Lesbian Versions of the Female Biography Play: Emma Donoghue’s I Know My Own Heart and Ladies and Gentlemen

Mária Kurdi

The Irish-born writer, Emma Donoghue, author of widely acclaimed, award-winning novels and anthologized short stories, is also a leading feminist historian who explores changing notions about and linguistic representations of sex between women in her works of non-fiction. Her 1993 study of British lesbian culture during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1668-1801), Passions Between Women, contains invaluable data and source material regarding the subject, offering a detailed discussion of the related discursive practices and their operation in the given socio-cultural context. Besides producing fiction and scholarly work, Donoghue has also written works for the stage, stating, in an interview that

Drama for me has provided the biggest excitements of my career. There’s nothing like working with a group of actors in rehearsal, seeing them add at least 100 percent to the material, seeing them act it out on stage and make it real and live and exciting in a way that I’m not sure a novel can be. And theatre is unspeakably live … if it works well it can hold people gripped.¹⁸⁴

Two of her plays are available in print: I Know My Own Heart (first performed in 1993) and Ladies and Gentlemen (first performed in 1996). They fit into the Donoghue canon as dramatized interpretations of the lesbian experience by giving voice to historical characters, who lived in early nineteenth-century Britain and late nineteenth-century America respectively. The protagonist of I Know My Own Heart is Anne Lister (1791-1849), a woman belonging to the landed class who, as testified by her journals, had love affairs with women. Primarily, the play focuses on her feelings for a farmer’s daughter, Marianne, and the dilemmas inherent in the relationship for both under the pressures of the patriarchal society. Annie Hindle (ca. 1847-19??), the English-born protagonist of Ladies and Gentlemen is presented at the time of her return to the stage as male impersonator after a few years’ absence during which she lived in seclusion married to a woman, her former dresser called Ryanny. The play is constructed of a series of recollections, which portray the history of the two women’s relationship. To a degree, – Donoghue’s works for the stage continue the explorations of Passions Between Women in a different performative genre noted for its evocative immediacy by the writer herself, and look at the century following the one studied in the book revealing how varied and decisive a period it was as far as both the individual expression and the communal treatment of same-sex attachment between women were concerned.

In the introduction to their 1997 volume Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis argue that the recent ‘progressive social changes or disturbing revelations’ in the Republic of Ireland ‘have given an urgency to the issues of gender and sexuality, and have been accompanied by a growing intellectual awareness of the extent to which social experience, past and present, is gendered’.¹⁸⁵ An obvious sign of the thorough revisioning of Ireland’s gender politics at the time was the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1993. Notably, the first two lesbian-feminist plays for the Irish stage had been written a few years before 1993, to ‘challenge the sexual imbalance prominent in Irish theatre and society at large’ by Joni Core, in the wake of which came Louise Callaghan’s attempt to dramatize the life of Kate O’Brien.¹⁸⁶ Having left Ireland for Canada in 1990, Donoghue, however, set neither of the plays examined here in Ireland of the 1990s, where the lesbian experience had just started to become more visible as part of the above cited increasing concern with the implications of gender and sexual practices for the society. She places the subject in a broader, international perspective by introducing English, American, and Irish protagonists who are based on real persons, having lived at the two ends of the nineteenth century and in markedly different social circumstances. I Know My Own Heart and Ladies and Gentlemen treat historical material similarly to several pieces of Donoghue’s fiction. Her historical retrospect is explained in the above cited interview as follows: ‘It’s not like I have one of those wonderfully varied biographies to draw on, of being a rodeo woman and nun. I don’t have great decades of experience of life … so I have to rely on my research skills quite a lot.’¹⁸⁷

