paxresort.blogg.se

In this thesis, I focus on the embodiment of gender performativity in three selected plays of Paula Vogel, namely And Baby Makes Seven, The Baltimore Waltz and Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief in order to show how Vogel managed to practice gender performativity in depicting her female characters in these plays. Keywords: Elaine Feinstein, Women's Theatre Group, Lear’s Daughters, Shakespeare, King Lear, Feminism, Patriarchy, Rewriting, Thatcher. Accordingly, this paper argues that Elaine Feinstein, as a feminist playwright, brings together both social and political critique concerning women by implicitly criticising Thatcher’s policies hence contemporising the issue of women’s subordination in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear’s Daughters deals with the problem of gender inequality as well as protesting the social and economic deterioration during the Thatcher period. Feinstein reinforces her feminist stance by eliminating the male characters, making the Fool an androgynous character, and making the daughters and Lear’s wife the new protagonists. The male protagonist of the original work is reduced to a lesser degree, and his daughters are not responsible for his tragedy any more. As the title also suggests, in this rewriting, the emphasis is not on Lear who is just a lecherous imperfect father, but on his three daughters who suffer from parental neglect. Lear’s Daughters marginalises the former protagonist King Lear by presenting him offstage and prioritises his imaginary wife instead who is absent in the original play. One of the contemporary revisionist women playwrights is Elaine Feinstein (1930-) who attempts to subvert both gender and political aspects of Shakespeare’s King Lear in her version of the play, Lear’s Daughters (1987) written cooperatively with Women’s Theatre Group.

Shakespeare’s plays have also been appropriated for contemporary theatre by women playwrights opposing the mainstream ideas initiated by his seminal works. To this end, some of the contemporary women dramatists make use of canonical texts and rewrite them in order to challenge the accepted notion of patriarchal dominance presented earlier by prominent male writers. Women playwrights have always struggled to redefine femininity in their works by primarily reflecting the unequal treatment of women in society.