Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia

Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama

Christina Wald

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Theatrical Performance, Gender Performativity, and the Drama of Performative Malady 1

Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as cultural tropes 1

Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies 4

Performance and performativity: From termini technici to umbrella terms 10

The theatre metaphor in Butler's performativity theory 13

Can performativity materialise as performance? 17

1 The Drama of Hysteria 27 Hysteria: Theory and theatre 27 Anna Furse: Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) 42 Kim Morrissey: Dora: A Case of Hysteria (1993) 60 Terry Johnson: Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an

Obsessional Neurosis (1993) 75 Hysteria as performative malady 89

2 Trauma Drama 93 Trauma concepts, trauma culture 93 Victoria Hardie: Sleeping Nightie (1989) 102 Sarah Daniels: Beside Herself (1990) 114 Phyllis Nagy: Butterfly Kiss (1994) 128 Claire Dowie: Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) 139 Trauma as performative malady 156

3 The Drama of Melancholia 161 Concepts of melancholia: From black bile to melancholic

incarnation David Auburn: Proof (2000) Marina Carr: Portia Coughlan (1996)

v

161 17l 184

vi Contents

Sarah Kane: Cleansed (1998) Melancholia as performative malady

Conclusion: The Drama of Performative Malady

Notes

Works Cited

Index

198 212

215

225

259

283

Acknowledgements

Over the years that I have worked on this study, I have received generous help and expert advice from teachers, colleagues, and friends, without whose support and criticism I never could have realised this project. This book is a slightly revised version of a PhD thesis which I completed at the University of Cologne in 2006. My first thanks, therefore, go to my teachers and colleagues at the Englisches Seminar, especially to Beate Neumeier who supervised my thesis and critically shaped my thinking about contemporary drama and gender theory. In the research groups of Hanjo Berressem and Claudia Liebrand, I presented drafts of chapters, and lowe a great deal to the responses of the participants. I am very grateful to Richard Aczel, Stefan Bornchen, Tobias Doring, Bernhard Klein, Martin Middeke and Gottfried Krieger for their thought-provoking comments on earlier versions of my manuscript and for their encouragement.

Without the grants of the Cusanuswerk, the German National Academic Foundation, the FAZIT foundation and the Johanna und Fritz Buch Gediichtnis-Stiftung, researching, writing and publishing this book would not have been possible. Most of the ideas of this book have been presented at conferences and seminars, and for their invitations, support and criticism my thanks are particularly due to the participants of the many inspiring workshops of the German National Academic Foundation and the German Association for the Study of Theatre and Drama in English, especially to Werner Huber and Martin Middeke, as well as to the research group of the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College. I am grateful to Irmela Schneider and Michael Gassenmeier for their encouragement of the project. Thanks also go to my colleagues at the University of Augsburg for their support during the final stages of preparing this book.

I am very grateful to Susanne Roltgen and Tim Jones for the painstaking care they have given to my manuscript, to Paula Kennedy for her interest in this project, and to the anonymous scholar who read my book for Palgrave and provided most helpful comments. I have benefited greatly from many conversations with playwrights and directors, whom I thank for their time, patience, and interest in my work: Claire Dowie, Anna Furse, Terry Johnson, James Macdonald, Kim Morrissey, Phyllis Nagy, Colin Watkeys, and Jules Wright.

For the generous permission to use his photograph of Cleansed, I would like to thank Arno Declair. I also owe thanks for their permission to reproduce material from the plays to A&C Black, Faber and Faber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nick Hem Books, and Routledge:

vii

viii Acknowledgements

SLEEPING NIGHTIE by Victoria Hardie copyright © 1990 Victoria Hardie. Reprinted by permission of the publisher: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk. Amateur performing rights: info@nickhernbooks.demon.co.uk.

DORA by Kim Morrissey copyright © 1993 Kim Morrissey. Reprinted by permission of the publisher: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk. Amateur performing rights: info@nickhernbooks.demon.co.uk.

Excerpts from PROOF by David Auburn. Copyright © 2001 by David Auburn. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpts from PORTIA COUGHLAN by Marina Carr. Copyright © 1996 by Marina Carr. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpts from AUGUSTINE (BIG HYSTERIA) by Anna Furse. Copyright © 1997 by Anna Furse. Reprinted by permission of Routledge.

Excerpts from BESIDE HERSELF by Sarah Daniels. Copyright © 1990, 1991 by Sarah Daniels. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.

Excerpts from EASY ACCESS (FOR THE BOYS) by Claire Dowie. Copyright © 1998 by Claire Dowie. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.

Excerpts from HYSTERIA by Terry Johnson. Copyright © 1993, 1994 by Terry Johnson. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.

Excerpts from BUTIERFLY KISS by Phyllis Nagy. Copyright © 1994 by Phyllis Nagy. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.

Excerpts from CLEANSED by Sarah Kane. Copyright © 1998 by Sarah Kane. Reprinted by permission of A&C Black Publishers.

Introduction: Theatrical Performance, Gender Performativity, and the Drama of Performative Malady

Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as cultural tropes

Hysteria not only survives in the 1990s, it is more contagious than in the past.

(Showalter 1998: 5)

In contemporary culture [ ... ] trauma is both a clinical syndrome and a trope [ ... ]: a strategic fiction that a complex, stressful society is using to account for a world that seems threateningly out of control.

(Farrell 1998: 2)

The particular melancholic mood of the present, which is apparent in contemporary art, culture, and society as well as in the political sphere, essentially is a sense of a fundamental 'disenchantment' of modern reality.

(Heidbrink 1997: 7, my translation)

Increasingly, contemporary culture defines its own moment through hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. As tropes, hysteria, trauma, and melan­cholia negotiate cultural meanings that are interconnected with but exceed the nosology of the psychic 'disorders' established by psychiatry and psycho­analysis. Contemporary drama plays a particularly important role in this negotiation. It is not only in the theatre, however, that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are invoked, but also in visual art, cinema, and literature as well as in life-writings, self-help books, and TV talk shows. Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia serve as explanatory patterns to account for the experiences, biographies, and behaviours of individuals, but they are also, on a more abstract level, employed to explain collective and sociocultural phenomena.

The present cultural significance of these concepts is nourished by their far-reaching histories. Hysteria and melancholia in particular, which have circulated as categories in medical and non-medical discourses ever since antiquity, are still informed by their discursive histories prior to their redefin­itions by psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytic discourses in the

1

2 Introduction

twentieth century. The term 'hysteria' encapsulates the first medical hypo­thesis about the aetiology of the disease, which was thought to be caused by a wandering womb (voTEpa). The current cultural and cultural theoret­ical appropriations of the concept critically engage with hysteria's discursive history, paying particular attention to the transition from Jean-Martin Charcot's neurologically founded concept of Grande Hysterie to Sigmund Freud's psychically grounded model of little hysteria.

Because of the persistent discursive association of hysteria and femin­inity in psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytically informed discourses, hysteria plays an especially important role in feminist cultural theory. Since the 1970s, feminist scholars such as Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Luce Irigaray, Christina von Braun, and Elaine Showalter have figured 'hysteria' as a powerful trope to discuss the exclusion of feminine subjectivity that is intrinsic in patriarchal Western cultures. They interpret the female hysteric as an ambivalent figure who oscillates between victimhood and rebellion against "the phalse woman-being which the logos has assigned to her" (von Braun 1985: 193, my translation). Simultaneously with the feminist re-evaluation of hysteria, scholars from the humanities and social sciences began to recover the history of male hysteria (Micale 1991, 1995), to explore the visual and medial fabrication of the disease (Gilman 1993, Baer 2002, Didi-Huberman 2003 [1982]), to trace postmodern forms of hysteria (Showalter 1998), and to explore hysteria as a reaction to the (repressed) knowledge of vulnerability (Bronfen 1998a). Observing the immense interest in hysteria as a historically variable cultural concept, Showalter calls the international scholars working on hysteria the "New Hysterians" (1998: 7).

Taking into account that psychiatric and psychoanalytical research on hysteria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have gone to constitute current trauma theory, the revived interest in the history of hysteria also attests to contemporary Western culture's intense preoccupa­tion with issues of physical, psychic, and sociopolitical wounding. Since its application to psychology in the late nineteenth century, trauma, origin­ating from Tpavlla ('wound'), has described the long-lasting psychic effects of an event that is so overpowering that the subject is unable to respond to it adequately at the moment of occurrence. 1

Trauma is considered such a dominant cultural formation for Western societies that critics have employed the labels "wound culture II (Seltzer 1997, 1998) and "traumaculture" (Luckhurst 2003). In contrast to melan­cholia and hysteria, which today no longer serve as psychiatric categories, the increasing employment of trauma as a cultural trope is concomitant with its rising importance in psychiatry and psychology. As a result, a fast­growing, interdisciplinary field of trauma studies has emerged, whose devel­opment proceeds apace.2 Since the late 1980s, trauma-related diagnoses, such as 'multiple personality disorder' (now renamed 'dissociative identity disorder') and 'post-traumatic stress disorder', have abounded in the influen­tial Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is used both in

Cultural Tropes 3

the USA and in Europe. 3 Scholars from various disciplines employ (and modify) these classifications as accounts for the long-term innerpsychic responses to trauma, but also for interpsychic, collective reactions to traumatising events, such as experiences of (sexualised) violence, war atrocities, and genocide.

Observing the social and theoretical fascination with trauma, studies in the field, such as Kirby Farrell's Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (1998) and the aptly named essay collection Trauma: Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Bedeutungsmuster (Trauma: Between Psychoana­lysis and Cultural Paradigm, 1999) edited by Elisabeth Bronfen, Birgit R. Erdle, and Sigrid Weigel, suggest, respectively, that trauma is a way of interpreting the cultural centennial crises of the 1890s and the 1990s, and that trauma is a new means of interpretation for modernism and modernity in general, designating that part of personal or collective history which cannot be made up for, which remains inconceivable and inadequate. The employment of trauma as a cultural trope has on the one hand risked its generalisation to the point of meaninglessness, as Ian Hacking laments. To him, trauma has become "a metaphor for almost anything unpleasant" (1995: 183). On the other hand, trauma remains" an immensely loaded and highly debated term, around which some of the most pressing cultural questions are negotiated" (Berressem 2003a: 1) - among them the issues of experience, memory, the body, and representation.

The cultural fascination with trauma is interlocked with the contemporary interest in melancholia. In its psychoanalytical meaning, melancholia can be understood as a specific traumatic formation, since it describes the psychic reaction to an experience of loss which the subject, as in the case of traumat­isation, does not fully register. Rather than accepting the loss, the subject remains in a state of disavowed or suspended grief that keeps the lost object present by psychic means. The contemporary cultural preoccupation with melancholia on the one hand draws on this psychoanalytic notion of melan­cholia. On the other, it displays a persistent fascination with melancholia as a state of sadness that involves heightened sensitivity, which was once defined as the excess of black bile (~EAav xoAi]).

Cultural critics characterise "the contemporary aesthetic realm [ ... ] [as] a melancholy space" (Gibson 2003: 136), perceive a "rhetoric of loss" in contemporary theoretical discourse (Schiesari 1992: 1) and even "a melan­choly of the disciplines" (Schor 1996: 1). A considerable number of studies have taken the recent cultural interest in melancholia as a starting point for the exploration of the medical, literary, and iconographic tradition of melancholia. While scholars like Lynn Enterline (1995) and Martina Wagner­Egelhaaf (1997) have contributed to the research on the medical and cultural function of melancholia in particular epochs, survey studies by Stanley W. Jackson (1986) and Juliana Schiesari (1992) as well as readers (Lutz Walther 1999, Jennifer Radden 2000) have undertaken a diachronic assessment of the concept of melancholia and have explored its intersections with related categories such as acedia, depression, and schizophrenia.

4 Introduction

Employing the psychoanalytic definition of melancholia as a theoret­ical concept for sociocultural analYSis, Julia Kristeva (1989 [1987]), Kaja Silverman (1988) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997) have theorised gender formations with regard to melancholia, while Anne Anlin Cheng (2000) explores racialisation and racism as melancholic phenomena and Paul Gilroy characterises the neo-imperialist politics of contemporary Western society as a form of sociopolitical melancholia (2004). Starting from different theor­etical premises, other studies have drawn on definitions of melancholia as a political category as proposed by Wolf Lepenies's Melancholie und Gesellschaft (Melancholy and Society 1969) (d. for example Gibson 2003) and have char­acterised the contemporary disorientation and indifference caused by the dissolution of grand narratives as a melancholic phenomenon (Heidbrink 1994, 1997, Derveaux 2002).

Given the versatile cultural adaptations of hysteria, trauma, and melan­cholia, which I will trace in the main part of my study, their attraction seems to stem from their very capaciousness, which allows them to act as projection surfaces for psychic pain, social rupture and loss as well as epistemological crises. My study, however, will focus on one specific realm of cultural reception and production, on contemporary theatre. How do anglophone plays employ these concepts? Which significance and which impact do the phenomena have on the stage? How are the plot patterns and modes of representation affected by these disorders, which mean a departure from, if not a break with a collective/conventionalised sense of reality? Which exchange relations between theory and theatre can be traced? This book pursues such questions. It seeks, on the one hand, to explore the formal characteristics of the theatrical representation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. On the other hand, it launches an argument as to the cultural Significance of these phenomena in the theatre. Arguing that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are staged as 'performative maladies', my exploration of the plays selected proceeds from the thesis that the disorders can be read as tropes for the performative quality of gender identity.

Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies

[T]he rise of an interest in performance reflects a major shift in many cultural fields from the what of culture to the how [ ... ]. Its real meaning is now sought in its praxis, its performance.

(Carlson 2004: ix)

There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; [ ... ] iden­tity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its result.

(Butler 1990: 33)

Performative Maladies 5

In contemporary drama, hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are, as I will argue, staged as 'performative maladies'. They are tropes, most prominently metaphors and metonymies, which represent the performative quality of gender identity. My conceptualisation of the performative maladies conjoins the culturally prominent discourses on hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, performance theory, and the notion of performative identity formation as theorised by Judith Butler. Butler's model of gender as an ongoing, performative activity, which she has developed in her writings since the late 1980s, participates in and has considerably contributed to the cultural and academic fascination with issues of performance and performativity. Simultaneously with the cultural re-evaluation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia, performance and performativity have gained such immense cultural significance and critical attention in recent decades that scholars have identified a 'performative turn' in contemporary culture (d. Conquer­good 1991: 190, Connor 2004: 14, Fischer-Lichte 2004: 24-6). As I will trace in the following section, however, the relationship between performativity and theatrical performance has been a subject of controversy. Many scholars, Butler herself among them, perceive the relation as troubled if not altogether severed. My study revisits this question and aims to show that the perform­ative maladies of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia bring performance and performativity into a mutually illuminating interplay.

The wealth of contemporary anglophone plays on hysteria, trauma, and melancholia and the cultural eminence of the phenomena suggests that the time has come to group these plays and to consider them as dramatic genres in their own right. My study explores 'The Drama of Hysteria', 'Trauma Drama', and 'The Drama of Melancholia' as genres which have evolved since the late 1980s and have not lost their significance to the present day.4 In the three main chapters of this book, I set out to define each genre with regard to its thematic interests as well as its aesthetics. Each of the chapters discusses the cultural significance of the respective phenomenon, introduces the relevant theoretical concepts, and unfolds my notion of the performative malady through in-depth readings of representative plays. Proceeding from the thesis that my notion of performative malady allows the interlinking of these genres, I will propose to regard the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melancholia as variants of the Drama of Performative Malady.

While some of the plays, such as Victoria Hardie's lesser known Sleeping Nightie (1989), but also David Auburn's commercially successful Proof(2000), which was released as a Hollywood movie in 2005, have not yet been explored by literary or theatre studies at all, the majority of plays have already been analysed from different theoretical premises and have been grouped according to other salient genres and stylistic trends in contem­porary drama, such as the (postmodern) history play, feminist drama, and in-yer-face theatre. My study suggests the consideration of the plays selected from an alternative and, as I aim to show, particularly productive perspective.

6 Introduction

My readings set out to examine, first, the ways in which the performative maladies allow inquiry into gender performativity, secondly, with which aspects of gender performativity the individual plays engage in particular, and thirdly, which role the medium of theatrical performance plays in this complex field of negotiation. Considering the plays both as dramatic scripts and as plurimedial performance texts, my study interlaces literary and performance analysis.5 Focusing on the plays in a British context, I will look primarily at their first British productions, but whenever fruitful, I will also refer to different theatrical realisations or evoke as yet unrealised staging options.6

The theoretical project of my study, that is, the conceptualisation of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies, draws on feminist and gender-theoretical employments of the concepts. In the field of hysteria, Bronfen's The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (1998) instigates a reflection on the relationship between the disorder and Butler's gender theory. In contrast, earlier influential feminist assessments of hysteria by scholars such as Cixous, lrigaray and von Braun, who wrote prior to the 'performative turn' in gender studies, offer accounts of the 'female malady' hysteria as a mode of genuinely female expression. Although my gender-theoretical approach differs from theirs, my notion of hysteria as performative malady makes use of their exploration of the subversive poten­tial of hysteria and of their foregrounding of issues such as imitation and the embodiment of images, which I will discuss as the process of 'image-ination'.?

As rewritings of hysteric case studies, the Drama of Hysteria features historical figures on stage and thus participates in the trend of postmodern history plays discernible on the British stage since the 1980s, when plays that combine historical facts and fictitious elements began to proliferate. Terry Johnson belongs to the most prominent authors of this trend;8 he employs the 'what-if' structure typical of many postmodern history plays not only in Hysteria or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis (1993), but also in Insignificance (1982) and Hitchcock Blonde (2003). Anna Furse's Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) has also been situated in the context of the contemporary historical drama (d. Kramer 2000).

As a self-conscious and academically informed genre, the Drama of Hysteria draws not only on psychoanalytic and psychiatric case studies, but also on cultural theoretical studies on hysteria and on earlier plays of the genre. The intense exchange relation between academic research and theat­rical negotiations of hysteria is illustrated by the academic forewords to the published play texts of Augustine and Kim Morrissey's Dora: A Case of Hysteria (1993) by Showalter and Lizbeth Goodman respectively (d. Showalter 1997 and Goodman 1993a). Furse herself, who works as a lecturer in theatre studies, has written an extensive introduction to her play and published several articles which explicate the writing and rehearsal process and reflect

Performative Maladies 7

on the feminist background that informed Furse's rewriting of the hysteric case study (d. Furse 1994, 1997,2000). My consideration of the plays draws on these introductions and essays as well as a number of readings by Tobias Doring, from which I adopt the label 'Drama of Hysteria' (d. Doring 1996, 2000,2002). Doring assesses the plays in the context of the feminist critique of psychoanalysis and elucidates how they demystify and rewrite notions of hysterical femininity. He points out the intersection of theatricality and hysteria in Freud's writing and shows how the plays, in a self-referential manner, make the female hysterics utilise the subversive potential of theat­rical mimesis for "crucial interventions in the classic Freudian performance" (2000: 168). Linking this theatrical strategy to Butler's gender theory, I will explore the thesis that the subversive project of the plays can be regarded, beyond the demystification of psychoanalytically established notions of hysterical femininity as explored by Doring, as the critique of essentialist gender notions in general.

Interpreting the plays according to my concept of the performative malady, my readings often depart from the interpretation made explicit by the playwrights in the introductions to the plays, in articles on the plays, or in interviews. Thus, I establish my notion of hysteria as performative malady in contrast to Furse's concept of hysteria as a genuinely female mode of expression. I will argue that the notion of hysteria as performative malady allows a productive way of dealing with the aporia staged by Furse and identified in Margarete Rubik's criticism of the play, that is, the silencing of woman's voice in her attempt to abandon phallogocentrism (Rubik 1996; d. also Kramer 2000: 233).

Chapter 2 on Trauma Drama focuses on theatrical negotiations of sexual child abuse, the most dominant form of traumatisation discussed in the 1990s. My notion of trauma as performative malady brings together Butler's gender theory, trauma theory, and performance theory to investigate how the protagonists' traumatisation, their gender performances, and the theat­rical medium interact.9 Concerning the interface of trauma and gender, studies on sexual child abuse have identified the preponderance of male perpetrators and female victims and explored the gendered power struc­tures underlying abuse (d. for example Herman 1992). Moreover, at several points in her writings, Butler briefly evokes trauma as an experience which fuels gender performance in non-visible ways (d. for example 1993a: 123-4 and 2004: 153-60), but she refrains from extensively theorising trauma in relation to gender.

Because a great number of feminist dramatists have tackled this issue of abuse, the plays that I categorise as Trauma Drama have mostly been explored in the context of women's and feminist drama. Alternatively, some of the plays have been examined as instances of in-yer-face theatre. Thus, Elaine Aston's Feminist Views on the English Stage highlights the sociopolitical relevance of the plays that "use theatre as a forum for a feminist 'speak out' "

8 Introduction

(2003: 43) by tackling the issue of incestuous sexual child abuse, which has been, according to Aston, "a specific victim of the general backlash against feminism" (ibid.: 38) in the 1990s. Kathleen Starck's recent I Believe in the Power of Theatre likewise identifies the preoccupation with sexual child abuse as an important trend in women's drama and dedicates a chapter to Sarah Daniels's Beside Herself (1990) and Claire Dowie's Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998) (2005: 178-89; cf. also Godiwala 2003: 136-40, Goodman 1993b: 192-9 and 1994, Aston 1995a, Griffin 2000). Although these readings for the most part acknowledge traumatisation as an important topic, no study as yet exists that systematises and specifies the function of trauma in the plays.

The most prominent author whose play I investigate in Chapter 3 on melancholia, Sarah Kane, is considered the figurehead of a prominent styl­istic and thematic trend in the work of young playwrights emerging in the 1990s, one which critics have given competing labels, such as 'theatre of shock', 'sensationalist drama of cruelty', or 'new brutalism'.l0 The seminal monograph on this confrontational theatrical style, Aleks Sierz's program­matically entitled In-Yer-Pace Theatre: British Drama Today, discusses both Sarah Kane's Cleansed (1998) and Phyllis Nagy's Butterfly Kiss (1994) (2001: 47-53 and 112-17). Kane's work has not only been controversially discussed in newspaper articles and radio and TV programmes, but also elicited an academic response far exceeding that of the other writers I cover in my study. Apart from a wealth of articles on Kane's ~uvre, Graham Saun­ders's monograph Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002) explores the sociopolitical and dramatic challenges of Kane's theat­rical style in a similar vein to Sierz, drawing on the play texts, the perform­ances, and interviews with the practitioners involved in the production of her plays. Both Aston's and Sierz's survey studies include a chapter on the work of Kane, in which they assess respectively her controversial position in feminist drama and the increasingly less confrontational style of her writing throughout the 1990s. Anna Opel (2002: 132-79) argues that Kane's plays feature abstract, linguistically constructed 'language bodies' rather than psychologically grounded characters. Among the assessments of Cleansed, Aston's analysis is most relevant for my focus. Aston argues that Kane's play can be compared to Butler's theoretical project, since it exercises "a figurative dismantling of the psychoanalytical framework that endorses and produces a 'diseased male identity', one that punishes homosexual [ ... J couples and [ ... J is even damaging to heterosexual relations" (2003: 90). I share Aston's view that Cleansed proffers a theatrical version of the decade's preoccupa­tions with issues of gender, but suggest a different focus in my investigation of the play from the perspective of melancholia.

Just as Cleansed, Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan (1996) has not been read with regard to melancholia either. Because of Carr's exceptional status as a successful Irish woman writer, her work has mostly been analysed as a

Performative Maladies 9

female contribution to and transformation of the (male) Irish dramatic tradition (cf. Murray 1997: 237-8, Kurdi 2000: 59-71, McMullan 2000, O'Dwyer 2000, Llewellyn-Jones 2002: 78-80 and Leeney 2004). Carr's ~uvre has also had an essay collection dedicated to it, The Theatre of Marina Carr: "Before Rules Was Made" (Leeney and McMullan 2003b). Although my analysis of Portia Coughlan does not focus on Carr as a woman writer and her role in the dramatic tradition, I share with these readings the interest in issues of gender identity. I revisit their exploration of Portia's failure and/or refusal to fulfil the gender expectations of her environment in the context of her melancholic incorporation of the lost brother, which results, as I will argue, in Portia's transgression of gender norms. Melissa Sihra's article on voices, topographies, and corporealities of alterity in the play is especially productive for my analysis of the play through the lens of (gender) melancholia. Sihra's argument that Carr's ~uvre "asks the audience to question which bodies may be regarded as 'real' and which may be considered 'ether-eal'"(2003: 24) has immediate bearing on my assessment of melancholia as a state which blurs the boundaries between (allegedly) 'factual', discretely gendered, and 'fantastic', gender-ambivalent, and gender-transgressive bodies.

My concept of melancholia as performative malady draws, on the one hand, on the research on melancholia as a gendered phenomenon and, on the other, on Butler's notion of gender melancholia. As Schiesari elabor­ates in her study The Gendering of Melancholia, melancholia, as a nosological category and as a cultural trope, was considered a typically male affliction as far as it was understood as the concomitant of exceptional intellectual and artistic talent. Separately from this investigation of the discursive history of melancholia, Butler has explored the intersection of melancholia and gender from a psychoanalytic point of view. Throughout Butler's writings since Gender Trouble, she has used the psychoanalytical concept of melancholia to theorise the disavowed aspects that fuel gender performativity. I will invest­igate the plays from these complementary perspectives and explore how contemporary drama negotiates the gendering of melancholia as investig­ated by Schiesari as well as the gendering through melancholia as theorised by Butler.

Before I start examining the plays, I will in the following sections establish the theoretical co-ordinates of my study. Discussing the relationship of the loaded concepts of performance and performativity, I will begin to explore the reasons why the theatrical stage might be a particularly suitable arena to negotiate the nexus of gender performativity and hysteria, trauma, and melancholia. At the same time, I will indicate how through the lens of the plays selected, the relationship of Butler's concept of gender performativity to theatrical performance can be reconsidered from an innovative and, as I will argue, particularly illuminating perspective.

10 Introduction

Performance and performativity: From termini technici to umbrella terms

[Wlhile philosophy and theatre now share 'performative' as a common lexical item, the term has hardly come to mean 'the same thing' for each.

(Sedgwick and Parker 1995: 2)

[Plerformativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-representation; nor can it be simply equated with performance.

(Butler 1993a: 95)

[Als soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects, all become discussable.

(Diamond 1996: 5)

As the above-quoted statements indicate, the relationship between perform­ance and performativity is a contested issue. Proposing that hysteria, trauma, and melancholia are staged as performative maladies in contemporary anglo­phone drama, my study aims to reconsider the troubled relationship between performance and performativity. After outlining the development that led to the dissociation of performativity theory and theatre studies, I will, taking my cues from assertions such as Elin Diamond's, explore how relevant concepts of Butler's performativity theory, such as reiteration, imitation, belatedness, original/copy, and parody, can be reconnected to their source in theatrical performance. I intend to show that reading Butler, and occa­sionally reading Butler against Butler, allows for a complex concept of theat­ricality that encompasses intentionality and scriptedness, 'presence' and representation, embodiment and discursivity, and the affirmation and the subversion of dominant structures.

Both performance and performativity have become key terms in recent cultural theory and practice. In 1991, Dwight Conquergood suggested that after the 'linguistic turn', which made us understand the world as text, a 'performative turn' was about to take place in cultural theory, which casts the world as performance (1991: 190).11 Culture's and cultural theory's relentless fascination with performance has made performance studies a heterogeneous field, which encompasses not only the studies of theatre and performance art, but also ethnography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, business organisation, technology, linguistics, and literary and cultural theory, among others. While most of these fields initially utilised insights about theat­rical performance for their theories, especially about religious ritual or social drama, their thought has fed back into and advanced the study of aesthetic performance.12 Because of the proliferation of performance's applications and its resulting resistance to definition, performance studies have recently been called an "antidiscipline" (Schechner 2001: 10, Carlson 2004: 206).13

Perfonnance and Perfonnativity 11

Comparable heterogeneity and elusiveness apply to the concept 'perform­ativity', which has become so closely intertwined with 'performance' that critics have resorted to metaphors of troublesome companionship to describe their relationship: performativity is performance's "uneasy bedfellow" (Campbell 2001: 6) and its "new theoretical partner" (Diamond 1996: 2). Their conceptual 'romance' has indeed made the terms indistin­guishable in some contexts, in which performativity tends to serve either as "a fancy synonym for performance" (Solomon 1997: 3) or as the more abstract term that describes the conditions, functions, modes, and effects of individual performances (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 234). One possibility to differentiate performance and performativity is their reference to speech act theory. In many - but by no means all - cases, the use of 'perform­ativity' relates to John L. Austin's speech act theory as developed in his Harvard lectures in 1955 and first published in How To Do Things With Words in 1962,14 or to adaptations of Austin's theory. According to Austin, the performative speech act does not relate to an extra-linguistic referent but enacts or produces that to which it refers. Therefore, the performative speech act does not describe social facts, as the constative speech act does, but creates them. In Speech Acts (1969), Austin's student John R. Searle expanded Austin's speech act theory to an understanding of all language as action. Searle thereby shifted Austin's focus on rather specialised speech situations, such as the christening of a ship or marriage vows, to the recognition of the performative character of speech in general.

However, because theatre and performance theorists, most prominently Ross Chambers (1980), Umberto Eco (1977), and Timothy Gould (1995), have likewise employed Austin's terminus technicus in order to theorise the generative power of performances, the reference to speech act theory ulti­mately does not allow a clear differentiation between performance and performativity either. Significantly, the appropriation of Austin's speech act theory for the conceptualisation of theatrical performance runs counter to one of Austin's basic axioms. In How To Do Things With Words, Austin decidedly excludes from his theory the 'non-serious' speech acts which are carried out during theatrical performance because he understands those 'infelicitous' speech acts as an exception to (and a parasitical version of) the 'normal' use of language (1975: 22). In "Signature Event Context", Jacques Derrida challenges this omission and argues that rather than being an excep­tion to the conventional use of language, the speech acts carried out on stage are exemplary of the general use of language, which is likewise based on non-originality, that is, on iteration, infinite citationality, and the possibility of recontextualisation: "ultimately, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, 'non-serious', citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soli­loquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality - or rather, a general iterability - without which there would not even be a successful performative?" (1988 [1972]: 17). It is partly due to Derrida's broadening

12 Introduction

of the term that 'performativity' has been adopted by a variety of discip­lines and theories. As many scholars (Dolan 1993: 419, Sedgwick and Parker 1995: 2, Wirth 2002: 10, Davis and Postlewait 2003: 31, Carlson 2004), among them Butler (1999: xiv), have remarked, its extensive use has made performativity, like performance, an umbrella term for varying concepts in a heterogeneous field of interests and disCiplines.

The broad application of performance and performativity theory -including its (at least partial) incorporation of Austin's speech act theory -to almost every aspect of human activity had, as Diamond observes in her introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics, already by the mid-1990s led to a dominance of "performance discourse, and its new theoretical partner, 'performativity', [ ... ] [in] critical discourse almost to the point of stupefaction" (1996: 2). At the beginning of the new century, Jon McKenzie in his study Perform or Else has even further extended the use of the crit­ical tool 'performance' beyond aesthetic, cultural, and social performance to investigate business organisation and technology. Rather than critic­ally assessing the 'stupefying' proliferation of the concepts of performance and performativity, McKenzie acknowledges and emphasises the persistent use of 'performance/performativity' as the dominant intellectual trope of the past and the forthcoming century. He daringly makes "the specu­lative forecast" that "performance will be to the twentieth and twentieth­first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that is, an onto-historical [sic] formation of power and knowledge" (2001: 18).

Despite the proliferative employment of performance and performativity, two general characteristics are shared by their various definitions and applications. They are involved, first, with both the reinforcement and the dismantling of stable systems of meaning and representation and, secondly, with a sense of doubleness or repetition (Carlson 2004: 80). This latter sense of doubleness or repetition implies two basic assumptions about perform­ance. On the one hand, it designates the iterative quality of all performances, which imitate or actualise a rehearsed 'model'. As Richard Schechner has pointed out, every performance consists of 'restored behaviour': "Perform­ance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second or the nth time. Performance is 'twice-behaved behaviour'" (1985: 36). On the other hand, the logic of doubleness refers to the split awareness of both the audi­ence and the performers, who simultaneously perceive the performed events and the event of performing. Critics have termed this awareness "double consciousness" (Carlson 2004: 5) or "hyperconsciousness" (Kubiak 2002: 158). I will show in the following that while Butler's concept of gender performativity works with both performativity's ambivalent relationship to normative structures and its iterative quality, Butler challenges the assump­tion of the audience's and performers' double consciousness.

Butler's Performativity Theory 13

The theatre metaphor in Butler's performativity theory

As briefly mentioned above, contemporary theory's fascination with performance and performativity has in most cases begun with an engage­ment with theatrical performance, which has become a highly popular metaphor in poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Theoretical projects as diverse as those of Kristeva, Jean-Fran\ois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard have offered different rephrasings of the notion of a theatrum mundi. Barbara Freedman concludes at the beginning of the 1990s,

A theatrical model is [ ... ] ideally suited to the project of decentring and subverting fields of representation that face postmodern theory. This explains why theatre is the source not only of much of the vocabulary of postmodern theory, [ ... ] but also of many of its key strategies. A refusal of the observer's stable position, a fascination with re-presenting presence, an ability to stage its own staging, to rethink, reframe, switch identifica­tions, undo frames, see freshly, and yet at the same time see how one's look is always already purloined - these are the benefits of theatre for theory.

(1990: 73)

However, as theatre scholars observe with regret (d. for example Diamond 1996, Case 1997, Kubiak 2002), theatrical performance appears to withdraw more and more into the background of the evolving 'New World Order' proclaimed by McKenzie and others, which is shaped by performances at work in psychic, cultural, social, organisational, and technological processes.

In the following sections, I will outline the process of theatre's increasing marginalisation in the performativity theory of Butler, who is acknowledged as one of the most influential of the performance theorists of the 1990s, if not the most influential, mainly because her theory of performativity synthesises psychoanalytic and post structuralist notions of performativity, speech-act theory, and cultural and social theory. This innovative combination and its employment for gender studies have fuelled a discussion of performance and performativity of remarkable variety and complexity. Butler describes the social as the theatrical in the early stages of her conceptualisation of gender performativity, but problematises the theatre metaphor in her writing after Gender Trouble. Whereas she states at the outset of her 1988 essay "Perform­ative Acts and Gender Constitution" that lithe acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts" (272), in Bodies that Matter, she emphasises that "performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-representation; nor can it be simply equated with performance" (95) and adds towards the end of the book, lithe reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake" (ibid.: 234). In the following, I will examine the conditions and reasons for the weakening of the theatre metaphor in Butler's writing. In so doing, I will analyse the shifts

14 Introduction

in her understanding of theatrical performance that are part and parcel of this development. In a second step, I will explore arguments and strategies that might re-establish theatre's validity as the performative medium par excellence.

Butler conceptualises gender as an ongoing performative activity which produces the appearance of substance or originality through the acts of reiterative citation alone. Inverting the claim that gender derives from sex, Butler maintains that the notion of a biological, 'natural' sex is determ­ined by culturally constructed models of gender; gender hence produces the misnomer of pre-discursive, 'purely physical' sex. Butler argues that gender (and, therefore, sex)15 comes into existence through imitations and actual­isations of gender norms, which in contemporary Western societies include ideal dimorphism, heterosexual complementarity of bodies, ideals and rules of proper and improper masculinity and femininity (1999: xxiii), and the ideal of reproductive heterosexuality which links sex, gender, and desire.

Butler develops her notion of gender performativity by means of the meta­phor of theatrical performance and emphasises the importance of reiteration and citation. Although she does not specifically engage with speech act theory in her writing before Bodies that Matter, she employs a concept of performativity that likewise emphasises the generative power of enactment and of discourse as enactment. 16 When Butler writes, "Consider gender [ ... ] as a corporeal style, an 'act' as it were, which is both intentional and perform­ative, where 'performative' itself carries the double meaning of 'dramatic' and 'non-referential'" (1988: 272-3), she connects the theatrical and the speech-act notion of the performativeY

Her employment of theatricality refuses to acknowledge a world beyond theatrical performance; in terms of gender performativity, the "actors are always already on the stage" (ibid.: 277). Hence, Butler's notion of theatrum mundi rules out the sense of double consciousness, of the "very condi­tion of consciousness split against itself" (Kubiak 2002: 167) that theatre scholars identify as one of the crucial characteristics of theatrical perform­ances. Rather than allowing for critical distance through the recognition of a gap between the representations on stage and the world beyond the stage, according to Butler both the actors who 'perform' gender and the environ­ment watching their performances are fully absorbed in what Samuel Taylor Coleridge has called the "willing suspension of disbelief,,:18 "the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accom­plishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors them­selves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief" (Butler 1988: 271, 1990: 179). Just as the characters of a particular performance come alive through the embodiment by the actors alone, the (gendered) subject is constituted through the citational acts s/he performs. In the process of "doing gender" (1993a: 41), the doer is the product of the deed (1990: 33).

Hence, Butler's early concept of gender performances as theatrical perform­ances does not imply that they are voluntary, deliberate, and controlled

Butler's Performativity Theory 15

acts exerted by actors with full agency.19 Butler emphasises the compulsory character of most gender performances, as "there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations" (1988: 282). In Butlerian terms, the actor is perfonned by the particular production just as much as s/he performs it; the actor creates, or at least revives, the performance, but s/he is also determined by it (1993a: 282). Describing the complex relationships between agency and subjugation and between ostensible spontaneity and predetermination that are at work in the 'production' of gender, Butler resorts to the image of the theatrical stage and argues that

the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed [ ... ]. [T]he gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.

(1988: 277)

Butler also uses the theatre metaphor to criticise cultural assumptions about psychic interiority. She strips her gender concept of the notion of an inner, or even innate, core of gender identity. Just as the actors create the impression of the character's interiority, their inner conflicts, their repressed emotions, et cetera, through their performances, gender is fabricated by acts of citation alone: "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; [ ... ] identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its result" (1990: 33); "gender attributes [ ... ] are not expressive but performative" (1988: 279); "Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed" (1993b: 4). In order to establish ontological effects, performativity depends on citationality and repetition:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. [ ... ] This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.

(Butler 1993a: 95)

As the maintenance of gender norms depends on their ritualised imita­tion, the norms can be irritated by failed and deviant actualisations of the 'command performance'. A perfect citation of the norm even remains impossible, as the performer "never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (ibid.: 231). Butler repeatedly conceptualises the demand to imitate gender norms as a law which is only powerful to the extent that

16 Introduction

it is quoted by judges and obeyed (ibid.: 14).20 The necessity of reiteration implies the instability of the law, which can be rephrased or possibly even abdicated by 'wrong' citations. Butler's most prominent example of such a 'wrong' and distorting citation is the practice of drag, which can mock the notion of 'true' gender identity by illustrating the performative character of gender.21

The reception of her example of drag, which was often understood as the quintessence of Butler's theory rather than as one of many possible strategies of denaturalisation, has contributed to Butler's abandonment of the theatre metaphor. Those readings tended to reduce Butler's notion of gender performance to deliberate, voluntary acts which can be altered at will and modified through theatrical means such as clothes or make-up. However, although Butler at some points acknowledges theatre's capacity to explore alternative imagined spaces which potentially subvert the normative heterosexual hegemony, she puts particular emphasis not on theatre's 'as-if', but on the scriptedness and compulsory character of every performance. In Butler's theory, the subjunctive mode of performance's 'as-if' is "intimately related to an imperative mood which commands 'it must be'. Perform - or else: [ ... ] [it] is a command perfonnance" (McKenzie 2001: 168). Butler has distanced herself from the comparison of gender performativity and theat­rical performance, partly in order to forestall further misunderstandings.22

In order to distinguish between gender performativity and theatrical performance, Butler turns to a more traditional and simplistic notion of theatrical performance and of the stage actor in her writings after Gender Trouble. Thus, she argues in Bodies that Matter that

performance as bounded "act" is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists of a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer's "will" or "choice"; further, what is performed works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, un-performable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.

(234)

Butler's demarcation of theatrical performance from gender performativity is phrased ambiguously. On the one hand, her differentiation can be - and indeed has been - understood as presupposing that the stage actor's perform­ance is fully determined by his or her will and control (d. for instance Aston 1999: 16, Diamond 1997: 46 and Kubiak 2002: 33-4). On the other hand, however, the relationship between performativity and performance which Butler envisions can also be grasped as a type-token-relationship rather than as an opposition - an interpretation that seems more fruitful to meP Following this trajectory, the mechanisms of performativity would likewise

Can Performativity Materialise as Performance? 17

apply to the 'bounded acts' of theatrical performance, and performativity principally could only materialise as performance.

Can performativity materialise as performance?

The subsequent sections will argue not only for the theoretical compat­ibility of performance and performativity, but also for theatrical perform­ance's particular capacity to stage and negotiate questions of (gender) performativity. My argument shares the assertion of theatre scholars such as Diamond, Marvin Carlson, Aston, Alisa Solomon, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Anthony Kubiak that theatrical performance offers a particularly apt arena to reflect on and possibly provoke an alteration of the workings of (gender) performativity because of its double consciousness. Given that every theatrical performance depends on the double consciousness of its audience, which always only partly suspends its disbelief in the on stage action, theat­rical performance "is the site in which performativity materializes in concen­trated form, where the 'concealed or dissimulated conventions' of which acts are mere repetitions might be investigated and reimagined" (Diamond 1997: 47). In order to sustain my claim for the capacity of theatrical performance in general (and the plays I consider in particular) to reflect on performativity, I will address two of the main complexes that appear to separate theatrical performance from performativity and hence seem to prevent Butler's notion of performativity from materialising as performance: first, questions of inten­tionality and control, which are of importance for the process of producing theatre, and secondly, the opposition of presence versus representation that concerns theatrical reception.

Producing theatre: Intentionality and control

As we have seen above, Butler distinguishes between theatrical perform­ance and performativity on the ground of the latter's characterisation by conventions that are beyond the actor's intention and control. However, every performance can itself be understood as "performative, i.e. shaped by conventions that likewise exceed, constrain and precede the performer" (Lloyd 1999: 202; d. also Aston 1999: 16, Diamond 1997: 46, Fischer­Lichte 2004: 39). Rather than separating gender performativity and theat­rical performance, Butler's emphasis on the non-voluntary and compulsory aspects of performativity can be used to conceptualise theatrical perform­ance in a way that highlights the non-deliberate, scripted, and 'matrixed' aspects of theatrical performance. As the gendered subject, any actor in a theatrical performance performs as much as s/he is performed by a partic­ular production. For instance, the actor has to reproduce the performance text or at least the rehearsed processes, follow cues, and perform within and according to specific theatrical conventions, such as acting styles, sceno­graphy, or theatrical architecture.

18 Introduction

Like the gendered subject's agency, the actor's agency resides in the possib­ility and, indeed, the inevitability of slightly varying the command perform­ance of the rehearsed production, but this agency does not necessarily stem from deliberate and conscious acts (Butler 1990: 189). Although variation can be due to a deliberate attempt at innovation, it also can be an effect of technical malfunctions, a different attitude of the audience, or the actor's failure to reproduce the 'original' moment, for example.24 The resignifica­tion that can take place within theatrical performance equals that of gender performativity, as both depend on "an agency that is (a) not the same as voluntarism, and that (b) though implicated in the very relations of power it seeks to rival, is not, as a consequence, reducible to those dominant forms" (Butler 1993a: 241).

Yet, the notion of an original that every theatrical performance attempts to restage is precarious. In order to conceptualise the relationship of indi­vidual performances of a rehearsed production to their 'original', Butler's paradoxical argument about performativity can be applied, which inverts the causal relationship between original and copy through the logic of belated­ness. Butler contests the originality of gender norms and argues that gender performances are copies of non-existing originals which create an idea of Originality or naturalness merely through their ostensible reproduction. Analogously, a production's particular performance on one night can be conceptualised as the ostensible reproduction of a non-existent original. Although neither the play text, nor any script with production notes, nor the opening night's performance can be considered the 'proper' or 'original' performance which all subsequent shows are meant to imitate as perfectly as possible, all artists involved in a particular performance will orientate themselves according to such an illusionary original.

Describing the reiterative quality of every performance, Carlson cites ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in order to emphasise that for the performers, "all performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action" (2004: 5). Applied to theatrical performance, the performance's norm is either a potential, that is, the 'perfect' performance which one day might take place, or an ideal, that is, the 'perfect' performance which remains inapproximable, or a "remembered original model" - would that be the, possibly blurred, recollection of the opening night? Or of one particular rehearsal? Do the individual actors remember the same "original model"?

Furthermore, performances and rehearsals require both repetition and innovation; in terms of theatrical performance, satisfactory repetition can only be achieved via variation. Herbert Blau emphasises that as soon as actors attempt to repeat a past achievement, they are confronted with the necessity to vary the 'original' moment in order to actualise it properly: "it wouldn't be the same if it were only the same, it would be nothing but

Can Performativity Materialise as Performance? 19

a repetition, not as right as it was, spontaneous, as when it happened for the first time" (2001: 28). Blau hence concludes that there is something in both theatre and performance that "implies no first time, no origin, but only recurrence and reproduction, whether improvised or ritualized, rehearsed or aleatoric, whether the performance is meant to give the impression of an unviolated naturalness or the dutiful and hieratic obedience to a code" (1987: 171). In a similar vein, theatre practitioners Lisa Baraitser and Simon Bayly, co-directors of the company PUR, conceptualise rehearsal as performance's "pre-play II and the actual performances as the rehearsal's "replay"; strik­ingly, the moment of 'play' itself, the culminating moment of the rehearsals and the starting point for later performances, is missing. Acknowledging the fictionality of performance's 'original', Baraitser and Bayly argue that the performance tries "to invoke the secret 'real' of rehearsal II (2001: 70) but remains multiply deferred from actuality: the performance "can only point to a moment of epiphany that we dream happened in rehearsal II (ibid.: 71). They hence suggest that performances aspire to a remembered vision of an ideal, a collective dream about a moment of epiphany, which is the product of the collaborative rehearsal process.

Because the collective aspiration towards a particular, if volatile, ideal that the performance is intended to actualise is negotiated in rehearsal, the processes of this 'pre-play' of performance are of importance to the rela­tionship between performance and performativity. In rehearsal, the issues of intentionality and control are even more central, as the collaboration between the director and the actors negotiates and transmits intentions. Rather than simply installing a 'command performance', the director has to transmit his or her idea of a character or a situation to the actors and make them intend to act in a specific way. As a result, the actor will enact the director's intent as his or her own intent under the control of the director. However, because the director's intent materialises only via the acting skills, body, and voice of the actor, it will never be exerted without variation. There­fore, in the dialogue and interaction between director and actor that takes place during rehearsals, intentions and control are negotiated, and perform­ances will take off from the point that this exchange has reached, from the shared "image of perfection in the head" (Blau 1987: 179). Insofar as the performance actualises characters and situations that were once instigated by the stipulations of the director, an expanded version of the Althusserian concept of interpellation, which allows for bilateral dependence rather than the unilateral exertion of power, seems to be fruitful not only for the descrip­tion of the workings of gender performativity,2S but also of the theatrical rehearsal process. Just as the director initially observes, reprimands, and calls the actors to action, his or her presence is increasingly interiorised by the actors, who will then perform as if the director were still present or who will depart from certain agreements once the director is no longer there - thus rearticulating the 'law' installed and defended by the director.

20 Introduction

As a result, every performance will also involve the loss of control, both by the director, who can no longer interrupt and correct the actors, and by the actors. Not only are actors susceptible to technical malfunctions and the failures of their own "un accommodated body that at any performative moment may really lose control, as in something so elemental as a case of stage fright" (Blau 2001: 289), they will also need to let go of control to a certain extent in order to fully embody their character and to be able to deal with changes that occur spontaneously during the performance. Thus, the balance of keeping ancllosing control, of exerting intentions and being ready to depart from them is at the heart of both the rehearsal process and the theatrical performance.

In the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma Drama, and the Drama of Melan­cholia, this volatile relationship between deliberate performing and being performed, of control and loss of control, does not only apply to the perform­ance process inherent in the theatrical medium in general, but to the play's staging of hysteria, trauma, and melancholia in particular. The plays present protagonists whose conduct displays hysteric, traumatic, and melancholic symptoms and thus invites audiences to speculate about the repressed, unconscious psychic processes which surface in their conduct. Thus, the plays encourage audiences to perceive the protagonists' acts as forms of acting out, of "action[s] in which the subject, in the grip of his unconscious wishes and phantasies, relives these in the present with a sense of immediacy which is heightened by his refusal to recognise their source and their repetitive character" (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973 [1967]: 4). Because of this invitation to audiences, the plays contradict Butler's aforequoted notion that "what is performed works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, uncon­scious, un-performable" (1993a: 234). By highlighting the degree to which the protagonists are installed in psychic repetition compulsions of which they are often not even aware, the plays demonstrate that the conduct of the protagonists cannot be reduced to intentional and controlled acts, but, inadvertently, displays that which is 'opaque' and 'unconscious' and cannot be performed deliberately by the protagonists. Since the plays employ acting out as a trope for gender performance, I will argue, they call attention to certain exclusions and repressions at work in the (gendered) performances of the characters rather than solely concealing the unperformed. Hence, through their subject matter, the plays focus on the non-conscious and disavowed aspects of performance which Butler, as elaborated above, misses in theatrical performance.

Hysteria, trauma, and melancholia as performative maladies thus proffer one way of illustrating and explaining the unconscious repetition compul­sions which are characteristic of gender performativity. Particularly in her writings since the latter half of the 1990s, Butler has acknowledged that not "all of the internal world of the psyche is but an effect of a stylized set of acts" (1999: xv) and "to reduce the psychic workings of gender to

Can Performativity Materialise as Performance? 21

the literal performance of gender would be a mistake II (1997: 144), because "what is most apparently performed as gender is the sign and symptom of a pervasive disavowal" (ibid.: 147). Butler utilises melancholia to theorise psychic interiority as the merely provisional product of internalisation and argues that gender is the - likewise provisional - result of such an intern­alisation, namely of melancholic incorporation. As I will explore in detail in Chapter 3, the concept of melancholic incorporation offers Butler one way of theorising that which remains hidden and possibly unconscious but nonetheless directs gender performances. Conceptualising not only melan­cholia, but also trauma and hysteria as performative maladies, I will argue that also the latter disorders as staged by the plays are interlinked with the workings of gender performativity.

Watching theatre: Presence versus representation

Because theatre, unlike Cinema, video, and other art forms that involve tech­nical means of reproducing the body, depends on the material and live presence of the actors' bodies, the double consciousness of theatre audi­ences who are constantly aware of theatre's representational status can be eclipsed when it comes to matters of the body, and thus, issues of sex/gender. Fischer-Lichte in this respect differentiates between the 'semiotic body' of the character and the 'phenomenal, sensuous body' of the performer (2004: 130-60, esp. 132) and highlights that the perception of audiences oscillates between focusing on the former and the latter. In a similar vein to those theorists who speak of theatre's intrinsic 'double consciousness', Fischer­Lichte therefore characterises the perception of theatre audiences as a state of being "betwixt and between" (ibid.: 151).

As feminist scholars have pOinted out, the perception of sex/gender in theatre is prone to confiating these 'bodies'; it is "exceptionally susceptible to naturalization. Indeed, the female body on stage appears to be 'the thing itself', incapable of mimesis, afforded not only no distance between sign and referent, but, indeed, taken for the referent II (Hart 1993: 5). As a consequence, the staging of gender might not be understood as a semiotic production or representation by theatrical means, but as immediate presentation, or 'pres­ence', so that an actress onstage automatically is a female figure rather than acts like a female figure. Similarly, Butler suggests, "the theatrical models II understand "the gendered self to be prior to its acts II (1988: 271). She hence equates the theatrical reception with the, likewise naturalised, everyday perception of gender.26 Following the same line, Butler in Bodies that Matter no longer allows for theatre's critical distance from itself, for a self-referential sense of its own historicity. According to Butler, gender performativity "is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and conversely, its theatric­ality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity)" (1993a: 12). Rather than casting the theatrical as that

22 Introduction

which is contrived and representational, Butler in this passage categorises the theatrical as the fully illusionistic, the authentic, and the seemingly non-historical. She thereby excludes from her concept of theatricality the double consciousness of audiences and performers that distorts complete theatrical illusion and allows for "the startling/contradiction of the stated by the shown" (Solomon 1997: 4).

Already in her early essay, however, Butler at the same time acknowledges the double consciousness of theatre audiences when she discusses the differ­ence between the everyday performance of non-normative gender and the theatrical performance:

although theatrical performance can meet with political censorship and scathing criticism, gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions. Indeed, the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence [ ... ]. In the street or on the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act.

(1988: 278)

In contrast to Butler's phrasing that tends to characterise theatre as the more limited, more conventional, and less dangerous site of cultural negoti­ation and provocation, I think that at the same time, it is precisely theatre's status as heterotopia (ct. Foucault 1967), as protected space, which offers a chance for critical reflection on society, for the trial of different perspectives on 'reality', and for the unlimited imagination of, possibly utopian, altern­atives. Protected by theatrical conventions, the theatre opens up a space for cultural observation and contemplation that everyday performances can hardly achieve. Rather than failing to expose the constructedness of gender, theatre can then become an appropriate arena to stage and upstage notions of gender, to see traditional gender concepts from a critical distance and to reflect on their inherent theatricality, not despite of but because of the fact that "theatrical performance depends on the legible presence of the quota­tion marks, which, as described by Butler, the process of performativity as citation operates to conceal in 'everyday life'" (Harris 1999: 76).

Butler's contradictory treatment of theatrical performance is part of a larger poststructuralist trend. As Shannon Jackson shows in her genealogy of performance and gender theory, the 'emancipation' of poststructuralist performative theory from the theatre metaphor depends not only on a reduc­tion of theatricality to a state of simplistic intentionality, but also highlights its alleged 'presence' at the cost of its representational status (2003: 206). Jackson demonstrates that gender theory (as promoted by Butler, Diamond, and Sue-Ellen Case) participates in a general theoretical confusion of the two