Robert Nunn
Jacob Mercer as a character is a compendium
of patriarchal values, and at the heart of Salt-Water Moon is a
struggle between two tendencies: one, to uphold the values embodied in
Jacob; the other, to resist them. This struggle is not only between the
two characters, Jacob and Mary, but is also embedded in the text, and more
particularly in the cues given to the spectator as to how the characters
are to be looked at.
At one level, the
play is based on stereotypical and regressive views of the nature of men
and women. The plot is constructed so that Jacob is the one who makes everything
happen; Mary reacts. Jacob's behavior is calculated and conscious and completely
under his control at all times. Mary's conscious behavior, her rejection
of Jacob's advances, is discounted in favour of her involuntary behaviour
which reveals 'against her will' that she still loves him. The play assumes
its audience's complicity in these assumptions; the performance of the
play constructs a position for the spectator, a position that is assumed
either to be male, or to accept the male perspective as natural. On another
level: within the text itself are contradictions, resistances, to the dominant
reading it tends to elicit. Perhaps more significantly, in performance,
these resistances can be made truly subversive.
Jacob en tant que personnage est un
amas de valeurs patriarcales et au centre de Salt-Water Moon se
trouve une lutte entre deux tendances: celle de soutenir les valeurs incarnées
par Jacob et celle d'y résister. Cette lutte n'est pas seulement
entre les deux personnages, Jacob et Mary; c'est également une lutte
profondément enracinée dans le texte, et tout particulièrement
dans les indications fournies au spectateur pour lui faire voir les personnages
comme il faut.
A un niveau, la
pièce est basée sur des idées stéréotypées
et rétrogrades sur la nature des hommes et des femmes. L'intrigue
est construite de sorte que Jacob mène toujours le jeu, tandis que
Mary réagit. La conduite de Jacob est calculée et consciente,
toujours complètement sous son contrôle. La conduite consciente
de Mary, son refus des avances de Jacob, s'annulle par sa conduite involontaire
qui révèle que "malgré elle" elle est toujours amoureuse
de lui. La pièce suppose la complicité des spectateurs dans
ces hypothèses; la représentation de la pièce crée
une attitude pour le spectateur, une attitude donnée comme mâle
ou qui accepterait comme allant de soi la perspective mâle traditionnelle.
A un autre niveau: au coeur du texte lui-même il y a des contradictions,
des résistances à la lecture dominatrice qu'il tend à
évoquer. Le plus signifiant, peut-être, c'est que l'on peut
jouer cette pièce en sorte que ses résistances soient vraiment
subversives.
Contemporary critical theory has tended to strip the act of reading or receiving a text of its innocence. It is no longer the case that the text is thought of as an autonomous realm, nor is reading thought of simply as a matter of receiving the meaning inherent in the text. Rather, meaning is reconceived as an exchange between the text and the reader: its production is completed in the act of reading. Susan Bennett's recent Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (1990) 1 applies reception and post-structuralist theory to the act of viewing the theatrical event. She adds the important consideration that the act of viewing is never ideologically innocent. The subject who views the play is always a subject constructed in ideology. One aspect of the subject's position, one which Bennett considers but not at great length, is gender. We do not approach any work of art without carrying our deeply-ingrained sense of sexual identity and sexual difference with us to colour the act of reception. When we consider that it is only on one side of the footlights that theatre has been for millennia dominated by men, while audiences have almost always been composed of men and women, the problem of reception of the theatrical text is foregrounded. What viewing position is elicited by texts predominantly produced by men, if the viewer is male, and again if the viewer is female? The idea that a specific gender position is constructed for the viewer was first explored in writings on film, first in the influential essay by Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), 2 and subsequently in work by among others Kaja Silverman, E. Ann Kaplan and Teresa de Lauretis.3 De Lauretis outlines the approach succinctly:
The representation of woman as image (spectacle, object to be looked at, vision of beauty - and the concurrent representation of the female body as the locus of sexuality, site of visual pleasure, or lure of the gaze) is so pervasive in our culture, well before and beyond the institution of cinema, that it necessarily constitutes a starting point for any understanding of sexual difference and its ideological effects in the construction of social subjects, its presence in all forms of subjectivity ...
