is itself a fallacy, a social narrative that serves the existing social hierarchy. The two women in Trifles are aware of this, hence their decision to preempt the very possibility of a public, judicial, narrative by removing any evidence that might make it possible. Pollock's drama also exposes the subjectivity of the judicial discourse but through a different manipulation and a different attitude towards its power to impose "truths."
Blood Relations begins with a refusal to tell a story. It is 1902, ten years after the Borden murders. Lizzie Borden, acquitted of the crime and living still in her family home, is entertaining her friend and perhaps lover, the Actress. During the course of their visit, the Actress asks Lizzie to tell her "the truth": whether she committed the murders or not (19). Here again, the drama explores the issues of history, truth, the law, and narratives. In this case, Miss Lizzie refuses to satisfy the Actress's desire for a story. To be more exact, Miss Lizzie refuses to fulfil the Actress's desire for a satisfying story, for Lizzie has already told her story-in court, during the trial ten years earlier. However, her narrative of innocence, which seems to satisfy the court and the bourgeois society of Fall River that the court represents, does not satisfy the Actress (nor others as we will see). Tired of the question, Miss Lizzie invites the Actress to assume the role of Lizzie Borden at the time of the murders and, in effect, to find out for herself what happened. Pollock uses this re-enactment of the events of 1892, which she calls the "dream thesis," to represent the relations within the Borden household and the contemporary condition of women's lives, as interpreted by Miss Lizzie and the Actress (13).
The women in Blood Relations, like those in Trifles, are confined by patriarchal social narratives. Their responses, though, are different from those of the women in Glaspell's play. Abigail, Emma, and Lizzie Borden are all trapped in a social narrative that characterises gentlewomen as loving and subservient mothers and daughters with neither social ambition nor interests in property, business, and wealth, whose destiny is to marry a man and look after his home and children. The sudden ease with which Andrew Borden translates his anger into physical abuse[10] when his daughter refuses to enact the social narrative by marrying the man of his choosing reveals the underlying brutality of patriarchal society's prescription of women's lives.
As in Trifles, Pollock's women eventually acknowledge their shared circumstances. But there is no similar development of sisterhood, no resultant community in the later play. Convinced of Minnie Wright's victimisation, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters empathise with her, refuse to subscribe to patriarchal standards of judgement,[11] and take personal risks to protect Minnie Wright. In contrast, Abigail and Emma Borden distance themselves from Lizzie. In fact, the women in Blood Relations victimise each other. For example, Abigail acts as an agent of the patriarchal system enforcing upon Lizzie the social narrative of female submission. Lizzie, in turn, diverts her anger at her father and the law of the father towards Abigail, her step-mother.
Issues of economics and class function in different ways in Blood Relations than in Trifles. Glaspell's women can unite in gender solidarity despite class and economic differences[12] partly because Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters are not dependent on the same man. Though inhabiting the same social and economic class, part of the Borden women's mutual victimisation derives from their competition for limited power and autonomy, and their mutual dependence on Andrew Borden for their financial and social survival. Abigail reminds Lizzie, the stage directions say, "Without animosity": "You know, Lizzie, your father keeps you. You know you got nothing but what he gives you. And that's a fact of life. You got to come to deal with facts. I did" (41). It is a brutal observation that indeed requires no animosity for its effect. Though Abigail admits that she and Lizzie share the same "fact[s] of life," she is unwilling to share what little authority she gains by submitting to the social narrative and she is unwilling to risk jeopardising her own position to help another woman. This is ultimately Emma's behaviour as well, though she has fewer powers than Abigail and is more sympathetic towards Lizzie.
What then of the Actress, a figure who is unlike any of the female "investigators" in Glaspell's drama? How does she function within the network of power relations in the play? To answer this question, let us consider another theory of narratives and spectators. Theatre theorist Elin Diamond discusses how narratives figure in the theatrical construction of gender identity. She writes:
If narrative art and, by extension, narrativity tend to reinforce the power relations created by sexual difference, then feminist revision of narrative texts means not only exposing a representational form that delimits the female but also interrupting those processes of audience participation that collude in female subjugation. (emphasis added, 94-95)
Diamond suggests that theatrical representation conveys two temporalities that are conflated by the spectator: "a series of 'presents'" and an assumed "story-line or narrative that is inferred by the spectator on viewing the dramatic representation" (95). She adds: "In the perception of the spectator the inferred story [...] precedes and guides the enactment" of the series of presents (95). Diamond's model of dual temporalities is similar to my notion of social, fictional, and personal narratives. Her inferred narrative functions like social and fictional narratives in preceding and guiding an individual enactment, and her "series of presents" behaves like a personal narrative in its status as an on-going creative process.
Unlike Trifles' naturalistic form, which does not call attention to nor disrupt the audience's own narrative making process, Blood Relations, with the Actress, its meta-theatrical frame (the world of 1902), and "dream thesis" re-enactment of the past (the world of 1892) attempts to expose and disrupt the process of audience participation in narrativity and signals history's constructedness. The Actress serves many functions. By asking, "Did-you-Lizzie? Lizzie-did-you?" (19), the Actress may be seen as the audience's surrogate on stage. As such, she highlights the tension between the "inferred story-line or narrative" and the "series of presents." The Actress is also a professional role player and performer of narratives (plays). One might expect her to be sensitive to the prescriptive powers of narratives. Finally, as a friend and perhaps lover to whom Lizzie insists: "I tell you everything," she might be expected to be aware of the conflict between social and personal narratives faced by Lizzie (18). However, it is clear that at the start of the play, the Actress is caught up in the same social narrative that assigns Lizzie to only two possible subject positions: "Did Lizzie Borden take an axe? . . . If you didn't I should be disappointed . . . and if you did I should be horrified" (20).
The Actress also introduces and envelops Lizzie in a whole web of other narratives. It is the Actress who introduces the social narrative of the "proper" woman by teasing Lizzie about the proper order in serving tea (14). Lizzie pointedly ignores her questions. The Actress recites the fictional narrative of the children's rhyme: "Lizzie Borden took an axe / Gave her mother forty wacks" (16). And again, Lizzie refutes her, this time countering with a social/historical narrative of her own: "Did you tell them I was acquitted?" (17).
The endless questioning ("Lizzie did you?") and continued existence of several narrative solutions to the question highlight not only alternative "truths" but different communities with different desires and investments. For example, the judicial discourse, with its traditional claim to authority and power to curtail the further generation of narratives through its legal, public, determination of events, clearly fails in this case. The Defense articulates what is at stake: "If this gentlewoman is capable of such an act-I say to you-look to your daughters-if this gentlewoman is capable of such an act, which of us can lie a bed at night, hear a step upon the stairs, [...] Which of you can plump your pillow, nudge your wife, close your eyes, and sleep?" (36). For the citizens of Fall River, the fiction of social stability and the denial of women's anger and potential for violence is more important than the determination of "truth." The existence of the children's rhyme points to another community with another narrative desire. For children, a Lizzie Borden who "gave her mother forty wacks" and "her father forty-one" may be psychologically satisfying in her representation of extreme transgression, of a child's fantasy of power over her parents.
Lizzie tells the Actress, "You look like me, or how I think I look, or how I ought to look... sometimes you think like me ... do you feel that?" (19). Here, Lizzie lists three possible identities: "me," the ur-subject prior to narration; "how I think I look," the subject created by her personal narrative; and "how I ought to look," the subject prescribed by social narratives. Lizzie's frustration at the Actress's inability to admit a narrative other than the social prompts her to initiate "[a] game," (20) the play-within-a-play in which the Actress will enact the Lizzie of 1892. In effect, the Actress has been behaving like Diamond's spectator, inferring a story that forecloses the possibility of a personal narrative, a differing plot conclusion. By forcing the Actress to be the Lizzie of the past, to enact the dream thesis, Lizzie disrupts the Actress's story-making desire. Instead of standing outside the "series of presents" and inferring a narrative, Lizzie forces the Actress to live the "presents" and to understand the potential destructiveness of her inference.[13]
Due to the limited scope of this essay, I have chosen to focus my discussion on Miss Lizzie and the Actress as the chief narrators[14] on stage, but it is important to note the status of the other characters. In Glaspell's drama, all the on-stage characters exist within the same narrative frame. Thus, the behaviours of the men on stage may be evaluated by the audience independent of Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peters' interpretation (if not the playwright's). In Blood Relations, Mr. and Mrs. Borden, Bridget, Harry, Dr. Patrick, and Emma (until her appearance within the 1901 frame) are subjective creations of Miss Lizzie and the Actress's "game." As such, these characters' behaviours and the past they enact, represent an added level of narrative ambiguity in Pollock's drama, and a stage performance can highlight the contingent nature of these figures in ways unavailable to the printed text (for example, through differences or exaggerations in costume, gestures, make-up, lighting).[15]
The question of what is natural and its dependence on narratives occurs in Blood Relations as it did in Trifles. Lizzie herself wonders if she is unnatural. She posits that there was some natural feminine quality that she did not receive at the time of her birth (during which her mother died) hence her inability to follow the proper social narratives. However, the Actress tells her this is not true; the cause is not in biological nature (36). When her father hints that an attraction for men is a natural thing for women and questions why she is not interested in marriage, Lizzie demands, "You're saying I'm unnatural ... am I supposed to agree, is that what you want?" (38). Since social narratives are often taken to exist naturally, Lizzie's refusal to follow the patriarchal script of female subservience to men, which nineteenth-century marriage normally entailed, is interpreted as unnatural. Lizzie and her father also struggle for the power to define and name the story. What Mr. Borden calls marriage and being a wife, Lizzie calls service and being a housekeeper (39). This is an instance of what Christine Roulston characterises as the forcing of a politicized economic discourse of the public realm into the domestic realm of the family home, which, for the upper-middle class of the nineteenth century, constitutes a social and gender transgression (50).
Pollock's decision to foreground the possibility of a lesbian relationship between Lizzie and the Actress is also interesting. On the one hand, in the context of patriarchal definitions of women as heterosexual, Lizzie's possible lesbianism may be interpreted as being another sign of her as an "unnatural" woman. In reference to the social narrative of "heterosexual virtue" as delimited by Allen, it would be a small step for patriarchal heterosexual society to conflate lesbianism with crime: women who commit murder are unnatural, lesbians are unnatural women, Lizzie is a lesbian, therefore Lizzie committed the murders. The possibility of contextual motives related to social and economic rather than "natural" considerations, possibilities which point to social culpability, are ignored. On the other hand, the relationship between Lizzie and the Actress exists in the meta-theatrical frame of 1902, ten years after the murders. Lizzie's lesbianism may be interpreted by the audience symbolically not as the cause of her possible actions as a murderer, but vice versa. The possible act of killing her parents, hence violently breaking free from the prescription of social narratives, gives Lizzie the confidence and freedom to create her own personal narrative despite continuing social pressures.
Like Glaspell's Trifles, Pollock's play emphasises that it is the social condition of the women's lives that is significant in the murders. And, like Trifles, Blood Relations suggests that any woman, in the same circumstance, can become a killer. Pollock's dramatisation, however, differs from Glaspell's. While Minnie Wright is absent from the stage, and hence unable to agree or disagree with Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peters' narrative interpretation and assumption of commonality, Lizzie Borden is very much present and, in fact, challenges the Actress's empathy and final conclusion. Realising that she herself could and would have killed Andrew and Abigail Borden, the Actress leaves the dream thesis, transfers her subjective experience onto Lizzie, and accuses Lizzie of having committed the murder. In an ironic twist that demonstrates the commonality of women's subjugation within patriarchal society and yet insists on the potential of their subjective differences, Pollock's Lizzie points out to the Actress and the audience: "I didn't. You did" (70).
The notion of a stable subject is made problematic by Pollock just as she challenges the idea of a stable narrative. Lizzie suggests that not only did the Actress and the audience enact murder, so did Emma. She posits that Emma left the house on the day of the crime to enable her to act out the murders which Emma also desired. Yet, as Madonne Miner points out, if Lizzie enacted Emma's desire, so the Actress may be seen as enacting Lizzie's own desire and perhaps that of the audience (19-20). Who then committed murder? Where can the unified subject be located? It is, of course, a sleight of hand by the playwright since desire is not will and neither necessarily leads to action. The dramatic effect, however, is a confusion of subjects and narratives that confronts the audience and causes them to reflect on the problematic nature of identity and narratives.
Both Trifles and Blood Relations use experiential knowledge as a means of establishing truths. Where they differ is in the power of that truth. Glaspell, writing in 1916 and participating in the American feminist movement of the time (a time when women were still campaigning for the suffrage and when gender was the overriding strategic category under which women successfully united for political and social change),[16] dramatises that women's experiential knowledge can be shared, circulated, and hence, be potentially as prescriptive as the patriarchal social narratives they counter. While Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale may have a more accurate narrative of Minnie Wright's life and identity than the men have, they are still imposing their order of events onto another individual. They use their personal experiences and narratives to construct a more public one and Minnie Wright's absence helps to make this possible.
Lizzie Borden's presence in Blood Relations and her refusal to answer the Actress's and Emma's questions, ensures her ownership of the narrative since she is the only person who really knows if she committed the crime or not. Pollock's Miss Lizzie has a personal investment in refusing to bring closure to her story. If she did commit the murders, society would judge her a monstrous criminal and her prized personal freedom would have been taken from her. And, as the Actress points out, if Lizzie did not commit the murders she would be "a pretentious small-town spinster" (20). There would, in effect, be no story-at least none which Lizzie Borden would find satisfying. Brenneis's idea of the transformation of entitlement and authorship once a story becomes public offers another way of looking at the situation. By limiting public ownership of the full story, Lizzie protects her status as master narrator. In fact, her engineering of the Actress's enactment of the past and her accusation of Emma as an accomplice can be seen as evidence of her narrative control, her power to organise the narratives of other women, an activity through which she tries to avoid questions about her own contingent subjectivity (Roulston 45). Finally, Lizzie's rejection of the Actress's plot conclusion limits the power of experiential knowledge to determine the truth and questions its transcendental potential.
Pollock's 1980 play, written at a time when the feminist movement was beginning to focus its attention more on the complexities of differences rather than similarities, suggests that experiential knowledge can determine a truth and foster a personal narrative, but that extrapolation from the personal to the social (and the political) is fraught with ethical, as well as logical, problems. It is unlikely that human beings can resist constructing narratives, but Pollock makes us acutely aware of the need to respect the subjectivity of others and be more cautious of the exercise of power inherent in the very act of story-telling.
The forms of the two plays reflect these differing attitudes toward subjectivity. Both plays present history as narrative, unnatural, created by human agents with vested interests, and hence subject to critique and change by human agents. However, the degree of aggressiveness with which each playwright's narrative interferes with that of the audience's own narrative desires differs. The naturalism of Glaspell's Trifles demonstrates the narrative making process of the men and women on stage, but does not make apparent those of the men and women in the audience. Pollock's play, with its meta-theatrical framing, with Lizzie's rejection of the Actress's and the audience's imposition of a narrative conclusion (hence, in Hayden White's terms, a fixed moral judgment) upon her, does promote self-reflexivity and make the audience aware of its narrative making and moralizing desires.
Glaspell's theatrical economy is no less effective than Pollock's complex meta-drama in raising the issues of competing narratives, the necessity for women's narratives to be acknowledged and understood, women's potential to construct or modify prevailing narratives, and the complexities of experiential knowledge. Glaspell's drama examines the issue of women's community and the need for women to communicate with each other. Pollock's play demonstrates the need for women to be permitted the creation of their own personal narratives and simultaneously makes problematic this enterprise. In regard to Blood Relations' success and fascination with audiences and critics, no doubt a woman's public claim, albeit amidst significant moral ambivalence, for the importance and validity of her own life above that of others (Lizzie asserts that "My life is precious" (62) while "not all life is precious" (63)) and the degree of action which she might have taken to defend her claim is startlingly transgressive whether in 1892 or the present. However, my present analysis suggests to me that Blood Relations intrigues us also because of its complex play with narratives. Not only do the multiple frames and myriad layers of actors and spectators offer an intellectual challenge but its self-conscious foregrounding of history and identity as performance, its exploration of the problematic ownership and authorship of narratives, its tantalizing mix of moral judgment (narrative closure) and moral ambiguity (refusal of narrative closure) are all issues that resonate in contemporary Canadian and international society and identity politics.
Near the end of Trifles, Mrs. Hale, who was played by Glaspell herself in the play's première production (Papke 19),[17] makes a striking observation about the lives of women: "We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things-it's all just a different kind of the same thing" (44). Like a reflection of Mrs. Hale's paradox of proximity and distance, difference and similarity, Glaspell's Trifles and Pollock's Blood Relations, though separated by changing feminisms and understandings of narrative construction, both speak to the contemporary concerns of women engaged in the examination of experiential knowledge and narratives in the creation of subjects, gender identity, moral meaning, and the representation of women on stage.
Notes
1. While often understood to mean the murder of one's father, parricide properly refers to the murder of one's parent, near relative, or an individual whose person is held sacred.
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2. Pollock was the first woman to receive the award for drama since the start of the Governor General's Literary Awards in 1936.
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3. Each drama also carries traces of its author's personal experiences and encounters with violence. Though Glaspell is better known for her association with the Provincetown Players, a company she co-founded, and though she wrote Trifles while she was living in New York, she was not unfamiliar with rural life and the Hossack case itself. Glaspell (1876-1948) was born and grew up in Davenport, Iowa, where her paternal grandparents had been early settlers. She went to Drake University in Des Moines and worked as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News after her graduation (Bigsby 2). It was as a twenty-four year old reporter for the paper that she covered the Hossack murder and the trial of the accused Margaret Hossack. Linda Ben-Zvi's research shows that Glaspell wrote twenty-six articles over the five-month duration of the murder trail and might have visited the Hossack farm house herself (Ben-Zvi 145-46). No doubt the Hossack case must have made a special impact on Glaspell, sufficient that sixteen years later it would provide the basis of her first independent dramatic work. While it is prudent to interpret an author's comments about her work with caution, it is relevant to note that Pollock herself has written about a more personal link with Blood Relations. In an Afterword for the play, when it was anthologised by Michelene Wandor in 1984, Pollock writes:
As for the content-the script gradually, as I kept returning to re-write it, began, for me, to transcend the particulars of the Borden case. They were incidental to the real content of the play through which I came to deal with something very personal [...] Prior to working in the theatre I was married for some years to a violent man. I spent a great deal of time devising, quite literally, murderous schemes to rid me of him. I implemented none of them [...] I would not have killed for money and real estate, I would not have killed to prevent injury to myself although it was that that brought me to leave. I would have killed to maintain my sense of self, to prevent a violation that was far more frightening and threatening than any blow, and of which physical violence against my person was only the outward manifestation. And so it is with Lizzie (123-24).Return to article
4. The two main sources for my historical data on the Hossack and Borden cases are: Linda Ben-Zvi's "'Murder, She Wrote': The Genesis of Susan Glaspell's Trifles" (Theatre Journal 44 (1992) 141-162) and Ann Jones's Women Who Kill (New York: Holt, Rienhart and Winston, 1980).
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5. Women were not permitted to serve as jurors in the United States in 1892, much less as lawyers or judges.
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6. In addition to gender, the differences in age and class between Lizzie Borden and Margaret Hossack were, no doubt, key factors influencing the drastically different outcomes of the two trials only eight years apart.
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7. The bird in the cage and its violent death suggest not only John Wright's brutality towards his wife's pet, but also towards his wife through the conflation of two fictional narratives: the use of the bird in the cage image to symbolise the human soul within the human body and the metaphor of a woman in the house as a bird in a cage. Interestingly, Pollock also has Andrew Borden slaughter Lizzie's pet birds. Both plays, of course, recall an even earlier use of the metaphor in Strindberg's Miss Julie.
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8. Mr. Hale states that John Wright refused to have a telephone installed n his remote home (38).
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9. Further support for the relevance of applying White's idea of the relation between history/narrativity and authority/morality to an analysis of Trifles may be seen in the fact that theorists in law and moral development have used the prose adaptation of the play, "A Jury of Her Peers," to exemplify their ideas. See Dawson 253-61 and Gilligan 29-31.
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10. Andrew Borden slaps Lizzie in the face twice in the first act of the play when she defies him (41, 46).
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11. For example, at the end of Trifles, when asked by Henderson if she ever thought of herself as "a sheriff's wife ... married to the law," Mrs. Peters, the once cautious defender of the law, answers significantly, "Not-just that way" (45).
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12. Mrs Hale is a rural farmer's wife while Mrs. Peters is a sheriff's wife who lives in town. Glaspell also emphasises their differing social status through a difference in their diction and speech patterns.
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13. Pollock says in an interview with Robert Wallace published in The Work:
In the original Theatre Three production, the reason Lizzy played the game was that there was something that could not be said. There was no right answer for her to give the Actress when the Actress asks, did you do it? ... I]f Lizzy actually said, yes I did do it, I'm sure the Actress would say to her, no, no tell me, you can tell me, I mean, really tell me. ...] If she said no, then the Actress would say the same thing ...] Now the way it was done at the National Arts Centre ...] Miss Lizzy played the game ...] out of impatience-you know, you keep asking me that and asking me that; all right, you want to know what it's like, I'll show you what it's like. Here. You live it. You feel what it was like to live in this God damned house. Maybe then you'll stop asking me that fucking question. It was much more of an angry reaction, even malicious. I found that more interesting than the way we had done it first time around (124).
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14. See Kerr for a consideration of Miss Lizzie and the Actress as collaborative authors.
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15. See Miner for interesting psychoanalytic interpretations of the characters in the play. I also have not focused on the meta-theatrical and meta-historical nature of Blood Relations, areas which have received previous attention. For example, see Knowles, Stone-Blackburn, and Wyile.
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16. See works such as Nancy F. Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987) and Judith Schwarz's Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940 (Lebanon, NH: New Victoria, 1982) for a description of the American feminist movement in the 1910s and Glaspell's own participation in the Greenwich Village group, Heterodoxy.
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17. Interestingly, Pollock also performed in the "première" of her own drama. She played Miss Lizzie in My Name is Lisbeth (1976), the first version of the play, which had a linear narrative with neither the 1901 frame nor the character of the Actress.
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