Rape, Murder and Mayhem: Women Writing Violence

Lisa Fitzpatrick

A number of critics have noted that rape and sexual and domestic violence are amongst the recurring themes in women’s dramatic writing (Goodman 1993; Canning 2003), suggesting the importance of these issues to women’s lives and experience. The volume of work suggests that sexual violence is a concern for women across cultural borders, though refracted differently through the specific cultural circumstances of different communities of women, other material conditions of their lives, and the cultural conventions and practices available to them. In the Irish theatre, there are representations of gothic families that populate the plays of Marina Carr, and the unthinking, violent contempt dramatized in work like Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic, Stella Feehily’s Duck, and Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl. Plays by Patricia Burke-Brogan, Patricia Byrne, Stella Feehily, Miriam Gallagher, Gina Moxley, Abbie Spallen, Paula Meehan – to name a few – deal with issues of sexual and psychosexual abuse by placing it on the public stage and writing female characters who speak and name the experiences in a way that potentially encourages spectators to reassess cultural norms of shame and blame, or indeed to feel less alone with their own experiences of violence.

In work by Northern Irish playwrights Anne Devlin and Christina Reid, set during the ‘Troubles’⁸³⁸, there is a pervading sense of a violent culture in which women are largely relegated to secondary status within both family and the wider society. This is manifested in the plays in their depiction of women’s lack of connection with their own bodies and sexualities and a clear sense of social disapproval around extra-marital sex (in, for example, Tea in a China Cup, The Belle of the Belfast City, and Ourselves Alone), and in repeated representations of male characters reinforcing their dominance through verbal threats and physical violence. Thematically, gender-based and sexual violence recur as naturalistic representations in the dramatic practice of many Irish women playwrights. Unlike male-authored work, which tends to position sexual violence as a metaphor for the violence in Northern Ireland, women’s writing generally tends to address issues of sexual violence as intimate and interpersonal. In examining the representation of rape and violence by contemporary Irish women playwrights, I will be looking in particular at the tensions between the staging of rape from a female and/or feminist perspective, the demands of dramatic form and meaning-making in performance, and the dominant social discourses around rape that shape the reception of the work. The texts under discussion are Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill and By the Bog of Cats, Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic which was performed by Glasshouse Productions in Dublin in 1991, and Stella Feehily’s Duck.

Writing Rape

Violence is, and historically has always been, an intrinsic aspect of theatre and drama. Aristotle’s Poetics identifies the representation of the painful and monstrous as a source of spectatorial pleasure, but warns that it should not be merely ‘monstrous’ but should evoke fear and pity in the spectator (xi; xiv). Although conventions of different periods have prohibited the representation of violence on stage, the performance of quite gruesome acts has been commonplace throughout theatre history, and has often been undertaken with considerable ingenuity. In the Mystery Cycles, the scourging and crucifixion of Christ is staged; Marlowe’s Faust is dragged by demons into Hell; Gloucester’s eyes are put out; Jacobean tragedy is fantastically gruesome, while comedy has historically allowed for the staging of all kinds of physical rough housing. So putting explicit violence on stage to revolt, thrill, and excite the audience is nothing new; and similarly, though the staging of rape and sexual violence may seem like a feminist concern, it has historically been commonplace. Elizabeth Howe notes that after the introduction of female actresses on the British stage in 1660, ‘rapes occur regularly in plays right into the eighteenth century. Anne Bracegirdle [a popular actress of the time] actually specialized in having her virgin innocence brutally taken from her’⁸³⁹. Rape and domestic violence are common themes in comedy, too, and the representation of violence can be quite explicit. The Taming of the Shrew is a palimpsest of earlier folk tales and folk belief about women, in which the abuse of Katherine is staged as comic; bawdy humour in the Restoration comedies often hangs upon the idea that the woman’s virtue is a pretence aimed at securing a husband, so that rape is understood only as a forceful seduction, and in melodrama the villain’s assault on the heroine’s virtue only makes her saviour hero more desirable by comparison. René Branca asserts that ‘A staging of an attempted rape would … draw a crowd’ and that posters often used images of distressed or dishevelled young women, clinging to their armed protectors (2005: 34-5). More recent examples from comedy include The Benny Hill Show, with its recurring scene of Benny Hill chasing a curvaceous and scantily clad young woman in fast-motion; or rape-jokes in contemporary stand-up comedy. It seems churlishly and humourlessly feminist to object to such material, but it reveals how much a kind of sexual bothering of women is part of our culture of humour, and how insistent is the sense that it is harmless, inoffensive and fun.