The two dramatic works qualify as versions of the biography play, presenting a kind of gender-sensitive as well as interrogative life-writing for the stage which defines its own strategies against the male-dominated traditions of the genre. Neither do they share a conceptual basis with contemporary, postmodern examples of the biography play which stage a variety of cultural constructions and media-represented versions of the main character, revealing but a void at the centre. As a feminist writer Donoghue is not interested in the concept of the disappearance of the subject, yet her approach undermines its stability when couteracting the lesbian subject’s exclusion from theatrical representation. Theorizing biography plays by women Ryan Claycomb in Modern Drama claims that

Instead of focusing on recovering the identities of the women themselves … they focus on the real-life acts and transgressive gender performances of feminist and protofeminist women. These plays avoid merely holding up historical women as museum pieces removed by time from their audiences; they choose, instead … [to] turn their critical eye to the historical gender performances being recovered, as well as to the process of that recovery, the performance of doing biography itself, and the paths by which we, as postmodern readers and audience members, have access to these historical acts.¹⁸⁸

Donoghue’s biography play constructs disjointed narratives alongside the employment of ‘scenic presentation … to create a realistic atmosphere’,¹⁸⁹ by which she reflects on the protagonists’ subjective landscape and strife for agency at the expense of attempting to offer as complete a picture of the chosen lives as possible. Moreover, the writer’s enterprise is unique in that she cuts across the boundaries of genre and gender, integrating specific features of lesbian feminist dramaturgy. This chapter intends to analyse how these dimensions and choices underpin both plays, as well as to investigate the historical and cultural embedding of the lesbian protagonists’ subjectivity and self-professed otherness. At the same time, the essay will be concerned with the potential of the multiple effects that such an experimental combination evokes to refresh the understanding of alternative generic and gender formations.

Through several examples of the contemporary female biography play from the English-speaking world, including Blood and Ice by Liz Lochhead about the person of Mary Shelley, Claycomb points out that they are imbued with acts and tropes of performance to ‘foreground the representations of subjectivity’.¹⁹⁰ Donoghue’s protagonists are shown performing what had made their figures known. Anne Lister, whose journal written in secret codes about her relationships with women was found and decoded only long after her death, and Annie Hindle, ‘the first woman … to specialize in male impersonation in the music hall’¹⁹¹ often appear involved in writing and performing on stage respectively. Along with its contradictions, the progress in the history of women’s developing opportunities for creative expression throughout the nineteenth century becomes foregrounded by the performance of these activities.

Anne and her long-time friend Tib read from Jane Austen’s new novel in I Know My Own Heart; the intertextual insertion calls attention to writing by women as the main form of how they could assert their subjectivity with comparative freedom for much of the nineteen hundreds. The quotation which describes Emma’s ‘admiring those soft blue eyes’¹⁹² of Harriet seems to illustrate that within the female-authored novel may be found a coded text which implies its author’s unconventional desires, functioning not unlike the journal Miss Lister was keeping. Austen’s novels and this play by Donoghue are set in the same period and feature a similar country lifestyle. They also share the writing of letters as a strategy to suggest that middle-class women’s communication with each other often took such forms due to the scarcity of occasions or places, save the church, where they could have met and talked unchaperoned outside the carefully guarded confines of the family home. Evaluating Jane Austen’s letters, Deborah Kaplan claims that Austen and the women (relatives and friends) who were the addressees of the majority of her letters ‘experienced the doubleness of participation in both a woman’s culture and the general, gentry culture’. In contrast with her novels, which represent ‘a public and ideological form’ and, thus, ‘resist expression of cultural contradictions’, Austen’s letters, representing an uncensored, private genre, ‘express multiple, indeed even opposing, cultural values’.¹⁹³ It is with a similar effect that, beside the frequently performed act of Anne writing her journal, the female characters’ penning of letters to each other is staged in I Know My Own Heart. Marianne’s decision to leave her husband and stay with Anne is rejected by the latter: ‘My aunt would never permit it, what with my uncle bedridden and your husband likely to ride up at any moment with a brace of pistols’ (137). The letter Marianne writes to Anne upon her arrival back home words the ambiguity of having to do the consensually right thing while personal feelings revolt against it: ‘My dearest, truest husband, here I am back in Lawton Hall. I shrink from sharing a house with Charles …’ (139).

