Women in Edward Bond PDF
Preview Women in Edward Bond
Women in Edward Bond TRANSATLANTIC STUDIES IN BRITISH AND NORTH AMERICAN CULTURE Edited by Marek Wilczyński VOLUME 25 Susana Nicolás Román (ed.) Women in Edward Bond Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in theinternet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2364-2882 ISBN 978-3-631-77365-9 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-77443-4 (E-Book) E-ISBN 978-3-631-77444-1 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-77445-8 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b15005 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2019 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.com To Elizabeth Bond, the woman Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................ 9 Susana Nicolás Román My Female Characters. An interview with Edward Bond ............................... 13 Sam Haddow Are We Saved yet? Riot, Revival and the Feminine Passive in Saved ............. 25 Susana Nicolás Román Female Wickedness and Violence: Narrow Road to the Deep North and Lear ................................................................................... 37 Susana Nicolás Román The Revolutionary Woman in Human Cannon ................................................ 51 Harry Derbyshire “Four-square behind the Sputum”: Dramatic Form, Female Characters and Implacable Politics in Restoration and Summer ......................................... 65 David Tuaillon Other Mothers Courage: The War Plays ............................................................. 93 Kate Katafiasz Castrated Ladies: Bond’s Mirthless Mothers ..................................................... 129 Chris Cooper Strong and Active Women in the Big Brum Plays ............................................ 151 Introduction Women in Bond focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond’s writing. While different studies have examined the violence present in his plays or his dra- matic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. Remarkably, the presence of women in Bond’s plays is dominant in contrast to his contemporary playwrights. Female protagonists and powerful secondary characters abound in Bond from the begin- ning of his career. And the author himself has often stated that he was interested in women’s problems. Yet, the metaphysical human condition Bond describes is not gender-specific. Bond’s human world is one that inscribes its figures in an apocalyptic aura, but it is a world in which the word ‘human’ subsumes both male and female voices without prevailing conditions. This collection approaches femininity focusing on the importance of the his- torical and social context in which women grow as characters. This project has mainly concentrated on women in Bond’s plays, describing and studying their evolution; discussing the forces that influenced their depiction; and illustrating their significance in his writing, and more generally, their relation to the depic- tion of women in modern society. In the following chapters, Bond’s progress in the conception and delineation of female characters will be analyzed through a grouping of plays which mark distinctive stages of development. In his early plays from Saved (1965) until The Woman (1978), we find op- pressed women with the only possibility to show their presence in the world through violence. Bond himself assumed that men are the same as women for this effect: “I put women on an equal status with men: they have to accept responsibility for changing their society, not merely be its victims, acquiescing or otherwise” (Stuart, 1995: 201). We find powerful examples of female evil in Early Morning, Lear, Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Sea. The characterization of these figures aligns different traces to femininity such as religious obsession, sexual power or craving desire for extreme torture. The later female-focused plays can be interpreted as depictions of female responses to the same suffering and limit situations. From The Woman, Bond’s main domain is on political and social heroines in different historical contexts. Opposingly to the early women, these heroines (Restoration, Human Cannon, The War Plays, Summer) take ac- tion and change their society becoming the voice of the author and his political commitment.
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