The social and cultural changes wrought by the Women’s Movement internationally have radically altered the ways in which sexual and domestic violence are represented in public discourses and on stage, and thus its reception by critics and audiences. Nonetheless, certain assumptions about women writers persist, and this is evident in the treatment of women’s writings on rape. In particular, women writers’ emphasis on the physical, interpersonal and violent nature of rape (rather than its use as a metaphor for public or political struggles) shapes the interpretation of women’s writing as concerned with ‘realistic’ exploration of issues, and therefore often as aesthetically weak, as didactic, or as deeply concerned with ‘authentic’ reproduction of the actual world. But staging strategies that are not realistic may nonetheless express something that can be recognized as truthful (if not verisimilar), for their representation of emotional or affective responses to violence. For example, Fabulous Beast’s 2003 production of Giselle represents the rape of Giselle by her brother Hilarion through a series of movements that do not mimic the movements of rape. Giselle is mute due to the trauma of her mother’s suicide, but the sense of threat is established by her tense, silent compliance with her brother’s demands, which suggests that she knows to fear him. The threat is rendered sexual by the direction of Hilarion’s gaze (at her breasts), and his pointing finger which descends from her mouth to her breasts, and by her frozen immobility. His manipulation of her while she sits on his knee, his turning of her and placing her on her back, and his movements above her, are all sexually suggestive, as is his spitting on her face (an image of ejaculation), and his licking her face. He then prances around her prone body. The movements of the performers communicate a rape or sexual violation to the spectators through the foregrounding of Giselle’s fear; her familiarity with this violence; her brother’s madness, and her sense of isolation and helplessness which is made more poignant by her inability to cry for help.

Giselle’s silence suggests an unspeakable trauma, which language cannot adequately capture or express; it suggests the difficulty of reducing her experience into a readily comprehensible narrative, and it references a number of canonical, silenced female characters: Philomele, whose brother in law Tereus rapes her and cuts out her tongue so she cannot speak against him, or Lavinia in Titus Andronicus who is raped, her tongue cut out and her hands cut off, again so that she cannot identify the guilty. The silent Giselle cannot tell anyone what is happening to her: she literally has no words to express her experience. Canning argues that ‘making rape something shameful so that women would not dare voice their experiences’ led women to believe that ‘since they were the only ones suffering, they were responsible’⁸⁴⁰. She argues that dramatic representations of rape have potential as ways for women to speak and name their experience, and to insert a female perspective in the public communal space of the theatre. Both Canning and Goodman see this as empowering and activist, and link female-authored representations of rape on stage to the feminist movement and to the emergence of a feminist theatre movement.

Representing Rape on the Irish Stage

In the Irish theatre, one of the first feminist performance companies was Glasshouse Productions, which staged Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic (along with Eve Lewis’s Ficky Stingers) in Dublin in the early 1990s. The play centres around three young women sharing an apartment in an unnamed city, and the action takes place mainly in the bathroom as they bathe and dress to go out. The episodic structure and the deft comedy of the dialogue between the friends enhance the exploration of sexual politics and in particular, the character Mary’s emerging awareness of connections between the objectification of women, and the casual sexual violence recently inflicted upon her. The play ran at the Andrews Lane Theatre, and the members of the cast remember that the (female) Evening Press critic described the piece as ‘cathartic … and doubly painful because we witness it every day of our lives’, while the (male) reviewer for the Irish Times described it as ‘loaded’ and ‘clearly a kind of propaganda’, ‘Brothers, I think this is one for the Sisters’. It is interesting to read this review – which is by Gerry Colgan – in the light of Countryman and Headrick’s argument about the international reception of Irish women’s writing being troubled by an incongruity between what is represented, and the audience’s expectations of Ireland and Irish theatre. Low Level Panic unsettles received ideas about sexual assault as a crime committed by monsters in an alleyway, by representing a female experience of the crime and by forcing an audience response through the uncomfortable, audible assault of screaming. Sexual assault is here represented as something that ordinary men do to ordinary women, while the power relations in operation through their taunting of her are also revealed as a form of violence. Caroline Williams, the company’s producer, recalls how the review validated and inspired the company: ‘[Colgan’s] review was a clear indicator to the company that there was a belief out there that plays by women were for women, and that a play which explored women’s sexuality, pornography, eating disorders and more was marginal because it was not about men … we found it proof positive that presenting plays by women about women was an important and radical act’⁸⁴¹.