The English-born Annie Hindle, the protagonist of Ladies and Gentlemen, came on the scene in the United States ‘when the female emancipation movement was growing more vociferous and demanding. On stage, unruly women disguised as men were less threatening …’.¹⁹⁴ Thus the socio-cultural changes permeating the contemporary discourse of gender facilitated Annie’s debut as a dedicated cross-dressing performer, starting to pursue an inevitably public form of creative art. Part of the entertainment provided by the vaudeville and variety shows that emerged in post-bellum American society included the performance of both female and male impersonators: ‘female assumptions of male identity appeared in the theatre as a novelty, a salacious turn, a secular Johnny-come-lately’ as Laurence Senelick observes.¹⁹⁵ On the one hand, female members of Annie Hindle’s audiences may well have cherished a secret longing to dress and behave as freely as men, thus for them to watch Annie’s acting male in an unrestrained manner was perhaps a kind of wish-fulfilment. Male spectators, on the other hand, were gratified to see that the transgressive inclinations of woman, the never fully reliable ‘other’, could be contained in a public institution, the theatre; a place known for creating illusion while leaving reality intact as nineteenth-century popular drama trained the audience. In this Donoghue play, a life centred on performance is portrayed, doubling the characteristic that theatre ‘proceeds through a process of impersonation and role-play’, with which Ladies and Gentlemen enhances its dramatic potential to ‘function as a critical site for exploring the constitution of identity through performativity’.¹⁹⁶

Donoghue’s title, Ladies and Gentlemen, in this respect may be seen as invested with dual meaning. While it evokes a crucial theme of the play, gender, it exposes its constructed status through its coincidence with a well-known staple of the theatre and the world of performance, namely the phrase used to address an audience. The two meanings interact in an intriguing way: the binary formulation of the subject of gender carried by the title is undermined as the reference to theatre suggests that the gender divide is created through acts of illusion, which makes it slippery and opens it up to interrogation. Concurrently, ‘in the dressing-room of a New York vaudeville theatre’¹⁹⁷ as setting the items of costume, make-up and other requisites like the wig, false moustache or beard emphasize that theatre is a privileged site of performative acts to reinforce or unfix gender through self-conscious role-playing and playing with roles.

Drag performance, however, is not necessarily recognized as parody. Implicated as it inevitably is in hegemonic power relations, it may signify many different, even contradictory things to its viewers.¹⁹⁸ Annie’s inspired exploration of masculine identity manages to persuade women attending her shows that she could be taken for a real, desirable man. The drama includes a letter from one of her young female admirers, who makes the confession: ‘Darling Mr Hindle, please oh please oh please leave off this pretence that you are a woman only dressed as a man … I told my mother I know you are a real true man and I intend for to marry you’ (38). The possibility of equating the performing female body with authentic masculinity highlights that the latter is itself an act, contrary to beliefs about its allegedly stable nature. For Annie, male impersonation does not mean a mere imitation of men’s behaviour, a speciality of her performance being that she appeared not in the stereotypical roles that lovers of the music-hall had been accustomed to, but acted as an individual. Not just mimicking clichés of masculinity but creating something new, she surpasses the citational nature of the performative act, and achieves what Judith Butler posits as the possibility of ‘a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style’.¹⁹⁹ Believing in the transformational power of role-playing Annie re-negotiates gender by unfixing the norms that define masculinity as a stable category and constructs herself to look ‘the model of modern man’ on stage, a protean being as her favourite song, ‘A Real Man’, puts it into words (103):

I’ve been to the east and I’ve been to the west

From Philly right through to San Fran

Of the fellers I’ve met I’m the out-and-out best

I’m the model of modern man.

