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MY QUORUM WITH WAR

Before there were blogs, there were journals. People actually wrote words on paper. I'm not a pundit on camera, so I rely on my friends' memory to back up my own sometimes, and I was shocked when one didn't remember me speaking out against the Iraq war. I have a vivid memory of singing war protest songs against The Iraq War: Number One with my band, Fugitive Blonde, at the China Club in Los Angeles, and I have a fixed memory of loathing the current decision to bomb Iraq from day one, but where is the proof?

Things have been fuzzy since 9-11 around my house, what with the business crashing, and the downsizing, and the graduate writing courses, and one crisis after another. Since I've had no public platform to speak from of late, the only documentation of what I've said is from reliable witnesses and my journal.

These may just be words swirling around in the blog-o-sphere and who cares anyway. But at least I can read my typing. And as long as the internet keeps going, and I can hang on to my computer memory sticks, my computer, printer, and ink, everything will be swell.

My handwriting is not much above scribble these days, but I did scratch out a few thoughts about The Iraq War: Number Two to myself, and luckily the journal survived a move and my I-Love-Lucy filing system. There is no search button to find things in my closet.

As I recall, if one spoke out against either Iraq war, one was labeled a traitor or aiding terrorism. Obama's stance on the war in Iraq was one of the big reasons I voted for him. Yes, even the appearance of change feels good.

Exhibit A:


The funny thing is I did go to Mérida four years later--Mérida, Spain. Life gets weird sometimes.

THE LINES OF THAT ONE

The ghost line flickers in the new dawn.
The blue-tipped flame melts
the wax edge, and the goo of myself
oozes into a pool of a dream
that one, like me can

dream of that one cooling the heat
of blood boiling in my veins of cooked sorrow,
healing seared love burned by arteries of hate.
The lines are long. The lines snake
around the y + x. The spiral crow
flies through airwaves of primordial mud,
spitting, sputtering, spewing, birthing
lines and lines of descent, ions in the making.

I dream of genes flowing from body to body;
nights of kisses, nights of release,
nights of smelly, smouldering sex.
The apple in the eye of
millions of fathers and millions of mothers
survives eyes of storms, shifting
sands, whirlwind seas, epic ghost stories

that one after another all suffer, bleed, orgasm,
die one after another. The lines do not
end. The lines eat and grow and
travel across seas, over mountains
dodging bullets, and germs and rabid
ideas that consume energy, resources,
and good news. That one ghostly
sense of lively purpose lingers, thrives.

Myself, I live in the snake-eee line of descent.
Righteous Mumbo and Holy Jumbo
now back where they belong, next to
that one singular thought: We,
and the ghosts who live

are that one, the one
and the same,
and only one.

Amen.*

* In Homage to Barack H. Obama & His Family. Pictured with Barack is his maternal Grandparents, Stanley & Madelyn Dunham.

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

BARACK OBAMA IS MY COUSIN. Granted there may be millions of us here in the U.S. and that many more in Africa, but for me, it’s a staggering moment—the idea that the cousins who are voting for the first African American to be the 44th President of the United States are mostly white Caucasian.

Hailing from large agricultural families, my ancestry lines and Barack’s go way back in U.S history from idealogue-minded Quaker and Puritan folks in nascent New England to profit-seeking adventurers in Jamestown, Virginia. Their numbers flowered into family reunions many years later that were like a day at the fair with hundreds of people bringing sugar pies, pecan pies, ham, home-baked bread, and mystery casseroles to spend a joyful day in each others' company. While the adults caught up on recent births, or the latest triumph or tragedy, my cousins and I played tag or hide-and-seek in the park setting. As organizers of these affairs died off, the numbers dwindled. People moved away, and connections were lost. Here is one of the last ones I remember from 1959. I’m front row, fourth from the left.


MY MOTHER'S FAMILY connects me to Barack. Barack and I share the same gr-grandparents: Col. James Lewis Hickman (1724-1816) and Hannah Lewis (1722-1822), both born in Virginia. Hickman served in the military during the War of the American Revolution and was given a land grant in Kentucky for his service. He settled in Paris, Clark County, Kentucky. Hannah was the daughter of Maj. Davis Lewis (1695-1779), of St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, Virginia, another veteran of the American Revolution.

HANNAH LEWIS AND COL. HICKMAN had a number of distinguished children, who are great grand uncles of mine and Barack’s. Capt. Davis Lewis Hickman served in the AR, as did his brothers, Capt. Joel Hickman (1761-1852), and Capt. James Lewis Hickman Jr. (1759-1828). Another brother, Gen. Richard Hickman (1757-1832), an AR veteran, moved to Kentucky with his parents. Gen. Hickman was a member of Kentucky’s Second Constitutional Convention at Frankfort in 1799. He served in the Lower House for five years, and then sixteen years in the State Senate—elected in 1812. This Hickman was the 4th Lt. Governor of Kentucky under Gov. Isaac Shelby, and acted as Governor when Shelby went to war in the War of 1812.

Our common 8th great grandfather, Edwin Hickman, sired this distinguished family of American patriots. Edwin was Lord High Sheriff of Spotsylvania County in 1729, and Lord High Sheriff in Thomas Jefferson’s Albemarle County in 1740. In 1744, Edwin Hickman became Chief Justice for the Virginia Colony that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River. WE ALSO SHARE SIGNERS OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Caesar Rodney, and George Wythe.

SO, BARACK AND I HAVE A FAMILY TREE with deep roots in this experiment called the United States of America. But not all of Barack’s white cousins are voting for him, at least the ones in my extended family of which about 20 are of voting age. In my unscientific survey, I found the main reason for NOT voting for our cousin is the abortion issue. My family heard Barack say he is “for abortion.” WHAT BARACK REALLY SAID ABOUT ABORTION.

Since my family comes from a proud tradition of anti-slavery with several grandfathers and uncles on the Union side, (One Quaker grandfather carried a flag for his Ohio unit in Sherman’s army--not exactly war-monger racist types.) I didn’t particularly grow up thinking my family was racist. I had “colored” friends at school, and close friends intermarried without condemnation from my parents.

BUT, SOMETIMES I WONDER IF THIS ABORTION ISSUE IS AN EXCUSE for some closet racists to hide behind. It can't be about HIS HEALTH CARE PLAN, which will give me and millions like me insurance that can never be canceled. Any informed person would want a leader to get our country out of Iraq, a war draining our resources and men. His TAX-PLAN ET AL IS ENDORSED by top economists who believe Barack's leadership will get us out of the ditch Bush/McCainers have driven our country into. So, for my family anyway, it seems to be all about abortion. Yet, the Bible is silent about this abortion issue.

AND JESUS DOESN'T MENTION what to do about an unwanted pregnancy, so I just don’t get this war over abortion. It's philosophically easy to argue a fetus is not a person, but how can anyone argue the fact that innocent women, children, and men blown up in a war deserve to die? Jesus does say, "Suffer little children...to come unto me" (Matt 19:14). How can anyone be so righteously concerned about a collection of cells, when 26,000 CHILDREN SUFFER AND DIE EVERYDAY! Why are the born less important than the unborn? What would Jesus do?

Does anyone thinking clearly really believe in the 21st century that Jesus would force a woman to have a child whether or not she was capable, physically or mentally, of mothering this child? What about rape victims? Don’t we already have enough misery on this planet from issues we have no control over?

WANT ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR BARACK? Trickle-down economics looked good on paper, but it has failed miserably, just like Communism or Socialism, or CORPORATE WELFARE; just like the BUSH DOCTRINE. Based on the results of the last 7 years, this so-called Bush Doctrine is a recipe for continuous war. Thank God neither Bush nor Cheney are my cousins. Sorry for you Barack!

Even if some of Barack's cousins miss this opportunity to vote for one of their own, this cousin won't. In fact, my daughters and I have already voted. It’s a family affair, at least for Barack's cousins under my roof.

MARIANNE MOORE'S ROMANCE WITH THE DAO PART 2

IN A CALIFORNIA SPEECH titled, “Tedium and Integrity,” Moore discusses Sze’s two books, The Tao of Painting and The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.

One of her major points is that “painting is not a profession, but an extension of the art of living” (qtd. in Qian 226). For Moore, who viewed her poetry as her canvas, the word “painting” and “poetry” are interchangeable. Moore reverently extols Mai-Mai Sze, the artist/translator of the two ancient texts, as being “an angel to me and friend of the dragon-symbol” (Qian 181). For Moore, “the manual is to me a world of romance – the romance of words” (qtd. in Stamy 157).

Moore embarked on a lifelong love affair with words that “cluster like chromosomes” (Stamy 44). The Dao infused Chinese art was a catalyst for Moore’s inquisitive imagination, and in investigating the nature of this art she found, “A Chinese ‘understands/ the spirit of the wilderness’/and the nectarine-loving kylin” (CP 30). Being an inquisitive person with the formal training of a biologist, her investigation into why this art seemed to “breathe” life led her straight to it’s source, the philosophy of the Dao, the spiritual resource that fuels much of Chinese and Japanese art, especially that which portrays Nature-related themes.

