Where are the representations of older lesbians in the media?

Three decades of lesbian scholarship have borne witness to our incredible courage and creativity in the face of unremitting misogyny and homophobia. Where are the stories, the representations of our lives and our loves?

Well, imagine my surprise to discover an authentic depiction of a old lesbian couple in an Agatha Christie episode filmed by the BBC in 1985. [Click here for selected lesbianic excerpts from the show.]

Even for a series about a woman detective, "A Murder Is Announced" stands out as unusually woman-centered.  Not only is the entire plot built on a matrix of female bonding: love between sisters, between girlhood friends, between a wife and her husband's secretary, and between lesbians, but, in fact, the lesbian relationship provides the key to solving the mystery. And the original mystery was written in 1950!

The time is immediately after the war, and the place is a fictional little village in England.  Murgatroyd is the fem.  She wears the housedress, does the laundry, and defers to her partner.  Hinchcliffe, affectionately known as "Hinch," is the butch.  She wears the boots, slops the pigs, drives the car, and brags about drinking.  Both women are in their late forties/early fifties. Murgatroyd is a big woman with soft features, maternal and plodding in her process.  Hinch is angular, articulate, acerbic, and animated. The two women have apparently been partners for a long time, and the villagers accept their relationship.

I found myself replaying and fast-forwarding to watch the scenes with the two lesbians, and as I did this, I asked myself why I should be so fascinated with such obviously old-fashioned and stereotypical representations of lesbians at a time when I could download so many more recent lesbian films.

The fact is Hinch and Murgatroyd have something I rarely see anywhere else.  They have a real relationship.  A long-term relationship.  A relationship in a world which is brutally hostile to lesbians and which involves complicated strategies for survival, compromises, divisions of labor, and highly protective coloring. Hinch and Murgatroyd reflect a relationship where, over time, each partner has gained a monopoly over the areas in which she possesses the greater strengths, ceding to her partner the territory to which she holds the lesser claim.  It is a question of economy, not caricature. 

This is evident from comparisons with the other characters: the communist student-idealist, the mysterious war widow, the potentially unbalanced refugee, the long-lost school chum, the retired army officer, and the upper class "waster."  All of these characters are charming, shifty, and one-dimensional.  Their heterosexual relationships are blatant plot devices, which even the actors cannot  invest with any authenticity.  Not so Murgatroyd and Hinch, whose behaviors are complex and coded.

For example, when Hitch characterizes Murgatroyd as flighty and unreliable
to the police inspector, it is not only to cast herself in the light of being the responsible partner, but also to shield Murgatroyd from the questions of the police and the eyes of the community.  In this scene, Hinch makes a point of mentioning her fondness for liquor, her war service record, and the fact that she has seen things that would make the inspector's hair curl.  Caught slopping the pigs, she makes a show of her affection for the animals, as if she were indulging herself in a hobby instead of performing a menial task.  When Murgatroyd joins them, Hinch hovers over her -- correcting, mocking, and confusing her.  Editorializing on the inadequacy of Murgatroyd's answers, Hinch successfully deflects the inspector's interest in both of them and redirects it toward the other villagers. Even as she patronizes her partner, she throws a protective arm around her and makes it clear that the inspector will have to deal with her if he intends to badger her lover.

Two later scenes are even more illuminating. Both women are at home in their modest cottage. In both scenes, Hinch is puzzling over the murder they have witnessed. She recruits Murgatroyd's aid in re-enacting the shooting. Overtly, Murgatroyd follows Hinch's orders, anxious to please her mistress. Overtly, Hinch is acting in a high-handed and domineering way. But watching the scenes a second time, a different quality emerges. When Murgatroyd mentions that she remembers hitting her foot against the door, Hinch stops mid-hunch to address her concern for Murgatroyd's failure to see a chiropodist about her corns. Later, Murgatroyd, caught up in the drama of the re-enactment, drops her deferential act, and we see her emerge, if only for a few seconds, as a full partner to her irascible lover.

During the second re-enactment, Murgatroyd realizes the identity of the murderer, but Hinch is distracted by a call to rescue the family dog from the train station. On the way back, Hinch picks up Miss Marple, rescuing her from a downpour. She rakishly suggests that Miss Marple tell the others she is "out on the town." Returning to the cottage, both women discover Murgatroyd's body.  After a thorough check for vital signs, Hinch sets her face with grim determination: "When I find out who did this, I'm going to kill her."