The director, Katy Hayes, identifies two questions that demanded her attention and that ‘presented major challenges to our youth and inexperience: how do you show rape on stage that captures the horror, but is theatrically convincing? How do you present a naked woman in a bath in a play about pornography, and avoid titillation?’ (136). The issue of capturing the horror of sexual violence while avoiding a gratuitous display of the female body, is one that recurs in representations of sexual violence. In Low Level Panic, the female protagonist narrates and enacts a sexual assault by two men, using the movements of her own body and the voices of two men, A and B, who are never seen. The scene takes place on the street, where Mary is unlocking her bicycle late at night, and begins with a monologue in which she considers all the things she could have done differently:

Mary: Maybe if I’d been wearing trousers … it’s not really comfortable on a bike in a skirt: it just makes people look at your legs. But who’s around at that time of night to look? Anyway I wasn’t even on the bike … I could have cycled to work wearing a pair of jeans and had my skirt folded in one of the panniers but then it would have been all squashed and that wouldn’t have gone down well at all with the management … Or I could have come to work on the bicycle wearing a skirt and could have changed into trousers to go home given that you’re meant to be alright in daylight but you’re not safe at night. Or I could have walked to work and got a taxi home and I could have worn whatever I liked … (86-7).

Eventually she concludes that, no matter what other circumstances she had changed, ‘I’d still have been there’ (87), acknowledging the irrelevance of what she was wearing and by extension her blamelessness. The scene follows this narrative so that the audience see Mary unlocking her bicycle while, in voiceover, A and B circle her, commenting on the bicycle, asking where she is going, if she has been with her boyfriend, where she is from, and complimenting the bicycle in mocking double entendres that are designed to intimidate and disempower her. The stage directions for the attack specify that one man puts his hands on her hips and pushes his fingers into her vagina while the other grasps her breasts:

The movements are forceful and deliberate. The actress should carry out these actions until it is crystal clear that she is not being felt in a tentative way but is being sexually assaulted. She then holds her arms away from herself, disassociating herself from what is happening to her and screams (89).

The scene ends with Mary ‘screaming for everything: to be helped: to release her anger and her fear’ (90).

The actor’s dissociation of herself from her body communicates some of the trauma of the attack in its physical representation of her desire to escape the restrictions of her physical body and her gender, her alienation or withdrawal from the body that is helpless to defend itself, and her paralyzing sense of being entrapped between social demands (of feminine compliance, submission, and politeness) and her instinct to defend herself. Her distress at the assault is expressed in her screaming, her rage at finding a discarded pornographic magazine in the bin, and her sudden awareness of billboard posters which she now reads as graphic images of sexual violence: she begins to connect the sexual objectification of women to the male violence she experienced.

Marina Carr’s 2002 play On Raftery’s Hill is a kind of gothic family horror that also explores female inarticulacy in response to male violence. In terms of textual analysis, the play offers an example of what Sharon Marcus and Carine Mardorossian in their competing analyses call the ‘rape script’. Marcus uses the term to argue that ‘the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength … from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts’ (1992: 388-9). She identifies rape as one such ‘script’ – meaning, a range of discourses that the individual is exposed to and shaped by – and as such, she argues that it ‘continually scripts these [gender] inequalities anew’, that it acts to ‘feminize’ women in the sense of reinscribing a sense of powerlessness and victimhood which curtails freedom of movement and expression, and imprints the gender identity of ‘feminine victim’. Carr’s play illustrates the argument in a scene at the end of Act 1, in which Red Raftery rapes his daughter Sorrel, and in which the dialogue systematically strips Sorrel of her ability to speak and so to resist. The scene ends with Red shoving her down on the table and slamming his knife into the table beside her body, signifying rape without actually showing it explicitly.