it is ... the feminist critique of representation that has conclusively demonstrated how any image in our culture - let alone any image of woman - is placed within, and read from, the encompassing context of patriarchal ideologies, whose values and effects are social and subjective, aesthetic and affective, and obviously permeate the entire social fabric and hence all social subjects, women as well as men.4
More recently, feminist theatre critics
have assimilated this work on film into the study of theatre: for example,
Sue-Ellen Case and Jill Dolan. 5
David French's Salt-Water Moon 6 is an interesting play to examine in the light of these theoretical explorations. A brief synopsis of Salt-Water Moon will suggest why. Jacob Mercer abruptly left Coley's Point, Newfoundland, a year before without even saying goodbye to his girl, Mary Snow. They are both in their late teens. He returns when he hears she is engaged to a young schoolteacher, Jerome McKenzie, whose father is a wealthy merchant and ship-owner. Jacob is a fisherman; he has spent the year in Toronto making concrete blocks. Mary is a domestic servant. He comes to her employer's house on a lovely night in August 1926, to find her waiting for her fiancé. He sets out to win her back. The play ends at the moment she casts her lot with him. Two vital pieces of exposition unfold through the play. We learn that Jacob left Newfoundland because he could not bear to see his father, who had fought so bravely in the Great War, being cruelly mistreated by his boss, Jerome's father. We also learn that Mary has become engaged to Jerome largely so that she can have her own home, and thus rescue her younger sister Dot from the orphanage (their mother is living, but has not been capable of caring for her children since her husband died in the Great War). At the crux of the play, Mary voices her suspicion that Jacob is trying to win her back only to settle the score with Jerome's father. Jacob, deeply offended, walks off. Mary cries out his name with all her might. He returns and the rest is Parts I, II and IV of the Mercer Tetralogy. The very fact that the play is about a young man wooing a young woman who does not want to be wooed indicates the position the audience is implicitly invited to assume. 'We' are watching a man watching a woman for signs of weakness, 'we' are invited to watch a woman's resistance weaken until she yields. The positioning of the audience as male is reinforced first of all by the gender of the playwright, second by the fact that the first production at Tarragon was directed by a man. Not surprisingly, given that positions of power in the theatre, such as playwriting and directing, have until recently been exclusively in men's hands, and still are predominantly so, 7 every one of the twelve subsequent productions of the play listed in Canada On Stage 1982-1986 was directed by a man.8 But every actor who played Mary Snow was a woman. This might seem too obvious to mention but for the fact that a woman acting (in several senses of the word) implicitly opens a gap in the closed circle of representation of women by men, and immensely complicates what seems at first glance a simple invitation to view the play from a masculine point of view. Thus it matters enormously that Mary too has a project, the rescue of her sister, which she pursues with something like heroism, and which she never loses sight of.
Some time ago I wrote a review of the published text of the play, in which I argued that it seeks to seduce its audience into accepting uncritically certain stereotypes about men and women. 9
... the entire action hinges on the old binary code, male=active, female=passive. Male pride, it is revealed, drove Jacob away from the place where his father was humiliated by his boss, the fiancé's father. Jacob models his behavior on Tom Mix whom he saw in a movie gallop into a church and rescue the bride from being married against her will. The implication is that the bride's will has no bearing either on the wedding or the rescue. Jacob's behavior throughout the play is calculated and manipulative; Mary's is given off like the scent of her hair - the stage directions call for her to tremble and swallow hard when he comes near her, take an involuntary step towards him, etc. At the climax, Jacob walks away, and he waits offstage, and the audience waits, for Mary to 'let out a cry that splits apart the night.' Even her one significant action is controlled by him and given off by her.
I also argued that the play takes for
granted its audience's complicity in the assumptions underlying the plot;
that is, that the performance of the play constructs a position
for the spectator, a position that is assumed either to be male, or to
accept the male perspective as natural. 10
However, the simple position I outlined in the review has become complicated
by the fact - more and more evident as I read and reread the play - that
within the text itself are contradictions, resistances, to the dominant
reading it tends to elicit, resistances that can be foregrounded in performance.
A distinction Pierre Bourdieu makes between the doxa and orthodoxy is relevant here. The doxa consists of those schemes of thought and perception which produce such a perfect fit between the natural and social order that the latter simply 'goes without saying.' It 'goes without saying' because it 'comes without saying.' Orthodoxy is that system of cultural assumptions which have to be proclaimed and asserted because they are contested. 11 In this play, orthodox assumptions about the positioning of male and female are asserted vigorously by Jacob because of the quiet but persistent questioning that Mary voices. The position of the spectator is hence equally complex. A persistent invitation to view the female character from the traditional male perspective is subject to interruptions and contestations.
I am going to base my argument on close readings of certain passages. The first scene we will examine occurs late in the play. In it, Jacob and Mary argue over the meaning of an earlier scene. In that earlier scene, Jacob claimed to disbelieve that there was such a thing as a blue star. He persuaded Mary that if she showed him one, he would leave (a promise he had no intention of keeping). The business of being shown the star allowed him to stand close to her and breathe in the fragrance of her hair and more importantly gauge her reaction to his nearness.
JACOB: Look me in the eye and tell me you loves him, and I'll walk out of this yard and never come back.
MARY: You made one promise tonight you never kept. You can't be trusted.
JACOB: Try me once more. Tell me you loves Jerome McKenzie, and you'll never see the dust of my feet again.
MARY: All right, and I'm holding you to it. She turns and stares straight at him. Slight pause.
JACOB: You can't say it, can you? then Can you?
MARY: I loves him. There. I said it.
JACOB: Beat.
No odds. I don't believe you. He walks away.
MARY: No, you wouldn't believe the Devil if he snuck up behind and jabbed you with his fork.
JACOB: That I wouldn't.
MARY: No. All you believes is what you wants to believe.
JACOB: No, I believes in what's real. I believes in a young girl trembling at my breath on her neck. That's what I believes in.
MARY: What young girl?
JACOB: There's only one in the yard that I can see.
MARY: And just when was I trembling?
JACOB: When? I'll tell you when. When you pointed out the blue star of Vega tonight, and I stood behind you. I could feel you shaking under your dress like a young bride at the altar.
MARY: It's chilly out!
JACOB: Indeed it's not chilly out, or where's your shawl to? ... Your heart was pounding, wasn't it? then Wasn't it?
MARY: Next you'll be telling me you could hear it.
JACOB: No, but I could see the pulse in your neck, Mary, beating like a tom-tom.
MARY: The Bible's got it all wrong. It's not the women who are the vain ones, it's the men.
Slight pause.
JACOB: You ought to wear yellow more often, maid. It really do become you. Suits your black hair and fair complexion. (58-61)
Mary is the object of a gaze that appropriates
her and interprets her gestures and involuntary movements. Jacob has the
key, he decodes. She resists this appropriation, with alternative explanations
of her behavior, which he dismisses, and a critical revision of the Bible,
which he ignores. He reasserts the primacy of the male gaze, its power
over her, with instructions on how she should look. When he speaks of her
body trembling under her dress, 'like a young bride at the altar,' he is
in effect telling her that her sexual desire is his property, not hers.
The reference to the tom-tom connotes primitive, irrational 'jungle' means
of communication: the implied comparison is with his command of language
and her exclusion from language. What Mary says, especially what she says
she wants to do, is subject to appeal to the higher authority of the male
gaze. It determines 'what's real.'
As I said a moment ago, this scene is a narrated and interpreted replay of the telescope scene early in the play. At that time Jacob himself does not interpret Mary's behavior, or comment on it, unless to foreground her pauses and unfinished sentences; hence it is the spectator whose interpretative activity is called on and is presumed to be based on the same ideological premise as Jacob's interpretation in the scene we just examined. That is, inscribed in the text is the assumption that the audience already knows how to look at a woman.
One particular stage direction makes this very clear. This occurs at the moment Mary catches sight of the silk stockings Jacob has brought her from Toronto:
MARY says nothing. She takes an involuntary step and stops. From the look on her face you'd be hard-pressed to know whether she liked the stockings, except for one thing: she can't keep her eyes off them. She stands several yards from JACOB, staring almost quizzically at his outstretched arm. (50)
That is, the audience is assumed to
interpret Mary's behavior in exactly the way Jacob does. Quite consistently
throughout the play, Jacob's objectives are shared with the audience, while
Mary's objectives are subject to Jacob's and the audience's shared access
to codes which permit 'us' to read the primarily visual signs involuntarily
given off by Mary. Jacob's objectives belong to him, while Mary's objectives
seem to belong to the viewer. That is to say, the issue of the male gaze,
which is central to the body of film criticism I referred to, is also central
to this play.
It's significant that the play starts with Mary alone on the stage in a series of still poses that allow her to be looked at as an icon of feminine beauty. Then Jacob enters unnoticed, and for several seconds we watch Jacob watching Mary. It seems to me that this cues the audience as to who does the looking and who gets looked at. The same thing happens at the crux. After Jacob has left the stage, ostensibly never to return, we watch and wait, exactly as Jacob is watching and waiting offstage, for Mary to cry out his name. That is, the play is written in such a way as to conflate the two gazes, the one in the dramatic fiction, and the one in the auditorium. The latter is modelled on the former. After a pause, in which Mary is perfectly still, that is, composed as a picture to be looked at, Jacob returns and gazes at Mary for several seconds before she is aware of his presence. It is significant that this paradigm, consisting of the active male gaze and the passive female recipient of the gaze, begins the play and is repeated at the crux.
Twice Mary is alone on the stage. On both occasions she is silent for the most part. The stage directions call for her to assume poses that allow her simply to be looked at. At the beginning of the play 'she sits on the front step.' Once standing, she 'peers at the sky through the telescope.' Hearing Jacob's voice 'she faces that direction, listening intently'; 'she stands riveted to the spot'; 'she resumes her study of the stars' (9-10). This last is the pose she holds as she is the object of Jacob's gaze. At the crux of the play, she is more active: after Jacob has left the stage, she tries to sing a verse of a song 'defiantly'; then her feelings well up against her will (once again her real feelings are involuntary and are known by virtue of the spectator's interpretative activity); then she cries out Jacob's name; and then:
MARY stands looking down the road, her eyes straining to see, her eyes almost listening ... but there is only the empty road, the moonlight, the silence ... She composes herself and returns to the porch step. She sits gazing at some middle distance, absently turning her engagement ring on her finger.
At that moment JACOB walks quietly back onto the road, still carrying his suitcase, his fedora cocked at a jaunty angle. There is no grin on his face, however, as he stands staring at MARY for a long moment, waiting for her to notice him ... Finally, she does. She rises, but remains standing on the porch, looking at him. (80)
The difference between the two poses
is revealing. Mary's gaze is passive. Resigned, she gazes into the middle
distance; her inaction permits her to be watched; her passivity allows
her to be 'looked at' - by the audience, and, the audience knows, by Jacob
offstage. (Laura Mulvey refers to this characteristic form of representation
of women as 'to-be-looked-at-ness.' 12
Jacob, on the other hand, stands still and stares at Mary to make her
notice him. It is a gesture implying an action, not a passive pose.
Man does, woman is, as the saying goes. Finally, Mary returns the gaze;
but here also, certain cultural codes determine how we 'read' the two gazes.
'She rises, but remains standing on the porch, looking at him,' that is,
waiting for something to be done, by him not her. Jacob's silent gaze,
on the other hand, again is a gesture indicating purposive action, which
is to stretch out Mary's suspense. And it is up to him to break it with
the line, 'You had me worried there. I t'ought for a minute you wasn't
going to call' (80).
Jacob is alone on the stage once, earlier in the play, after Mary has gone into the house and has slammed the door. But the difference between his behavior when alone and hers is worth noting. There is a 'slight pause,' and then Jacob swings into action, taking one tack after another to get her to come back out. He knocks, he calls, he invites her to look at the moon, he tells a funny off-colour story, he invites her to consider the fact that he is making enough disturbance to wake up the village, and the corpse at the wake, he warns her that he is not going to budge until her employers and her fiancé arrive, and what are they going to think, he begins to sing one of those rowdy folksongs about a wedding celebration, more and more loudly, until 'the door bursts open, and MARY comes striding out'(49). No 'to-be-looked-at-ness' here. Unlike Mary when alone, he is engaged in constant purposive action, and the audience is not so much looking at him as they are watching him watch the door.
We should also take note of the fact that Mary is dressed to be looked at by a man. She is wearing a short-sleeved yellow satin dress and is lightly made up. Her bare arms are on display for her flancé, whom she is expecting. The text several times calls attention to how she looks in the dress. For example Jacob says at one point that sarcasm doesn't become her whereas the yellow dress does (16). That is, her active resistance to Jacob's wooing is unbecoming, while her passive self-display in the yellow dress becomes her. To complete the ensemble, and to make her even more to-be-looked-at, Jacob has brought her two pairs of silk stockings from Eaton's in Toronto. Here too the audience is implicated: if Mary is on display for men to look at with pleasure, so is the actress playing Mary. Laura Mulvey relates this objectification of the woman to an unconscious struggle to neutralize the threat of castration always inherent in her sexual difference from the man. 13 Here Jacob continually reassures himself with reminders that Mary herself has sought to transform herself into an object of a male viewer's visual pleasure.
The telescope figures prominently in the play, at one level simply as a stage metaphor for the activity of looking. At another level it is implicated in the politics of the gaze. For the first twenty-one pages of text, the telescope is in Mary's hands. Then Mary thrusts it in Jacob's hands and challenges him to find for himself the blue star they have been arguing about. When she tries to retrieve the telescope, Jacob will not give it back, and for the next thirty-six pages of text it is in his hands or at least not back in Mary's. (The text does not indicate at what point Jacob lays it down, although he still has it in his hands on page 45.) On page 69, Mary picks it up, and it is in her possession for the remaining fourteen pages of text. This small detail underscores the nature of the struggle between Jacob and Mary: he displays his possession of the telescope as a sign of his possession of the power of the gaze: she contests this appropriation. Or we might say that as long as Jacob has the telescope it signifies the phallus and Mary's empty hands signify the lack of the phallus and the threat of castration posed by woman. In Mary's hands it disrupts this identification of the phallus and hence of power with man. Whether it does so in the first few moments of the play, however, before Mary is aware of Jacob's presence, is questionable. On the one hand, she is actively seeking knowledge about the stars: in other words she could be seen as a strong active subject pursuing her own project of self-improvement. On the other hand, she is expecting Jerome McKenzie to turn up at any moment, and it is he who has been teaching her astronomy: in other words, once that piece of exposition has been accomplished, we could reinterpret her pose as a mark of submission to the power of a man. To be seen by Jerome in this pose would convey the old sexual double entendre: 'teach me tonight.' There is no question, however, that we will see her submit herself to Jacob as she has been intending to submit herself to Jerome. In the course of the play, the telescope comes to signify a struggle between Mary and Jacob over who has the power to gaze at whom, that is, a struggle over who is to be recognized as a subject, not an object.
In this light it makes perfect sense that the play ends in silence with the two figures staring intently at each other. Although Jacob assumes that as a man he is privileged to look at Mary and that her position is to be the receiver of his gaze, Mary's contradictory assertion of her subjectivity is never stronger than at the end of the play. Again, a close look at the text will prove rewarding. (The 'Rose of Sharon' Mary will mention is the girl Jacob may or may not have gone out with in Toronto.)
JACOB kneels down in the yard and unties the rope on the suitcase. He looks over at MARY
JACOB: Don't be fooled by appearances, Mary. I've got more than songs up my sleeve. I've got your future and mine, all neatly folded on top of my plaid shirts and diamond socks. He lifts the top of the suitcase and removes a pair of silk stockings, draping them over his arm. All you have to do, Mary, is reach out, and old Bob can rest tonight with a grin on his face. then Well?
MARY: Beat.
What about my sister? Are you forgetting her?
JACOB: I'm not forgetting.
MARY rises from the step. She crosses slowly into the road, but remains well away from JACOB. She stands looking out front as though her eyes are on a distant star. Finally, she speaks.
MARY: evenly, with great seriousness
In the years to come, Jacob Mercer - and this is no idle t'reat, mind - in the years to come, if you ever mentions Rose of Sharon, even in your sleep, I'll make you regret the night you knelt in this yard with those stockings in your hand and the moon for a witness. Do you understand me? She turns and stares at JACOB. Do you?
JACOB smiles up at the serious face of this lovely young girl. His smile becomes a grin until it is splitting his face from ear to ear. (83)
This is complex. Jacob stares at Mary,
demanding that she receive his gaze and their future which
he
is
holding in his hands. She appears to comply, staring out front at
nothing, tacitly accepting both Jacob's gaze and the audience's. But what
she says contradicts the passiveness of the pose. Just before assuming
the pose she has demanded Jacob's assent to her project: 'What about my
sister? Are you forgetting her?' And she has ignored the seductive silk
stockings. Gazing as if at a distant star she demands respect for herself,
and follows up the verbal demand by turning and staring at Jacob, demanding
a response from him. The last moment of the play is equivocal. Jacob responds
with a smile that broadens into a grin - is it a grin of triumph? joy?
mischief? - while Mary continues to gaze intently and seriously at him.
14 The resistance
in the text to the orthodox positioning of male and female subjects
is evident in this passage, and even more so in the scene we are going
to examine next. In it, Jacob piques Mary's interest by hinting that he
had a girl in Toronto whom he took to the picture show. Mary has never
been to a picture show. Jacob 'takes' her to one right there on the front
step.
JACOB: Look, will you sit down and watch the picture? This is one of the best Tom ever made. He rides right into a wedding chapel and snatches the bride from under the nose of the groom. He grins.
MARY: I suppose you finds that funny?
JACOB: It made me stand up, maid, and cheer.
MARY: That's the most brazen t'ing I ever heard of. Why did he do it in the first place?
JACOB: Why? 'Cause the girl was being married against her will, why else. Tom rode to the rescue.
MARY: What if she wasn't marrying against her will? What then?
JACOB: Then there would've been no picture. Besides, she had to be getting married against her will. If you saw the slouch of a bridegroom, you wouldn't have to ask.
MARY: No odds. He might be full of himself, this ... this Mr. Tom Mix, but that don't give him the right to barge in and take what's not his.
JACOB: Go on with you. Sure, even the horse looked pleased. He stood there on the carpet, Tony, all sleek and smug. Tom was sitting in the saddle, clutching the bride on his hip, the train of her gown brushing the floor. All eyes was on Tom. The Maids of Honour in their summer hats all gazed up at him, puzzled, and the minister looked on with his t'umb in the Bible, waiting to see what happened next.
MARY: What did the groom do? I suppose he just stood by and never lifted a finger?
JACOB: What could he do, the fool, against the likes of Tom Mix? He raised himself to his full height and gave Tom a dirty look, and Tom gazed right back down at him with that little smirk on his lips, as much as to say, 'Too bad, buddy. Better luck next time.'
Slight pause.
MARY: Well, Tom Mix had best climb back on his horse and ride off into the night. This is one bride he won't be stealing.
JACOB: No?
MARY: No. And he better ride off soon, too, before Mr. and Mrs. Dawe return from the wake.
JACOB: Nobody puts the run on Tom Mix.
MARY: Tom Mix is a fool. (67-69)
There are some interesting things going
on in this scene. Within the fiction as Jacob describes it, it is very
clear that certain powerful stereotypes about gender are at work. Tom Mix
is active, the bride is passive. Although the bride is rescued from being
married against her will, her will is not consulted: all the viewer has
to do is to compare Tom Mix and the bridegroom to understand all
he
needs
to know about the bride's will. 'She had to be getting married against
her will. If you saw the slouch of a bridegroom, you wouldn't have to ask.'
But Mary dissects the relation between the illusion of the film and the
viewer. Even before the 'film' starts, Jacob has formed a complete identification
with Tom Mix. Tom Mix has become the imaginary ideal image in which the
(male) spectator completes himself. 15
Before Jacob describes Tom's gaze with the little smirk on his lips he
describes practicing it on the fellow sitting in front of him at the picture
show. And indeed he has modelled his behaviour throughout the play on 'The
King of the Cowboys.' In fact we see the identification process taking
place in this passage. Whereas the element of voyeurism is evident in the
description of the look appropriating the bride's subjectivity, it is obvious
that Jacob's subjectivity merges with that of Tom Mix ... as Mary instantly
recognizes: she understands perfectly that when Jacob says 'all eyes was
on Tom' he is imagining all eyes on himself. The position of the spectator
of the play here, I venture, is quite contrary to what it is elsewhere.
Here the spectator is not solicited to view Mary through Jacob's eyes,
but exactly the reverse; here the orthodox viewing position is being deconstructed
rather than constructed. Very odd. This scene is a perfect illustration
of Laura Mulvey's argument that the viewer of the classic Hollywood film
is constructed in such a way as to identify with the 'male gaze' within
the narrative: that is, that the form of representation in the fiction
film codes the viewer as male. Mary's resistance to the assumption that
the bride's 'will' in the matter can be known entirely through the male
gaze - a 'resistant reading' 16
of the film text - runs into a brick wall.
MARY: What if she wasn't marrying against her will? What then?
JACOB: Then there would've been no picture.
The connotation here is that woman's
will, woman's subjectivity, is unrepresentable within the conventions of
narrative film.
This is oddly like the most far-reaching form of the argument I have just sketched in, which is that in Western culture, all forms of representation rest on the objectification of women: this is the argument Jeanie Forte makes in a study of women's performance art:
As a deconstructive strategy, women's performance art is a discourse of the objectified other.... This deconstruction hinges on the awareness that 'Woman,' as object, as a culturally constructed category, is actually the basis of the Western system of representation. Woman constitutes the position of object, a position of other in relation to a socially-dominant male subject; it is that 'otherness' which makes representation possible (the personification of male desire). Precisely because of the operation of representation, actual women are rendered an absence within the dominant culture, and in order to speak, must either take on a mask (masculinity, falsity, simulation, seduction), or take on the unmasking of the very opposition in which they are the opposed, the Other.17
Jacob's response also parallels the
most provocative statement in Mulvey's essay, in which she states that
the male desire to control castration anxiety by dominating and controlling
the woman is the basis of narrative: 'Sadism demands a story.' 18
Curiouser and curiouser! This scene - a 'found analysis' of the construction of the male gaze and the objectification of the woman-found inside the fictional world of the play - very accurately describes the mechanism by which this play constructs a viewing position for the audience in the theatre, a viewing position that 'carries ideologically weighted gender markings' of maleness.19 And, since this viewing position is contested, the potential for a powerful alienation-effect is there.
As I have implied throughout this essay, the process of constructing a male viewing position is most evident in the stage directions. Without going too far into the vexed question of the relative authority of dialogue and didascalia in the dramatic text, I can simply say that while the dialogue implicitly conveys a demand that this text be performed, the stage directions convey a demand that it be performed in a certain manner. 20 Throughout this text they call for the performer playing Mary to stand still to be looked at, to react involuntarily, or to act in such a way that the force of the act can be discounted. Thus, when Mary expresses exasperation at Jacob's flippant comment after she has called him back at the top of her voice, the stage directions read:
She raises her elbow and clenches her fist in a parody of a threatening gesture. A gesture that is not coy but more the gesture of exasperation a woman might feel who is taken for granted. (80)
The gesture is to be played and interpreted
as a womanly parody of a threatening gesture; that is, its force is reduced
(but not too far, not to the point of being 'coy'). It is further reduced
in significance by Jacob's echo of the stage direction: 'Now she makes
a fist ... And such a little fist, too. Wouldn't bruise a hummingbird,
let alone the King of the Cowboys ...' (81).
To return to the Tom Mix passage: it also alerts us to the fact that within the frame of the dramatic fiction, there is a resistance to the privileging of the dominant male subject: Mary's resistant reading of the Tom Mix film is but one of the subversive currents that run through the whole play, implicitly contradicting the conventional absence of female subjectivity within dramatic representation. This resistance, far more evident in the dialogue than in the stage directions, may well be reinforced by the fact that in any performance, the subjectivity of the actress playing Mary, her will and her desire, contradicts her presence on stage as simply an object of male desire. How this might work in performance is suggested indirectly by the comments of the black actress, Catherine Bruhier, who played Mary in the Theatre New Brunswick production of the play in 1989. 21 She says that while the production made no issue of the colour of one actor's skin, her own performance foregrounded lines in the text which 'showed [Mary's] strength and desire to better herself,' thus adding a subtext of struggle 'to overcome not only poverty but oppression based on race.' The actor's subjectivity thus can add a perspective that interrupts and contests an orthodox reading of the play, and can perhaps in Brechtian fashion produce a divided audience, one in which a woman and a man seated next to each other may have sharply different responses.
The contradiction we have been examining in the interaction between the characters is present thematically as well. The play is about wooing, but underneath that is the theme of courage and heroism. There are all sorts of variations on it, from the Newfoundland regiment charging over the top in terrible crossfire to the ridiculous warcry 'Jennie Saunders or a wooden leg' to the bravado of a boy showing off to his date at the pictures by sticking his feet on the back of the seat in front and staring down the fellow who objects, just like The King of the Cowboys. All the models are male. When Mary seeks a model of courage to inspire her sister Dot who is being bullied by the Matron of the orphanage, she takes her to look at Tommy Ricketts the druggist:
I pointed out the drugstore where Tommy Ricketts was now the druggist, and we went inside and looked at him. He had the shyest smile and the kindest eyes, and him so brave in the War. The youngest soldier in the British Army to win a Victoria Cross. ... Once outside, I told Dot who he was, and how she had to be like him. Brave like him and Father, only brave in a different way. I told her the matron was a coward, and like all cowards, I said, she was cruel, so the next time she puts her foot on you, Dot, I said, don't make a sound: don't even cry out, 'cause she'll only grind her heel into you all the harder. Just look into her eyes, I said, and let her know that no odds how often she knocks you down, no odds how hard she steps on you, the one t'ing she'll never destroy is your spirit. And maybe, just maybe she'd stop doing it, 'cause it's a funny t'ing, I said, about cruel people like the Matron, they only respects one kind of person in the long run, and that's the ones they can't break.... (74-5)
Mary's advice to her sister depends
on a male model of what it is to be courageous. Mary counsels Dot to exhibit
a different kind of bravery. Endure, don't whimper, and look the tormentor
in the eye. She advocates a passive version of the bravery of the war hero.
That is to say, male courage is translated into a secondary, feminine copy.
Which is emphatically not acceptable for men or by men. Jacob's father is cruelly treated by Will McKenzie. But it does not seem to be an option for Jacob's father the war hero to look Mr. McKenzie in the eye and let him know that he cannot destroy his spirit. Destroy it he does, to the extent that Jacob's father cannot bear to look anybody in the eye, and Jacob cannot bear to live in the same country where such a thing could be done to a man, and abandons Mary without a word of farewell since he cannot bear to speak to her about it. Significantly, what Mr. McKenzie did to make Jacob's father fill out his contracted time as a hired-on fisherman when there were no fish to be caught was to make him rock an empty cradle on the front porch of the McKenzie house.
Is the play critical of the stereotyical male courage? Maybe ... Certainly Mary mocks the bravado Jacob displayed before another man when he had an excruciating toothache (21-22). But, more to the point: are we invited to draw a parallel between Jim Snow, Mary's father, marching off to war and leaving his wife behind, and Jacob Mercer leaving the island and Mary without looking back? In both cases it's the idea that 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' that drives them, while the women are helpless to stop them, and have no option but to suffer.
The important point here is that the shadow of the Great War looms over a play set in 1926. The raw memories of the war have contradictory connotations. On the one hand, the Newfoundlanders who died in the battle of Beaumont Hamel seem to be admired for their bravery, not wondered at for obeying insane orders. Jacob's description of the destruction of the Newfoundland Regiment on 1 July 1916, is deeply moving:
Out of seven hundred and fifty men, only forty not dead or wounded.... one regiment after another was wiped out - the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Border Regiment, the Essex. And then it came the Newfoundlanders' turn. Colonel Hadow walked twenty yards forward and gave the signal. The Captain blew the whistle, and the men went over the top, heading straight into the German cross-fire, knowing they was walking alone t'rough the long grass of No Man's Land into certain death. Not a single man flinched or looked back, just kept on walking in perfect drill formation, the sun glinting off their bayonets.... all the observers noticed that day as the Newfoundland Regiment walked into the storm of machine-gun bullets and mortar shells: how all the soldiers to a man tucked their chins into their forward shoulders like sailors leaning into a gale of wind ... (36-37)
On the other hand, the play contradicts
its own celebration of male bravery in conveying the terrible cost of Jim
Snow's useless sacrifice, multiplied seven hundred-fold. Mary's mother
still sets a place for her husband at her table. Mary had to go into service
and her sister Dot had to be placed in an orphanage because their widowed
mother was too devastated by her loss to care for them:
When Father was killed, she'd slip into those queer moods that still haven't left her. Moods that last for weeks on end, staring at the floor, forgetting to comb her hair ... (25)
In the Mercer family, Jacob began working at age ten because his father had gone off to war. Perhaps the scale of the devastation of the lives of women and children implies a critical perspective on male bravery.
In conclusion: I have argued that the form of representation in Salt-Water Moon is deeply complicit with orthodox codes which determine what it means to be male or female. These orthodox codes elicit an orthodox reading by an audience that is assumed either to be male or to accept a male viewing position as natural and universal. But, I have also argued, these solicitations are contested within the text, thus opening up the possibility of a resistant reading. Reviews offer the most accessible source of information on how spectators may respond to this contradictory weave of solicitations and disruptions. Robert Crew, for example, described Denise Naples' performance of Mary Snow thus: '[Naples' Mary was] feisty and iron-willed, a determined little chit of a thing.' 22 The diminution of 'iron will' by the epithets 'little,' 'chit' and 'thing' (not to mention his description of the character as 'steely little Mary') exactly echoes similar processes in the dialogue and the stage directions. Crew's outline of the plot similarly suggests what an unquestioning accceptance of the solicitation to view the play from a masculinist position might look like:
[Mary] apparently wants nothing to do with Jacob.
But we, the audience, know otherwise. The physical attraction is still there and Jacob will charm his way back into her heart and carry her off, just as Tom Mix does in the cowboy movie that Jacob tells her about. There is no tension here - her despairing cry of 'Jacob!' will be answered.
In contrast, Marianne Ackerman's review
of the Centaur Theatre production in Montreal suggests how a viewer (whether
male or female) might produce a complex reading, responding both to the
invitation to view the play from an orthodox male position, and to the
resistance in text and especially in performance to that invitation. Thus,
on the one hand she writes:
For those who've not yet recognized language and wit as the most seductive weapons known to man, the 90 minutes that follow will be a thoroughly entertaining lesson in the art of successful talk. 23
It is 'man' who knows how to use language
and wit as a weapon to seduce the implied 'woman.' And the audience, women
equally with men, will receive a lesson in how things are, a seductive
lesson because 'thoroughly entertaining.' Yet later in the review, Ackerman
writes:
Lucy Peacock's Mary is a wonderful answer to Jacob's dancing wit. Innocence and strength combine to equal, sometimes surpass, the surprises rolling off Jacob's lightning tongue.
The mention of Mary's strength is not
immediately qualified by epithets that discount it. The 'lesson' seductively
conveyed about man's ownership of language as a weapon is contradicted
by an equally strong 'lesson' about the strength of a woman. The reviews
of the 1989 production at Theatre New Brunswick likewise suggest how a
performance text may interrupt a simple identification of the viewer's
position as masculine. We have seen that Catherine Bruhier wished to bring
out Mary's strength and her struggle against oppression. We can assume
that Sharon Pollock, who directed, shared and reinforced this concern.
Anne Ingram, writing in the Fredericton Daily Gleaner, describes
Mary as a 'tough, feisty 17 year old' and goes on to say 'Miss Bruhier
managed to reveal the streak of toughness and determination in the innocent
servant girl.'
24
Jo Anne Claus, in the Moncton Telegraph-Journal, writes:
Director Sharon Pollock maintained a strong tension at all times between the two young people. Catherine Bruhier, a New Brunswick actress from Saint John, played Mary as a passionate young girl with a steel core ... Eric McCormack as Jacob has poetry and comedy to make him charming. 25
The extent to which this production
may have disrupted a masculinist reading is suggested by the interesting
switch in epithets conventionally assigned to men and women: it is Mary
who is steely, Jacob who has charm.
As the reviews we have examined imply, the play, both as text and performance, is a tissue of contradictions, the site of a struggle between the construction of a privileged male spectator and a deconstructive analysis of 'him.' Equally it is a text which represents a woman as the object of a man's gaze and a man's desire, yet contradicts this with a representation of a woman as a subject in her own right, desiring, and in the last few moments of the play returning the gaze with interest. It is possible in performance to completely assimilate the resistant reading I have outlined into an old-fashioned love story, fashioned, that is, in the old narrative pattern: boy overcomes all resistance, especially girl's, to get her in the end. Otherwise, as Jacob might say, there would've been no play. Sheila Rabillard makes this point eloquently in a letter to me:
I guess my only real worry about this paper is that it seems (at least as I understand it) almost too optimistic in its reading of the liberating function of the resistance to the masculine point of view you see in Salt-Water Moon. Can't the incorporation of an opposing voice within a larger structure still left standing serve to strengthen the encompassing structure that can contain it? (Like Mary's gesture with her clenched fist, which becomes read as a mark of her relative weakness, not her strength?) In terms of plot, the resistance of the heroine can serve not to inscribe her subjectivity but rather to add to the spice of pursuit and conquest for the hero (and the male viewer who identifies with him). From this perspective, the bride whom Tom Mix snatches from the altar is not only an image of female passivity but also a metaphorical rape victim, her stimulating resistance indicated by the holy and virginal setting from which she is abducted. Of course, she is an unwilling bride who really wants to be carried off from her wedding by the hero; but that is another aspect of the masculine rape fantasy - that the woman underneath her resistance wants to be taken. In short, I am not disagreeing with your analysis of the several productions of the play that managed to read Salt-Water Moon against the grain of the stage directions... ; I'm really just trying to say that woman's subjectivity perhaps enters this play only by such means, and that the 'resistance' in the speeches the text gives Mary is one that in fact collaborates in the processes of the male gaze, in the narrative of masculine pursuit and conquest. 26
The last word on this question does
not belong in the pages of a scholarly journal but on the stage, in performances
which, like that of Catherine Bruhier, might give the resistance in the
text an autonomy, a story of its own to tell. The possibility exists, I
believe, that a production of Salt-Water Moon might feature not
one subject but two.
Notes
THE SUBJECTS OF SALT-WATER MOON
Robert Nunn
1 SUSAN BENNETT, Theatre
Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge,
1990)
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2 Reprinted in LAURA MULVEY,
Visual
and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) pp
14-26
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3 KAJA SILVERMAN, The
Subject of Semiotics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); E.
ANN KAPLAN, Women and Film (London: Methuen, 1983); TERESA DE LAURETIS,
Alice
Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984)
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4 TERESA DE LAURETIS, Alice
Doesn't,
pp 37-39
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5 SUE-ELLEN CASE, Feminism
and Theatre
(London: Macmillan, 1988); JILL DOLAN, The Feminist
Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1988). See also Performing
Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
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6 DAVID FRENCH, Salt-Water
Moon (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1988) All references to this text will
be given in parentheses in the body of the essay
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7 See the discussion of
Rina Fraticelli's 1982 report on The Status of Women in the Canadian
Theatre in KATE LUSHINGTON, 'Fear of Feminism,' Canadian Theatre
Review 43 (Summer 1985), 5-11
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8 See Canada on Stage
1982-1986 (Toronto: PACT Communications Centre, 1989) pp 266, 299,
353, 375, 387, 394, 445, 452, 493, 522, 569, 574
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9 ROBERT NUNN, 'Salt-Water
Moon, Jennie's Story and Under the Skin,' Canadian Theatre Review 60
(Fall 1989), 89-90
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10 MULVEY refers to 'the
"masculinisation" of the spectator position,' p 29
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11 PIERRE BOURDIEU, Outline
of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University
Press, 1977), pp 164-170
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12 MULVEY, p 19
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13 MULVEY, p 21
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14 A very different reading
of this passage is possible. One of the readers of this essay in his or
her report writes: 'Of crucial importance is the fact that she says explicitly
her primary concern is her rivalry with Rose of Sharon. What greater homage
to pay to a man in a patriarchal world than for a woman to say that her
greatest concern is her rivalry with another woman? As long as this is
the case, he is in complete control.'
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15 See MULVEY, p 20
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16 The term is borrowed
from JUDITH FETTERLEY,
The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to
American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978)
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17 JEANIE FORTE, 'Women's
Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism,' Performing Feminisms,
p 252
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18 MULVEY, p 22. See
also TERESA DE LAURETIS, 'Desire in Narrative,' in Alice Doesn't,
pp 134-157
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19 DOLAN, p 44
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20 See ANNE UBERSFELD,
Lire le Théâtre,
4e édition
(Paris: Editions Sociales, 1982), p 230-231: '. . . le théâtre
dit moins une parole que comment on peut ou l'on ne peut pas parler. Toutes
les couches textuelles (didascalies + éléments didascaliques
dans le dialogue) qui définissent une situation de communication
des personnages, déterminant les conditions d'énonciation
de leurs discours, ont pour fonction non pas seulement de modifier le
sens des messages - dialogues mais de constituer des messages autonomes,
exprimant
le rapport entre les discours, et les possibilités ou impossibilités
des rapports interhumains.'
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21 CATHERINE BRUHIER,
'Darkness Visible: A Multiracial SALT-WATER MOON,'
Theatrum 20 (Sept-Oct
1990), 13-15
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22 ROBERT CREW, 'Charming
Salt-Water Moon Crafted to Win People's Hearts,' Toronto Star, 3
Oct 1984
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23 MARIANNE ACKERMAN,
"'Salt-Water Moon" shines bright at Centaur,' Montreal Gazette,
Friday,
9 Nov 1984, p Fl
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24 ANNE INGRAM, 'Saltwater
Moon - Great Play, Well-Acted, Don't Miss It,' Fredericton
Daily Gleaner,
Saturday, 16 Dec 1989
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25 JO ANNE CLAUS, 'Newest
TNB hit charms audience,' Moncton Telegraph-Journal, Fri 1 Dec 1989
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26 SHEILA RABILLARD, personal
correspondence with the author, 1 July 1991. I am grateful to Sheila Rabillard
for permitting me to quote from her letter
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