Back at the cottage, Hinch blames herself for Murgatroyd's death, because the re-enactments had been her idea -- "silly games."  Miss Marple, in a very tender scene, gently asks her to focus on the killer's identity.  Later, Miss Marple will make inquiries about how Hinch is doing.  The inspector notes that she seems to have aged ten years.

In the final confrontation scene, Hinch is silent and stony, but as soon as the accusation is made, she rivets her attention on the killer like a bloodhound who has scented her prey.  When the killer is apprehended, she bursts in on the scene, lunging at the murderer with the cry, "I'm going to kill you!"  Restrained by the police, Hinchcliffe finally gives way to her grief. 

Alcoholism, domination, gender roles...  and real life. Real lesbian life. In a story where the detective-heroine is an old woman who speaks plainly about what it is to live on fixed low income at an age when all of one's friends are dead, the lesbian story line is given a dignity and depth not accorded to the other more privileged characters.  Miss Marple and Hinchcliffe share the understanding that beneath the surface of life in a storybook village lie violence and evil. Hinchcliffe, in carving out some corner of joy and safety for herself, had found a partner who seemed untainted by knowledge of that evil, and she had devoted her life to protecting her innocence. Indeed, Murgatroyd's last words were admonishments to the murderer to come in out of the rain. 

There appear to be several links for viewing this episode online.  Click here for one of them.

Okay... Albert Nobbs... 

Is the glass half empty or half full?

I'm going to go with half full, because there is a pretty spot-on depiction of a lesbian butch in the film. And a working-class butch,at that. Not addicted, self-hating, or self-destructive. Comfortable in her own skin, happily married and living in a cozy home.... Sassy, self-confident, compassionate, helpful to a sister in need. Does not die. Yep, nicely half-full. Janet McTeer knocking it out of the park.

So that's where I would focus. Yes, a representation of a butch character that neither exoticizes nor excoriates. See the Butch Visibility Project for a little context.

If, however, I were to focus on the title role, Albert Nobbs... well, I'm afraid that's the "half-empty" part. And it's too bad, because this was apparently Glenn Close's project. In 1982, Close was in a stage production where she first performed the role. This was an adaptation of a short story by Irish author George Moore. She had a dream of making it into a film, which she worked toward for fifteen years. I wish I could say something nice about her portrayal.

Well, I can. It's not her fault. Someone else wrote the story. She plays a survivor of a gang rape, who has adopted male drag in order to secure better employment and (implied) indemnity from more assault. She appears to be in a freeze state of PTSD... either that, or arrested development. She has a nervous breakdown over a flea, nearly passes out at the sight of another woman's breasts, and (spoiler alert) has a heart attack over the excitement of a fist fight.

Let me just say here, it takes a lot of gumption for a woman to pass as a man. Especially in a culture with criminal penalities and incarceration for the deed. Nobbs' character just doesn't make sense. She appears more like Tony Hopkins' fussy butler from the BBC's Remains of the Day. Hate to say it, but it's more from the archive of prissy gay male stereotypes than any lexicon of lesbian butch characters. This is the kind of thing that can happen when  men attempt to create lesbian characters in the absence of visible butch culture.

There is a completely incoherent scene where the butch and Nobbs put on women's clothing (from the turn-of-the -century) and run along the beach. Nobbs is weeping with liberation. The metaphor is completely misguided, in my opinion, because it is their male clothing that has liberated them both. The female clothing signifies "other," subordinate status, sexual prey, economic dependence, and--as Nobbs trips and falls in the sand--serious literal as well as figurative challenges to mobility.

And while we're on half-empty...  the film depicts both Nobbs and then later the butch character sexually objectifying a femmy (and snotty) servant in the hotel where they work. Both of them are not above exploiting her out-of-wedlock motherhood and the stigma that goes with it, to pressure her into partnership with them. One might make the case that the glass is half-full in that they are chivalrously willing to come to her rescue. I see it as half-empty as the woman, clearly in love with another person (a man), is being pressured to prostitute herself in a coerced marriage for the sake of the baby. Not cool.

The author of the short story from which the stage play was adapted, from which the film was adapted, gives us some clues about the character of Albert.