On Raftery’s Hill is set entirely in the kitchen of Red Raftery’s farmhouse on top of the eponymous hill where the family live. They are Shalome, his senile mother who is always trying to go ‘home’ to her Daddy; his son Ded, whom he has terrorized and brutalized to the extent that he lives a semi-human existence with the animals in the cow-shed; his daughters Dinah and Sorrel, the latter of whom is twenty and engaged to a young local farmer named Dara Mood, and Red himself. His wife is long since dead. Red tortures the livestock, slashing the cows’ udders, and he is involved in a long-term sexual relationship with his elder daughter Dinah. This began violently in her childhood when the mother sent Dinah in to sleep with her father; but Dinah has long since resigned herself to the inevitability of it, though it remains a source of shame. She says, of herself and her father: ‘So we do ud from time to time … we want ud to stop. Ud’s just like children playin in a field ah some awful game before rules was made’ (2000: 57-8). Dinah, it gradually becomes apparent, is the mother of Red’s younger daughter Sorrel. It is enough here to note that the dialogue and action suggest that the family has a long history of incestuous relationships. Shalome’s repeated attempts to escape from the Hill to Kinnegar, to her ‘daddy’, hint that Red himself may be her son by her own father. The first act ends with the rape of Sorrel, and the second act sees the family gradually reveal its secrets to her, and concludes with her troubling decision to break off her engagement and stay on the Hill amongst them.

The rape in On Raftery’s Hill is the culmination of a long sequence of angry exchanges between Sorrel and Red that takes place late at night. The sense of threat develops quite suddenly, when Sorrel attempts to pass him to leave the room, and he blocks her path. He accuses her of not gutting the hares he caught earlier in the day. When Sorrel states ‘I don’t know how to gut a hare’, Red seizes control of the moment: ‘Donten ya? Alrigh, I’ll show ya how to gut a hare’ (34). The stage directions read: ‘Grabs her suddenly and holds her in a vice grip. Sorrel struggles pointlessly against the strength of him’ (34). Red implacably cuts off her clothes with a knife, narrating how to skin and gut the hare while Sorrel screams for help to Dinah, Ded, and her grandmother. Red tells her ‘Dinah won’t come and ya think Ded’s comin? (a mad laugh) And Granny’s noh comin. And your precious Dara Mood can’t help ya now.’ Sorrel loses speech as the scene progresses: ‘Her voice has betrayed her. We hear the odd animal moan or shriek.’ (35). Meanwhile, Red is so much in control that he even pauses and ‘looks in satisfaction at his work’. He then ‘(… pushes her across the table, cuts the straps of her slip.) Now, this is how ya gut a hare. (Stabs knife in table. Blackout.) (35).

In staging violence, the creation of a sense of threat can be more effective than the witnessing of the act of violence itself: the capacity of the violence to exist at the edges of human imagination before it is enacted on stage allows the full range of possible horror to exist momentarily for the individual spectator. The fear of what might happen, of the unknown, is greater than the horror of witnessing of an act (which in any case happens to a body one might empathetically identify with, but which is not one’s own; and, of course, the act is simulated, however convincingly, and is not actually real.) Thus Carr’s strategy of proceeding to blackout is one that invokes and exploits the audience’s imagination, and the second act, which includes references to Sorrel’s injuries – ‘There’s marks on her as hasn’t healed in three weeks’, Dinah says (45) – validates the spectator’s worst imaginings.