Chan Buddhist or Zen painting technique is relentless in detail. “Each detail has its reason” (Sze 536). In Dao teaching, the student-artist is taught not only that “birds with long tails should be drawn with short beaks,” but also equally important is for the artist to know, “they sing beautifully and fly high” (ibid). Only if the details are drawn in this way (a communion with Nature from direct observation) will the results be lasting.

Modernist leaning writers like Moore, who searched for meaning, not only to survive, but to live a life of inspired imagination, found passion and joy in this thinking. Knowledge of the material sort is the direct result of a science that utilizes close observation, but Western science does not even try to answer that forever question; why are we here? Dao gave artists then and now a path to experience peace and explore that question in a useful, productive way, a way that creates breathable art, a pictorial representation of this invisible relationship between consciousness and flesh.

Moore found the Chinese recognition of how the individual should function in perfect harmony with landscape and animals defensible and “illuminating” (Qian 174). Moore treated Nature with respect in her poems about the jerboa, the basilisk, the jelly-fish, the elephant, and so forth. She does not embrace the Judeo-Christian idea of “man’s dominion over Nature” found canonized in the book of Genesis. As anyone knows who has lived in an urban environment, the city has toxic affects on the human body. Moore lived most of her life in urban New York. This parallel reality she lived in through her study of Chinese Nature artifacts, and in her poetry by analyzing it, kept Nature near and alive in her thoughts. Her relative good health and longevity is a testament to the healing power of this approach.

Moore, like everyone, needed help in dealing with her own struggles, and she found acceptance in society from her wit of words at an early age. “So I smile, (as if I had found a penny) when people tell me how they like them (poems) and talk about writing poetry and so on as if it were gymnastics or piano practice” (SL 63). Her invisible Father’s shadow and her station in life was ever present. Moore worked hard lest anyone doubt she was a woman of integrity. She would never lose her balance, such as her Father had.

In fact, she had dismissed her Father’s chromosome that made her female, and consistently referred to herself as male, and gave herself (and was given) a male pronoun in correspondence with her brother and mother (SL 4). Moore maintained her internal consistency. At a discussion at a Bryn Mawr Friends Meeting, Friend being the other name for Quaker, the discussion turned to “Progress and Women.” Moore made a point of saying, and then writing it down to her mother and brother, “we (women) are provoked with people for calling us unprogressive when often we fall short ourselves and fail in realizing our individual (her italics) ideals and just stop - comfortable – inventing all manner of excuses for our faint-heartedness and laziness” (SL 30).

Moore would later find solace in Sze’s canon regarding Chinese art to allay any “faint-heartedness,” a canon replete with tangible artifacts created by artists who displayed what Moore called “integrity,” a display of internal consistency, or a quality of being honest and using strong moral principals. In this Way of Daoism, she found a corroboration for dismissing the ego. In her “Tedium and Integrity” speech, Moore feels “very strongly what Juan Ramon Jiménez said in referring to something else – to what is not poetry – ‘there is a profounder profundity’ than obsession with the self” (qtd. in Qian 226). To give up egotism, which Moore renamed, “tedium,” what the “Buddhists call ignorance” (Qian 173), was not a problem for Moore, especially if it kept her from coming near the “ragged brink” (SL 63). She had consistently removed her self, her narrative, from her poems, a hallmark of Modernism. Skipping past her immediate heritage, Moore aligned herself with a sturdier, more reliable anchor, the “tao of the ancients” (Qian 177).

Born several generations before the confessional poetry of Plath, Hughes, Lowell, and others came into vogue, (Pictured Moore & Plath 1955) Moore didn’t indulge her readers with any details of her sexual relationships, nor did any potential partner of hers come forward (I doubt she had any, unless her niece, the executor of her estate, has information she’s not sharing). Linda Leavell has put forward a theory of an early crush on Peggy James (William James’ daughter), but without proof of a consummated relationship, it is mere speculation. Human nature being what it is, rumors swirl, and theories abound. Was she molested? Did she have an encounter that horrified her to celibacy? Moore’s mother wrote of her daughter’s “grim ‘sternness” and “Monk-like severity” (SL 118) Was she a lesbian? Moore supported the Woman’s Suffrage movement, but deferred to her brother’s wishes not to march in public and avoid “such public display” (SL 77). However much Moore wished to step out of her skin, the social and emotional restraints remained boundaries.

Not being Chinese, she didn’t carry the emotional baggage of Eastern misogyny. Was it only a coincidence that an intellectual like Mai-mai Sze, the Chinese artist who Moore described as an “angel,” had chosen her own alternative lifestyle, by choosing a lesbian relationship? Many of Moore’s intimates were homosexuals, such as Bryher and fellow imagist, H.D.; two of her biggest champions and editors of her first book, Poems.

(Bryher in Picture circa 1938)

There is some evidence that her mother, who never remarried after her separation from her husband before Moore was born, had an affair with the family friend, Mary Norcross. Yet, Moore gave no clues regarding her love life, and resisted the entire “homo/heterosexual binary itself” (Leavell). Moore seems to have found romance in the act of writing her poetry, a poetry infused with romance: romance with the Dao.

Next Week: Marianne Moore's Romance with the Dao Part 3

See Part 1 for Works Cited Page.

Winnifred Bryher in Picture circa 1938

CONNIE THE UNEMPLOYED & UNINSURED

AT LEAST JOE THE PLUMBER, the current darling of the GOP spin, has a job and ONLY a $1000 tax lien. My husband and I have worked and had health insurance our entire lives, but we lost the insurance last month. When facing foreclosure and other bills, like food, we just couldn’t pay the premium. The “Health Plan” really should have been called a “Some Hospital Plan,” because the deductible was huge and it covered no prescriptions, and only theoretically would have paid for “some hospital.”

As independent contractors and small business owners, my husband and I lost our business, our savings, our 401K, and his contractual retirement royalty for a thirty-year job with a famous band (Steely Dan) after the events that followed the tragedy of 9-11. Not all the crooks are CEOs and banks.

But we didn’t give up. We downsized our house, our lifestyle, and our expectations. After all, unlike many poor people in New York and later Iraq, we were still alive. My husband continues to find his place in the restructured entertainment world. (He has seven Grammys, so he has skills.) I returned to school with student loans, and earned my MFA in Creative Writing with a GPA of 3.9 last May from the University of New Orleans, taking the English Literature classes required to teach English. I’ve been substitute teaching and applying for jobs ever since—forty plus. So my degree means nothing? Does that mean I don’t have to pay back my student loans? At least, Joe the Plumber, who lives in Ohio, has a job.

AS A NATIVE OF OHIO, born and raised in Columbus, I was part of the first group of eighteen-year-olds to vote in the National Election of 1972. I voted the way of my staunch Republican household--I voted for Nixon. After Nixon resigned, I lost faith in most Republicans and politicians in general. No small choice for someone who was the President of the American Youth for God and Country group at my High School, (middle front row) a not-so-popular club during a period of Vietnam War protest riots that filtered into my West High School from the OSU campus.

THIS YEAR I AM VOTING FOR OBAMA. You betcha! Why? Because he has a health plan and he will end the war. Because I feel better after hearing Barack Obama or Joe Biden speak. Because the Republican Party left me, long before I left it. I was just too blinded by the rhetoric to see it. My one little vote may not be enough, but it’s about all I have left. With Obama’s positive spin in my head, I will forge ahead and continue to look for a job, and maybe get lucky, like John McCain’s friend, Joe the Plumber.



C. Reeder

© All Rights Reserved

MARIANNE MOORE'S ROMANCE WITH THE DAO

I'VE ALWAYS ADMIRED THE TENACITY and word-skills of the poet Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972). Grouped into the Modernist Movement with Pound, Williams, Stein, Stevens, T.S. Eliot and others, Moore carefully sculpted a life by nurturing a razor sharp wit. She also found a balance for her sensibilities about relationships, and crafted ideas of how she wanted to present and even propagate her “insight and sympathetic ways” (Moore, SL 35) to the world at large. She worked hard at her writing, producing over 30,000 letters, which doesn’t include her articles and poems extant. At the age of twenty she came to the conclusion, “I want to write,” and “shortly I will have something to say” (SL 40). In part, Moore found sustenance for her balanced wit, and much of her “insight” in the aesthetic of The Dao.

The Dao, also called The Tao, The Way, The Path, or Zen (in Japan), encourages the artist to develop a “wide and keen observation, eventually to find in enrichment of the spirit, the secret of the rhythm of nature” (Sze 18). This was a perfect marriage for Moore’s burgeoning sensitivities that grew out of her early desire to “scrape sparks from the ground, from the mere excess of animal spirits” (SL 39). The Dao offered another framework, not necessarily to replace, but to enhance her American/Western tradition.