George Moore attended a Catholic boarding school in England where he was the youngest of 150 boys. Not surprisingly, he had a breakdown and was sent home.When he returned, he refused to study the assigned subjects and was sent home for good. Later on, he made a career writing about prostitution, extramarital sex and lesbianism. According to Wikipedia, "Moore was believed by some to be impotent and was described as 'one who told but didn't kiss.'"

Gertrude Stein wrote about George in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. She describes him as "a very prosperous Mellin's Food baby." [See Mellin Food ad below.]

_Where am I going with this? I think that Albert Nobbs is Moore's alter-ego. He is writing about himself. He is writing about his surviving of  sexual assault, his desire to escape, his sense of delirious liberation in women's frocks. He is the one fainting at female nudity. He is the one who cannot dare imagine a woman being attracted to him.

You know what? George is half-full. He appears to have been quite a rebel, defying his school, going with a disreputable publisher, rejecting the church, taking part in the Irish Literary Revival, and disinheriting his brother...I'm going to give him a pass  for his appropriation of "passing women."

So, go see the film. Appreciate that Close is opening territory for women. And then enjoy every second of McTeer's remarkable performance.

“Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children, we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

These are the words of educational pioneer John Holt. They came to my mind when I sat down to write a review of Christine Stark’s ambitious first novel, Nickels.

Nickels is the story, told in a first-person narrative, of a survivor of paternal incest and maternal abandonment. The chapters are named for the age of the protagonist, and they advance in five year increments, beginning when “Little Miss So and So” is five and ending when she is twenty-five. Although Stark makes clear in her introduction that the story is not autobiographical, the authenticity of the heroine’s voices at these various ages and stages of development indicates—at least to this reader—that Stark has remarkable recall for the voices of childhood.

This is no small feat. Early childhood is a landscape of disconnected perceptions, whose causal links and contexts are not yet understood by the developing brain. It is a world of limited language and limited concepts… or perhaps the better word would be “restricted,” because the child must make sense of her world using templates handed to her and imposed upon her by the adult world. Childhood is a paradox. For all the confusion and intentional obfuscation, children manifest astounding clarity about the beauties of the natural world as well as the hypocrisies of the adult one. Sadly, most of us lose both the sense of wonder and of horror as we mature. It goes without saying—literally—that the child’s perspective is a challenge for most writers. When the child is a survivor, it becomes nearly impossible to retrieve that voice, because of the dissociation, amnesia, and denial associated with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD), which is the legacy of child sexual abuse.

Stark has done something in Nickels that deserves our attention. She has not only remembered, but she has resisted the impulse to editorialize. Instead, she has given us the pure voice of the survivor, and in doing that, she compels her readers to experience the world—fragmented, distorted, with fragile islands of comfort and familiarity—through the eyes and limited context of the child. And then she enables us to grow up along with that survivor, collecting and integrating the fragments of self along with her protagonist.

Thank you, Ms. Stark, for what must have been a descent into some kind of personal hell to recover this fictional Eurydice , this survivor with no name, whom you have led back up into the light of publication—an indictment and a torchbearer.

Forgetting childhood sometimes appears to be the primary goal of socialization, even as civilization promulgates evermore clever incentives for amnesia and evermore diabolical penalties for remembering.

Nickels is a tough read, like other novels about incest (Push by Sapphire, which was made into the film Precious, or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.) Historically, the culture has preferred perpetrator-identfied or apologist books like Lolita, depicting the survivor of child sexual abuse as a sexually precocious predator, or a shadowy figure around which the rest of the plot revolves. The trope of the survivor of incest in a father-knows-best world, like the 19th century trope of the “tragic octaroon” in a world of racial apartheid, is that of a lamentable anomaly in a system that otherwise works just fine for everybody. The incest survivor is a reminder of inconvenient truths, and writers and artists historically either pretend she does not exist or they—regretfully—kill her off (suicide, of course, being a form of death by remote control).

Stark does neither. Her protagonist survives. She comes to an understanding of what has been done to her, and as importantly, by whom it has been done. She has been victimized by her father and her mother, by a criminal justice system that fails her, by misguided social workers and foster parents, by mental health professionals and institutions. But she finds a community. She finds feminism. She recognizes her own lesbianism, a lesbianism that enabled her to form a powerful and passionate alliance with another girl at the age of ten. She begins to write and she finds her voice.

I want to give an example of Stark’s brilliant stream-of-consciousness, literary and spot-on accurate portrayal of PTSD. This is an excerpt from the chapter titled “Age Twenty-five.” A little backstory: When the heroine was ten her father made her wear a purse, where he would put the nickels he gave her after sexually abusing her. Now, she is in a women’s bookstore attempting to purchase a feminist novel:

"Sarah rings me up That’ll be 1.95 with tax I give her two dollars five cents is your change she drops a nickel so shiny and bright into my hand I freeze the nickel rolls off my hand onto the counter I stare at it I want to tell someone something the nickel circles itself on the counter looking for a place to settle I don’t move What’s going on Tara says somewhere over my shoulder I stare at the nickel spinning in a spot next to the pile of bright pink A Room of One’s Own bookmarks I shake my head I don’t want them to think I’m crazy don’t want them to know a nickel dropped out of the sky into my hand made me want to die Keep the change I grab the book walk under the shimmering crystal into the street"

This is how it happens, integration of trauma: moment-by-moment, association-by-association, synaptic-connection-by-synaptic-connection, by constant negotiation between past and present, telling and not-telling, depairing and hoping, heaven and hell.

Thank you, Christine, for the gift.

(Nickels (ISBN: 978-1615990856) is available at bookstores, online booksellers, and can also be purchased as a Kindle download. For information about Stark and her other work, visit her website.

In her  book, The Symbiotic Planet: Evolution by Merger, geo-scientist Lynn Margulis has put forth what she calls the “Gaia Concept.”  What this is, is a serial endosymbiosis theory of evolution.

And you thought this was going to be about food . . .

Bear with me, because the food chain we all learned about in grade school is on the brink of becoming the food potluck—a paradigm shift so major that it’s going to make the discovery of fire look like an evolutionary weenie roast. What we are witnessing is the closing down of our homo sapiens executive dining room in favor of a more democratic, more inclusive, inter-species, employee lunchroom. And it’s all about the “Gaia Concept.”

So just what is this “serial endosymbiosis” that Margulis is talking about? In a nutshell, it’s a theory about relationships not just between plants and animals, but also between them and atmospheric gases, surface rocks, and water, which she maintains are regulated by the growth, death, integration and other activities of living organisms. In other words, it’s about the entire ecosystem of the Earth’s surface as a series of interacting ecosystems, which is definitely not your grandmother’s theory of evolution.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, the book that made a monkey out of creation theory. Darwin’s theory of evolution was about survival of the fittest: Random genetic mutations would lead to “natural selection,” whereby the more rugged or adaptive species would multiply and be fruitful, while the less rugged, less adaptive species would die out. In other words, according to Darwin, competition was good for us. This notion led to something called “Social Darwinism,” a convenient rationale for the rampant and predatory capitalism that characterized the Industrial Revolution and which continues, under various guises, to manifest itself today.

But, Margulis has looked at the numbers, and they just don’t add up.  She makes the point that genetic mutations, although common and easy to induce, rarely lead to changes that are beneficial to the organism. In other words, one’s chances for becoming the lucky host of an advantageous change in DNA structure are considerably worse than those for winning the lottery—and the chances are even slimmer of becoming the founder of a new species, based on such a rare mutation.

Margulis argues that evolutionary advances are achieved, not by good genes and natural selection, but by a species’ success in achieving symbiotic mergers with other species. And just as Darwinism coincided with the economic movements of its day, Margulis’ theory appears to be right on time for a planet that has been ravaged by the proponents of Social Darwinism and headed toward a global economy.

In explaining to the lay person how symbiosis works, Margulis uses the example of lichen. Lichen is a combination of two organisms living in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most of the lichen is composed of fungal filaments, but among these filaments are green algal cells.  If the lichen is submerged in water, the fungus will die out and the algae will proliferate. On the other hand, if there is an inadequate amount of sunlight to sustain the algae’s photosynthesis, then it will die out, leaving the fungus to its own devices. The algae gains a structure that enables it to live on land, and the fungus benefits from the food-making capacity of the algae.

Moving to mammals for her examples of symbiosis, Margulis describes the cow, not as an entity, but as a fifty-gallon fermentation vat. The cow does not digest the grass it eats. The grass is digested by the organisms that are growing—yes, symbiotically—inside its gut.

Having led us gently by the hand from lichen to cow, she now asks us to make the leap from cow to human. And here Margulis is not so gentle. She informs us that we are all hosting eyelash mites. All of us. It doesn’t matter that we take a shower every morning; we still have them. And she invites us to look at our body fluids through the lens of a microscope in order to see the plethora of exotic critters living out their lives, as it were, under our very noses. Having brought us along this far, she then asks us to consider the colon. And here, even the most rabid Darwinist must pause before the void.

The colon is host to the bacteria that constitute the largest percentage of the dry weight of the human body. And whether we like it or not, these bacteria constitute a de facto Lower GI Tract Tenants’ Association. When we are not eating with proper symbiotic respect for the needs of the bacteria in our gut, they die out or the more harmful ones proliferate, and we find, like most landlords, that unhappy tenants have a way of making their problems into problems for the landlords. Unhappy colon bacteria can form pockets of resistance, trash the place, or stage a sit-down strike.

The early 21st century has seen an unprecedented breakdown in communication between the bacterial tenants’ association and the landlord homo sapiens. Perhaps in a simpler time and place, when the human scavenger’s choices were narrowed to a unripe yam, a ripe yam, or a rotten yam, the bacteria had less to fear from the appetites of the landlord.  But in the year 2002, the human forager faces a staggering array of substances for ingesting. Notice, I say “substances,” not “food.” There was actually a time when the food industry granted an award for the “invention” of foods from substances not usually considered edible. Cool Whip forever distinguished itself by being the first, and subsequently most difficult to top, recipient. Even when the substances ingested are the more traditional fruits and vegetables of the human habitat, the consumer discovers that these have been “enhanced” with dyes, their shelf lives have been extended by the use of preservatives, the crop yield has been multiplied by dousing with pesticides, and, most recently, unnatural selection via genetic engineering has been imposed in the name of some surreal, corporate survival of the fittest—which the Supreme Court now informs us have the legals rights of persons.

Our intestinal bacteria, which are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of non-corporate evolution, are at a loss to come up with the one-in-a-bazillion kind of genetic mutations that might, over eons, enable them to adapt to what we are eating today.

Unable to cope with the increasing volume of toxins, the gut has taken to passing some of the garbage on to the bloodstream. The infamous “leaky gut syndrome” is the culprit behind strange new constellations of such seemingly unrelated symptoms as neuro-fibromyalgia, sleep disturbances, panic attacks, migraine headaches, mysterious skin lesions, and debilitating fatigue. What happens in “leaky gut syndrome” is that nutrients meant to be absorbed into the body are suddenly being taken out with the trash through the colon, while substances meant to stay in the intestine are entering the bloodstream where they trigger immune-system responses as foreign invaders. Absorbing more toxins while excreting valuable nutrients, the beleaguered body becomes more and more overwhelmed with work orders, even as it’s experiencing a cut-back in payroll.  Meanwhile, the CEO’s vote themselves another raise in appetite. Not a good situation, as any union mediator can tell you. In the final stages of this deteriorating economy, the Mafiosi of the gut, Candida albicans--also known as yeast, begins to get a parasitic toehold, and there goes the neighborhood.

Auto-immune diseases and allergies, especially food allergies, are on the rise, and we have arrived at the endgame of the food chain. Having arrogantly constructed a theory of consumption that places us at the top of the heap, we have made the potentially fatal error of overlooking our dependence on micro-organisms. The food chain theory goes like this: We eat the big animals who eat the little animals who eat the big plants who eat the little plants, and so on back to the pond scum. (Did somebody say “spirulina?”) We have deluded ourselves into believing that, as long as we humans continued to pay out thousands of dollars to have our bodies incinerated after death or pickled in toxic preservatives, we could lay claim to a dubious, but unique status in the animal world as the only species that eats, but is never eaten.

But Darwinism is failing us. We have made valiant efforts to colonize our native bodies, imposing our artificially-manipulated, corporately-driven, commercial consumerism on the inhabitants of our various viscera. We have even come up with systems of psychology, spirituality, and philosophy to rationalize this new territorial imperative: We believe that our illnesses are the result of repressed psychological needs, of abuse at the hands of our dysfunctional families, of previous karma from past lives, of negative thinking. We bring in ever more drastic implements of surgical intervention, ever more bewildering and toxic medications—anaesthetizing or poisoning our grumbling constituencies into silence and provoking new conflagrations among previously peaceful inhabitants.

We are having as much difficulty controlling our colonies as Great Britain was having controlling theirs at the turn of the previous century, and our evolution will force us to the same conclusion:  We cannot afford our colonies. Humans have no new colons to conquer. Much as it offends our theories of species superiority, we must yield to the demands of the native, single-cell organisms to whom we owe our health, whom we have systematically oppressed, and who have consistently demonstrated not only more intelligence in their operations (“wisdom” is not too strong a word), but who have also held the high ground morally, in sustaining an ethic of cooperation, shared benefits, and input from all levels of production—even with all the forces of late-twentieth-century agribusiness and biotechnology arrayed against them.

We have lost our free lunch, but what we will be gaining at the interspecies potluck is an incredible pooling of diverse resources. We will find ourselves allies, where formerly we could only dream of domination.  Listening to other species as if our lives depend on it—which they do—we stand on the threshold of undreamed of modes of communication. And the devastating isolation of predatory individualism that has bred so much paranoia, insecurity, and desperation will break up when we begin to understand that we have never been alone, that we have always lived—even in our most delusional, destructive grandiosity—in symbiotic relation to all of the other forms of life on this planet, and in symbiotic relationship with the very earth, air, and water itself.

Surrendering our crowns as kings and queens of the species, we will apply ourselves diligently to winning the true crown of the creation pageant—that which is awarded for most congeniality. As the models for property ownership yield to an understanding of the responsibilities of stewardship, our orientation toward food will undergo a natural evolution. And eating what best supports symbiosis, we may just acquire a taste for life.

I'm going to keep this short. I don't want to bore myself.

I recently ordered a play. I rarely do that. But this was the first play written by a woman to be produced on the main stage at the Royal National Theatre. Furthermore, it was a play about women's history... the Suffrage Movement in England, to be exact. And... it dealt with a lesbian love story! It garnered four-star reviews in most of the London papers, and even managed three in The Times.

Needless to say, I was intrigued.

I've been writing plays about women's history featuring lesbian love stories for a quarter century. Not coincidentally, I have also been writing about the censorship of lesbian and feminist drama for that long.  Had there been some kind of cultural revolution in the West End that I had missed?  Or was there something about the play itself?  I had to find out.

Okay, I promised to keep this brief:

1) The title: Her Naked Skin. Whew... Thank the Goddess she had enough sense to give it a title that showed some skin!  And how clever of her! Like the woman who shows a little cleavage in the board room... All one has to do is think of the titles of Suffrage books to realize the strategic brilliance of  Ms. Lenkiewicz' title. Just imagine a West End play with a title like "Shoulder to Shoulder," or "Women Who Dare," or "The Fighting Days..." 

Moving on.

2) It opens with a woman's apparent suicide. Well, actually, that's controversial.   It's a rather celebrated death, actually. Emily Wilding Davison was a militant Suffragist. She had been a hunger striker in Holloway. She had planted a bomb in the Prime Minister's home. She had also taken extraordinary measures to follow a course of study at Oxford at a time when Oxford did not grant degrees to women. This, of course, allowed her to be a governess... which is something like a glorified nanny.

Davison's apparent suicide was occasioned by her running out onto the track with a Suffrage banner just as the King's horse was rounding the bend. She was trampled to death. Some think she intended to die. Personally, I think she planned to attach the banner to the ass of the King's horse and make him advertise her cause. She died with a return rail ticket and a ticket to a women's dance in her pocket. I think she was planning to celebrate. On the other hand, she had intentionally thrown herself thirty feet down an iron staircase in Holloway.

Her Naked Skin opens with Emily in front of a mirror. How reassuringly female! Because even Suffragists on their way to their death care about their looks! The gramophone gets stuck... Emily does not fix it immediately. A metaphor for the broken-record quality of women's demands for equality? The annoying redundancy of our political movements? And then the script calls for a projection of the authentic, grainy, nearly indecipherable, 1913 newsreel footage of her death. The playwright acknowledges in the stage directions the obscurity of the imagery, but notes that "the general impression of the film is that something has 'happened.'"

Brilliant.

But I promised to be brief.