Further associations are propelled as a reference in the drama reminding us that this was the time when Oscar Wilde, whose principles notoriously contested the limitations of Victorian identity formation on virtually all fronts, gender and sexuality included, visited the United States to give lectures on aesthetics.

Biography plays by women, to refer to Claycomb again, explore as well as critique the past by portraying the lives they focus on in context.²⁰⁰ The mores of the respective societies, with their coercive influence on the protagonists themselves as represented in Donoghue’s works, form a significant part of this critique, from the particular angle of how psychologically and discursively transgressive gender behaviour managed to assert itself, and how these assertions were received. As an heiress to landed property, Miss Lister’s life in I Know My Own Heart is conspicuously enmeshed in problems related to class differences, the private interest compromised by communal expectations. In her comments on the play, Anna McMullan observes: ‘the central character is not romanticized – we are aware of her class position operating in relation to her socially marginalized sexuality, producing a complex profile of privilege and constraint, confidence and vulnerability’.²⁰¹ Social prejudice seems to overwhelm individual needs: when Anne Lister notices her sexual attraction to the daughter of a farmer, Marianne Brown, it is not so much sexual inhibitions but class-conscious reservations that she has to overcome in herself. Paradoxically, women of similar social standing did not arouse suspicion even if they maintained a very close friendship, since ‘The generality of people don’t suspect that such a thing [female homosexuality] exists’ as Marianne remarks (117). It is in this context that Anne’s encouraging Marianne, already her secret lover, to marry her older suitor, a man of means and with a good name can be understood. However, the grammatical nuances of her discourse betray how ambivalent she is concerning the subject:

ANNE. Lawton Hall is a prosperous estate; I seem to recall visiting it as a child. I should rejoice at such a marriage for you.

MARIANNE. Would you?

ANNE. I said should, not would. I ought to rejoice at it, and I would certainly seem to (112).

‘Should’, however, is not the same as ‘would’, she quickly adds, because she is also aware of the emotional cost to both of them of her partner having, as a married woman, all the usual legal and bodily duties. However, there is no way for the two women to live together; only complete financial independence could make it possible for women to abandon their social bindings and start a new life like the Irish Ladies of Llangollen who, according to historical record, had inherited family money to sponsor their unconventional set-up far away from their original home.

In Ladies and Gentlemen Annie Hindle does have the financial background to marry her lover, the Irish-born dresser Ryanny, but they cannot continue as an accepted ‘normal’ couple in their own environment, even though it is the bohemian world of vaudeville shows. The troupe’s boss, Tony Pastor, appears in Donoghue’s play in a way that complicates if not subverts the idealized image theatre history seems to have of him as an ambitious manager bent on serving audience needs to guard his reputation and remain financially successful in a highly competitive cultural milieu. Therefore he tends to measure even the private behaviour of members of the troupe against the moral views of the public, conservative and unflinchingly heteronormative though they may well be. True, his worried harangues such as: ‘I don’t want any whiff of scandal attached to my Grand Speciality Troupe, you hear? … It makes me nervous as hell having Ella hang round with that Mansfield moll’ (33) provoke laughter. Yet they underscore that the performers are not at all free from the cultural and economic constraints of Victorian America. Tony has a ‘show-book’, which prescribes what the impersonator is to do on stage to provide the audience with the amount of fun they expect for their money. A woman impersonating the opposite gender on stage, even to great audience acclaim, was one thing, but appropriating the male prerogative and living with a wife in public was quite another. Consequently, the newly-wed Annie and Ryanny have to leave for Annie’s New Jersey cottage where Annie soon finds herself missing the challenges of the theatre as her career. The couple live in comparative isolation during the five years of their marriage: the ladies in the neighbourhood, who habitually talk about them as ‘those Hindle sisters’ (71), would be shocked if they knew the truth and probably react in a way that Annie and Ryanny, with clichéd citations and excess, perform as a little scene to amuse themselves:

RYANNY. (Being Mrs Bagnall) Ye-es, Miss Hindle? Do you wish to purchase a cherry pie?

