The Faces of Eve

By T.E. Kalem

Helmer: Before everything else you're a wife and a mother.

Nora: I don't believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I'm a human being, just as much as you are--or at any rate I shall try to become one.

Nearly a century has gone by since Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Nora's challenge has not been met in the theater. Ibsen himself could have written a sequel that began with Nora slamming the door and journeying forth to mold her destiny. Ibsen never wrote that play, and no modern playwright has made a serious attempt at it. Instead, women have been perceived as types--almost anything but the full human being Nora craved to become. Women characters fare no better at the hands of female playwrights, and even authors who respect women have trouble treating them as people.

Ibsen's ardent disciple, Shaw, saw women as serene, witty goddesses of reason, but he usually defined them solely by their relationships to men. Candida's final choice is to stay with the bumbling preacher husband who needs her rather than flee with the fiery bohemian poet who can fend for himself. There are exceptions. St. Joan wins martyrdom, and Major Barbara wins control of a munitions empire, both rather atypical social pursuits. And that tells us something. Drama is a reflexive, not an innovative art form, and a playwright can rarely advance much beyond the boundaries that society has reached in its consensus of values and acceptable roles.

Bonds That Chafe. The coming of World War II brought formidable changes in every area of social life, especially in the role of women. Entering the work force in massive numbers, they became visible--if not equal --competitors with men. Achieving an increasing degree of economic autonomy, many women found that marriage bonds that chafed could be snapped more easily than before. Meanwhile, Freud had become a household god, and the composition of the new trinity was the id, the ego and the superego. Armchair analysts lolled under many latitudinarian banners--Jung, Adler, Reich, Stekel, Krafft-Ebing, Sacher-Masoch and even the Marquis de Sade. What all of this generated was an unprecedented inquiry into the nature and needs of women as sexual beings.

Much of the drama of the past quarter-century has fostered and focused on images of woman that stress her competitive stance and her sexual behavior--aggressive, passive or inhibited. Naturally these categories sometimes overlap, and they are rarely the sole concern of any serious playwright.

Yet a number of image patterns persist and recur, forming a kind of psychograph of the way women are viewed in modern drama:

AS PRAYING MANTIS. After sexual congress, the female of this particular species devours the male. Dramatically, such a woman is a Venus's-flytrap, a castrating bitch who almost invariably renders the man sexually or psychically impotent. It is regarded as her demonic purpose to do so.

This image of woman was distilled in a title when Arthur Kopit wrote O Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Despite ample surrealistic high jinks, such as having poor dead Dad fall out of the closet as stiff as an ironing board, the underlying tone of the play is lethally bitter. The adolescent hero is in the steely grip of a domineering supermom, and when a lupine nymphomaniac attempts to seduce him, the scene more resembles cannibalism than sex. His only destiny seems to be Dad's closet.

Among contemporary dramatists, Edward Albee has displayed some of the most seething animosity toward women. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Martha pours molten lava of abuse and contempt over her professor-husband George, both privately and publicly. Though he does the same to her, she has clearly emasculated him even before the action begins. Then she tries to cuckold him in their own house with his younger colleague, but in her arms the colleague, too, proves impotent. "I am the Earth Mother," she brays. "You're all flops."

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel, a woman is used as the symbolic agent of a vindictively oppressive social system. The autocratic nurse who orders the rebel hero of the asylum lobotomized is intellectually presented as conformity's tool in crushing individualists. The emotional line of the play, however, suggests that the hero's real crime is machismo. He is, in effect, being castrated by a neurotic, sex-starved spinster in an acute fit of penis envy.

AS TEMPTRESS. The Judaeo-Christian tradition and its offshoot, puritanism, run very deep in Western culture. By the preconceptions of this mentality, Eve is the initial occasion of sin. While women frequently seem like supernumeraries in Arthur Miller's plays, the preface to his distinctly autobiographical drama After the Fall is revelatory. He writes: "After all, the infraction of Eve is that she opened up the knowledge of good and evil. She presented Adam with a choice." The sin then seems to be Eve's, and Adam, we are to assume, would have been better off without a choice, better off alone. The temptress figure in After the Fall is Maggie, patterned on Marilyn Monroe. Desperate and drug-addicted, she says to the Quentin-Miller hero: "All I am is love. And sex. Whyn't you lie on me?"

Replies the fastidious puritan: "It degrades me."

In an article titled "The Bald Primaqueera,"* which blasted the theaters of cruelty and the absurd, Sean O'Casey offered his view of the source of this sense of degradation: "It was Artaud--the latest trumpeter of the Primaqueeri--or one of his brethren, who gave us a picture of a beautiful girl, naked, with a malignant tarantula spider between her lovely thighs." In Harold Pinter's work, the temptress/tarantula becomes the slut/ mother. The theme is developed with the greatest finesse in The Homecoming. Ruth and her husband Teddy come home to England to visit Teddy's widowed father, his two brothers and an uncle, who all live under the same roof. Ruth is enigmatically cool but she crosses and recrosses her legs, and her role as the sexual aggressor is established in one line of dialogue over a glass of water. "If you take the glass," she says to Teddy's pimp brother, "I'll take you." When the pimp suggests that she become a part-time professional prostitute and "mother" the family, she strikes a crafty financial bargain and accedes. Only the father is struck by a final spasm of dread: "She'll use us, she'll make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it! ... She won't--be adaptable."

The women in Tennessee Williams' plays are often temptresses, but they are also more complicated creatures partly because Williams is almost religiously obsessed with the duality of the flesh and the spirit, and partly because he has an abiding concern for the violated heart. Many of his women spend an amazing amount of stage time in negligee, a provocation and an invitation to the bed. The widow Maxine Faulk (the surname is scarcely subtle) comes onstage in The Night of the Iguana with her blouse enticingly unbuttoned. Yet Hannah Jelkes in the same play is a stalwart saint of duty who has clearly transcended sex and is presented as a human being of nobility. Maggie the Cat is a tigerish temptress in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, though her prey is her husband, whom she is trying to lure away from alcohol and his homosexual leanings. An evil temptress is rich, aging Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, who tries to corrupt and seduce a young wanderer with a knapsack who may possibly be Christ.

Williams has said, "I was brought up puritanically. I try to outrage that Puritanism." As a dramatist, he sometimes practices a reverse puritanism by preaching salvation through the big stud. This holy devil can redeem parched, inhibited and neurotic women, but those who do not avail themselves of his service, like shy, strait-laced Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke, seal their doom.

The big studs are the exception and not the rule; in modern drama, the temptress holds sway. Compounded of many elements, the image of the woman as temptress contains one that may possibly be paramount. It is the fantasy of a relatively passive male who would like the woman to take the sexual initiative or even requires her to do so. Few writers have caught that particular aspect with the exactitude of a speech in British Playwright E.A. Whitehead's Alpha Beta, a corrosive drama about a married pair that death would do well to part. The two characters, Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, are quite past the point of sleeping with each other, but in her proprietary way Mrs. Elliot wonders aloud if Mr. Elliot would consider sleeping with someone else. He answers: "I suppose ... it is conceivable that if I were relaxing at a party . . . and I saw this angelic young dolly across the room . And she was looking at me ... gazing at me, with an expression of rapture in her peerless eyes . . . and she wandered across to me, and addressed herself to me, and plied me with drinks and innocent flattery and lured me upstairs to some remote bedroom . . . and unbuttoned her dress with trembling fingers and drew me down onto the bed . . . murmuring her demure desire and then stuffed her tit in my mouth and her hand down my trousers ... I believe I might succumb."

AS CLOWN AND WAIF. This is the particular province of the U.S. musical theater. Every female superstar launched on the American stage in the past decade has been cast as a clown or a waif. Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut as the office-girl clown, Miss Marmelstein. in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and graduated to the Fanny Brice clown in Funny Girl. Liza Minnelli enjoyed her first solid success as a waif in Flora, the Red Menace, and has now gone on to fame as Sally Bowles, the waif of waifs in the film Cabaret. I Am a Camera, the nonmusical version of Cabaret, starred Julie Harris who had already qualified in The Member of the Wedding as the quintessential American waif. Carol Burnett gawked and geeked her way onstage in Once Upon a Mattress and went on to become one of TV's clowning glories. Gwen Verdon was the gamine waif of both Redhead and Sweet Charity, and Audrey Hepburn was a winsome waifling as Gigi.

The popularity of these characters is related to that of the golden-hearted whore. She exists to be laughed at, to please, to flatter, and she accepts the role of an inferior through self-deprecation. Make no mistake.

She possesses spunk, stamina and en durance, but she lacks the strength of parity. She can pose no threat to the male. Instead she invites his strong protective arm, defusing the competitive antagonisms aroused by equal rights and countervailing power.

Interestingly enough, a musical sans clowns or waifs like Follies, which tries to treat mature women in a mature way, encounters substantial audience resistance. The show's actresses are seasoned by age, skill and valiance; Follies celebrates women who have learned to sift the grain of truth from the chaff of illusion, and the paths to its box office windows are now only half-beaten. What better evidence that the theater cannot profess a maturity that its audiences do not possess?

Follies, of course, is not completely alone in departing from stereotyped women. The most interesting current exception is Vivat! Vivat Regina!

Whatever their fates, Robert Bolt's Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart retain an emotional and intellectual autonomy by which their hearts, their minds and their destinies, however tormented or thwarted, rest primarily within their own control. They are their own wom en, in the way in which it has been customary to say, "He is his own man."

Ironically, Bolt has to drop back 400 years in history to find such women.

Surely, Ibsen must have intuited that the day would arrive when some play wright would see every woman as her own woman. When that happens, we will all learn what happened after Nora slammed the door.

T.E. Kalem

*The phrase is an O'Casey word play on the title of lonesco's The Bald Soprano, known in England as The Bald Prima Donna. He aimed it at absurdists whose reputations he considered inflated.

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