Born into a society where women didn’t vote, or legally own their own bodies, Moore reached out to the Eastern tradition to feed her meditative spirit. Like the virgin Queen, Moore remained single, yet celibate—married to her art.
Moore & Mother: Zorach Painting 1919

Her mother was her mate for life (Leavell).


Moore sensed in China, “a cultural superiority to Europe itself,” and justified this as many Westerners did, and still do, “because of China’s historical longevity” (Stamy 5). Like her predecessor, Emerson, Moore moved the “struggle for American definition to another and, for her, a superior site” (Stamy 5). At Bryn Mawr, a Quaker school, Moore was encouraged to meditate on her inner light and the beauty of God’s creation: Nature. These sensibilities did not discourage Moore from investigating likewise philosophies.

Some of her early successes as a writer were a direct result of her investigations into Chinese artifacts. One of her early poems published in her book, Poems (The Egoist Press 1921), was about a Chinese scroll or screen (Willis). As Professor Zhaoming Qian explained in a graduate lecture for a Modernist Workshop at the University of New Orleans, early Moore used “Chinese motifs on the surface level,” and later Moore treated “Western motifs with Chinese perspectives.”

In “He Made This Screen,” Moore experimented with her imagist ekphrasis. In lieu of a narrative, she described a piece of art. It’s as if she were circling the dragon, trying to free her style of writing. Her Modernist leanings were apparent—the image is the thing, but she fell back on meter and rhyme.

"Nine Dragons" Chen Rong 1244 Boston Museum of Modern Art

He Made This Screen

not of silver nor of coral,
but of weather beaten laurel.

Here, he introduced a sea
uniform like tapestry;

here, a fig-tree; there, a face;
there, a dragon circling space --

designating here, a bower;
there, a pointed passion-flower.

In her poem written almost forty years later, “O To Be A Dragon” (CP 177), Moore was still circling the space, but had switched gears. Moore wanted to not just circle, but become the Modernist Dao Dragon, which for her was the “symbol of the power of heaven.” She wanted to become one with the space now enlarged to the “totality of heaven and earth” (Qian 182).

The Dao invigorated Moore’s mind throughout her life. In her late 60s, after receiving her book set of The Tao of Painting and The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, ancient texts by Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, and translated by Mai-Mai Sze, Moore wrote to the publisher, John Barrett, “You cannot imagine my excitement in possessing these books […] it “is pleasure enough for a lifetime” (qtd. in Qian 168).

(Sze 320) Her romance goes further into the realm of passion in describing how she “passionately admires […] – an insect-and-frog picture,” even suggesting that if she were in a mental decline, “Volume I of the Tao would, I think, help me to regain tone” (qtd. in Qian 169).

Not an idle statement for someone who never met her father because he was institutionalized for a “nervous breakdown” before she was born (SL 3). Moore identified a space in which she could live and create, but most importantly, feel good about life, as if the Dao kept her sane.

Always a good thing in troubled times: Sanity.

Next week. Marianne Moore’s Romance With The Dao Part 2

Works Cited

Leavell, Linda. Marianne Moore, the James Family and the Politics of Celibacy.
     Twentieth Century Literature. vol 49: 2. Hofstra U, 2003. 219.
     http://www.questia.com/ 10 Oct 2008

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

---. Marianne Moore: Selected Letters. Bonnie Costello (ed) New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Pollak, Vivian. Moore, Plath, Hughes, and “The Literary Life. American Literary
     History 17.1. USA: Oxford UP, 2005.      http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.uno.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v017/17.1pollak.html   18 Nov 2006.

Qian, Zhaoming. The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stephens.
     USA, U of Virginia P, 2003.

Stamy, Cynthia. Marianne Moore and China. USA: Oxford UP, 1999.

Sze, Mai-mai. trans. The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. Chieh Tzu Yuan
     Hua Chuan, 1679-1701. New York: Princeton Univ. P, 1977.

White, Heather. Moral, Manners, and Marriage: Marianne’s Art of Conversation.
      Twentieth Century Literature. Hofstra U, 1999.        http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_4_45/ai_61297799 10 Oct 2008

Willis, Patricia C. (curator) Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University,
     1997 http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/orient/mod10.htm 10 Oct 2008.