In relation to the rape in On Raftery’s Hill, there are two key points to raise. Firstly, that Sorrel is silenced by Red, and that he controls the conversation and therefore controls the scene; and secondly, that the knife is a pocket knife, one he has used earlier in the scene to clean his nails. If it were not specified it would be easy to imagine that Red is using a far more threatening object, such as a hunting knife. The small knife emphasizes that Red’s power resides mainly in his words and in his socially approved dominance as Sorrel’s father and the head of the family. His monologue does not offer Sorrel any opportunity for verbal resistance, and he reduces her – via his language of intimidation and power – to the helpless animal described in the stage directions. As the scene continues, Sorrel increasingly capitulates to Red’s scripting of her role, which reasserts his control of her and of her sexuality, both as a physically stronger male and as her father: the attack begins on the pretext that she has been plotting to overthrow him and to install her fiancé in his place as head of the patriarchal family. The scene scripts Sorrel’s submission while it performs it, so that her systematic disempowerment is metaphorically represented in the physical stripping of her clothes, reducing her to a silent, and silenced, body. The other characters’ refusal to come to her aid also testifies to Red’s control of his environment.

Though narratively coherent, in rehearsal the scene uncovers difficulties with the staging of the piece as well as insights into its genre. The initial aim in rehearsal was to explore strategies that potentially implicated the audience ethically in the performance of violence, ways in which Sorrel might struggle out of the proscenium arch, out of the frame of the performance, to appear to appeal directly to the spectators as well as to her family within the dramatic world. Such staging strategies may create a sense of foreboding for the spectator, so that he or she experiences the desire to intervene, and a heightened sense of dread at what is about to happen. The first issue for consideration is the stage directions in the rape scene. The stage directions given in the printed text specify that Red ‘grabs [Sorrel] suddenly and holds her in a vice grip. Sorrel struggles pointlessly against the strength of him’. It seems that a degree of submission on Sorrel’s part is written imperceptibly into the script, just as it is in the dialogue where Sorrel’s screams for help are not answered by the others in the house, and as she realizes she is alone, Red’s control of language reduces her to inarticulacy.

Rehearsals pointed to particular ways in which such a scene might reflect – wittingly or unwittingly – normative ideas about gender, about gendered bodies, and about gender relations. The submission of Sorrel to Red’s violence fits within popular narratives of rape: the act is represented ambivalently in scholarly volumes on female psychology and sexuality, in film, pulp fiction, romantic magazines and novels, soft and hardcore pornography. This narrative is of rape as a kind of forceful seduction to which the woman submits when she realizes she has no alternative, and in which she finds a kind of masochistic pleasure. Such narratives are so familiar to all of us that they become part of a cultural landscape. The play ends with Sorrel breaking off her engagement and choosing to stay with her family on the hill – and therefore, choosing or accepting a likely sexual relationship with her father. It is arguably the incestuous context that Carr gives to the rape that makes it so repugnant: if Sorrel’s rapist was her fiancé, would a conclusion in which they were reunited be so far beyond conventional plot or narrative?

One of the problems with pursuing a kind of realistic staging in which rape is enacted in front of the audience, is that the body of Sorrel is put on display in a way that Red’s is not; and the seeming inevitability of the action does not provoke the audience to question the structures that support Red’s power over his children. Therefore, the interpersonal violence is foregrounded and vilified, but the systemic violence that underlies it remains invisible. Sorrel’s forced inarticulacy is also troubling, as an image of silencing that obliterates her subjective experience. And in fact, the greater the attempts at realistic staging the more the play emerges as a dark fairytale, a story of hobgoblins, or to quote Dinah a horror story of ‘children playin in a field ah some awful game before rules was made’. Though apparently naturalistic, at least in some respects the play is anti-naturalistic, grotesque, and monstrous.