3) There is a lesbian love story: An upper-class, married Suffragist meets and falls in love with a fellow Suffragist, a factory worker, in prison. There is a scene that calls for their semi-nudity in bed. I'm assuming the naked half would mean their  breasts exposed. This is always good for box office. I know because I am a producer sometimes. When word gets 'round that there are bare titties in a show, there is a certain demographic who would otherwise never set foot in a women's theatre. Again, a good move. And, of course, with a title like Her Naked Skin... well, what choice did she have?

4) There is an onstage assault of a woman. In fact, it would appear to be the obligatory scene... more so even than the sex. The infamous force-feeding of the hunger strikers in Holloway is heavily foreshadowed in scene after scene. When it finally arrives, it is all we can hope for: The victim is, of course, the working-class lesbian. She is man-handled, bound, her orifice is pried open, a phallic tube is inserted, with descriptions of how many inches of penetration. There are two--count 'em--two gags. The stage directions indicate that the actor should shake and choke.  A suggestive mix of raw egg and brandy is forced into her mouth. According to the stage directions, the actor must  regurgitate it over her own face. Imagine... a pornographic "money shot" on the main stage at the National Theatre!  As I say, brilliant.

5) The lesbians break up. The factory worker is jealous about the fact that her lover has had other affairs (with men) before meeting her. Doesn't make sense to me either, but then, the factory worker also keeps going on about wishing she could have been a virgin. The only thing I can guess is that virginity and monogamy, being obsessions for heterosexual men, were introduced to help them identify with the characters. The fact is this: Lesbian audiences are never going to fill the National. Straight men and their girlfriends and wives will. If the playwright plays her cards right.

6) There is an onstage suicide attempt... again, by the working-class lesbian. She slits her wrists into a basin. Blood is specified. And... wait for it... before she does it, she takes her clothes off! All the way... because the stage directions call for a sponge bath! Naked lesbian AND lesbian suicide, in the same scene!  I'm speechless.

7) The working-class lesbian marries unhappily. Her punishment for surviving the wrist-slitting.

8) The upper-class lesbian has an Ibsenian ending, walking out on her husband and her seven (7!) children. Oh... but she stops and checks herself in a mirror on the way out. Get it?  The way Emily did at the top of the show, on the way to her suicide/death? Women and mirrors... the bookends for the action. Revolution is what happens to us between primping.

And that, my friends, is how it's done. That is how to get your women's history/lesbian play into a first-class theatre with good reviews.

Excuse me. I think I'll go back to my failures...  Which you can check out  at www.carolyngage.com.

See also: "How I Came To Write A Play Where the Lesbian Doesn't Kill Herself."

Today my world shifted a smidge on its axis. Today, I took in a painting. Really took it in. The painting is “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Stephanie Frostad, and the reason I took it in is that I watched a video where Ms. Frostad described her process in the creation of it. (The interview with Frostad begins 6:45 minutes into the video.)

The painting is named for the Biblical parable about the return of a son who has been away from home, wasting his family's money by living a life of irresponsible debauchery. Upon his penitent return, he is welcomed by his parents, who celebrate by slaughtering the “fatted calf.” The parable is filled with themes near and dear to Christian theologists: the redemption of the sinner, unconditional forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and so on.

Frostad has done something shocking. She has told the story—in painting—from the perspective of the calf, its mother, and the sober, responsible son who has stayed at his post, as a steward of the land and of the animals. The idyllic, pastoral relationship between the mother cow and her calf dominate the painting to such a degree that it appears at first glance to be a portrait of cows. The next most visible figure is what Frostad refers to as the “dutiful son.” In her video, there is a close-up of this figure. He stands aloof, watching the joyful reunion with a poker face. What is he feeling? Anger, ambivalence, resentment, skepticism, disgust?

Finally, way in the background, is the scene that takes center stage in the Bible—the reunion of the wastrel son and his grieving parents. The figures are so tiny, they almost appear to be stick figures, their personalities reduced to gesture.

On the three-month anniversary of the most dangerous nuclear accident on the planet, with radiation continuing to spew into ocean and air, I experienced a paradigm shift as I viewed Frostad’s work and as I listened to her words. The story—the real story, the important story—is the cow and her calf, the sanctity of the innocent. The drama of the disconnected, dissociated son returning home, because he has finally run through his resources and is out of options, seems suddenly small, insignificant, obscene, out-of-focus. Who cares about him? And why should any more of the planet's precious resources be wasted on him? Frostad has finally put the story of the prodigal son in its true, planetary perspective... and along with it, the toxic theology and pedagogy that spawned it. No small thing.

I am a playwright, and this drama of the bad-boy acting out  occupies an inordinate amount of the canon of Western drama. It is perpetually compelling. There was an entire school of  "angry young man" plays. And the ongoing parade of "mommy-shocking" films. There is the angst of the dying salesman, the corporate criminal, the hubris-ridden king, the corrupt politician. Whatever will become of them? Will they be saved in time by the love of a good woman(or man... but mostly woman)? Will they die unrepentant? Will the long-suffering partner be amply rewarded by a show of gratitude? And then the homecoming... the tearful reunion, the joyous return to the marital bed, the father-son reconciliation, the sentimental return to the mother's embrace...

Let's face it: The addict takes focus. Why wouldn't he or she? The addict's actions are dramatically erratic and potentially disastrous, the monstrous selfishness is compelling to watch, the mounting debt and burden of guilt carry their own momentum. It's a plot that fairly writes itself. The storyline of the victims is nowhere near as fun. And the sober citizen? Well....zzzzzzz.

At least this is how  we have been conditioned. This is The Story. This how women learn about relationships with men, how children learn about relationships to parents, how minority cultures learn about relationships with the dominant culture, how underdeveloped countries learn about relationships to developed ones, how workers learn about relationships to bosses, how underclasses learn about relationships to the privileged classes, and so on.

We watch with anguish as these favored "prodigal sons" of patriarchal culture repeatedly betray our loyalty, as they take our resources and squander them on their selfish pleasure. We wring our hands, wondering when they will realize how much they owe us, when they will come back and make amends. And if they do return (invariably for more access to our resources), we are just desperate or self-deceived enough to receive them back with open arms, eager to spare them any humiliation... and pressing upon them more of our already-plundered resources.

The parable of the prodigal son plays out in our unending hopes that the men who run the governments and the corporations will gain a smidgeon of self-awareness, some glimmer of compassion for the lives that are so affected by their greed-driven, war-mongering policies. The drama of the return of the prodigal plays out in our living rooms with the focus on the addict or the alcoholic—with whole families held hostage to whims of this most banal of diseases. What is so fascinating about the self-absorption of the dissociated individual, or government, or corporation?  It must be our investment. The investment of a parent in the child they have raised. The investment of the lover in her partner. The investment of the electorate who has campaigned for a candidate. The investment of the stockholders in a corporation. And the investment of the just plain desperate, whose already hellish lives can actually be made worse.

But this drama, as Frostad makes so clear has nothing in common with the natural world, its seasons and its cycles. Our investments have been misplaced and we must collectively cut our losses. It is time for the “dutiful son”-- those on the planet who are attempting to live moderate, sustainable, environmentally conscientious lives--to turn away from this tedious drama of redemption, to reject the pseudo romance of reconciliation, to refuse to kill any more fatted calves for this obscene celebration of non-accountability. And it is time for the “dutiful son” to examine destructive loyalties to a family that is so absorbed in that drama that it cannot focus its priorities.

Looking at Frostad’s painting, I am aware that the peaceful relationship of cow and calf is about to be shattered, that the animals are oblivious to the distant drama that can seal their fate. But the figures do not come off as vulnerable or as victims. Frostad has painted them as integral to nature. It is as if she wants the viewer to understand that this essential rightness of relation in the natural world will endure, and that it is the unstable and disconnected humans who will be displaced.

What this painting has done for me is to push me to examine all the ways in which I have internalized the drama of the return of the prodigal as a meaningful narrative. What are the ways I am complicit with it? Am I still susceptible to the romance of redemption, to the paradigm of the mother, eternally delighted to reward the males who show any signs of coming home, thrilled at any return, however meager, of my investment? Am I the father, flush with the power of "forgiveness," sponsoring the prodigal back into the family? Am I the prodigal herself, expecting the world to be waiting for me with open arms when I realize the extent of my profligacy, arrogance, participation in a culture of  greed and exploitation?

The parable of the prodigal son is a tale of enabling, and it has always been a luxury. Now, as it has become a planetary imperative for all us to be learn what it means to become "right-sized," we need to flip the parable, as Frostad has done, privileging the narratives of the innocent and of the accountable. We need to shrink the romance of the reformed sinner to a distant memory from a dying planet.