ANNIE. (In an Irish accent) Mrs Big-nose, I’ll have you know that I have not, for some years now, been a Miss.

RYANNY. And the lucky gentleman is …

ANNIE. A lady. (Ryanny shrieks) I mean, me sister here is actually me wife.

RYANNY. Incest! Abomination! (pretending to faint) Fetch me my smelling salts! (71)

As this little play-within-the play through its comic effects demonstrates, late nineteenth-century society is far from being ready to accept same-sex partnership, let alone marriage, as a viable option for either women or men.

Both Donoghue plays foreground costume and female corporeality, utilizing the dualism that the body is both a sign of social positionality and cultural experience, whereas it also reflects individual desire to gain liberation from rules and prescriptions of gender normalization to evoke subjectivity as a process rather than a fixture. Body and dress encode the lesbian characters’ relation to what Susan Bordo identifies as ‘the inscription of phallocentric, dualistic culture on gendered bodies’,²⁰² their obligatory acceptance of or voluntary resistance to it or the choice of contestatory variants between these two poles. In I Know My Own Heart Anne Lister likes to wear a large, loose black cloak to cover her sex and does not ornament herself like the ‘weaker women in captivity’, to borrow the precise and insightful wording of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her poem written to George Sand.²⁰³ Anne ‘rides a horse called Lord Byron’ (104), the often mentioned animal being a fetish-like indicator of her owner’s desire to fly free from all kinds of socio-cultural bonds. Due to the strict binaries of the era she can have only ‘fancies about dressing entirely in men’s clothes’, yet she manages to cultivate a distinguished look of difference and her manners are, in Marianne’s description, ‘softly gentlemanlike’ (105). However, the attempted gender-neutrality of her costume tends to deceive people who, like most of society, have no understanding of ambiguity as a creative force, but are instead threatened by it: Anne reports indecent assaults on her from both men and women. To look different also entails isolation; Annie realizes that she could enjoy more female company if, paradoxically, she abandoned the expression of her individuality through a particular choice of clothes and changed them for the ‘frills and bonnets’ (134) that belong to the conventional gear of female masquerade and making use of them would establish a place for her in the community of females. The ‘natural’ is, thus, pinpointed as part of a complex system of practices that function to reinforce constructed divisions as well as to exclude and even abject the liminal.

Costume physically and metaphorically operates in Ladies and Gentlemen as a characteristic marker of the actual overlapping of what is conventionally held as everyday reality on the one hand and the world of performance with its supposed secrets and mysteries on the other. Arguing with her dresser about ‘men’s clothes’, her professional wear, Annie asserts:

RYANNY. But do you like wearing men’s clothes?

ANNIE. They’re only called that because men got a hold of them first. You bet your sweet life I like ‘em; they’ve got pockets for everything (22).

With the stress on practicality and usefulness, another widespread social ideal of the era, Annie thoroughly unsettles the notional basis of the practice that these clothes are destined to be worn by one gender and not by the other. The issue of what kind of clothes to use or what kind of performance to engage in is, at the same time, associated with the subject’s sense of identity and social situation. Back on stage, after she has lost her wife, Ryanny, to breast cancer, Annie experiences profound existential anxiety: ‘I don’t know what to wear. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know who to be’ (67). The inability to play any role signals confusion and diagnoses depression, for which the cure is shown in donning a gendered garment and restarting her career as a performer. In a man’s jacket again, Annie’s realization, ‘This is all I’ve got’ (100) confirms that performance is a metaphor for life, which renews itself after the damage death has incurred and carries potential freedom for the player through expanding the ontological borders of the self. Ladies and Gentlemen dramatizes imagined situations from a lesbian performer’s biography allowing us to see how the marginal experience is able to reflect on crucial human issues of identity.