Writing Mayhem and Murder

On Raftery’s Hill and Low Level Panic represent female victims, and, arguably, reinscribe female identity as bound up with victimhood, casting the male as the oppressor. Such versions of femaleness sit in dismal contrast to canonical characters like Pegeen Mike, who is so memorably described as ‘a fine, hardy girl would knock the head of any two men in the place’, and as ‘a girl you’d see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop’⁸⁴². In Stella Feehily’s Duck, the central characters are more glamorous than Pegeen but they share her rambunctious engagement with the world around them. First produced by Out of Joint and the Royal Court in 2003, the play opened in London before touring to Dublin, and was critically well reviewed. It was likened to other work in the contemporary British theatre, such as Simon Burt’s Untouchable, though it is also reminiscent of Rebecca Pritchard’s Yard Gals, Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs, or other dramas of young women’s friendships and journeys to maturity such as Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey or Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls. Duck stages scenes from the life of two young women, Cat and Sophie, who are both in their late teens. The play traces the girls’ experiences as they try to establish a sense of who they are and their place in the world. Sophie is at college, and Cat has acquired a thuggish, drug-dealing boyfriend, Mark, who employs her in his club and offers her to his friend Eddie with the words ‘You can have her … She’s a hole. She likes it hard’ (19). She also has an older lover, the writer Jack, who calls her Gina Lollobrigida and offers her a more romantic image of herself. In Duck, violence is brutal, both in the language and in what the characters do to each other; and it represents the female characters as aggressors rather than victims, women who will fight viciously when necessary to defend themselves and their interests. The play opens with the sound of an explosion before the two run on drunk: Cat has just blown up her boyfriend’s car by setting fire to the fuel tank. They then fight two men who proposition them and threaten them with rape.

The opening scenes of the play show Cat drunk and retching by the roadside, smudged with ash from her attack on Mark’s car, while Sophie attempts to comfort her. As they squat on the pavement they are approached by ‘two inner city lads’ who ‘strut over’ and ask ‘Are youse queers?’ (6). As the dialogue unfolds, the male characters attempt the intimidation through language that operates so successfully in Low Level Panic or On Raftery’s Hill; but the female characters responses in Duck are very different. Rather than being embarrassed, disoriented, or reduced to inarticulacy Cat and Sophie respond directly:

Sophie: Right, you can get lost now.

Cat: Yeah, fuck off out of my face.

The dialogue continues:

Boy 1: I like dirty bitches. (Grabbing his crotch) Do ya want a bit of that baby?

Sophie: (Whispering to Cat) Pull your bag over and stand up with me

They get to their feet. Sophie has a bottle of Bacardi breezer behind her back.

No thanks, I was about to lick my friend out when you arrived.

The girls run, and the boys give chase:

BOY 2: Get them.

BOY 1: Fuck the shite oura them.

But Sophie smashes the bottle and uses it to cut both boys, shouting ‘FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF’, telling Boy 1 ‘I am going to rip your ugly face off’. The fight stops and ‘they all look in amazement at Sophie’ (8). The scale of Sophie’s resistance frightens the two boys who realize that these women are not the easy prey they expected. They run away, still shouting abuse.

Sharon Marcus’s argument that ‘the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength… from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts’ is illustrated in this scene where the female characters clearly do not respond as expected to the men’s sexual aggression. They not only resist – they are more frightening than the men, and more reckless in their violence. Such a response attests, amongst other things, to the value they place upon themselves and their own bodily safety and integrity. Cat is too drunk to do much, but Sophie demonstrates a willingness to kill, or at least mutilate and ‘rip the face off’ her assailants. The volume of her screaming and the fact that she screams her aggression – ‘FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF’ – rather than crying for help add to the sense of alarm within the scene. While the men’s aggression follows a recognizable pattern, similar to the taunting of Sorrel or of Mary, Sophie does not offer the conventional response. Her reaction typifies the qualities of violence: it is sudden, chaotic, unexpected.

Torching Mark’s jeep is Cat’s revenge for some slight. Like the broken bottle Sophie swings, this action expresses Cat’s lack of inhibition and lack of control. She is not afraid, afterwards: despite Mark’s violence she seems impervious to the danger he poses to her. Even when he and Eddie break into her other boyfriend’s house and attack them as they lie sleeping, Cat remains defiant, challenging him: ‘I’m sick to my tits of you / so hurry up and do something cos I’m getting cold’ (105). Like Hester Swane in Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, Cat and Sophie actively resist male aggression, refuse to respond in a passive or submissive manner to threatening behaviour, and commit acts of destruction on stage.

