Author: sparkleponyprincess

Towards the conclusion of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, Fun Home, she writes at length about her mother’s tenure as Lady Bracknell in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Naturally, having recently finished my second reading of the play for Victorian Sexualities, I was fascinated by the potential ways in which Earnest‘s narrative melds and contrasts with Bechdel’s lived experiences.

If Helen is positioned in the role of Lady Bracknell, then Alison is positioned as Gwendolen, the Lady’s daughter, over whom she holds a great amount of sway. Within Earnest, Gwendolen pursues an engagement with Jack Worthing—known to her by the name Ernest—but is hampered in her efforts by the Lady’s insistence on first interviewing Jack regarding his personal assets and virtues. Bechdel includes a particular exchange between Gwendolen and the Lady on page 154 of her novel, in which Gwendolen/Alison is told that “an engagement should come upon a young girl as a surprise.”

This moment comes almost one hundred pages after Bechdel narrates her coming-out to her mother, receiving a response in which Helen claims Alison’s “choice [is] a threat to [her family and work]” (77). The outright rejection of their children’s “choices” draws the first of many parallels between the Lady and Helen. Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel consciously draws several literary parallels between her and her father, ranging from the English literary canon to Greek mythology. Helen, however, is given far less attention in this department, save for two particular notable instances: an early comparison to “The Addams Family” and this instance of theatrical interplay.

Lady Bracknell within The Importance of Being Earnest functions as a sort of dominating force to rival Algernon’s farcical power over a given room. In Bechdel’s own words, when Helen steps into the role, she becomes a veritable “Victorian dominatrix to rival Wilde himself” (164). She does, of course, place great value in her work within the home, but within Earnest, she is placed upon a stage to be gazed upon as a figure of authority. With the knowledge of Helen’s broken marriage, the role of Lady Bracknell becomes then a sort of therapeutic device through which she can devote herself entirely to something more stable than her typical activities.

Although Helen is oftentimes overshadowed by the narrative of Bruce, her husband, The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Bracknell allow her a space for creativity and self-expression separate from her family unit. She is expanded upon as a character and a force within her family through her constant dedication to this work in a way that would not be possible without the direct connection to the literary canon Bechdel explores within her time at college.

The Robbers Cave psychological experiment, taking place in 1954 under the supervision of psychologist Muzafer Sherif, aimed to understand the relationships between two groups of participants when separated and then brought together. These participants were twenty-four “normal” eleven-year-old boys from Arizona, bussed to Robbers Cave National Park and permitted to befriend one another. In an effort to standardize his experiment and control any outstanding factors, Sherif specifically recruited boys who were White, middle-class, sociable, and Protestant, among other descriptors.

When I committed to writing a play for the Mermaid Players’ First-Year Play Festival, I had a general idea of how I wanted to approach the Robbers Cave experiment. Influenced by works such as Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, I knew I wanted to work creatively beyond the confines of Sherif’s narrow population. The experiment, whose outcomes are often compared to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, has been widely applied within the field of social psychology, although these results represent a rather minute section of the larger population. Everland, then, functions to take this isolated experiment and apply it to a more diverse, contemporary group of performers and audience members.

Everland is set at an unnamed summer camp and features four campers: Mason, Craig, Cutler, and River. These boys are supervised by the unnamed Counselor, a force written to represent the broader influence of society on the impressionable next generation: in other words, the normal. At odds most directly with normalcy is River, a boy whose embrace of his emotions and desire to prioritize friendship earn him scrutiny. The Counselor, in response to River’s frustration at his treatment, only tells him that “summer camp is for brave boys” and that “if [he wants] the other campers to treat [him] well, [he has] to play their game,” (Booth 3).

On a surface level, this shallow acknowledgment of toxic masculinity does not do much for the audience. However, this play was finished following casting decisions, and the actor portraying River—my dear friend Forrest—very much felt that his gender identity greatly influenced how he approached the role. Thus, I began to explore River’s potential as a force that queers the narrative of Everland. Within the confines of an experiment designed to function within the “normal,” what does it mean for queerness to embed itself into the narrative? How do characters rebel against the normalcy forced upon them?

With this information, River moves away from being a sacrificial lamb and becomes a more significant narrative force. Through Mason, Craig, and Cutler’s interactions with him, they are made to question their own understandings of just how fulfilling “normal” really is. Cutler questions River’s motives in writing home, but softens his harsher attitude, ultimately concluding that he “[doesn’t] wanna see them be mean to [him]” (2). Mason, shortly after critiquing River’s performance as a catcher, confesses in his nightly prayer that he “[doesn’t] know if [they] can win without [River]” and asks for forgiveness (4). Ultimately, these characters become more three-dimensional as a direct result of River’s queerness. His refusal to conform enriches the narrative, directly expressing the consequence of the Counselor’s “normalcy.”

“The constantly diminishing future [referenced by queer poet Mark Doty],” Jack Halberstam writes in his 2005 work In Queer Time and Place, “creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS … by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity,” (2). Literature as a form of expression oftentimes relies on a rather linear understanding of plot and narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement are taught as scripture to students from a young age, forging an understanding of what “good writing” is that can be challenging to dismantle. On the contrary, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body takes these conventions as almost a challenge, crafting a narrative whose temporality (or lack thereof) is crucial to its composition and broader perspective on relationships.

Written on the Body presents itself as an inherently-queer work in the narrator’s ambiguous gender: they invoke past relationships with both women and men, and given the reference to secretive gay lovers, it can be reasonably inferred that queerness is othered within Winterson’s narrative world. Therefore, queerness takes on the sort of marginalized identity it does in our world, to an extent. Jack Halberstam’s reading of queer time as a direct reaction to the long history of oppression and hostility the queer community has faced, then, takes on greater credence in Written on the Body as an expression of a legacy larger than the narrator’s rocky love life.

The thought process behind this post is not fully explored, but I believe that the implications here span beyond either In Queer Time and Place or Written on the Body and moreso concern the manner in which we read queer literature. Queer literature itself emerges as a consequence of a legacy that any one of us cannot fully comprehend, and Written on the Body exists as a stellar example of how, to use the words of Eli Clare’s The Mountain, language is “haunted, strengthened, underscored” by the bodies which have shaped it (11).

“Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? ‘I love you’ is always a quotation,” (Winterson 9). It is in these two lines on the first page of Written on the Body that Jeanette Winterson places what I believe to be her thesis for the work as a whole. Winterson, in an opinion I can certainly sympathize with, adores allusions. She uses them tar from sparingly in this work, and each can be tied back to this central position: that perhaps the words we need are not always our own. Just after this paragraph, the narrator includes a quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In this passage, the maligned character of Caliban speaks against the play’s protagonists who have settled on his native island: “You taught me language and my profit on’t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language.” What does it mean for the narrator that Caliban’s language is not his own, and yet the primary tool of expression he is given? On the very next page, Winterson enters an extended metaphor to the tune of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. “Love demands expression,” and this is what the entirety of the work strives to accomplish. As a translator, the narrator is intimately familiar with the words of others—perhaps maddeningly so. The words of others, not unlike the primary language spoken in The Tempest, become the avenue through which the speaker explores themself and those around them. Caliban’s outrage, Alice’s confusion, Jane Eyre’s devotion, Eve’s original sin, and Mercutio’s fatal hubris all become winters on in the great tapestry of language.

title taken from act 1 scene 2 of the tempest!