A significant piece of stage property in Ladies and Gentlemen is the dummy called Miss Dimity. Miss Dimity is originally part of the troupe’s dressing room, eventually making its way as a present from their former colleagues into the private home of Annie and Ryanny. Annie welcomes its arrival with the ambiguous phrase: ‘Another woman. How unsuitable!’ (78), referring to its displacement and nakedness by the same stroke. Bringing a bare, imitation female body into focus, which is to be given character by the kind of clothing imagined and selected for it, the haunting presence of Dimity suggests that woman as a sexed sign is open to a scale of potential meanings. In both Donoghue plays lesbian sexuality is represented in its own right, emphasizing that it can be a site of pleasurable experimentation with the body, an assertion which parallels the writer’s perception as articulated in another interview:

I’m biased here (laughs) but in terms of the details of technique, lesbians are often very imaginative because there’s no one thing they’ve been traditionally told to do … We listen to each other’s bodies more, I suppose, because we haven’t been brought up to believe that sex is one particular act.²⁰⁴

The bodily sensations and acts expressing same-sex love between women are performed or mentioned in the plays as similar but also different from those characteristic of heterosexual attraction and sexual practice, challenging the cultural inclination to restrict them by walls of artificially constructed stereotypes. When the issue of jealousy arises between the lovers, Donoghue has her lesbian protagonist in I Know My Own Heart state a view that sounds vital for all humans of all times:

MARIANNE. It’s different with a man.

ANNE. It is not.

MARIANNE. How would you know? You’ve never been with a man, you don’t know how … how nothing it is. A damp fumble in the dark, an insignificant spasm.

ANNE. Insignificant?

MARIANNE. It never really touched me. You know that, and yet you’ve let a woman inside you, the place I thought belonged to me. ANNE. It’s my body, it belongs to none of you (154-55).

Although a site of the sexual exchange, the body remains a constituent of subjectivity, ‘a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological’ as Rosi Braidotti cogently summarizes.²⁰⁵ The title of I Know My Own Heart resonates with a sentence from the beginning of the first chapter of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which, brought into intertextual play with the Donoghue narrative, evokes the meaning that self-knowledge is gained through listening to the body as much as to the intellect.

Another way of reflecting on the complex operations of the body is provided by including instances of illness, which assume metaphorical meaning in the action of the two plays. The female characters in I Know My Own Heart are infected by venereal disease, a phenomenon widely present but rendered invisible because they are barred from discourse in the society; an exclusion which, in fact, hindered proper and effective treatment. Anne complains:

The doctor’s examination was so humiliating; he averted his gaze and poked his hand up my skirt as if opening a drain. Then he asked if I was married, and I said, ‘No, thank God,’ without thinking. So I told him that I must have caught the infection from a married friend whose husband was dissipated, because I remembered visiting the water closet just after her (142).

The disease here is an indicator of the unhealthy nature of the cultural requirement that sex in marriage was compulsory for woman, her body being no longer her own, while men were permitted to enjoy unlimited promiscuity. In a recollected scene of Ladies and Gentlemen, featuring Annie’s first comeback on stage, the bruises and blue marks on her face and body tell of a largely hidden but not infrequent aspect of heterosexual marriage: domestic violence. These blows are usually suffered by a wife from a dissatisfied or frustrated husband. Ryanny’s death in the same play is evidently based on historical fact, yet the stress on its premature occurrence seems to corroborate with the idea, brought home through their isolation, that there is no future in terms of social integration for same-sex married partners under nineteenth-century circumstances.

Admittedly, the cultural construction, involving continual deconstruction and re-construction of gendered and sexual identities, can take place only within existing power relations. Lesbian subjectivity is theorized in terms of how far women’s same-sex relations replicate or, rather, complicate, or even contest the normative gender categories set up by the discourse of heterosexuality. To investigate the ways in which the identity of women involved in lesbian relationships is represented necessitates the consideration of the butch/fem categories as a framing discourse. The butch/fem binary has generated debates about lesbian roles in recent decades, while also serving as a vehicle of juxtaposition with heterosexual complementarity. Having charted the nature and the implications of these debates among feminists, Mary F. Brewer concludes that

Within the discourse of butch/fem, context is everything, and feminists must be careful not to conflate the power relations of heterosexuality with those of the sex act itself. Power is experienced in many different ways in butch/fem relationships as opposed to straight men and women. Therefore, alternative meanings should be possible.²⁰⁶

In Ladies and Gentlemen Annie Hindle, the protagonist, as it happened in history, marries her dresser, the Irish-born Annie Ryan, rechristened Ryanny. Anne Lister, in I Know My Own Heart, cannot marry her lover Marianne Brown, but gives her a ring to wear. They often refer to each other as wife and husband, thinking of theirs as a married relationship based on desire but necessarily involving problems like separation and jealousy. Both couples, it seems, define themselves according to the norms of mainstream culture, yet the way they feel and act as lesbians subverts rather than duplicates the masculine-feminine divide because it happens in contexts undetermined or only partly determined by the dominant ideology. Context has a dual importance and weight; while interrogating the self-defining features of the construction of lesbian subjectivity the plays work also as biographical narratives authenticated by their detailed social and cultural embedding. In addition, as a critic comments, the two plays’ ‘historical context and basis in real life events succeeded in opening new areas of lesbian experience that had not been accessible to Irish theatre audiences before’.²⁰⁷

The ‘gentlemanlike’, androgynous-looking Anne in I Know My Own Heart plays a multiplicity of roles, depending, besides the changes in her subjective emotional landscape, on how far the outer world interferes with the cultivation of her female relationships. Donoghue, in Passions Between Women, citing Lillian Federman’s relevant study, refers to ‘romantic friendship’ that ‘in the English upper and middle classes until the late nineteenth century … was seen as harmless or silly at worst and at best as the most edifying of social bonds’.²⁰⁸ Like many contemporary ladies Anne Lister has had a long-term friendship of this kind with Tib, a woman her social and intellectual equal. Sex enters the relationship when Anne feels increasingly neglected because Marianne, her wife-in-secret now legally married to a man, lives elsewhere, has new interests and ‘also loves her house, her fine dresses, her social standing …’ (134). It is Tib, characteristically the emotionally stronger of the two friends, who makes the first step by calling Anne ‘irresistible’ like a woman. She then surprises her ‘with a long kiss’ (134), and proves to be an excellent lover in bed. In their altered relationship Anne turns out to be more fem, and she also switches from the initial acting of butch to this role when, after a long interval, Marianne comes to visit her again, putting an end to months of waiting: ‘(Having a multiple orgasm as quietly as possible) … (To herself) No one else ever gave me a kiss like that’ (153). Wavering and transitions between ‘butch desire and fem receptivity’ in the play underscore that lesbian sexuality has more faces than ‘the masculine/feminine, active/passive binaries’.²⁰⁹ The roles of desiring and desired are blurred in Donogue’s alternative dramatic world.

In the portrayal of lesbian subjectivity Ladies and Gentlemen seems to offer less flexible formations at first sight. Annie, under a male name, and Ryanny get married in church by a minister with all the customary paraphernalia, which includes having a ‘husband-and-wife photograph’ (65) taken of them. However, their courage to have their same-sex marriage sanctified is itself a highly subversive historical act, especially from twenty-first century hindsight when gay marriage is still not legal and fiercely protested against in many countries of the world. Annie and Ryanny’s domestic life together, as a recollected scene demonstrates, is based on the complementarity of housewife and husband, mutually teasing each other as in heterosexual marriage. Yet, their bantering exchange is playful, suggestive, and disruptive of rules rather than citational:

RYANNY. Every time I have the fruit bowl nicely arranged, you pinch something and topple my bananas.