Hester Swane is a murderer: she describes her killing of her brother earlier in her life, and cuts her small daughter’s throat on stage in front of the audience. By the Bog of Cats is loosely based on the Greek tragedy Medea, though it references a number of other canonical texts as well. The central character, Hester Swane, has been abandoned by her lover Carthage Kilbride, who plans to marry Caroline Cassidy, daughter of Xavier a local landowner. Hester’s rage at this betrayal leads her to disrupt the wedding by showing up in her own wedding dress, and to burn down the cattle sheds with the animals inside them. Reacting to this violence Xavier Cassidy attempts to intimidate her into leaving the townland, but she resists. When she can resist no longer, she kills the seven year old daughter she has with Carthage, and kills herself. Her motivation for killing the child is complicated: she believes that the child will be in danger from Xavier, since she believes that he abused his own children; she was abandoned by her mother when she was seven, and she can’t bear to repeat that history, and the little girl begs to ‘come too’ when Hester tells her goodbye. But Hester has, previously, murdered her brother to benefit Carthage, so she has a long history of violent action.

As in many plays that deal with rape and sexual violence against women, key moments of the action revolve around who is credible and who is not. In Low Level Panic Jo gets irritated with Mary’s distress, saying ‘Try to stop thinking for once, will you? For five minutes’ (101); in On Raftery’s Hill Red warningly asks if Sorrel is ‘goin to start spreadin lies’ and in by the Bog of Cats Xavier Cassidy uses his shotgun to look down Hester’s dress, and tells her, ‘I could do what I wanted with ya right here and now and no wan would believe ya’ (331). But like Sophie and Cat, Hester fights back. She does not contradict him, because he is correct – he is more credible than she is. Instead she demands ‘What’re ya goin’ to do, Cassidy? Blow me head off?’ and she ‘puts her mouth over the barrel’ and taunts him, ‘G’wan shoot! Blow me away. Save me the bother meself (goes for the trigger.) Ya want me to do it for ya?’ (331). It is Cassidy, panicked, who struggles to get away from her. In responding to the violence with violence, Hester refuses to submit, in contrast to the disturbing sense in which the central female characters in Low Level Panic and On Raftery’s Hill internalize their own helplessness, and become compliant with their attackers in a way that performs female submission. Hester – violent, outcast, labelled mad – finds a freedom to resist those norms and to protect herself, at least temporarily. Ironically, it is her lack of concern for her own safety that protects her from Cassidy. While Cat and Sophie use violence to protect themselves, Hester demonstrates a reckless lack of concern for her own life and safety and in doing so, frightens Cassidy. He glimpses the chaos of violence and retreats. Although she kills herself in the final moments of the play, she dies by no hand but her own, and manages first to create a swathe of destruction all around her.

The murder of the child Josie and Hester’s suicide conclude a long sequence in which she reviews her life, beginning with her discussing her grief for her mother with her neighbour, progressing through her conflict with Cassidy, her last conversation with Carthage and Caroline, and her reflection upon the murder of her brother. Finally alone, she ‘takes a drink, goes into the caravan, comes out with a knife. She tests it for sharpness, teases it across her throat, shivers. Come on now, ya done it aisy enough to another, now it’s your own turn. Bares her throat, ready to do it. Enter Josie…’ (337). This sequence, following on from Hester’s confession of murdering her brother by slitting his throat and tipping him, still alive, into the lake with a boulder tied to his waist, heightens the tension for the audience. Aware of the character’s capacity for violence, the spectators have reason to fear what they will see next. At this point in the play, Hester’s death appears inevitable. But the scene is interrupted by the arrival of Josie, allowing for two contradictory reactions: a sense of reprieve, since Hester will not kill herself in front of her child, and a heightened sense of tension for the vulnerability of the child. The ensuing scene – of the child’s panic that her mother is ‘goin’ away … somewhere ya can never return from’ and her frantic demands to come too (338), lead to an horrific moment where, holding Josie in her arms, ‘Hester cuts Josie’s throat with one savage movement’ (339). She then ‘Begins to wail, a terrible animal wail’. In the premiere production, Olwen Fouéré interpreted this direction to produce a frightening, heartrending scream that continues over a duration to voice the character’s grief and despair but also to create an affective experience for the audience who are unsettled by the dreadful sound. Hester’s suicide, which follows and is represented in a dance with Death (the ‘Ghost Fancier’), is in fact far less harrowing than these earlier scenes.

Conclusions:

By resisting successfully in their various ways, characters in By the Bog of Cats and Duck disrupt what Mardorossian calls the ‘rape script’: they resist attempts to reduce them to violated bodies or to inscribe, through sexual violence, their inferior status. The ferocious independence expressed by Hester and powerfully interpreted in the premiere by Olwen Fouéré wreaks havoc on her community, but presents the spectators with a female character who defies male attempts to delimit and define her. She is always outside, in the exterior spaces of the bog, in opposition to the usual situation of female characters within or in connection to a domestic interior space. She is remorseless, scarcely regretting her brutal murder of her brother. She spread mayhem, thereby attacking the very symbols (the hearth; the bridal party) of the patriarchal family.

Violence by female characters is often written and received as evidence of madness or badness. Clytemnestra kills her husband in the bath, where he is helpless, unarmed, and believes himself to be in the safety of the domestic space; Medea kills her sons, also inside the home, to revenge herself upon her unfaithful husband; both are represented in Greek mythologies as sorceresses. Defined as evil characters whose behaviour challenges every sacred belief about womanhood, they are scheming, violent, and destructive of those they should love best and protect. Female violence is often considered more disturbing than male violence because it disrupts normative ideas of gender which force upon women the role of nurturers and carers. It is also particularly disruptive because the world that women inhabit – the domestic world – is supposed to be safe, a haven from the dangers of the unbounded public world. By wreaking chaotic violence within this private world, violent female characters make nowhere safe; they threaten to destroy the patriarchal family and therefore the society it stands for.

Women’s writing of rape and sexual violence is thus often problematically received, reduced to anti-male polemic (as in the reviews of Low Level Panic) and denied a complex aesthetic interpretation. Yet the issue remains central to women’s dramatic writing, whether it is present in the workings of the plot or in small details of the characterization or setting. In Irish women’s writing, rape, incest, sexual abuse and domestic violence are all recurring themes, represented in a wide variety of ways and in different genres of writing and performance. Though frequently interpreted as acts of interpersonal violence, these acts are also expressive of social and cultural attitudes, both contemporary and historical. The emphasis on violence and oppression within the family situates women’s writing as part of a tradition of drama that focuses on the family and on the domestic space, from the early years of the National Theatre movement and the work of Synge through to contemporary plays by Murphy, Friel, McPherson, Carr, Moxley, and other male and female playwrights.

Yet at the same time, depictions of rape remain problematic because they so often erase the human subjectivity of the victim, reducing her to a cypher or to a body suffering beautifully and displayed for the audience’s pleasure in spectacle. Staging violence in an explicit way, which draws attention to struggle, cruelty and pain, inevitably also emphasizes the physicality of the body. Erased or visible, the female body on stage remains problematic.

Works Cited:

Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher. Online, available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/poetics/. Last accessed 10/03/2012.

Canning, Charlotte, Feminist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience (London & New York: Routledge, 1996).

Carr, Marina, ‘By the Bog of Cats’ Marina Carr Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

---, On Raftery’s Hill (London: Faber & Faber, 2000).

Feehily, Stella, Duck (London: Nick Hern Books, 2003).

Goodman, Lizbeth, Contemporary Feminist Theatres (London & NY: Routledge, 1993).

Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1992).

Marcus, Sharon, ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: a theory and politics of rape prevention’ in Butler, J. & JW Scott, eds, Feminists Theorize the Political (London & New York: Routledge, 1992): 385-403.

Mardorossian, Carine, ‘Towards a New Feminist Theory of Rape’ in Signs, vol. 27:3, Spring 2002:, 743-775.

McIntyre, Clare, My Heart’s a Suitcase & Low Level Panic (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994).

Extract From: Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick (2013)

Cross Reference: Numerous playwrights mentioned, especially Carr

See Also: Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick