ROSALIND KERR
Sharon Pollock's well-known plays, Blood Relations and Doc, can be read as "out-law genres" by extending the criteria which Caren Kaplan has outlined to designate women's renegade texts to theatrical representations. Both plays mix conventionally unmixable theatrical elements and use collaborative discursive practices to expose the myth that texts are individually authored, creating alternative texts based on a discourse of situation or a "politics of location." After her split-subject representation of the notorious parent-killer, Lizzie Borden, Pollock crosses back into Canadian territory to create her own version of the excluded daughter's revenge in Doc where Catherine sets out to murder her father's reputation symbolically. Taken together, Pollock's plays, which rescue lost women's stories, point to a new dramatic future capable of expressing revolutionary transnational feminisms.
Les pièces bien connues de Sharon Pollack, Blood Relations et Doc, peuvent être interprétées comme des genres "hors la loi" en étendant les critères détaillés par Caren Kaplan pour désigner les textes renégats de femmes à des représentations théâtrales. Les deux pièces mélangent des éléments théâtraux traditionnellement polarisés et emploient des pratiques discursives collaboratives pour exposer le mythe qui veut que la paternité des textes soit singulière et non collective, créant ainsi des textes alternatifs basés sur un discours de situation ou sur une "politique d'emplacement". Suite à sa représentation de "sujet divisé" de la meurtrière notoire, Lizzie Borden, Pollock retourne au territoire canadien pour créer sa propre version de la vengeance de la fille exclue dans Doc où Catherine se met à tuer symboliquement la réputation de son père. Considérées ensemble, les pièces de Pollock, qui préservent des histoires de femmes perdues, signalent un nouvel avenir dramatique capable de l'expression des féminismes transnationals révolutionnaires.
"Out-law genres renegotiate the relationship between personal identity and the world, between personal and social history"
(Kaplan 130)
Sharon Pollock, "I see political scenes and class oppression in a personal way. Yet as I look at my own plays, I can see them moving closer and closer to looking at very personal things as well as an exterior political scene."
(Dunn 2)
Sharon Pollock's renegade play texts, Blood Relations and Doc qualify as deviant enough from traditional realistic drama to earn Kaplan's label "out-law genres." The presumption that both these plays could be considered to have auto/biographical elements--at least in the extended meaning that feminists are applying to women's and other minorities' texts--can be substantiated by Pollock's own increasingly self-reflexive remarks about her work. Interviews with her which extend back into the early 1970s indicate a gradual but growing consciousness of her own conflicted gender construction, as well as an admission that certain feminist auto/biographical concerns were informing her creation of both Blood Relations and Doc. In an important 1976 interview with Margo Dunn, she referred to My Name is Lisbeth, an earlier version of Blood Relations, as "the most personal of [my] plays to date" in its exploration of "the purity of emotion and motivation in any kind of extreme action, which gives you insight into very clouded things of your own, emotions you feel but can't handle. You gain insight because someone else has gone the whole way"(4). In Doc, which she temporarily retitled Family Trappings,1 Pollock acted on her own suggestion and turned her attentions to seek for "insight[s] into very clouded things of [her] own." As an article written at its premiere in Fredericton reported: Doc was "a painfully honest confession, for the doctor is Pollock's own father, Dr. Everett Chalmers" (Fraser D11).
Following what Derrida calls the "law of genre" ("Law" 203-04), traditional genres, including classical realist drama, have reproduced and consolidated the Rousseauean notion of the universal human self as white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual. As Sidonie Smith sums it up, " '[H]is' life story becomes recognizable, legitimate and culturally real...[with the result that] the life stories of many people whose history differs....because of race, class, and gender identifications go unwritten, or if written, misread or unread" (393-94). Thus, classical realist drama, which frequently represents a narrative focused on the auto/biography of a central character, usually invites audience members to identify with a strong male subject position in order to arrive at the desired understanding of events. Typically these strong male subject positions have been defined in opposition to those occupied by female characters who often exist only as the fragmented and fetishized objects of a male gaze. However, as Derrida suggests, this "law of genre" is always already undermined by the "counterlaw" ("Law" 203-04) on which it is based, and hence, genres can easily spill out of their boundaries. Certainly, some postmodern and feminist materialist playwrights have found the way to "invaginate"("Living" 97)2 the margins of modern classical realistic dramatic conventions, in order to challenge the control of the narrative by the universalized male subject and to permit the female's "entry into the symbolic [as] the condition of her survival, without which she condemns herself to marginality, to the outside" (Feral 10).
Pollock first owned her feminist agenda with Blood Relations--a truly "counterlaw" or "out-law" production in both its form and content--which fits into Caren Kaplan's definition in "Resisting Autobiography Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects" as mixing "two conventionally `unmixable' elements" (119). The unmixable elements, collaborative discursive practices which expose the myth that a text has been individually authored, are very much in evidence in Blood Relations where Pollock frames the play by having Lizzie get the actress to reenact her story while she coaches her from the side. In the following example, the Actress/Lizzie character pointedly asks Miss Lizzie/Bridget for help in understanding how to react to Dr. Patrick's house call:
MISS LIZZIE/BRIDGET. They're saying if you live on Second Street and you need a housecall, and you don't mind the Irish, call Dr. Patrick. Dr. Patrick is very prompt with his Second Street house calls.
ACTRESS/LIZZIE. Do they really say that? (1.31)
Kaplan stresses the critical accountability of the emerging out-law genres that she identifies as "requir[ing] more collaborative procedures that are more closely attuned to the power differences among participants in the process of producing a text." What results is that "instead of a discourse of individual authorship, we find a discourse of situation; a 'politics of location'"(119), just as Miss Lizzie/Bridget manages to locate herself gesturally in relation to Dr. Patrick so that the Actress/Lizzie character can play out the scene which follows.
MISS LIZZIE/BRIDGET. Well--he's hoping to see someone who lives on Second Street--someone who's yanking up her skirt and showing her ankle--so she can take a decent-sized step--and forgetting everything she was ever taught in Miss Cornelia's School for Girls, and talking to the Irish as if she never heard of the Pope! Oh yes, he's very prompt getting to Second Street . . . getting away is something else. . . . (l.31)
Although Kaplan is referring to nondramatic texts, it is possible to identify the two Pollock plays with some of the autobiographical "out-law" genres that she isolates. Indeed, adding in the element of performance only enhances the intertextuality by extending the application to other sets of sign systems specific to the stage. Thus, Blood Relations could be read as "biomythography","a writing down of our meanings of identity . . . with the materials of our lives"(129), since Lizzie constantly feeds this private information into the actress's psyche to inform and comment on the larger than life-size myth which has grown up around her. Correspondingly, Doc might be approached as "cultural autobiography" in its remembering of experiences which are "nonsynchronous with [the] dominant culture"(130). Doc' s reliance on recording the fragments of remembered conversations with the lost and despised mother and grandmother also qualifies it as a crossover genre in its "blur[ring of] the boundaries between orality and writing" (Davis 7, her emphasis ).3 When Bob talks about herself as if telling a story about someone who no longer exists, we get caught up in her folklore.
BOB. Eloise Roberts, and they called me Bob, and I could run faster and play harder and do better than any boy I ever met! And my hair? It was all the way down to there! And when I asked my Mama - Mama? - She said, we have been here since the Seventeen Hundreds, Eloise, and in your blood runs the blood of Red Roberts! Do you know who he is? A pirate, with flamin' red hair and a flamin' red beard who harboured off a cove in P.E.I. ! ( 62)
Having staked my claim to read Blood Relations and Doc as "out-law genres" that resist hegemonic patriarchal structures, I must offer the caution that the feminists whose work on women's autobiography I have referred to above, are committed, to avoid "privileging the oppression of gender over and above other oppressions [since this] effectively erases the complex and often contradictory positionings of the subject [by ignoring the fact that] the axes of the subject's identifications and experiences are multiple, because locations in gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality complicate one another and are not merely additive[]" (Watson xiv). My concentration in this paper is necessarily focussed on a white middle-class Canadian woman's perspective of gender oppression which sustains the "Oedipalized" bourgeois family structure of the Western world. Fortunately, Pollock 's careful attention to the specific historical circumstances affecting her oppressed female subjects mitigates against this universalizing tendency and facilitates her inclusion of different class, community, ethnic and sexual identifications. Turning now to the texts, I hope to show how, even though we are only working across one obvious national boundary line, Pollock's plays call upon feminists to participate in creating the "transnational feminisms" which could help us to break down the "law of genre," resist our pasts, and revolutionize our futures ( Kaplan 136).
Superficially at least, Pollock's turning to a notorious American female outlaw for her first feminist play can be interpreted as an act intended to foreground the doubly colonized status of being both Canadian and female (Dunn 6).4 Such plays as Walsh and The Komagata Maru Incident challenged Canadians by exposing forgotten public figures who participated in shameful events which Pollock discovered to have been whitewashed in the interests of maintaining the fiction that we are "nicer" than our American cousins (Hofsess 52). When My Name is Lizbeth was first produced in 1976, it marked an abrupt departure from the string of earlier plays which Pollock had written to force Canadian audiences to recognize the dominant ideologies underlying official government policies (Page 104-11). Crossing the border to find her first central female character, and selecting an infamous murderess at that, could be read at some level as a message that mythic Canadian female subjects were even less easy to find than their male counterparts. In Blood Relations, she teases contemporary Canadian audiences' aural memories, reminding us of our obsession with "more interesting" American legends by including the words of the children's skipping rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an ax
Gave her mother forty whacks,
When the job was nicely done,
She gave her father forty-one. (1.16)
As the actress tortures Lizzie by reciting it, its familiarity reverberates in most spectators' ears-- proof of how thoroughly our cultural identity has been permeated by our more aggressive neighbour. If Pollock were still attempting to demonstrate, as she claimed to be with her earlier plays, to teach Canadians that "to know where we are going, we must know what we have come from" (Programme Notes, The Komagatu Maru Incident, qtd. Page 107), the implications of her choice of subject matter are staggering. In more than one interview she claims her attraction to Lizzie was to "use[] history to make a comment on contemporary women" (McKinley 36). I might posit that her very choice of Lizzie5 is intended to draw attention to women's absence in official culture, and to confront us with the truth that only women whose transgressions in the private realm have condemned them to public exposure can gain entry, and then, only as reviled outsiders who have been pushed beyond the borders of civilization. Reclaiming women's lives by locating them historically is both a crucial and thankless task as Pollock shows by exposing how limited Lizzie's choices are, despite her relative wealth and privilege.
MR. BORDEN. Just listen to me, Lizzie....I'm choosing my words, and I want you to listen. Now...in most circumstances...a woman of your age would be married, eh? have children, be running her own house, that's the natural thing, eh? Pause. Eh, Lizzie? (1.37)
Through Lizzie, Pollock explores the annihilation which awaits the bourgeois daughter as she is forced to enter into an "Oedipalization" process which can only reduce her to the objectified and exchangeable "Other." Setting up the play within the play whereby Lizzie consents to let her inquisitive same-sex lover mirror her earlier self at the time of the murders ten years earlier, Pollock draws attention to the traditional dramatic structure of the Oedipal narrative while at the same time revealing that the daughter will be forced to discover that she has been doubly displaced and cannot ever make a successful entry into representation. Sue Ellen Case has noted how Pollock's brilliant deployment of the metatheatrical device of splitting the subject between Lizzie and the Actress reflects the Lacanian split-subject position which the child experiences at the moment of recognizing that he is forever separated from both himself and from the object of his desire (130). She argues that Pollock has captured the further split which female children suffer when they discover that there is no way for them to enter the male symbolic by representing the actress's recreation of Lizzie's role as a repeat of Lizzie's earlier traumatic discovery that she had no chance of establishing a separate social existence. The Lacanian baby who looks in the mirror and sees "the structure of a whole self [and] . . . enters the system of representation . . . in this unified form" can only be gendered male in a discourse controlled by the Law of the Father (Case 130). Hence a female child will have to identify herself as male if she wishes to believe that she is included in the mirror, although she will always be conscious at some level that she is also having to deny her own biological sex in order to do so. The brash, rebellious, younger Lizzie as played by the actress, Case proposes, is still unaware that she cannot access male privilege. The play charts her coming to awareness of her exclusion and ends up with her wielding the axe. The older Lizzie, who has endured the trial and the social isolation which follows it, has been chastened by it and now recognizes what the traps are. It is she who knows, as all women do at some level, that she is in the shadows of the mirror reflections.
LIZZIE. I'm supposed to be a mirror. I'm supposed to reflect whatever they want to see, and everyone wants something different. If nobody looks in the mirror, I'm not even there. I don't exist. (1.39)
Lizzie's scream at her defectiveness represents the moment when she discovers that individuation for a woman equals cultural death. Lizzie's guilt-ridden confession in which she accuses herself of "killing her mother" revisits the moment of the female child's tragic "Oedipalization," when she, too, has to abandon her first love and choose to compete with her for her father's affections.
MISS LIZZIE/BRIDGET. I can remember distinctly . . . that moment I was undressing for bed, and I looked at my knees--and there were no scabs! At last! I thought I'm the nice little girl Emma wants me to be! . . . But it wasn't that at all. I was just growing up. I didn't fall down so often. . . . She smiles. Do you suppose . . . do you suppose there's a formula, a magic formula for being "a woman"? Do you suppose every girl baby receives it at birth, it's the last thing that happens just before birth, the magic formula is stamped indelibly on the brain --KaThud!! Her mood of amusement changes and . . . through some terrible oversight . . . . perhaps the death of my mother . . . I didn't get that...Ka Thud!! I was born . . . defective. . . . She looks at the Actress. (1.36)
The girl child's passage into culture, which requires that she remain permanently alienated from her own disempowered gender, culminates in Lizzie's discovery that she has no "blood" relations since her father plans to sign off the farm to his wife's male relative. When even her own sister refuses to stand by her, she finds herself closer in kin to her more oppressed non-blood sister, the maid Bridget.
Case believes that Blood Relations belongs to the works of the first rebellious feminist playwrights who foregrounded the struggle of women trying to move into subject positions free from patriarchal controls; however, she also sees the play as caught at the stage where the female characters who take subject positions are still worried about whether they have the right to take them. I would suggest that Pollock has gone further in her metatheatricalizing of subject positions and has split "Lizzie's " story across multiple subject positions which proliferate different "sites" occupied by other identities than her own. Her lesbian actress lover, the Irish maid Bridget, her scheming stepmother, her passive sister cannot be reduced to one unified "woman." So, too, her bird-killing Papa, and her flirtatious Irish doctor, also participate in producing diverse gendered sites. As such, Pollock's axe-wielding message addresses multiple oppressions that implicate contemporary audience members in the need to destroy the patriarchal script, and, therefore, can be considered to have moved beyond merely questioning women's newly found rights. Even if, at the traditional narrative plot level, the actress-lover must experience the same fury as the Lizzie character by moving through the same chronological stages that Lizzie did ten years earlier, the progression is frequently halted by the shared moments of delight when the actress finds herself able to mirror Lizzie back to herself. The characters may be frozen again by the end, but symbolic representation has been shattered by glimpses of a symbolic order which sites the presence of the female. So too, the synchronic counter-narrative where an older, wiser Lizzie acknowledges her closer mirror reflection in Bridget, as the character she chooses to split into on stage, has also been put into motion even from the beginning.
A few years later when Pollock came to reveal her own scandalous, unmentionable personal life story in Doc, she imported the model of the legendary outlawed murderous daughter across the border to her own small New Brunswick home town in the form of Catherine, the alienated Daddy's girl, who returns home to revisit the primal scene. If the sensational murder trial had forever exposed the intimate details of Lizzie's menstrual madness to the public eye,6 Pollock's own "shedipal" tragedy could have been kept a secret permanently. In retelling the life of a successful and adulated small town doctor and benefactor-- the official biography of her father Everett Chalmers (Hofsess 44-48)--7 Pollock need never have mentioned the absent, silent, and dead women who had removed themselves from his controlling presence. For in this case, Catherine has come home to "murder" her father's reputation, as the real murders--the violent suicides of both her mother and grandmother--have been dismissed as either accidental or inevitable. Thus, the indelible gestic image in Blood Relations of the actress/Lizzie poised over her sleeping father with the axe in her upraised arms has its corresponding never-ending moment in Doc, with Ev sitting hunched in his chair holding the unopened suicide note written to him by his mother, tormented by the accusatory voice of his dead wife Bob.
While Blood Relations replays the male-identified daughter's shattering discovery of her exclusion from public existence, Doc takes another daddy's girl back to rediscover the personal deathly disempowerment which the culturally inscribed rejection of the mother had required from her. Reversing the Electra figure, this daughter puts the father on trial for his misuse of patriarchal privilege, and destroys the illusion of the uniqueness of his life story, showing how interwoven it was with the lives of those he had sacrificed to get there. In an 1987 interview, Pollock called it "a detective story [about] the daughter's attempt to understand the relationship between her mother and her father and herself and what it was that caused her mother's death" (Deakin 29).
Instead of building up a glowing tribute in recognition of Ev's great accomplishments, Doc's narrative flow is always already interrupted by playback memory scenes offering snippets of private family moments which can no longer be repressed. As Catherine observes to Ev, "And it all comes down to you sitting up here alone with Gramma's letter" (32). The play's halting movement back and forth from one remembered incident to another destroys the linearity of the traditionally ordered life of respectable auto/biography. Other recurrent patterns appear--moments when life-altering gender inscriptions were made. By positioning Catherine as the chief investigator who has the power to withhold her validation of Doc's life, Pollock has found the staging metaphor which recognizes that "woman is the locus of the process/trial of the subject['s entry into culture]" (Feral 10); the "Other" on whom male identification depends. To undo her male-identification, the character of Catherine has to re-enact her past by meeting up with her younger split-self, the little girl Katie. Together they must re-interpret their role in murdering the mother figures. The adult-child Catherine needs to know the process whereby she chose to participate in her mother's death in order to relieve her own self-hatred:
CATHERINE. What about Mummy?
EV. You blame me for that.
CATHERINE. No.
EV. It was all my fault, go on, say it, I know what you think.
CATHERINE. It was my fault.(32)
Crucial scenes where Katie becomes her mother's punisher are replayed at strategic narrative moments; in the beginning, a disassociated Catherine narrates as Katie enacts the scene in which she poured out some of her mother's alcohol and then was driven to assault Bob physically (8-9). What both of them discover is how Katie learns to enter culture as the keeper of the law of the father; the watchdog who guards him against the despised mother/wife. In scene after scene, Katie announces her hatred for Bob, while a distanced Catherine observes and continues to reject her mother's pleas for understanding. Slowly, Catherine is able to enter into Katie's emotional battles as they watch Bob's progressive deterioration re-played. But, as an adult, Catherine can no longer pretend, as Katie did, that she has not glimpsed her reflection in her hated mother, and grandmother:
KATIE. I wonder . . . do you know what I wonder? I wonder, did she take the pills to sleep like she sometimes does, or did she...
CATHERINE. It was
KATIE. An accident? . . . Sometimes I look . . .
CATHERINE. . . .in the mirror, I look in the mirror . . .
KATIE. . . . and I see Mummy and I see . . .
CATHERINE. . . .Gramma, and Mummy and me . . .
KATIE. . . . I don't want to be like them. (108)
Only when they have symbolically united, after Catherine has re-experienced how she learned "not to cry" (115), and Katie finds the grownup label for Bob's alcoholism (119), can they participate in the re-creation of the shameful moment when Katie, in abandoning Bob to her death, also destroys a part of herself. Along with a few tentative moments when Catherine comes close to responding directly to her mother's drunken stories, we hear the disembodied offstage voice of Bob calling out for her daughter. When it becomes frantic and incessant, Katie deliberately shuts out her cries, comforting herself with the nursery rhymes of her lost childhood:8
BOB. (on mike, offstage) Katie!
KATIE. (chants louder) Fire on the mountain/ break your heart/Years to come - kiss and run/bitter bark - break your heart
(KATIE slowly takes her hands from her ears. There is silence. Pause)
I don't hear you! (pause) I don't hear you! (pause) I don't! (120)
Although they could never meet in the flesh in this patriarchal world, Catherine has let herself hear enough of her Mother's stories to enable her to reconstruct her lost life. Bob, "outlawed" for her failure to succeed as a doctor's wife, is pushed out into the public sphere, where her reputation as a notorious drunk--bad enough to be banned from the local liquor store--makes her the butt of town gossip. However, it is as a facet of this outlawed public status that she is made credible to us as a woman whose career ambitions were thwarted:
EV. Look, you're not just an R.N. anymore.
BOB. No.
EV. You're not Eloise Roberts, you're not Bob any more.
BOB. Who am I?
EV. My wife. (57)
Bob's rampant alcoholism "speaks" to us of her despair at having her hard-won nursing degree dismissed as a convenient stepping stone to marriage, even by her own mother who had charred to send her daughter to school (71). These stories, so easily forgotten in the wake of Bob's ugly downward slide, bring to life a Bob who found her attempt at a professional career cut short by pregnancy (55), whose status isolates her from the maids she fires, and from the mother-in-law who despises her for "trapping" her son. We discover that it is this same isolation--the condition experienced by women who come to believe that their only value is derived from the success of the men in their lives--that drives Ev's mother to walk out in front of the night train (98-99). In giving voice to the unrecorded, unrecognized, devalued lives of the women in her past, Pollock's alter-egos, Katie and Catherine find the way to shatter the master narrative of Ev's great achievements. Ev's complacent excuses that he sacrificed his family in the medical interest of relieving the poverty he had come from only underlines his unexamined male privilege:
EV. Supposin' it were, her death my fault,/put a figure on it, eh? Her death my fault, put a figure on it, eh? Her death my fault on one side - and the other any old figure, thousand lives the figure - was that worth it? (123)
What he fails to take into account, and we now know, is that Bob's similar heroic efforts to have a meaningful career had been swept aside because of her "inferior" gender position. 9
Although Catherine's split-self supposedly heals, in that she sends Katie away before the final moments of reconciliation with Ev, the final heavily charged gestic moment when she takes the burden of guilt away from her father by burning her grandmother's unread suicide letter only serves to remind us that the traces of women's lives in official auto/biographical accounts of their famous men tend to be paper thin and barely decipherable. In Doc, Pollock has gone back to retrieve them from the margins and it is here that Catherine is able find her female relatives' faint reflections in a new cultural mirror. They, too, like their notorious American cousin, Lizzie Borden, have crossed the borderlines to enter into theatrical representation. It is no longer the official auto/biographical accounts which interest us in either Blood Relations or Doc, but the women's untold stories that have been rescued. We no longer care to look for the simple answer to whether Lizzie, Bob or Gramma "did it"; now we are interested in why and how they (might) (could) (would) (should) have chosen to cross over those borderlines. No longer bound by the master narratives, Pollock's plays have given us a glimpse of a new transnational feminist sharing, of a revolutionary literary future where we will feel safe enough to bring our outlaws home.
Notes
1. Matthew Fraser reports that Pollock regretted that she had "caved into pressures from Theatre New Brunswick artistic director Janet Amos and changed the play's title to Family Trappings. Doc, it was felt would lead audiences to expect a heroic portrait of a great man, while Family Trappings will ready them for something less cheerful." He went on to reveal that "[t]he mother in the play, Bob, commits suicide,as did Pollock's own mother when she was fifteen. And the play's daughter, like Pollock, is a writer. Except for her own character, she hasn't even changed the names."
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2. "Invagination is the inward refolding of the la gaine (sheath, girdle), the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket. Such an invagination is possible from the first trace on. That is why there is no first trace"(Derrida, "Living" 97).
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3. Carole Boyce Davies defines the crossover genre as one which the "challenges the oral/written separations and unites these forms as they maintain their distinct textualities" in order to give voice to unheard women's stories(7).
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4. Pollock's closing words in the interview stress her choice to write about Canadian content," What I write is quite Canadian-oriented. I couldn't live in the States. I couldn't work for the States either. I really believe that the artist has a job, a responsibility not just to her/himself but to the society s/he comes form. I represent the kinds of questions some Canadians are asking, and my responsibility is here."
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5. My generic use of the name Lizzie will be differentiated from the specific roles that "she" plays. It is sometimes difficult not to mix up her historic persona with her various stage characters.
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6. Evidence at the trial included references to Lizzie's monthly cycle and offered an explanation for the removal of bloodied linen. Angela Carter, "The Fall River Axe Murders," 103-04, refers to Lizzie's menstruation in her fictionalized version of the event.
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7. Other articles which relate Pollock's real life story to the play include: Audrey M. Ashley, "Sharon Pollock ...from the inside," Ottawa Citizen 16 Nov. 84: D12; Brain Brennan, "Pollock play confirms art follows life," Calgary Herald 1 Apr. 84: F1. Louise Sweet, "Playwright's life provided the tools of her trade," Toronto Star 3 Mar. 84: D1; "Writer explores mother's suicide," Winnipeg Free Press4 Feb. 87:35.
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8. Pollock's description of her mother's funeral as "hysterically embarrassing"(her emphasis)to her at fifteen, fails to mask what must have been a very traumatic event. She explained that her mother had tried to commit suicide so many times that when she told the doctors that she had swallowed a mercury compound, none of them believed her. "It took her a week and a half to die, ...; it was a terribly unpleasant way to die" (Hofsess 52).
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9. Pollock revealed that she had come to understand her mother's self-destruction better as she grew up. "I see now what a difficult position she was in. She came from a very large and very poor family in New Brunswick. She was the only one to get an education. No sooner did she become a nurse than she married my father, who was chief surgeon, and her career was terminated. Her whole personality was geared to striving --that's how she escaped whatever forces pulled everybody else in her family into an unending cycle of menial jobs and poverty. Yet suddenly she was expected to retire and play the role of a doctor's wife --gracious, idle, nothing much to do(Hofsess 48).
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WORKS CITED
Carter, Angela. "The Fall River Axe Murders." Black Venus. London: Picador, 1985. 103-121.
Case, Sue Ellen. "From Split Subject to Split Britches." Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 126-146.
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Watson, Julia and Sidonie Smith. "De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women's Autobiographical Practices." De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1992. xiii-xxxi.