Picture of Moore with Book: 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia

GODDESSES, WHORES, WIVES, & SLAVES: The Archetypal Roles Assigned to Women in Theatre. Part 2: Women Write Plays, Too!

Euripides' Medea (431 B.C.E.) does not go gently into the night, and some of her lines are the first uttered on a public stage in the defense of women.

Then they also say that whilst we live quietly and without any danger at home, the men go off to war. Wrong! One birth alone is worse than three times in the battlefield behind a shield (lines, 248-49).


The only notorious female writer of this ancient time in any genre is Sappho born about 612 B.C.E. and all that remains of her work is a single poem and fragments of others. In antiquity, Sappho was commonly regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets. An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (9,506) ascribed to Plato says, “Some say the Muses are nine: how careless! / Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth” (Campbell, D.A.)


Sappho's alleged bi-sexuality alluded to in the few remaining fragments of her poetry offended people throughout history; her books burned by Christians in the year 380 C.E. at the instigation of Pope Gregory Nazianzen. Another book burning in the year 1073 C.E. by Pope Gregory VII may have wiped out any remaining trace of Sappho’s works (duBois).

It's been a slow crawl from a woman's pen to the page to the public stage. Virtually no female playwright appeared in the West until the 10th century C.E. German Benedictine nun known as Roswitha or Hrotsvit von Ganderwhelm (Case 533). Roswitha penned six plays that are extant, following the form of the lax moral comedic plays by the 2nd century C.E. Roman playwright, Terence, albeit framed with a stiff moral Catholic slant.

But the first woman to make a living as a popular dramatist in the West, and the first female playwright covered in this essay (and an undergraduate course I designed as part of my Masters Degree Thesis) is Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), who wrote during the period of the English Restoration Theatre (1610-1710). Denounced by the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, as a fourth-rate playwright, Behn was nonetheless hailed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

Woolf believed Behn’s total career to be more important than any particular work produced. However, Behn’s work still gets staged. At a recent performance (2003) of The Rover in Oakland, the reviewer called Behn’s role reversal scheme “spirited and saucy” (Jones).

Behn, a former spy for Charles II, might have settled the argument with the first line from the Prologue of The Rover:

Wits, like Physicians, never can agree, / When of a different Society.

From this point forward, women slowly made inroads into the male-dominated theatre. After the Puritan shut down of theatres in London for a decade, the atmosphere in London at the reopening of the theatres after the Restoration (1660) was festive, and women appearing on the legitimate stage for the first time was not (I believe) coincidental with Behn’s debut as the first professional English female dramatist.

Women seized the moment: Hannah Cowley, Susannah Rowson, Susan Glaspell (Pulitzer Winner), Sophie Treadwell, Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Wendy Wasserstein (Pulitzer Winner), Caryl Churchill, Ntozake Shange, Marsha Norman, Emily Mann, Margaret Edson, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, Megan Terry, Theresa Rebeck, Beth Henley(Pulitzer Winner), Sarah Kane, Caridad Svitch, Lorraine Hansberry, Maria Irene Fornés, Marsha Norman (Pulitzer Winner), Wakako Yamauchi, Spiderwoman Theatre (Native American), and many more have all contributed to the growth of Western theatre since Behn broke the all-male rule.

Another radical playwright vilified and adored in her own time was Mae West (1892-1980).

Middle and upper class white women generally dominated the women’s movement, one that would have certainly disapproved of Mae (Watts 106).

Exclusion of West's plays from Murphy’s Cambridge anthology about women playwrights has much to do with critical readings of her plays, but I would argue that who or what she represented to the general public—-an independent, sensual woman who maintained a Goddess Archetype in spite of her Whore behavior, seized the same sexual freedom for women as men had always enjoyed. This was an unconventional Archetype for mortal women, as ground-breaking in society at large as the right to vote was empowering.

These days the discussion of West's first hit play titled, Sex, (which has no sex in it) should be an enlightening experience for young people in the twenty-first century who have been sexually saturated by society and the media.

(West & Cast of her Broadway show, Sex (1926)

The Westian use of double and triple entendre to convey sexual images is a refreshing study in form and dialogue. No playwright before West had ever

“attacked respectable women from the stage... of being whore(s) in disguise” (Schlissel 9).

West also opened the closet for the gays of New York City with her play, The Drag, which earned her jail time for her effort. In 1927, gays were the victims of viscous beatings by the New York City police. West was a major force behind legitimizing the gay subculture (Schlissel 11). Examining why West’s female brand of Archetype dominated the British/American stage and Hollywood movies for decades and during a depression era has merit in any study of plays by and about women. By designing her own unique Whore/Goddess that rejected male domination, West, a working class woman, offered “an early feminist role model” (Watts 107) whether certain feminists like it or not.

And then there is Suzan-Lori Parks.
Her play Venus exposed the vicious true story of the evil treatment of Saartjie Baartman, an African woman who was displayed in Europe (1789-1815) as a freak show because of her unusual buttocks.


This Hottentot Venus is a Goddess/Virgin defiled and reassigned the role of Slave, and then Whore. The slavic safety of domesticity is not an option for this woman. Parks satirizes the insanity of it all by using a Greek Chorus, a harkening back to a time when women were banned from theatre, just as Baartman is banned from life.

Parks is the Goddess Archetype in her own life drama--the story of the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2002) with her play, Topdog/Underdog; a play with only two characters—two male characters.

The boundaries of sex no longer apply. Women playwrights have joined their Archetypes center stage.


(Piccolo Spoleto theatre production of Topdog/Underdog, Charleston, S.C. 2006. Pic & article found here.


*Nancy Novak as Medea in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Works Referred To: Go to Part 1 of this essay.

Note: This essay is the introduction to an undergraduate class in Theatre History.

GODDESSES, WHORES, WIVES, & SLAVES: The Archetypal Roles Assigned to Women in Theatre PART 1

Plays by women and the roles for women in theatre represent a developing, dynamic field--historically, a much neglected field. If women wrote throughout recorded ancient history, most of it never saw the light of day, or was lost, if not systematically destroyed.



Based on the available evidence, the origins of Western theatre began in ancient Greece. Susan Pomeroy asks in her book, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, “What were women doing…” during this period (xiv)? Were the classical male playwrights accurate in their depiction of women (93)? There is no evidence showing that women were even allowed to attend the ancient dramatic festivals (80). Men portrayed women onstage until the seventeenth-century C.E.. What, if anything, did women actually write for theatre throughout recorded history?

Pomeroy also asks, “If respectable Athenian women were secluded and silent, how are we to account for the forceful heroines of tragedy and comedy”(93)? The simplest answer may be the best; men wrote these stories, promoting and perpetuating the most dramatic and entertaining archetypes from their cultural religion. Greek women may have been sequestered, but Greek Goddesses, like Athena, the Goddess of War and Wisdom were not.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the renowned mythologist, defined archetype as follows:
They (archetypes) are elementary ideas, what could be called ground ideas.

These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is a personal unconscious, it is biographical. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological. The biographical is secondary to that.

All over the world and at different times of human history, these archetypes, or elementary ideas, have appeared in different costumes. The differences in the costumes are the results of environment and historical conditions (Campbell 61).

For this discussion the term "Virgin" signifies an Archetype with a valuable commodity traded in society, as well as a sexual state. Most of the Goddesses of myth enjoyed lusty sex, so in this context the title of Goddess signifies a woman who can decide her own fate. The only power earthbound women held until recent history resided in their “Virgin” state, and the brokering ability this virginity gave them through the men who manipulated them. The prostitute was the exception. Prostitutes were historically the only women who exercised control over their own money (Pomeroy 91), but this was a power only fit for a life in the shadows.

Throughout recorded history prostitution was one of the very few positions open to women. Playwrights, male and female, have used the role of “Whore” with dramatic effect. Art mixes with life, and dramatists have painted the Whore/Mistress as a hapless character in soap-opera stories played out in every village and town from ancient history up to now, as recent events surrounding New York Governor Spitzer will attest, but the Whore can also have power and influence history making events. The famous courtesan, Aspasia, was vilified by later writers for influencing the Greek General Pericles of Peloponnesian War fame in the 5th century B.C.E.. Madame Pompadour exchanged sex, then companionship with married King Louis XV (1710-1774) for titles and funding, but she was the one blamed for the disastrous Seven Year War, not the King or Queen. The Whore is always the convenient scapegoat.

Although being a prostitute meant a woman without other means could survive, it also generally meant being subjected to societal scorn and ridicule, after all, prostitutes had no real authority to object otherwise. Playwrights generally left the whore in the dust. Even the rebel Aphra Behn leaves her character, Angelica, the prostitute in The Rover, unmarried and unsupported. Angelica sums up her ending with, “He’s gone, and in this Ague of My Soul/ The shivering Fit returns" (Behn 74). Until recent history, men have not traditionally been excoriated in text or in life for having extra-marital sex (Garton).

The Wife Archetype portrayed social respectability, a role that centered around the affairs of domesticity and childrearing. In the lower classes (even today) the role of wife was (and is) synonymous with that of a slave worker. Ask any working wife trying to raise a family with a lower income about her life.

Historically, playwrights often used the role of slave or servant to ridicule the upper classes and speak to the heart of the matter i.e. in Aphra Behn’s, The Rover (1677), it is the servant Moretta that quips to the roguish Cavalier, “Your Linen stinks of the gun room” (35).

Reducing the sum of assigned roles/archetypes to women as “Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves” catalogues broad categories that reflect the female stock characters on stage and in life. By scrutinizing how playwrights in the West and elsewhere have used these archetypes throughout recorded history, the next extrapolation would suggest Goddess/Virgin, Whore/Sex-No-Marriage, Wife/Married, and Slave/Worker.

With ancient texts labeling women as the “root of all evil” (Kramer & Moore), it would seem that a discussion about women and their role in theatre should begin with an examination of language, segueing to a look at Euripides’ Medea, as an early example of Greek theatre to kick-off the discussion.

According to the earliest (male) writers of Greek antiquity, the Muses were goddesses of song and prophecy. They lived on Mount Helicon in Boeotia. The exact number of Muses and their parentage varies from source to source. Early on, there were three of them. Some claim that they were the children of Mnemosyne (memory), one of the few Titan relatives Zeus favored and found useful. The popular Greek poet Hesiod (7th century B.C.E.) was the first to name nine muses—all female. Later writers assigned them to nine branches of literature, art, and science (James).

The Musae

Erato – Erotic poetry
Urania – Astronomy
Polymnia – Sublime hymn
Melpomene – Tragedy
Euterpe – Lyric poetry
Thalia – Comedy and idyllic poetry
Calliope – Epic poetry
Clio – History
Terpsichore – Choral song and dance

It would seem from this that women were prominent in the original scheme of things, based on key positions of deity and power, but certain early male writers took umbrage as to why women even existed. Theories abound. One currently circulates that the act of writing and reading somehow rewired our brains, splitting the sexes into a power struggle that literate societies continue to wage. Non-literate aboriginal societies have typically not vilified women (Schlain).

Pomeroy suggests the advent of the city-state (polis) advanced a culture ruled by laws and courts, instead of tribal law. This city-state evolved outside of the home. This new realm of men excluded women whose realm of influence remained inside the walls of the home. “Misogyny was born of fear of women. It spawned the ideology of male superiority” (Pomeroy 97). Since records are sparse, historical context might be missing, but misogynistic examples are numerous in ancient texts, including the above mentioned Hesiod, who wrote in his Theogony that “Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil” (590-93).

One wonders if Hesiod was working off his angst after being jilted in love when he wrote that, but the Judaic canon written roughly about the same time corroborates the stiff sentiment with “in sorrow dost thou bear children, and toward thy husband [is] thy desire, and he doth rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). Even Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the angelic doctor, refers to women as “defective and misbegotten” (Kramer).

Euripides’ Jason in Medea (431 B.C.E.) laments, “Life would be better without women if men could get children any other way” (564), and that was before Jason’s ex-wife, Medea, killed Jason’s virginal bride, the bride’s father, and his two young sons with Medea. Earlier versions of the Medea myth implicated an apparent unintentional killing of the children by the sorceress Medea during a ceremony to immortalize her sons. Another story blamed the Corinthians for killing the boys after Medea fled. Robert Graves catalogued the story about Euripides being bribed by Corinthian businessmen “with fifteen talents of silver to absolve them of guilt" (Graves 617).

Euripides upped the stakes by having Medea commit infanticide, which more than muddles the crimes committed by Jason. A mother killing her children betrays the most basic human interaction and therein the foundation of civic society.

It seems a girl can’t get a break from certain ancient writers.

PART 2: Next Week. Women Write, Too!


WORK REFERRED TO


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duBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: UCP, 1995.

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Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken, 1995.

Schlissel, Lillian. Three Plays by Mae West: Sex, The Drag and Pleasure Man. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998.

Theatre Theory Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. Ed. Daniel Gerould. New York: Applause, 2000.

Watts, Jill. Mae West: An icon in Black and White. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Women writing Latin: from Roman antiquity to early modern Europe. Ed. Churchill, Laurie J.; Brown, Phyllis R.; Jeffrey, Jane E.. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/complete.html 8 Feb 2008.



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