"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity." -- George Bernard Shaw
Nietzsche: "The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare."
Discuss the trope of maternity in Mother Courage. How do various characters conceive of motherhood? What is the role of children in the play? What is the relation between maternity and war?
What is the relation between virtue and allegory in the play?
What is the role of religion in Mother Courage? Isolate two or three examples for comparison.
Notes
Performing Gender as a concept is predicated on the assumption that sexual identity and sexual difference matter in performance.
the sex/gender binary. Where the first term, sex, is considered as prior to, innate the origin and source of the second term, gender. If we deconstruct that binary we find that gender is what brings sex into existence. The set of behaviours, bodily modes of moving, walking and sitting, diet and costume, hairstyle and makeup, that we usually understand as the markings of gender, actually signify the sexed body. Without gender attributes would we even recognise the sex of a body. Does sex come first or is it constructed in relation to a gender. In sexual relationships, gender certainly precedes and may be understood as the precondition for and cause of sex.
Elizabeth Grosz (1994) argues that within the binary opposition of mind and body, the body is usually considered a universal form, an anatomical organism. That is, it is usually defined in ‘nonhistorical, naturalistic, organicist, passive, inert terms’. It is often seen as an interference or intrusion into the operations of the mind, ‘a brute givenness which requires overcoming, a connection with animality and nature that needs transcendence’ (4).
‘Every body is marked by the history and specificity of its existence.’
Playscript Analysis of the Century
historical body. The modernist body is the one that is considered inferior to the mind. It is also a subject of the state and the various institutions religious, legal and educational in which it is interpellated into the social world. Cranny Francis talks about a postmodernist cyborg body, which we might understand as a technologically enhanced body with transplants, man-made organs and mood controlling drugs.
The school of formalism advised to see the forms independent from "meaning" (structuralism was to follow). Themes are for MEANING analysis (remember, Aristotle's "Idea"?)
I believe that the intellectual history of the 20th century can be studied through plays. Existentialism, for instance.
THR413 Playscript Analysis starts with Ibsen and Chekhov and the evolution of the thought can be seen to Beckett and Absurdism.
The focus -- the crisis of modernity (high modernity, turn of the 20th century) and the postmodern (after 1968).
The 20th century is the most important historical era...
11.1.02. After Ibsen, Strindberg, Williams and now O'Neill, I feel that the whole semester could be about the gender issue. [ Thinking about including The House of Bernarda Alba, Lorca ]. Not only the time table, ut the national take on woman.
[ I have to dump all it on this page -- gender, sex, and etc. ]
Grosz and Gatens are speaking in this respect from a position which is often referred to as corporealist: from the adjective ‘corporeal’ which means to do with the body. Corporeal theory emphasises the corporeal, bodily, aspect of being human. Corporeal theory attempts to return the body to the philosophical discussion of what it means to be human and that has been historically elided from the discourse. Cartesian discussions of the human subject focus on the human subject as a consciousness, that human identity is a matter of a mental knowing of oneself. In fact the Mind/Body opposition is also often referred to as Cartesian dualism. This refers to the eighteenth century philosopher Rene Descartes whose famous line ‘I think therefore I am’ has passed into popular philosophy and points to the way in which existence is considered to reside in a conscious mind. The popularity of Cartesian philosophy, coupled with a religious sense of the body as profane, has led to a construction of the modern human subject as if he is without a body; modern man is disembodied, more advanced than mere body.
Cranny Francis: ‘For most of the twentieth century, the individual has been theorised both politically and psychoanalytically in terms of consciousness.’ (1)
The modern body, argued Lingus, unlike the ‘primitive’ body is ‘a sign-laden body’. The modern body is a ‘sign system’, ‘a text’, ‘a narrative’ that is ‘rendered meaningful’ and ‘capable of being read in terms of personality, psychology, or submerged subjectivity.’ (Grosz 1994 141).
Grosz:
The civilised body is marked more or less permanently and impermeably. In our own culture, inscriptions occur both violently and in more subtle forms. In the first case . . . and environmental factors. (141-142)
In Streetcar, Blanche is inscribed as whore by Stanley’s acquaintances who travel through the town of Laurel. Blanche is inscribed with a reputation that is decidedly gendered. At the same time she inscribes herself with rhinestone tiaras, fake furs, cheap perfume and soap in a way that signifies the southern belle identity she wishes to project on Stanley and Stella and Stanley’s poker playing friends. In the final scene the forces of involuntary inscription threaten in the form of the straitjacket that the nurse considers using to subdue Blanche.
PS
Innner conflict makes us genderless.
Comic and Tragic treatments.
Love stories: Hamlet & Ophelia
Othello explores the ‘tragedies of private life that often focus on the consequences of unorthodox sexuality in a dark and narrow world. . .’ (Garner and Springnether 1996)
NB
HamletDreams: Shakespeare discover the modern man (Hamlet's love story, whne the gender bond is broken) -- after the link between man and woman is gone, the result is the total alienation of all and everyone (existentialism is the last chapter).
"Streetcar Named Desire" juggles stereotypical representations of man as a brute with a masculine identity that is complex and precarious. Blanche du Bois invests much of her identity in her body, especially her face. How does the body both serve and appear to betray Blanche?
The point he [Freud] most insistently made about masculinity was that it never exists in a pure state. Layers of emotion coexist and contradict each other. Each personality is a shade-filled, complex structure, not a transparent unit. (10)
Connell further reminds us that Freud was convinced that within a complex masculine personality resided also the feminine: Femininity was ‘always a part of a man’s character’. In this way, Freud advanced a theory of the ‘essential’ bisexuality of gender.
Clinical psychoanalyst Carl Jung has developed some of the best known theories of masculinity. This concerned the masculine persona, which was the conscious self constructed out of transactions with the social environment and the anima, the self formed in the unconscious from repressed elements.
Jung claimed that the anima was feminine and that the masculine arose out of the constant tension between the masculine persona and the feminine anima. The feminine within the masculine was not so much an idealised femininity or memories of the mother, but was composed from inherited ‘archetypal’ images of femininity. These archetypal images resided in a ‘collective unconscious’.
Jung theorised the existence, within universal structure of the psyche, of a masculine/feminine polarity that applied to all individuals irrespective of history, culture, class or race. The healthy psyche was one that found a balance between the masculine and feminine poles.
The modern body, argued Lingus, unlike the ‘primitive’ body is ‘a sign-laden body’. The modern body is a ‘sign system’, ‘a text’, ‘a narrative’ that is ‘rendered meaningful’ and ‘capable of being read in terms of personality, psychology, or submerged subjectivity.’ (Grosz 1994 141).