ANNIE. How have you managed to put up with me for four years, Mrs. Hindle? (70)

What reminds one of heterosexual patterns in the Annie-/Ryanny relationship is further undermined by Donoghue’s choice to foreground an object of ‘everyday use’. At the beginning of the drama Annie enters the scene carrying ‘a quilt, carpet bag and letter box’ (7). The quilt is a piece of genuine patchwork, Annie’s much cherished item of heritage from the already dead Ryanny, who possessed it as a specific treasure made by her mother back in Ireland. Wrapped around each other’s shoulders at some crucial points in the drama, the quilt provides not only warmth but the feeling of continuity with other female bodies, emphasizing that across racial and sexual divides women can build their own distinctive culture which has both enduring and sustaining values.

Donoghue’s works, thus, illustrate Claycomb’s observation that biography plays ‘show their subjects in communities and not as discrete entities’,²¹⁰ and do even more: they recover not only their chosen heroines’ complex subjectivity through acts of performance but, not unlike what happens in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, also lift their closest companions out of oblivion. Marianne, Anne Lister’s lover in I Know My Own Heart, appears not just as a farmer’s aspiring daughter who became attracted to same-sex love by chance, but a woman who, undergoing contradictory sexual experiences, also learns to know her own heart. In the later play, Ladies and Gentlemen Ryanny has run away from a convent in Ireland, a near synecdoche for the country itself as it was then, to settle down in America. Her progress to forge an independent gender identity for herself while being an emigrant with a highly conservative upbringing in her background allows the audience to see her achievement in a special light. Mary Trotter notes that through Ryanny Donoghue ‘challenges representations of nineteenth-century Irish women in Irish theatre and culture as either iconic figures who symbolize the oppressed nation … or passive supporters of a patriarchal status quo’.²¹¹ Under a creatively transformed androgynous name, Ryanny becomes a figure emblematic of the potential that Irish women, drawing strength from their mini-communities, can recast and reinvent themselves.

Widening their own biography-focussed borders by appropriating techniques of lesbian feminist drama, Donoghue’s works, to borrow Deirdre Heddon’s words, utilize ‘personal material as a resource’ with the result that ‘its assumed relationship to the “real” affords it particular power’, because the awareness that ‘something really happened invests it with a political urgency’.²¹² By this they support an agenda, albeit indirectly: the stories of Anne Lister, Annie Hindle and their companions model the discovery of alternative, fluid gender identities against the hegemony of gender and its restrictive corollary. In so doing, they are exploring the past to open new ways towards a more flexible sexual politics in the present and the future. At the same time, the plays confirm Lis Whitelaw’s contention that lesbian-feminist authors of lesbian biographies endeavour ‘to ensure that lesbian lives are understood for what they are, and not viewed through the distorting glass of heterosexual preconceptions and prejudice’.²¹³

It is noteworthy that Donoghue’s lesbian dramatic characters are travellers like herself: Annie Hindle and Ryanny have left England and Ireland respectively, while Anne Lister is ready to leave England for Paris at the end of I Know My Own Heart. However, they can be identified as nomadic subjects not only on account of their geographical displacement, but because, to rely on Braidotti’s theory of nomadism, they learn to refuse containment and the conventional mode of ‘settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour’.²¹⁴ Ultimately, I Know My Own Heart and Ladies and Gentlemen are concerned with the issue of how to achieve greater human freedom in socio-cultural as well as sexual terms through a revised sense of the links between performance and subjectivity, bodily inscriptions and their alterability. They evoke and reinforce these links as both roots and routes, reminding us that a critical consciousness of creative resistance to the various forms of ideological pressure is a potential to work for and work with.

Extract From: Deviant Acts: Essays on Queer Performance, edited by David Cregan (2009)

Cross Reference: Part Two essays on gender and sexualities

See Also: Seen and Heard: Six New Plays By Irish Women, edited by Cathy Leeney, Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi and Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick