SPECIALIZAREA: STUDII ANGLO -AMERICANE FORMA DE ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNT: ZI LUCRARE DE DISERTA ȚIE COORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFIC Conf. univ. dr. LUDMILA MARTANOVSCHI… [619885]

UNIVERSITATEA „OVIDIUS ” DIN CONSTANȚA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
SPECIALIZAREA: STUDII ANGLO -AMERICANE
FORMA DE ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNT: ZI

LUCRARE DE DISERTA ȚIE

COORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFIC
Conf. univ. dr. LUDMILA MARTANOVSCHI

ABSOLVENT: [anonimizat]
2017

UNIVERSITATEA „OVIDIUS ” DIN CONSTANȚA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE

Avizat Data
Semnă tura coordonatorului științific

THE DYNAMICS OF
VIOLENCE IN
PAULA VOGEL ’S PLAYS

COORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFIC
Conf. univ. dr. LUDMILA MARTANOVSCHI

ABSOLVENT: [anonimizat]
2017

Facultatea de Litere
Aleea Universității nr. 1 Constanța 900472, ROM ÂNIA
Tel. 0040 241 55 1773 Fax. 0040 241 650444
E-mail: secretariat_FL@univ -ovidius.ro

CONTENTS

Introduction 4

Chapter 1
Violence in a Psychoanalytical Context 11
1.1 Types of Violence 11
1.2 Violence from a Psychoanalytical Perspective 16
1.3 Violence and Theatre 30
Chapter 2
Violence in the Realis t Sequences of Vogel ’s Plays 36
2.1 Physical Violence in And Baby Makes Seven 36
2.2 Sibling Violence in The Mineola Twins 43
2.3 Gender Based Violence in How I L earned to Drive 53
2.4 Domestic Violence in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing 62
Chapter 3
Violence in the Fantasy Sequences of Vogel ’s Plays 70
3.1 The Visionary Realm in And Baby Makes Seven 70
3.2 Dream Sequences in The Mineola Twins 78
3.3 Memory Shifts in How I L earned to Drive 88
3.4 Imagina ry Frames in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing 96

Conclusions 103

Bibliography 106

4
INTRODUCTION

In the context of worldwide recent violent episodes, this study searches for a deeper
understanding of human violence and for traces of it in theatre . Oftentimes theatre is a
reflection of reality and sometimes an illusion of life. The complexity of life is shaped by
means of theatrical performances. The reality of our society includes the complicated issu e
of violence ; hence the necessity to perform, directly and indirectly, forms of violence and
aggression, as part of representing genuine life. After all, the pu rpose of theater is to reach
its audiences.
The members of the audience watch the shows subjectively , exploring, integrating
and reflecting upon the topics and characters displayed . They identify with some characters
or position themselves again st other characters , resonating or antagonizing with the related
topics. As part of the audience, vi ctims and victimizers look for a way of surviving both
the theater and real life. Therefore, theatrical spaces become starting points for analyzing
human behavior. In such a context, t he plays turn into battlefields for human power and
hegemony.
This study proposes to detect violence and to trace the dynamics of it, looking for
deeper comprehension and insight into four plays written by the American playwright
Paula Vogel : And Baby Makes Seven , The Mineola Twins , How I L earned to Drive and Hot
‘N’ Throbbi ng. These plays have been selected because they encapsulate different forms of
violence and aggression ; the type most often encountered being the gender based violence ,
as a result of assumed and imposed gender roles .
As part of the American lesbian commu nity, Paula Vogel exposes delicate issues in
her plays. These issues are neglected and bypassed by a lot of other American playwrights.
But, ignorance will not make problems disappear and will not make life simpler. Taboo
issues exhibited in theatrical cir cumstances are difficult to digest by the big
heteronormative mass of people, which seems to be reluctant and sometimes violent when
the truth is revealed (Cusack xi).
The investigation of this paper is based on a psychoanalytic al reading of the plays.
Thus, the plays are examined from the perspective of psychoanalytical criticism. Being a
Pulitzer Prize winner, both a contested and praised playwright, Paula Vogel and her

5
writings have been analyzed and reviewed by a large number of critics, especially feminist
ones. However, h er work is worth investigating further.
Paula Vogel does not fit feminist expectations about a woman writer ’s texts. She
exposes violence in her plays, but her message is nonviolent , diffusing tolerance among
people and fighting for the oppressed groups ’ rights. Her techniques include humor and
parody , and thus her plays upset and challenge authoritative figures, whose power is
threatened and undermined. Her different kind of political activism empowers not only the
gay community, but also the heterosexual oppressed assemblage, such as women. The
psychoanalytical approach is considered appropriate and assists in decoding Paula Vogel ’s
plays .
Psychoanalysis offers a form of therapy , as Peter Barry stated in his work
Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory , which aims to help
and cure, if possible, mental disorders and p sychic problems, providing what all human
beings long for, namely , the desire of understanding and help, the same way as theater
offers , at a c ertain level. By means of psychoanalytical criticism , the plays can be decoded
appealing to techniques and theories that focus on unconscious repressed fears, conflicts
and impulses, bringing them into the conscious, an d thus explaining the character ’s private,
and sometimes dark er, instincts and sexuality.
Psychoanalytical concepts have become familiar, having already entered our life
and helping to decipher every day human behavior. So, beside s being a very practical
method, the psychoanalytical approac h is very close to real life. The theories applied here
as literary criticism of Paula Vogel ’s plays start with Sigmund Freud ’s classical
psychoanalytical pr inciples. Since he was the founder of the field, some of his concepts
had to be inserted in this st udy, even though not all his principle s are applicable nowadays.
After Freud , psychoanalysis was developed and renewed by several other
theoreticians, of whom we choose to follow and explore some theories by Carl Gustav
Yung, Jacques Lacan and , more recen tly, Judith Butler. Our research has been guided by
critical theorists such as Lois Tyson, Peter Barry and Walter Davis. Kafka once
considered: “A book must be an ice ax to break the sea frozen inside us ” (quoted in Davis ).
Similarly psychoanalytical crit icism is a way of entering the core of human psyche,
sighting its complexity and trying to puzzle out its issues. As the artist R.B. Ki taj’s goal
was “to create images t hat will sit in the Unconscious ” (quoted in Davis xix), theater ’s aim

6
is to resonate with people ’s minds, and thus with individual and collective
unconsciousness.
Although violence is not an ordinary topic which psychoanalysis deals with, still,
the psychological a spects of violent behavior seem to be quintessential in understanding
human a ggression and related actions . The violent act, performed upon a body that
functions as an envelope for its psyche , is also a violent action directed towards the human
mind . As Alfred Arteaga highlighted in his Foreword to Arturo J. Aladama ’s Violence and
The Body , people “call on language to invoke the memory and image of the blood act and
red event ” (Arteaga vii) , meaning , the image of violence. Through the act of writing ,
violence is transferred from and to people , by means of black text. Hence the two c olors,
red and black become colors of writing and of existence i tself, “the red and the black
signified knowledge, for it is through writing that we know the awful truths of being
human ” (Arteaga viii) .
Understanding characters and human beings come s down to understanding
ourselves, as hard as it may be to believe it. Ultimately, the characters are defined and
manipulated through language, as well as limited by it. In drama, as Jeannette Malkin
emphasizes in her study of Verbal Violence in Contemporary Dr ama, the violent language
is pointed to characters , but also to audience s (Malkin 1), assuming and shaping their
identities, and sometimes coercing and exercising power on them.
Loss of human autonomy and selfhood , which Malkin (1) talks about , proves to be
very complex , but its concepts can be deconstructed and decomposed in “subatomic ” parts,
those smaller elements which permit an in -depth analysis. This deconstruction is seen as a
scientific understand ing of the complexity of the human body , starting f rom its smallest
particles up to the whole. But this understanding is furthermore induced to even smaller
fractions , which sometimes do not have “personal” meaning, only provide help to penetrate
the context . So, the unity is explained through its parts, a nd the elements have meaning
only as a whole. This is what Paula Vogel manages to accomplish in her outstanding work.
She reflects on life in all its complex aspects. She does not construct stereotypes and
templates, but she dismantles them. Therefore, Paula Vogel uses drama, the most
interactive and communicative literary form, and performance to destabilize and de –
essentialize rather than to fix identities, as her most appreciative critic, David Savran ,
argued in his volume A Queer Sort of Materialism (187).

7
Vogel herself stressed , as Savran mentioned in his essay in which he presents her as
male impersonator, that all subjects are impeachable and “That’s the great thing about
drama ” (quoted in Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 187). Savran describes h er belief
in gender transferability, by means of drama, signalizing her point of view: “gender is a
kind of floating signifier that can attach itself to bodies and texts in unpredictable ways ”
(Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism 187). Savran adds that, w hereas she a dmir es
Brecht ’s critique of the cannons of realism and his theory of estrangement, she adopts an
empathic approach in her drama, and she prefers to lead audiences to sympathize with
characters that they might find repulsive , mak ing them accompli ces, and thus parts of the
narrated world (Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism 188).
Vogel found herself excluded by feminist theater and theory, and sometimes
struggled to find theaters that would produce her work, having a complicated, difficult
recepti on of her plays or even harshly critique by lesbian community. Her dramaturgy of
defamiliarization, as Joanna Mansbridge names it, includes challenges and investigations
of gender, sexuality, identity, authority, family, fantasy, memory and history. Mansbr idge
claims that to se e her plays is like entering a tridimensional dialogue with “dramatic canon,
social history an d contemporary American culture ” (Mansbridge 1).
Vogel empl oys the structure of her plays “to disrupt habitu ated patterns of
identificatio n” (Mansbridge 7). The defamiliar ization encountered in her work is the
purpose of drama, as she herself admits. She challenges her audiences and her students to
analyze things from the edge, rather than from the center (Mansbridge 7). Including in her
works both low and high culture, she reorients conventional habits of theatrical
spectatorship and makes from every new play, a theory. Self -described formalist and self –
described feminist, as Mansbridge highlights in her volume dedicated to Paula Vogel, she
endorses that:
For me being a feminist does not mean showing a positive image of women. For me being a feminist
means looking at the things that disturb me, looking at things that hurt me as a woman. We live in a
misogynist world and I want to see why. A nd I want to look and see why not just men are the enemy
but how I was a woman participate in the system . (quoted in Mansbridge 10)
Revealing how gender is learned and enacted at all level s of American culture,
Paula Vogel ’s female characters depict femin inity as a product of history and authority,
and they are neither presented as victims of patriarchy nor worshiped just because they are
women. Analyzing her plays, Mansbridge (14) also punctuated that they demonstrate how
the past continue s to influence t he present, how individual or collective reality and fantasy

8
are overlapping states of mind that recal l and revis e the private and public memories of her
characters , while mobilizing multiple psychic registers simultaneously.
Only in the 1990s the audie nces were friendly to her plays, when the social climate
was more open -minded and transparent with gender and sexual identity politics. In 1992,
following Tony Kushner ’s Angels in America , The Baltimore Waltz was her breakout play
that was “praised by crit ics and audiences for its imaginative, irreverent and yet s ensitive
representation of AIDS ” (Mansbridge 13). Merely, after this success, other plays, such as
Desdemona , Hot ‘N’ Throbbing or And Baby Makes Seven were produced at off -Broadway
theaters, when they were vehemently rejected and criticized by most of her audiences,
either heterosexual or homosexual, either conservative or non -traditionalist. Her Pulitzer
Prize for Drama, in 1998 , for How I Learned to Drive , brought her recogni tion among
American d ramatists. Later, her place in the American drama canon was secured,
alongside other plays, such as The Oldest Profession and The Mineola Twins .
Vogel ’s dramaturgy feature s history as an “embodied participa tion in the cultural
narratives ” that shape b oth the bodies and the consciousness, as Mansbridge underlines in
her study (13). Her plays do not respect teleological plot, questioning the present by
nonlinear, interrupted history, as she explains:
The connection I have with time is something that cau ses enormous emotional repercussions for me
… I don ’t think that there is a neat demarcation, politically, ethically, between history and the present
moment … History is simply a way … to analyze shifting interconnections among politics, social
histo ry, economics, culture, gender. (quoted in Mansbridge 14)
The complex relationship between history, memory, private and public spheres of
human life and psyche, which Vogel traces in her plays, like a dashed curve, without
beginning and without end, dete rmined us to select a psychoanalytical approach of her
work. If, by the aid of classical psychoanalytical concepts and theories of Freud and
Young, we try to understand deeper aspects of traditional thinking, by the agency of more
recent psychoanalysts, such as the post -structurali st Lacan and the feminist Judith Butler,
we try to decode more complex issues of humankind and human mind, w hich are
problematized in Vogel ’s plays.
The study is st ructured in three chapters. T he first introductor y and theoretical
chapter, entitled Violence in a Psychoanalytical Context , examine s the concept of violence
from different perspectives, including the psychoanalytical point of view. The chapter is
divided into three sections. The first section, Types of Violence , define s the concept,
present s the types and forms of violence, categoriz ing and classify ing them, from different

9
points of view. The approach es negotiate violence in psychological, psychiatrical, socio –
cultural and historical context s, as the spe cialists covered them. The second section,
Violence from a Psychoanalytical Perspective , looks at violence with a psychoanalytical
insight. The main concepts and theories of psychoanalysis are discussed , starting with the
foundation of the field and ending with recent works and studies. The section covers parts
of Freud ’s, Yung ’s, Lacan ’s and Butler ’s research , but other representatives are also
mentioned. The last section of the chapter, Violence and Theatre , discusses the use of
violence in theatrical con texts and situates Paula Vogel ’s work in the frame and history of
American contemporary drama.
An important aspect of the structure of this research is the possibility offered by the
composition of the plays of splitting the analysis in realist sequences and fantasy
sequences, which in Vogel ’s plays are intersecting and overlapping, creating the sensation
of a complex, unitary and all -embracing narrative. The separation regards the next two
chapters, and makes easier the psychoanalytical critical interpre tation, as it exposes
different aspects and features of the interior mind, the conscious and the unconscious, the
collective and the particular.
The second chapter, entitled Violenc e in Realist Sequences of Vogel ’s Plays ,
focuse s on the analysis of the four plays by Paula Vogel. The chapter is separate d, again, in
different units , exposing different forms of violence found in the selected plays , but with
regard to their realist sequences. Thus , the first part , Physical Violence in And Bab y Makes
Seven , dissects the most known and terrifying form of violence. The second part, Sibling
Violence in The Mineola Twins , treats violent aspects of sisterhood and siblings rivalry.
The best known play , How I L earned to Drive , reveals the central t heme and concern of
Paula Vogel ’s political activism. Therefore, the third part of this chapter, Gender Based
Violence in How I Learned to Drive , focuses on types of violence that originate in a
socia lly construct ed concept, namely gender. The last part of th e chapter, Domestic
Violence in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , concentrate s the broader issues of gender based violence
into the domestic sphere. Of course, that one type of aggression that has greater occurrence
in one play does not necessary miss in another one. So, traces of other types of aggression,
different from those included in the titles of the sections named abov e, are found in all of
the four plays.

10
The last chapter, Violenc e in Fantasy Sequences of Vogel ’s Plays , examines
different forms of aggression en countered in the fantasy sequences of the selected plays,
without naming one specific form in the section titles. The chapter is divided in to four
sections in which different forms of fantasies are displayed. The first section, Visionary
Realm in And Baby Makes Seven , looks at the border between reality and fantasy, their
congruities and incongruities, but also searches for ways in which aggression is inserted in
the visionary realm, and ways in which these forms of violence influence the actual life of
the characters from the narrated world. The second part, Dream Sequences in The Mineola
Twins , shows a deeper understanding of dreams and the significance of violence which
occurs in them, from a psychoanalytical point of view. The third section, Memory Shift s in
How I Learned to Drive , focuses on memory as dreamlike moments that modify
perceptions of violent acts and transgress the lines of lived reality. In th e last section,
Imaginary Frames in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , the tunnel between imagination and authentici ty
of life is introspected and screened at full length . The section also reviews one of the most
worldwide provoking and challenging form s of violence , and its manifestations, even in
our phantasms.
In short, the current study plans to enter Vogel ’s characters ’ innermost thoughts, to
release some of them into the public attention, in order to question and dispute the
transparent, shadowy and darker aspects of their psyche, in an attempt to elucidate their
feelings, actions and behaviors , which shape their identities. Through this endeavor, the
study hopes to find meaning where the society norms fail to make sense , and to infiltrate
into the complexity of the human being , while treating the subjects from extremity to
kernel. Thus , the inv estigat ion is pointing to those feature s of the human min d that belong
to the marginalized groups of people who do not obey the general norms and values of the
mainstream society, and are pushed toward the edges just because they are different. By
this und ertaking the current paper expects to understand the violent urges of human beings
that create hi erarchies and hegemonies, but at the same time subdue and oppress, and
sometimes shift power and authority. In other words, we explore the complexity of life
with the help of the big stage set up by Paula Vogel ’s dramaturgy.

11
CHAPTER 1

VIOLENCE IN A PSYCHOANALYTICAL CONTEXT

1.1 Types of Violence

In a world in which people are used with the concept of violence , it is very difficult
to establish its limits or to categorize it. In order to understand the meaning of violence , the
etymology of the word turns out to be essential .
The word violence is attested from the late thirtee n century, with the meaning of
“physical force u sed to inflict injury or damage ”, from Anglo -French and Old French
violence , which originated from the Latin word violentia, signif ying “vehemence,
impetuos ity”, derived from violentus , meaning “vehement, forcible ”. A weakened sense of
“improper treatment ” is attested from 1590 s (Online Etymology Dictionary ). The word
violentus is probably related to violare , which implied to “treat w ith violence, outrage,
dishonor ” (Online Etymology Dictionary ).
Violence is defined as “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage ,
or kill someone or some thing ” or as “the unlawful exercise of physical force or
intimidation by the exhibition of such force ”, and also as “strength of emotion or of a
destructive natural force ” (English Oxford Living Dictionaries ). After other sources , the
noun violence is defined as “extremely forceful actions that are intended to hurt peopl e or
are likely to cause damage ” or as “actions or words that are intended to hurt people ” and
even an “extreme force ” (Cambridge Dictionary ).
The dictionaries ext end the meaning of violence pointing out some synonyms and
related terms, such as aggression, atrocity, barbarity, bloodthirstiness, brutality,
brutishness, confrontation, cruelty, destructiveness, ferocity, fierceness, force, forcefulness,
fury, heartless ness, inhumanity, mercilessness, murderousness, pitilessness, potency,
power, powerfulness, roughness, ruthlessness, sadism, savagery, storminess, strength,
tempestuousness, turbulence, vehemence or wildness.
When it comes to terms of reference, violen ce has a multitude of definitions ,
depending on the context and the perspective from which it is tackled. Thus f rom a socio –
psychological point of view, violence can be defined as an exercise of power, which is not

12
approved by the person who suffers this a ct of violence, an exe rcise which can be active
(i.e. injury) or passive (i.e. neglect or deprivation), intentional or involuntary.
Compared with history, violence is considered to be an instrument of time and
culture, with which societies and individual s constructed a contextual trauma of human
origin, with or without physical marks , but always with psychical signs (Bylander and
Kidd 2319 ). Considering its plurality of aspects, a metaphoric or symbolic definition of
violence gives in -depth insight into t he concept and creates certain inter- and trans –
disciplinary connections :
[…] a single substance, it would be a hard substance, capable of harming any surface. It would have
to be durable, as the impact of violence creates scars that can endure for gene rations. I t would have
to be multifaceted; both to reflect the many dimensions of violence and to afford each culture its
own unique combination of facets. ( Bylander and Kidd 2320 )
Psychiatrists describe violence as a form of aggression, a psychical aggre ssion
towards another or towards the self, with the aim to generate damage or pain. They also
stipulate for violence potential, which is viewed as the probability of a violent action of a
patient in the future (Tardiff 1210 ). On the other hand, aggression is seen as referring to
acts that inflict direct or indirect physical, verbal, psychological and/or social harm on
individuals , in a particular historical and cultural context, which defines its own ethi c
values ( Fry 14).
From a social and political point of view, violence is discerned as a presence of
coercion, a hybrid exercise of power or an unmediated conflict between parties ( Haugaard
and Ryan 1718 ). There is a mapped relationship between law and violence, therefore a
definition of this concept is fil tered through the items and products of legal rules and
stipulations, violence being clarified as the exertion of force to impair or abuse other
individuals or groups ( Curry 1127 ).
According to the “World Report on Violence and Health ” of the World Healt h
Organization, from 2002, there are many possible paths through which violence can be
defined. The concept of violence is qualified as an “extremely diffuse and complex
phenomenon ”, and pervasively defined by World Health Organization as “the intentional
use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or
against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting
injury, death, psychological harm , maldevelopment or deprivation ” (4).
The typology of violence is diverse and it lacks some historical traits of every
circumstance in which is conserved or produced, or every setting in which it is used. The

13
analytical framework used in the “World Report on Violence and Health ” splits violence
into three large categories, depending on the agent of malefaction: self -directed violence,
interpersonal violence and collective violence . Self -directed violence is divided into self –
abuse (self -mutilation) and suicide. Interpersonal violence includes fami ly violence
(partner abuse , child abuse , elder s and youth violence ) and community violence
(acquaintance and stranger violence ). Collective violence takes a variety of forms, such as:
genocide, armed conflicts within or between state, repression and other human rights
abuses, terrorism and organised violent crime.
The typology also encapsulate s the nature of violent acts, which can be physical,
sexual or psychological, or can involve deprivation and neglect. The taxonomy places
emphasis on the relevance o f setting (home, schools, prisons, workplaces, nursing homes
etc.), on the relationship between the perpetrator and the vict im, and on the reasons of
violence (4 -5).
Returning to the two dictionaries mentioned , an exemplification of the contexts in
which the term violence is used creates and illustrates a certain sense of typology of
violence. It is mentioned violence erupted in protest marches, domestic violence against
women, family violence, physical violence, racial and ethnic violence, ins titutional
violence, authority ’s violence, media violence , sexual violence, emotional violence, and
even political violence or violence of the nature.
When it comes of types of violence one does not have problems to decode the
above taxonomies. But the situation in which there appears a classification such as
developmental violence, eruptive violence, legitimate violence or symbolic violence may
be problematic and challenging and may necessitate a distillation of the meaning.
Developmental violence presumes a failu re to provide nutrition, care, education,
culture, love and play in order to realize the developmental capacity of the child (Bylander
and Kidd 2319 ). Eruptive violence focuses on suppressed anger which motivates violence.
This is related to reactive aggre ssion, implying aggressive actions motivated by anger.
(Marcus 672)
On the other hand, legitimate violence regards violence as authority used by the
state that it justifies adequate ly to act on its own policies, separating itself from other
illegitimate violence. It is a type of legal violence, taking the form of militarism in con trast
with illegal violence such as terrorism or criminality. Eventually, s ymbolic violence

14
comprises violent metaphors in language and music or violent images in films and
telev ision . These representations are found in popular discourse, social communication and
mass media (Elias 2288 -89).
Beyond all those psycho -sociological approaches of violence an interesting tackling
of the concept is from a linguistic perspective. Having t his in mind, researchers highlighted
that violence is located in language, at a lexico -semantic level , hurting or offending, and
can also be built in discourse, by means of intentional or unintentional discourse strategies
and techniques. So, one can perce ive a piece discourse as being violent and someone else
can perceive it as being unaggressive or inoffensive. Furthermore i t can be noticed that a n
enormous exercise of power can be practiced by the agency of linguistic devices , as a
result of an essential bond between language and power (Scripnic, Ganea, Gâță 151 -152).
The divergence and ambiguity of the concept show the aporetic status of violence,
as Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes when she deconstructs violence of writing, of thought and
of knowing. She revisits Derrida ’s theory and traces connections between violence and the
structure of writing or differenc e, highlighting the marking line made by writing over the
structure of violence (Grosz 136 -137). Therefore she define violence of nomination, of
language or writing, as being “an expropriation, covered over and concealed by the
violence that names itself as the space of no nviolence, the field of the law ” (Grosz 138) .
She deepens Derrida ’s tenet and she infers that “everyday violence, the violence we
strive to condemn in its racist, sexist, classist, and individualist terms, is itself the violent
consequence of an entire order whose very foundation is inscriptive, differential, and thus
violent ” (Grosz 138). Grosz challenges the distinction between “good” violence , a
constructive, necessary one and “bad” violence , “wanton, excess ive, and capable of
elimination ”, a destructive and negative type (Grosz 141), but she also fram es a dichotomy
of verbal violence and written violence, as parts of lingui stic vi olence or violence of
language.
Alternatively, Arturo J. Aldama invites his readers to analyze their own complicity
with violence of epistemology, thought and language, “that marks, otherizes , shames and
desecrate s both the social and material bodies ” (Aldama 8) . He cha llenges the reception of
“justifiable ” and “nonjustifiable ” violence, comparable with Grosz ’s “good ” and “bad”
violence (Aldama 10). He also takes notice of racial, sexual, physical and discursive
violence in relationship with the materialit y of the otherized, affected bodies and the

15
injuries produced to traumatized interior psychic areas of those made inferior by violence ,
reasoning whether the aim of violence is to discipline or traumatize, or both (Aldama 5-6).
A single act of violence ma y harm the body and create psychological scars or
traumas which can be difficult to recognize. So it can be revealed , in a Jungian sense , the
shadow of violence, which refers to those forms of violence that someone does not
recognize as being violent . Thes e forms of violence depend on each individual perceptive
system , and exist, more or less pointed, in every society , making the shadow of violence a
perpetual trace through universe. Accordingly, each definition of violence must be
multidimensional, involvi ng all aspects of life : family , commun ity, personal, ancestral,
cultural and perceptual configurations (Bylander and Kidd 2320 -21).
In view of all this, a s much as somebody wish es to overtake the struggle of ranking
all types of violence , they migh t discover the difficulty of establishing such clear typology ,
without narrowing the field of framing. The focus of the current study is on those types of
violence illustrated in Paula Vogel ’s plays , both the transparent and hidden forms of
violence she r eflects on, neglecting those types of violence t hat do not appear in Vogel ’s
work.
When reading Paula Vogel ’s plays, one can detect violence against women or
gender based violence , domestic violence, family violence, sibling violence , physical
violenc e, verbal and linguistic violence, sexual violence, violence against children, yo uths
or elder people, the authorities ’ violence, emotional violence and psychological violence ,
community violence, suicide and even legitimate violen ce. At a closer look there can be
discovered traces of developmental violence against children, eruptive violence or reactive
aggression and symbolic violence. This search ing for violence in Paula Vogel ’s plays,
effortless in some cases or thorny in others, guides to detection of a deeper meaning ,
within the struggle of decoding the message of her plays.

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1.2 Violence from a Psychoanalytical Perspective

Violence is a concept with which psychoanalysis deals indirectly, when it is needed
to detect those unconscious psycholo gical forces that influence the dynamics of it. It is
important to connect violence with psychological development in childhood or prenatal
influences , to relate it with the environment in the production of mental conflicts and the
interacting effects of e ndogenous emotional experiences in order to exploit and digest this
notion.
To penetrate into the psychological aspect of violence, specialists demonstrated,
from a social cognitive perspective, that the violent behaviour is a result of the way in
which t he individual understands and handles social information. Cognitive factors
influence the decisions made by every human being, including group leaders. But there are
situations in which these factors are in decline, especially when the social context is
hovering by fear and threat. Ch ildren, on the other hand, do not need to be frustrated or
rewarded to show aggressive behaviour. However it can be showed to them a model of
violent attitude and they could copy it, as a result of persistent exposure or person al social
processing. It had been pointed out that s ometimes human beings adopt a certain violent
behaviour in order to gain respect, power, or a sense of belonging and safety (Christie and
Wessells 1956). These lead to the question of what is the reason for violence.
When it comes to reasoning an act of violence, John Sallis indicates, as Murray
Code underlines in his essay, the f act that the dream to identify “a pure reason capable of
revealing truth in all its glory without the intervention of imagi nation ” (Code 1842) is
futile. Therefore, it is not a clear algorithm through which the path towards a nonviolent
reason or a violent one is located , in as much as it can be distinguished the transformative
violence of imaginative thinking from that thinki ng which robs subjects of their
subjectivity, in a world in which conflicts are unavoidable and “every act of imagination
threatens the stability of extant equilibrium ” (Code 1845). Reasoning is an act of human
being and violence is in herent in human being s.
Therefore, human nature is inherently and innately violent, as Thomas Hobbes
considered, and people want equality and p ower, especially when they do not have it and
they have to fight for it. Later, Freud , as it is seen further on , concluded that viol ence is an
innate tendency of human beings, which can destroy not only other s elves , but also one ’s

17
own self, and that humankind is naturally aggressive (Davies 959 -60). Thus, i n its pure
form, viole nce is a form of natural power (Haugaard and Ryan 1717).
Still, the study of violence from a psychoanalytical perspective star ts with the
International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation ex change of letters from 1931 and
published in 1933 under the title Why War? . One of the participa nts was Sigmund Freud,
the founder of psychoanalysis , chosen by Albert Einstein (Leitch 809 ). Sigmund Freud ’s
explanation of war and violence was influenced by his personal contact with the tenebro us
war which affected his life. His sisters died in two of the Nazi concent ration camps, his
daughter Anna wa s detained by Gestapo and Freud ’s household was besieged by the Nazis.
Therefore his exploration on violence and war presumed self -analysis as well (Hartman
1789).
Freud ’s view of war and violence as a cause of it was re lated to the unconscious
wishful impulses which determine human beings to be murderers , committing physical
violence . During the war t he repressed aggressive drives of individuals gain ground in
front of their intellect, being released from the latent stat e, and the humans become
incapable of master ing these destructive impulses. The only hope remains the libidinal,
loving and unifying drive, which could turn the scales towards the individual unity and
humankind synergy. He believed that civilization will thrive when the strengt h of
intellectual life with its rationality will manage to cope with those violent, death instincts.
Freud ’s postulate was that the power of nature, the frailty of our body and the
dissonance of the regulations which mediate human r elations are the sources of mankind ’s
suffering. Consequently a n irrational thinking leads to a delusional remo ulding of reality ,
including an identification of enemies which become demonized and dehumanized, of
course by means of exaggeration justified as a defence mechanism. His elucidation of war
and violence rested on individual and group psychology that were based on Oedipal and
Electra phase, the concept of the beginning of civilization in the primal horde (according to
which a group of brothers colle ctively killed and ate their father, and out of remorse they
worshipped a totem representation of him), along with identifications between the group
members (Hartman 1790 -91).
Starting with Freud ’s central concept of the unconscious, that inventory of hu man
unaware desires, fears, needs and conflicts , continuing with the concept of repression, that
removal of certain unhappy or painful psychological events from consciousness and

18
pushing into the unconscious, ending with the concepts of oedipal conflict, s ibling rivalry,
inferiority c omplexes and defence mechanisms, psychoanalysis built up its foundation
based on notions about human experiences which prepared this field of study for a deeper
quest in understanding human behaviour, including acts of violenc e. Of course that
violence is always accompanied by emotion of anger, hostility, hatred, frustration, fear,
and sometimes cruelty or even sadism. Human beings found out how to protect themselves
in order to keep unconscious certain destructive contents, by means of defence
mechanisms, such as selective perception, selective memory, denial, avoidance,
displacement, projection , sublimation and regressio n. These defence mechanisms lead to
anxieties and complexes , such as fear of intimacy, of abandonment, of be trayal, low self –
esteem, insecure or unstable sense of self and the oedipal complex. And “anxiety always
involves the return of the repressed ” (Tyson 11 -17).
Because the defences do not functio n in the same manner during dream states ,
dream symbols , recur rent or not, prove to be very important tools in uncovering the
unconscious, revealing life instincts such as sexuality or death instinct s such as aggression
(Tyson 18-21). By means of dream distortion in which the message is metamorphosed ,
dream displacem ent in which one person, event or object is replaced by another one less
hovering , and dream condensation in which a single dream image or event corresponds for
more than one unconscious significance, Freud brought out the latent content of the
unconscious and interpreted the symbolic meaning of dreams (Freud 814 -824).
So, what seems to “usually emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of most
intricate possible structu re” actually is a ‘complica ted structure ’ which “can represent
foreground and backg round, digressions and illustrations , conditions, chains of evidence
and counter -arguments ”. This is Freud ’s “manifest content of a dream ” and dream
representation (Freud 821), which could imply constructive or destructive impulses.
Nevertheless , the rela tionship between the death drive – Thanatos and the life drive – Eros
may be one based on dysfunctionality or equilibrium, and is a principal promoter of human
psychological experiences . All this are entrenched in a cultural context in which the
interrelat ionship between ego, id and superego is marked (Tyson 21-26).
As Peter Barry empha sizes too, Freud was sure that “there is a lways a return of the
repressed ”, not only in anxieties , as Tyson underlined . Sometimes that repressed memory,
wish, desire, fe ar or frustration continue to live hidden into unconscious, “like radioactive

19
matter buried beneath the ocean, and constantly seeks a way back into the conscious mind,
always succeeding eventuall y” (72). There are cases in which the return of the repre ssed
reveals life impulses such as sexual instincts. But, o nce in a while , if not often, this return
is like an eruption of the most violent volcano and it is as destructive for the environment
as for itself ; splashing violence, aggression, atrocity, anger, fu ry, and even murderousness.
In the course of human evolution, thes e death instincts diminished their intensity,
humankind learn ing how to deal with them . But civilization never succeeded in eliminating
this power of nature ; physical violence suffered a t ransformation, a trans mutation and a
fusion into other types of violence . These forms of violence do not produce death so easily,
instead they give rise to psychical trauma s which shape a defeated enemy that can be
tortured a considerable period of time. S o, Freud ’s first pessimistic view regarding
violence adjusted to human evolution and extended to new complex dimensions.
A lot of post-Freudian psychoanalytical explanations of violence and war emerged ,
based on research made by psychoanalysts , such as Erik Erikson, William Walter Meissner
and V amik Djemal Volkan . After the World War II the interest in psychoanalysis and the
ego flourished. The study of the ego implied exploration of those functions of the mind
which deals with management of conflict and a daptation. In addition a greater emphasis
was given to the relationship w ith the mother during the child ’s personality development,
the pre -Oedipal period of development which involve s more primitive influential
mechanism s of defen ce, and also the mental r epresentations of the sense of self and the
significant others (Hartman 1791) .
Picturing figures from history, such as Hitler, Luther or Ghandi, Erikson enlarged
the concept of identity from accumulation of identifications and instinctual nature to
mutual interaction between biology, interpersonal relations, culture and history, and
between the leader and the group. He analyzed, for example, the role of nonviolence and
hatred in life ’s socio -cultural contexts of Ghandi or Hitler. Robert Jay Lifto n, inspired by
Erikson, has explored violence in the context of totali tarianism and brainwashing ,
Hiroshima bombing, Holocaust and genocidal mentality. He disrupted the realm of
psychoanalysis with the phenomenon of psychic numbing, a process by which indi viduals
can emotionally distance themselves during experiences of massive psychic trauma
(Hartman 1792) .

20
From all -good and all bad thinking of Franco Fornari, to primitive idealization,
introjections, projections and paranoid process, William Walter Meis sner broke social
violence. A defence against feelings such as helplessness and worthlessness, which are
seen as inner enemies, is created during paranoia and an external enemy is scouted in order
to defeat those feelings. From paranoid process back to tha t unleashed primitive
aggression , narcissism and role of media and internet underlay the foundation stone of Otto
Kernbe rg theory of social violence (Hartman 1792 -93).
Analyzing violence implies looking for its motives too. A Turkish Cypriot –
American ps ychoanalyst, Vamik Djemal Volkan, pointed out the idea that small
differences between individuals and groups can be turned into the identification of targets
of externalization, and thus identification of enemies and allies, which can be passed from
genera tion to generation without resolution, and in which can be found Freud ’s views on
men’s aggressiveness and destructiveness. In his view, war and ethnic violence appear
when a group ’s sense of identity is threatened in a context of social trauma or crisis
(Hartman 1793 -94).
The p ost-Freudian work was a psychoanalytical contribution to reducing violent
social conflicts. From Anna Freud ’s details regarding the effects of children dislocation
from their families by World War II on their dev elopment to other psychoanalysts ’
research on Holocaust survivors or post -traumatic stress disorders , all these endeavours
guided the path to the disentanglement of the concept of violence . No doubt that in Paula
Vogel ’s plays one does not find all types and forms of violen ce, and a psychoanalytical
study and references cannot be all -embracing. Therefore, even though some extensions are
made, so that indirect hints are created, it is very important to mention them in order to
understand, elucidate, analyze and interpret the concept of violence as a whole.
Indirect connections with violence were made by non -traditional psychoanalysts,
such as Carl Gustav Jung, Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. Each of them enhanced the
field of psychoanalysis with new concepts and theories, s ome of which emerged from
older, traditional ones, but a lot of them were brought into existence without any affinity
with the one before . Certainly that some of the new concepts and theories were considered
as being counter -critical responses to earlier ones.
In this manner Carl Gustav Jung expanded Freud ’s concept of individual
unconsciousness and constructed the notio n of collective unconsciousness, after their path

21
separated in divergent ways. So, he abandoned the sexual theory of Freud and his new
concepts rested on the supposition that the occu lt phenomenon affected everyone ’s life.
Like Freud, Jung put great emphasi s on interpretation of dreams and dream symbols , and
he disregarded Freud ’s techniques, advocating that his interpretations were incomple te,
especially when it dealt with dreams with collective contents. Born in Europe, n aturally
that his theories were influenced by his travels, namely his visits and experiences in
connection to Pueblo Indians , African, Indian and Italian communities (Jaffé 4-13).
His conviction was that “the conscious mind is not only influenced by the
unconsc ious but actually guided by it ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 86). He
distinguished between personal and collective unconscious. He regarded the collec tive
unconsciousness as “a sum total of all those psychic processes and contents which are
capable of becoming conscious and often do, but are then suppressed because of their
incompatibility and kept subliminal ”, which “shows no tendency to become conscio us
under normal conditions, nor can it be brought back to recollection ” (Jung, The Spirit in
Man, Art and Literature 93). It is not an easy operation to look for traces of violence in his
work , but someone can discover that Jung ’s notions of archetype, dri ven from the
collective unconscious , such as shadow, anima and animus, may embrace a shade of
aggression.
If the archetype is defined by Jung as the embody of an ancient or archaic figure,
“the primordial image ”, which can be a demo n, a human being or a process, “that
constantly recurs in the course of history ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 94),
then this image conjures up the “participation mystique of primitive man with the soil on
which he dwells, and which contai ns the spirits of his an cestors ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man,
Art and Literature 95). Hence “the contents of the collective unconscious are invariably
archetypes that were present fr om the beginning ” (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 188).
A powerful perturbing archetype upon the ego is the shadow, that “moral problem
that challenges the whole ego -personality ” (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 189), the
negative or darkness side of the personality, which involve an inferior level of feelings and
behaviours, with “its uncontrolled or scar cely controlled emotions one behaves more or
less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly
incapable of mora l judgement ” (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 189). The shadow ’s
contents may be easily absorbed into t he conscious personality and it has always the same

22
sex as the person that bears it. Someone could deduce that violence and aggressive
behaviour may be connected with primitive characteristics, and therefore with the
archetype of shadow. As a result of def ensive or offensive attitude the primitive human
being had been obliged or not to appeal to violent behaviour in order to survive. Sure
enough that the arc hetype of shadow does not comprise only violent feature s, but also
immoral, hidden, repressed and shadowy ones.
In this context, Jung’ s statement becomes full of meaning and triggers the
resonance of ancestry : “it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize
the relative evil of his nature, but it is rare and shattering experience f or him to gaze into
the face of absolute evil” (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 191). So, the shadow, “the
privation of light ” as the one that follows the body, or “the privation of good”, “ whose
ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise
the whole histo rical aspect of the unconscious” , this darkness masks influential and
autonomous factors, namely anima and animus (Jung, Aion: Researches into the
Phenomenology of the Self 266).
In Jung’ s view the archetype o f anima is the feminine side of men, “a spontan eous
product of the unconscious”, which “ possesses all the outstanding char acteristics of a
feminine being” and “ appears i n dreams, visions and fantasies”, where “she takes a
personified form” (Jung , Aspects o f the Feminine 195). Jung’ s conception about the
feminine psyche integrate s also a compensatory masculine element , resistant to
consciousness, the animus, which is correspondent to anima. So every human being has an
opposite sex imprint. The men store a ma ternal Eros by means of anima and the women
store a paternal Logos by means of animus. The relationship between anima and animus is
one of animosity, as Jung as serts: “when animus and anima meet , the animus draws his
sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction” (Jung , Aspects
of the Feminine 197). According to Jung’s theory anima which “ gives relatio nships and
relatedness to a man’ s consciousness” becomes Eros or Yin, and animus which “ gives to a
woman’ s consciousness a capacity of reflection, d eliberation, and self -knowledge”
becomes Logos or Yang (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 198). However, so metimes animus
operates like a “ devastating, blindly, obstinate demo n of opinionatedness in a woman” and
anima proceeds as a “glamorous, possessive, moody, and sentimental seductress in a man”
(Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self 266). In this manner the

23
negative aspect emerges, probably on the verge of violence, which nevertheless seems to
be in the human nature , even if the “ more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a
man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts” (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 198).
As mentioned before, violence is located in language and can be built in
discourse. So it is no wonder that “the French Freud” (Leitch 1157), namely Jacques Lacan
considers that the unconscious, “the nucleus of our being” (Barry 77) is “not a chaotic
mass of disparate material, as might formerly have been thought, but an orderly network,
as comple x as the structure of a language: (Barry 78). In his writings, Lacan uses “ difficult,
polemical, and ironic, organ ized in sometimes baffling ways” (Leitch 1156) to describe his
psychoanalyti cal theories. His discourse is “ dotted with strange syntax, foreig n words,
wordplay, obscure allusions, persona lity, and mathematical formulas: (Leitch 1156) in
order to highlight that “language is central” and that the psychoa nalytic “ realm of truth is
in fact the word” (Barry 78).
The “kernel of our being” (Barry 7 9), the unconscious , which like a language , a
“foreign language ” (Leitch 1160), had existed before the individual penetrated it, even if is
“structured, not amorphous ” (Leitch 1160), is ambiguous and infers a loss or lack. This
implication is encountered i n metaphor and metonymy , and in both cases it is involved an
absence (when metaphor appears in language, a symbol is used to compare a different
thing or to compress several entities , and when metonymy appears, a part of the object is
used to stand in for the whole) (Tyson 29 -30).
Lacan abs orbs, in the eyes of Roman Jakobson (Leitch 1157), many of Freud’ s
concepts and theories, including the unconscious processes during the dream work,
condensation and displacement. He associates condensation, which repre sents the
substitution of an entity with few different ones, with metaphor , and displacement, which
embodies the replacement of an entity with a different, less threatening one , with
metonymy (Tyson 30). Lacan also reinterprets the concept of the unconscio us, through
Ferdinand de Saussure ’s model of the sign, which according to Lacan encloses
unconsciously the social norms, conventions and interdictions, and thus the language
speaks , before the individual begins to speak, and the self is split between a con scious and
unconscious one (Leitch 1160).
Lacan ’s theory of psychological development of a person begins with the infant
stage in which there is not any differentiation between itself and the infant ’s environment,

24
and the imaginary field between the two is a “random, fragmented, formless mass ” (Tyson
27). Accordingly to his theor y, the infant further develops the “Mirror Stage ”, at some
point after six month, when the child develops a sense of itself as a whole, separated from
the environment, after seein g its own reflection in the mirror. This initiates the “Imaginary
Order ” of the psyche , which comprise a world of images, a worl d in which the child still
does not speak and has the illusive feeling of complete union with its mother.
The follow ing stage of psychological development implies the acquisition of
language and the initiation into the “Symbolic Order ” of the psyche, which in volve s a
system of signification and meaning -making , and a separation from the others, including
from the child ’s mother . The most important experience of loss, the separation from its
mother , will chase the child and the future adult during the rest of its life, and will give
them the feeling of incompleteness. This separation from the preverbal world of idealized
bond with the mother led to modified perception of the mother as a result of entering into
the Symbolic Order. Thus, the lost object of desire or “object petit a ”, with the letter a from
autre , the French correspondent for other , is the “little other ” part of the one that lost it,
anything that is in contact with the repressed desire of the lost object (Tyson 27 -28).
This experience of lack , conceived in the Symbolic Order , points out the passage
between the conscious and the unconscious mind, with the lat ter being created by the
initial repression of child ’s desire for the unification with mother , and continuing with
anything lost, driven into the background. So, the illusion of fulfilment and control is lost
in the exit moment from the Imaginary Order.
The restrictive Symbolic Order marks the substitution of the “Desire of the Mother ”
with “the Name -of-the-father ”. In this context, the phallus, a signifier, a symbol of men ’s
penis and a metaphor for patriarchal power and authority, becomes a sign of lack , being a
part of the Symbolic Order. And, s ince through language the social norms and prohibitions
are learned , the individual desire s, beliefs or biases are constructed based on cultural
ideologies (Tyson 29 -31).
When th e ideology ’s limits are transcend ed the experience of the untranslated
dimension, of “the Real ” becomes authentic. Meaning created by the society sometimes
terrifies, because it does not give an alternative, and thus creates the anxious feeling of the
Real, the “trauma of the Real ”, which presumes a lack of knowledge, understanding and
control (Tyson 32).

25
Each shift from one dimension or “order ” of the psyche to another may call for
dissonance, unbalance, rejection, unconscious desires and traumas , which could last for the
rest of somebod y’s life , even if that person is aware of it or not. This inadequacy may be
accompanied by aggression or violence , and
also throws light on the dynamic opposition between this libido and the sexual libido, which the first
analysts tried to define when the y invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to
explain the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the
aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other, even in a relation invo lving the most Samaritan
of aid . (Lacan 1168)
There is no wonder that Lacan ’s view of “the madness that deafens the world with
its sound of fury ” is sprung from the “light reflected on the level of fatality, which is where
the id manifests itself ” (Lacan 1169) . He does not believe in altruistic attitude and
considers that psychoanal ysts “lay bare the aggressivity that underlines the activity of the
philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer ” (Lacan 1169) , which is
unconcealed, latent or mask ed.
Lacan ’s apprehension of subject formation is transposed and metamorphosed by
Judith Butler. She juxtaposes to Lacan ’s overview Michael Foucault ’s display about power
and Jacques Derrida ’s understanding of “performative speech acts ”, and she t roubles and
challenges the notions of gendered and sexual identity and how they are socially
constructed. So, through the “alienation of self from desire ”, the “discourse which orders
knowledge ” and “produce subjects open to power ’s control ”, and altered speech acts which
are repetitions of “old words and structures ” in new settings, Butler ’s perception of identity
trends towards a “fluid and dynamic understanding of desires and selves ” (Leitch 253 6-
2537) .
If someone considers that word s do not denote and describe entirely the real things
and feelings, another one could take into consideration the fact that these things and
feelings may be “created and reinforced through language ” (Nevitt 29 ). In this way Judith
Butler , in Excitable Speech: A Politics of th e Performative , explores and decomposes
performative speech acts:
“What does it mean for a word not only to name, but also in some sense to perform and, in
particular, to perform what it names? ” (Nevitt 30)
Thus speech acts are produced to perform contro l and power, as acts of violence .
The use of “hate speech ” or abusive terms converges through a “history of familiar abuse ”
and extracts power from it. In this manner language becomes a violent action used to

26
attack, oppress and abuse, being no longer just a description. This kind of speech act cites a
“history of oppression ” and increases its effects by “connecting it with pre -existing
structures and attitudes ”, embodying reiterated aggression and hate (Nevitt 30).
Besides violent acts of speech, envision ed by Butler as citational repetitions, there
are also the notions of “sex” and “gender ”, “experienced only through the categories and
expectations set out by the culture ’s signifying order ”. She insisted that nothing is natural,
that “anatomical differenc es are mapped to expectations about sexual desire ”, and that
“compulsory sexuality ”, “identity construction and maintenance ”, put in any historical
socio -cultural background, are oppressive , and they should be open to revision or
“resignification ” (Leitch 2536 -2537).
Although pervasive social power of language operates through its cited and
reiterated meanings, Butler looks to question and to “resignify ” these perceived meanings.
She considers that fixed “identity is a trap, a hardening into rigid, binariz ed categories of
much more fluid and heterogeneous possibilities ” (Leitch 2537). Compulsory heterosexual
identity disavows or eliminates nonheterosexual desires and acts, but through penances
paid by those who do not obey the norm, culpability is internali zed. Even if those deviant
identities are targets to aggression , discursive power and gender hierarchy are troubled
while subversive performances “destabilize the naturalized categories of identity and
desire ” (Leitch 253 8):
Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion
between a subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the product ion of that binary
frame for thinking about gender. (Butler , Gender Trouble 2540)

Even if Butler ’s work arises and develop s from feminism, she believes that “all
forms of identity politics ” are “prone to aggressions used to enforce rigid consistencies ”,
and thus a “queer theory ” is imperative to break down the “established boundaries between
male and female, normal and abnormal, self and other ”, in a society where hegemony is
maintained through discursive power to a deep unconscious level, and has a masculine
gender (Leitch 2538). So, when Butler emphasizes a “false stabilization of gender, in the
interests of the h eterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the
reproduction domain ”, she also argues that the gendered body is a construction of
exclusions and denials, but the “construction of coherence conceals the gender
discontinuities that run rampan t within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian

27
contexts in which gender does not neces sarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality
generally ” (Butler , Interiority to Gender Performatives 2548).
Butler explores, among many other theorists ’ conce pts, Julia Kristeva ’s notion of
“abject ”, explaining it as an exclusion, something “which has been expelled from the body,
discharged as excrement, literally rendered Other ” (Butler, Subversive Bodily Acts 2546).
According to Butler, “the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very
terms of history ”, a “medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for
‘culture ’ to emerge ” (Butler, Subversive Bodily Acts 2543) .
Discussing , through Mary Douglas ’ material, the dichotomy of mater iality versus
immateriality of the body, and body boundaries , Butler underlines that the exterior of the
body is “systemically signified by taboos and transgressions ” (Butler, Subversive Bodily
Acts 2544), and afterwards she distil s Foucault ’s metaphor of the interior psychic space as
a “prison of the body ”, not vice versa, as Christianity taught the human kind (Butler,
Interiority to Gender Performatives 2548) . She also phrases the notion of gender
identification, as being a replica of a replica :
[…] constituted by fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a
‘figure ’ in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender
fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. (Butler, Interiority to Gender Performatives 2550)
The philosopher reckons that abiding gendered self is a fragile constructed identity,
instituted through internal discontinuous repetitive acts which created the illusion of
endurance. For her, gender is also a “norm that can never be fully internalized ”, impossible
to embody, and possible to achieve transformation, through a failure or parodic repetition
or even a “de-formity ” (Butler, Interiority to Gender Performatives 2552). However, for
her, gender is a concept which cannot be polarized as true or false, real or apparent,
original or derived (Butler, Interiority to Gender Performatives 2553).
Butler ’s theories have great impact on literary studies, as Leitch itself assserts
(Leitch 2538) , challenging debates that concern society ’s received categories or
performative imitation and trans mutation of cultur al contexts. Through the agency of her
theories, literary critics may turn over a new leaf and reconsider their texts analysis,
expending their insights regard ing characters ’ subject formation, their intersubjective
relation to power and dominant elements of the society in which they are installed. In that
manner , critics may distinguish and envisage protagonists ’ conscious actions which reflect
the society ’s influence on their unconscious attitude towards important notions such as

28
gender ed and sexual identity. Her work has an easier applicability , and thus, a better
understanding when the social order is disrupted by unfitted , maladjusted individuals , as
the one s from Paula Vogel ’s plays.
These kind of unadapted characters are liable to Lacanian analysis as well, circling
around notions such as subject construct ion and instability , “subject as a linguistic
construct or language as a self -contained universe of di scourse ” (Barry 80), merely in a
given patriarchal order. Beyond any literary interpretation of Lacan ’s theories, his seminar
on Edgar Allan Poe ’s “The Purloined Letter ” underlies his groundwork of psychoanalytical
reading. Commenting upon Freud ’s concept of “repetition compulsion ”, named by Lacan
“repetition automatism ”, he illustrates the mechanism of “symbolic determination ”,
pointing out that “the purloined ” letter ’s position or place among characters , “and not the
psychology of individuals ”, determine s their displacement and actions , which are
unconscious repetitions of different individual activities (Leitch 1158 -1159) . Thus, the
letter , a “pure signifier ”, becomes a symbol and “an emblem of the unconscious itself ” and
its “unknown content is an embodi ment of aspects of the nature of language ” (Barry 8 2).
But to investigate, analyse and interpret a literary work of art is always a point of
view, as Jung himself exhibited in his essay Psychology and Literature , collected in the
volume The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (99). In his study, Jung admits that “the
phenomenology of the psyche is so colourful, so variegated in form and meaning that we
cannot possibly reflect all its riches in one mirror ” (99), the human psyche being “the
womb of all arts and sciences ”, including literature (100).
What he previously anticipated in the essay On the Relation of Analytical
Psychology to Poetic Art , namely that the “poet’s conviction that he is creating in absolute
freedom would be an illusion ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 86), he
reformulated in Psychology and Literature , asserting that the work of an artist “grows out
of him as a child its mother ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 120) , whether he
imagines having a free will or not. So the artist becomes the “one who allows art to realise
its purposes through him ”, and by means of its “innate drive that seizes the human being ”,
makes him its “instrument ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 119).
Criticis ing harshly Freudian psychology, Jung transcends beyond the influence that
Freudian personal neurotic psyche, traced by complexes, has upon his work of art, and
compares it with a dream, which “does not explain itself and is always ambiguous ” (Jung,

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The Sp irit in Man, Art and Literature 123). Bringing up the different attitude between the
literary critic and the psychologist when approaching a literary work, Jung disposes the
creative act “rooted into the immensity of the unconscious ” (Jung, The Spirit in M an, Art
and Literature 101), which may be occasionally affected by the artist ’s personal human
experiences , but, in the end, the work of art satisfies “the psychic needs of the society ”, and
force back the artist into the primordial experience of humankind :
He has plunged into the healing and redeeming depths of the collective psyche, where man is not
lost in the isolation of consciousness and its errors and sufferings, but where all men are caught in a
common rhythm which allows the individual to communic ate his feelings and strivings to mankind
as a whole (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 123).
Thereafter, the literary language, “pregnant with meanings, and images that are true
symbols because they are the best possible expressions for somethi ng unknown ”, which
“bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore ” (Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature
88), must be decoded and translated into a contemporary language , which can be
subjective and objective at the same time, as the literary work appe ars in a relative
relationship with its creator.
Sure enough that Freudian interpretation of literary works should not be abandoned
completely even though distrust in Freud ’s theory has increased a lot from the
development of feminism. Basically, the cen tral reason is the unconscious, which is
discovered every time by means of symbols, images, dreams, metaphors and emblems
(Barry 73) , which are understood differently , depending on personal values, norms and
beliefs, thus making literary psychoanalytical i nterpretation violently polemic .

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1.3 Violence and Theatre

Freud, Jung, Lacan , Butler and other psychoanalysts have offered , throughout the
entire history, elaborate topographies or “spatial formalizations ” of the psyche, mapping
psychic “geographical aspects of conflict ”, as Jean -Bertrand Lefèvre -Pontalis phrases,
according to Anne Ubersfeld observations in Reading Theatre (99). Such r emarks direct to
spatial and temporal associations of literary materials, overlapping literary langu age, by
means of metaphor and metonymy, with psychoanalytical reading of textual and non –
textual components of theatre ; which are contextualized in all sorts of non -theatrical facts
of life (Ubersfeld 99 -100).
No matter what psychoanalytical theory one c hooses to app ly to theatrical textual
spaces, they would discover beside the “reconstructed image ” of one ’s self, a chain of
related dreams or phantasms which need decoding. This psychoanalytical reading
pinpoints the stage or the space of internal conflic ts as a “closed field in which elements of
the divided, split self confront each other ” (Ubersfeld 105). The key decoder of spatial
representation is a “triangular reading ” whose edges drift from the mind ’s structures to
textual frame, and to the materiali ty of stage space (Ubersfeld 105).
Moreover, t emporal and spatial factors influence the perception of performance
practice and theatrical representation s of violence, as part of the human psyche nature. The
context in which violence may occur varies in ti me and space, and it can be displayed and
represented in performance in many possible ways. Thus, some theatrical performances
tackle political and social side s of violence; others employ vengeance or trauma as a result
of an act of violence, and make voca l a specific public and aspects which involve a violent
conflict (Nevitt 71 -73). The violent images from these performances remain impregnated
on the retina growing “powerful and resonant and deeply distressing ” (Nevitt 7 5),
advancing as one of theatre ’s accountability the abnegation of the normal human status of
violence (Nevitt 74) .
When one discuss es different representations of violence in theatrical contexts, they
can infer that it is a simulated violence inspired from reality, from our world ’s strugg le to
prevail (Nevitt 2 -3). The plurality of violence categorisation by its causes, effects, scale,
length of time in which it occurs, or intentional elements implied, is enacted during the

31
performances and “narratively associated with the effects of the b utterflies, which have
been introduced by an invading power to subdue and control the populace ” (Nevitt 7).
In theatre, the network created among characters and spectators and their language s
could lead to a form of aggression, as a result of certain pra ctises and usages . This network
marks connections between dramatic violence and dramatic language (Malkin 2) . Thus, the
human being becomes the “prisoner of his speech ”, as Malkin (2) calls it, even if he faces
verbal coercion , or exercise s it. Men and wom en are robbed of their consciousness ,
independence and selfhood , through the use of language . In a theatrical context , this
deprivation becomes a quintessential tool for decoding the violent message of the play:
The violent action of language is di rected both against the audience and against the characters. In
either case language is on trial: it stands accused of usurping and molding reality, of replacing
critical thought with fossilized and automatic verbiage, of violating man ’s autonomy, of destr oying
his individuality. (Malkin 1)
The dramatists control their characters ’ language , with the idea of denoting power
in a political context , in which through coercion , human beings are manipulated to become
homogenous and limited. Language is central to human relationships , not only in
performances but also in actual life, and if it gets aggressive and subversive, language
operates as a brutal element of speech (Malkin 11) , even in the illusion of reality or the
portrayal of it. Language is related with power, aggression and victimization, and dramatic
characters pass as medium s for propagation of verbal violence, through the use of implicit
and explicit language structures (Malkin 48).
It is no doubt that violence is a real and potential fact, but in t heatre, violence
“crosses boundaries of period, genre and context ”, and the play itself becomes an act of
violence (Nevitt 10 -11). Hence , the spectators or the readers “go through a mental process
of analysing and understanding ” the violent image depicted and performed (Nevitt 14).
Aware of the simulation process, the audience quickly engage s in this “intellectual analysis
of shifting meanings ”, and the experience of the performance i s assorted with the
subjective level of perception (Nevitt 15 -16). Thus, t he role of fantasy and fictional
violence turns out to be a very important element of the process of understanding the world
in which we live, acting as a defence mechanism, a helping han d in coping with real
violence (Nevitt 26 -27). Connecting the power o f fear generated by violence to simulated
representations of it , David Trend , in his discussion of The Myth of Media Violence ,
according to Lucy Nevitt, divulges the impact of this political issue on the audience:

32
Media violence may not provoke people to become aggressive or commit crimes, but it does
something more damaging. Media violence convinces people that they live in a violent world and
that violence is required to make the world safer. […] This anxious worldview is the result of a
culture of vio lence that forges our core identiti es in fear . (Nevitt 27)
Contextualising violence in a certain culture in which it was produced, the
representations of it “can reiterate or challenge normalised social structures ” (Nevitt 29) ,
and the importance of powe r and its oppressive or redeeming inferences becomes crucial
and sometimes canonical. Theatre and violence are inextricably related, but a performed
act of violence only creates the illusion of aggression and trauma, preserving the safety of
its players an d more or less of its spectators (Nevitt 49 -58). This possibility of injury
among the audience sometimes involves a n actual lived experience of violence. However,
recognition of historical trauma by the act of speaking and being heard reaches to be a
thera py for the victims, whether they are spectators or playwright s. And thus, “speaking is
a form of healing ”, as Yael Fa rber points it in an interview (Nevitt 70).
Thus, the stage represents a “forum ” in which significant issues, including violence,
from wo rld’s societies in general, and American society in particular, are debated and
challenged, “presented, questioned and refined both politically and aesthetically ”
(Martanovschi 104). Put in a historical context, dramatic literature and theatrical
performan ces are u nable to be isolated from cultural influences, political movement s, and
social change s, and impersonate, directly and indirectly, a certain social milieu, such as the
American one. Even though “American drama has struggled since its inception with a
reputation of inferiority ”, according to David Krasner, this perception is changed, and it is
not considered a ‘bastard child ’ anymore . Krasner also notices that American dramatic
literature started to become a sample of American art and culture (Krasne r 1-2).
“A hunger for substance and freewheeling imagination in the theater has made the
zeitgeist right for the plays of ” many American playwrights, including Paula Vogel , though
her plays po rtray her contemporary frameworks of American histo ry, and go no farther
back (Green 146-157). Even if, as Martanovschi (94) highlighted, Brenda Murphy brings
out into high relief the exhaustible space of The Cambridge Companion to American
Women Playwrights (1999), when she regrets Vogel ’s not being discu ssed in the volume
(xv-xvi), Vogel ’s work, as an American dramatist,
[…] plays with and against the masters of British and American theater, forcing the audience to see
things from new perspectives and investigating subject matter that is not usually ta ckled by others.
(Martanovschi 93)

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Violence is part of this subject matter, often looked at with lightness by Paula
Vogel, when other dramatists built from it unapproachable, taboo, dark or tragic topic s and
settings . Thus, h er work become s a room of therapy, especially for women , in which
“complex issues in women ’s lives ” are not simplified, but investigated , envisaged and
confronted, “reconfiguring the feminist agenda ” and matching the second wave of
feminism (Martanovschi 94) . In addition, a ccording to Martanovschi (94), i dentifying new
strategies by which male -dominated theater ’s boundaries are exceeded and cancelled,
Vogel shows how women “are entrapped and oppressed ”, and how they “have to contest,
subvert and redefine the roles they have been assign ed” (Savran, “Loose Screws: An
Introduction ” xi).
It is un arguable that “the American theatre explores the blurred boundaries between
authenticity and role playing in relation ” to American identity, and those blurred
boundaries glimpse a line between acting and being that necessitated exploration (Saddik
13-14). In Vogel ’s plays, the construction of identity, mostly the female identity, is based
upon “her self -identification as a lesbian and feminist playwright ”, a fact that had a great
impact on her work. But ‘the schizophrenia ’ of American cultural identity, as Vogel sees it,
deals with sexuality, body, legitimacy, truth and visibility, and yields to limitations
asserted by simple social ranking of identity. Nevertheless, P aula Vogel definitely resis ts
such restraints , and she makes use of “an anti -realistic vision ”, which transcends the
standard common praxis and lays out connections, main ly among women, outside the
“superficial appearance ” of reality (Saddik 164 -166).
After a history of inade quate recognition among American culture, to the detriment
of the novel, American theater comes to depict a “society whose changing nature was both
its central promise and the cause of anxiety ” (Bigsby vii), and to offer a certain
understanding of this soc iety; remaining “one of the most vibrant ” theater in the world
(Bigsby ix). As a result of an American “hunger ” for theater in the twentieth century ,
[…] drama remains not only a sensitive barometer of social change, re sponding to shifting moral and
intellectual pressures, but also an internationally respected aspect of American cultural life . (Bigsby
vii)
In such circumstance , Paula Vogel ha s had to struggle for appreciation, and her
idiosyncratic approaches proved to be unpopular at the beginning (Bigsby viii) , even her
desire ‘to seduce ’ (Bigsby 289) the audience was eventually fulfilled. Her plays become a
sort of “dialogue with her culture ” (Bigsby 289), a dialogue whose substance is immersive.

34
Paula Vogel manage s, using inclusive politics, to o rganize an unbelievable journey
for her audiences, as Bigsby admits (289), and during the performance of her plays, the
audiences are carried into a “world of the fantastic and the bizarre ” that liberates them
“from a Manichaean frame of mind, from a binar y mode of thought ” (Bigsby 289). Her
plays deal with sexuality, pornography, discrimination, subliminal or displayed violence , in
a politicized environment with a feminist agenda.
In spite of all this, she became famous only at forty one years old, when one of her
best-known works, The Baltimore Waltz , was staged in 1992 (Martanovschi 94). Before
that, she already had written several plays , including Meg in 1977, a second edition of
Desdemona , in 1979, The Oldest Profession in 1981 , but also And Baby Make s Seven in
1984 . Vogel ’s inspiration continues with Hot ‘N’ Throbbing in 1995 or The Mineola Twins
in 1996 . Later, she receives a couple of major prizes, which brings her recognition and
notoriousness, among which a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for How I Learned to Drive , a play
which had already won an Obie Prize (Bigsby 290).
Ranging Vogel ’s plays someone could ask himself why she is received well by the
public and critics only after almost fifteen years. Maybe, at that time, the society was not
prepared for her wide views, for her peculiar contemplation of the world, which uses irony
and humour to challenge “definitions of the real ”, liquefying those definitions and aiming
at “an alchemical, protean, transformative art ” (Bigsby 293). For all this, it becomes a
transparent idea the fact that she does not doubt the normative values of the society, and
she transcends through the conventional reception of the world:
Paula Vogel is not part of an homogenised women ’s movement concerned with consciousness –
raising dr amatic paradigms or engaging in potential challenges to male autonomy. She is not
interested in subverting existing gender, social or moral categories in order to operate others, not
interested in seeing her plays as operating in the service of worthy caus es. (Bigsby 293)
Some of Vogel ’s plays lack “both the aggressive and the literal nature of violence
and sexuality ”, as Desdemona does, but others, such as Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , exhibit images
of domestic, unjustifiable and sometimes extreme violence , as Bigsby underlines (299 –
312). In The Mineola Twins , Vogel presents “two types of Americas joined by violence ”
(Bigsby 318), and in How I Learned to Drive , even though there are moments in which
there is no trace of threat and violence, Vogel plays with language in order to find a
mechanism which could break “the cycle of violence ”, understand and obviate it (Bigsby
316-325).

35
Paula Vogel ’s inclusive theatrical techniques and politics not only incorporate a
wide range of violence typology, but also employ the power of language to reveal taboo
subjects, which indeed are prevalent not only in American culture and society, but all over
the world. The next chapter will focus on the analysis of certain types of violence ,
identified in four of Vogel ’s plays, dissimulated or unconcealed, without excluding the
possibility of some omission s.
Thus, a psychoanalytical reading of her plays becomes essential in digesting and
disambiguating the meaning of violence, discomposing classical feminine and masculine
perspectives. Th ese insights are visibly entrapped , and sometimes not only exposed but
also parodied, in And Baby Makes Seven , The Mineola Twins , How I Learned to Drive , and
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing . In these plays, physical violence, sibling violence, family or do mestic
violence, and gender based violence are understood through exposure at everyday life
events , in contemporary settings.
The plays refer to other t ypes of violence as well, and to a certain extent , they will
be tackled , deconstructed , and in the end re-gathered together as part of the comprehensive
theme of violence. The purpose of such analysis is to demonstrate that Vogel ’s work is
veritably, not only an American , but a worldwide theater masterpiece , which transcends
theatrical illusion, cultural a nd historical boundaries, and remains humane.

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CHAPTER 2

VIOLENCE IN THE REALIST SEQUENCES OF VOGEL ’S PLAYS

2.1 Physical Violence in And Baby Makes Seven

As Brenda Murphy explains in The Cambridge Companion to Ameri can Women
Playwrights (1999), Vogel ’s plays focus on non -traditional families, domestic violence,
sexual abuse, and the feminization of poverty (xxxii) . And Baby Makes Seven is a play in
which the status of the American conventional family is questioned, a nd it should not be
seen as “a portrait of a gay household or as a contribution to the debate about gay
parenting ” (Bigsby 304). And Baby Makes Seven echoes Edward Albee ’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? , but as Vogel herself admits, according to Bigsby , her play begins where
Albee ’s play ends – with the homicide of the fantasy children (Bigsby 303 -305).
In contrast with Albee ’s fantasy child who existed only in language, Vogel ’s three
fantasy children are enacted, substantiated, and after they are ki lled, they are finally
resurrected. Even if Albee ’s play is a purification of fant asy on behalf of truth ; Vogel ’s
image of reality absorbs fantasy, making the blurred line between the two more ambiguous
and diffused . The play is a comedy which exposes pare nting issues, regarding the
relationships between partners, with all the anxieties concerning pregnancy, childbirth and
upbringing , which, afterwards, give rise to fantasies (Bigsby 293 -304).
And Baby Makes Seven is a play which presents a trio relatio nship between two
lesbians, Anna and Ruth, and a gay man, Peter, who live together. One of the lesbian s,
Anna, is carrying Peter ’s child. They also have three fantasy boys: Henri, an eight year old
child and a representation of a character from Albert Lamo risse’s movie, The Red Ba lloon,
Orphan who is supposed to be raised by dogs, as his name suggests, and Cecil a nine year
old genius.
The play is far from being seen as a debate about gay parenting or gay habitat,
“though it does address the question of t he post -nuclear family ” (Bigsby 304), but , as Tony
Kushner does in Angels in America , Vogel ’s play redefines the conservative attitude about
family , as David Savran explains in his “Loose Screws: An Introduction ” to The Baltimore
Waltz and Other Plays :

37
Baby is really a play about narrative, about the stories that people make up to construct their
identities, to deal with the people they love, and to divert themse lves. […] What is one to make of a
family in which the boundaries between illusion and reality , power and subjection, friendship and
love, female and male, are so porous and in which family members freely materialize and
dematerialize. (Savran, “Loose Screws “ xiv-xv)
Where there is conflict, there is comedy, as Vogel herself asserts, according to
Bigsby (305) , and when this comedy regards aspects of one ’s life, the audience feels a
sense of inclusion when leaving the theater. The trio relationship is a comedy which
parodies their future roles as parents. They use a doll to exercise these roles, which leads to
humoristic situations, disjointed from the hypothetical simulation. Peter neglects his gay
sex, but project s this desire into the father role that he plays with the three fantasy children,
being all male, curiously, like the child who finally appears . Anyway, Vogel turns all the
uncomfortable situations which come out of the pregnancy issue into humoristic and easy
to approach moments , seeing amusement in actually real life problems.
Even if the play stars with an anticipatory and a curious discussion about sex
between the children, the audience finds a sense of fantasy only after the prologue ends, at
the beginning of the first scene. Although he seemed to be comfortable in the presence of
children, Peter feels excluded, like every man feels, when the pregnancy begins. This is
happening even though Peter and the two lesbians had a resolution for the distribution of
parental responsibilities. Yet, h e is disturbed by the fantasy children, because they are the
visions of Anna and Ruth, not of hi s own imagination, and that expels him from their real
lives . In this manner , he might be excluded from the baby ’s life, too. It seems that only b y
means of imaginary children do the women succeed in dealing with the ir anxieties , even
though Peter pays a p sychiatrist to help them . The problem is that the fantasy children are
at home, and , even if he seems to repeat his father role with them, Peter feels threatened by
their existence, and pushes Anna and Ruth to give up and eliminate their fantasies in order
to prepare for the real child and life.
Just as in real life all parents are actors who try to struggle with real problems in
order to raise their children and sometimes do not have a certain pattern to follow and they
have to fashion a new one, the cha racters of And Baby Makes Seven are “self-conscious
performers, struggling to invest their roles with conviction, improvising their lives ”
(Bigsby 306). Vogel , according to Bigsby (306), asserts that all people have imaginary
children in one form or anothe r, thus fantasy is part of life. To what extent someone will

38
live more in fantasy than in reality remains to be seen, but Peter, Ruth and Anna seem to
reinvent their fantasies rath er than giving up on them, as ordinary people do.
The play challenge s not the discrepancies between the characters ’ sexualities and
conventional roles which they want to play, but the sameness of their imagination, guided
by emotions, fears, anxieties and uncertainties shared by people and families around.
Mansbridge (57) does n ot see Oedipal and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories as possible
interpretations of the play, considering them as inapplicable and obsolete. But the fears and
anxieties lead Vogel ’s characters into a humorous version of the Lacanian “trauma of the
Real”, keeping them stocked in Symbolic Order , with the desire of a continuousl y
experience of Imaginary Order.
The characters of the play who are supposed to live in reality, Anna, Ruth and
Peter, appeal to fantasy “as a means of pleasure and a method for coping with the transition
to a new kind of family life ” (Mansbridge 50). The public nature of private fantasies
“might take perverse pleasure in reimagining the roles ” somebody assumes in everyday
life, as part of a traditional family, rather than unc onsciously reiterate the same story
(Mansbridge 20 -21). This reconstruction of cultural narratives, of private and public family
spheres, displaces the conservative, established and already defined social practices
(Mansbridge 49).
Read as a burlesque of Albee ’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , by Mans bridge
(50), And Baby Makes Seven theatricalises the domestic conflict using humor and , fusing
fantasy and fictional with reality, yields an escape, a draining out of emotions and anxieties
assigned to birth. Contrary to Albee ’s play, which depicts the edge between truth and
illusion as a controversial battlefield for contested power, Vogel ’s play challenges the
notions of authority, autonomy, control, and regulation, offering a pos tstructuralist view of
langu age and meaning, which claims a new interpr etation of the play in every new context
performed (Mansbridge 50 -51).
Written in a historical context – the Reagan administration – in which pro
conservative family manifestations, in an attempt to preserve stability and the Christian
sanctity of family as national institution, were mostly defined by what act ually the society
rejected such as gay rights, feminism, divorce, and abortion rights , And Baby Makes Seven
should be situated and read as “a body of work that comments on the often unnoticed
privileges, injustices, and hierarchies operating within a postwar heteronormative

39
American culture ” (Mansbridge 53) , making heterosexuality hege monic, as, according to
Mansbri dge, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant reckoned in their essay from 1998 , “Sex
in Public ”. Therefore, the play impersonates suppressed culture and history in order to
reveal “a queer commentary on heteronormative family structures ” (Mansbridge 53) .
As double sides of Vogel ’s agency, Anna and Ruth conceive elaborate plots and
narratives, which enact their anxieties and fears, moulding the meaning of their own story.
The women use their endowment for plotting and narrating to reconstruct cultural
meanings, legitimacies and values of family, gend er and sexuality (Mansbridge 54).
But Peter does not share the same invol vement in the visionary realm, as Anna and
Ruth, and he feels marginalized. As a defense mechanism he suggests the necessary death
of the imaginary children, invoking the approachin g of the real child coming. Peter ’s
divergent view of reality and fantasy does not meet Anna and Ruth ’s position of inclusion
one in another. So, he becomes part of the resistance, although he shares his otherness,
being a gay man; he tries, even if from a self-centered reason, to cope with his role as a
father and to be part of a remodeled nuclear family.
By rejecting social binaries, such as reality/fantasy, hetero/homo, sexual/non –
sexual, male/female, father/mother, the play conflicts with hegemonic metanarratives and
collective public fantasies, but breaks surface to comedy and meaning , as Vogel herself
said about the play, according to Mansbridge:
“I think the structure of the play is the meaning of the play. These three people are taking a journey,
and it ’s a journey that a lot of people face at some point in their lives, which is that kind of insane
crisis period just before you have a child , when you know your entire life will change but you ’re not
sure how. […] And there is that sense of high anx iety and great exuberance and hope, and fear. There
is a sense of comic crisis in the structure of the play itself. ” (Mansbridge 55)
In And Baby Makes Seven it can be traced the “defamiliarizing effect of a voice
spoken by an incongruous body ” (Mansbrid ge 56), which relieves contradictory and
fragmentary aspects of identities, as a conglomeration of internalized identifications and
ventriloquism , by means of Anna and Ruth , who are equipped with cultural texts and
discourses . As Anna and Ruth alter from f eminine to masculine personas or from adult to
child, the play offers an understanding of identity, related to gender, sex or age, which
turns to searching the origin of imitation and the cleavage that makes possible every
impersonation (Mansbridge 58) . As an attempt to defamiliarize moral attitudes towards
sexuality, the characters do not appeal to a particular sexual identity, and moreover they
move between identities, displaying desires out of homosexual or he terosexual polarity.

40
Thus, the play shows that the parents of the real unborn child are homosexual, and but they
neglect their sexual desi res in order to become parents; i n scene 2 the audience finds out
that Anna and Peter conceived the baby in a traditional sexual encounter that Anna
describes be ing romantic and Peter finds to be “pretty funny ” (Mansbridge 58 -59).
The blur boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality, sexual and
nonsexual behaviour, mark Anna, Ruth and Peter ’s relationship. Their different model of
relationship is built on a neutral territory, symbolized by Anna ’s breast, when all three
have a moment of unifying intimacy. Although Ruth finds Peter stroking Anna ’s breast, as
a result of Anna ’s desire to fulfil Peter ’s loss as homosexual, she does not feel angry or
disappoi nted, but she joins them in a calm integrating moment of affection, sexual and
non-sexual . Hence Vogel spotlights the relationship between the power or authority and
the manner in which the polarized boundaries affect people in everyday life (Mansbridge
59-60).
Anna, an embodiment of the opposing forces of fertility and nourishment associated
with the forces of destruction and power, becomes an agency of the Jungian mother
archetype (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 124-147), and followed by the shadow she a grees
with the imaginary children ’s killing. A mother complex can be traced not only in Peter ’s
homosexuality, but also in Anna ’s attitude and b ehaviour, sometimes pointing to positive
aspects of it. After all, as a result of her symbiosis with the unborn child, she is the one that
shows love, unconditionally, to all her imaginary children and her real unborn child, being
the most affected of the fantasy children ’s disappearance:
This mother -love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories o f our lives, the
mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long
silence from which everything begins and everything ends. (Jung , Aspects of the Feminine 138)
Anna ’s pregnancy symbolizes maternal, convention al femininity , and Peter ’s
paternity, the antagonistic masculine force. Alternatively, Ruth represents “the
unconventional sexual impulses and tenacious belief in the reality of fantasy ” (Mansbridge
62). Thus, unlike Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , Vogel ’s play deconstructs the dichotomy
illusion versus reality, and masculine dominance versus female submission, along with the
sexual and gender identities they construct.
By use of “theatrical collage of identifications and disavowals ” the play
demonstrates that authority does not come from somebody ’s power to distinguish between
truth and fantasy, “but rather from the narratives one chooses to quote and enact ”

41
(Mansbridge 63). In Vogel ’s play “self destructive narratives ” do not find their place, as
the two kinds of stories found by Davis (231) in Albee ’s play: the stories told to prevent
psychotic regression and the true ones suppressed for fear of a complete disequilibrium .
For Vogel, there is no such thing as mismatch or unbalance, only multiple, differen t and
unlimited possibilities of combination and recombination of narratives.
The end of the play, integrating the resilience of the imaginary children, even after
the seventh member of the family , the “real” baby Nathan, was born, testifies to the
ongoing power of fantasy which creates a “new kind of chaos ” that is never finished,
namely the play, as Vogel believes (Mansbridge 63) . The closure moment of the play
presents theater as a space of public testimony to a private life. The Epilogue offers a
possible picture of family formation and reformation, as complementary and all -inclusive
to the Prologue ’s innocent chat, between the imaginary children, related to babies making.
The all -embracing tableau of the end of the play closes the imaginary circle l ine wh ich the
Prologue started, but at the same time, initiates new possible lay -outs (Mansbridge 64) .
Receiving homophobic responses, from both gay and straight audience members,
And Baby Makes Seven , the “regressive ” “Gothic nursery tale ”, as Mel Gusso w classified
it, seemed to produce , for its early receptors, psychotic characters, as Michael Feingold
suggests. Later, the play became a “good medicine for Washington theater ”, as Jeanne
Cooper adjudged . After long harsh critical reception the play turns into a fascinating
portrayal of life issues , for “its brilliant unsettling of our notions, not of sexual boundaries,
but of the ‘real’“, as Helen Thomson acknowledges. Thereby “its exuberant fusion of
fantasy and everyday life is refreshing ” (Mansbridge 65 ).
And Baby Makes Seven unhinges the classical oedipal arrangement, and by means
of two lesbians who impersonate their own imaginary boy children, Vogel dismantles
normalized societal relationships. Henry disguises an “incestuous, gay female nephew of
his ‘Uncle Peter ’” (Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 195), and from the beginning of
the play, he declares straightforward and unexpectedly: “I want to have your baby!! ”
(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 66). Intentiona lly, all children are male, the
imaginary ones and the real baby, Nathan, suggesting “the struggle for a kind of phallic
authority ” (Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 204).
Reimagining family, values, social relationships, identities and sexual development,
the play “perfor ms a reinterpretation of the cultural narratives ” (Mansbridge 66) . It

42
becomes very difficult to apply traditional psychoanalytical theories, because the play
subverts conventional Oedipal or Lacanian paradigms and norms (Mansbridge 57 ),
challenging establi shed frameworks and making them inadequate or obsolete . Quotational
repetitions engaged in everyday life transcend the barriers of language and fantasy , and
create meaning which transmute and cultivate connection between people, as Judith Butler
advocates in her tome Undoing Gender : “What operates at the level of cultural fantasy is
not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized ” (Butler, Undoing
Gender 214). And Baby Makes Seven creates that “critical promise of fantasy ”, as Judith
Butler pictures:
Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the
limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and
where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality.
Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in
excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.
(Butler, Undoing Gender 29)
In Vogel ’s play the characters do not have visible core psychological trauma, as the
one from Albee ’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Davis 233) . The audience is not aware
of any childhood psychological bac kground of the adults from Paula Vogel ’s play, unlike
Albee ’s characters , who deny their core issues , and are incapable of pointing out to the
interpersonal status of the psyche (Davis 220) in order to avoid regression into delusional,
psychotic anxieties. But, repression, as Davis notes, “the most civilized advanced defence
mechanism ” (251) which George resort s to, is not a solution in Vogel ’s drama, and “the
violent penetration ” (Davis 242) of Martha ’s mind is deleted from Vogel ’s version of the
play. The characters are not presented as being insane, on contrary, the circums criptions of
such restraint are not marked out, and thus a promotion of tolerance and acceptance is
vastly proposed.
Malcontent and incompatible with the limitations impos ed by patriarchal society
and dramaturgical tradition, Paula Vogel framed “her own feminist practices on a kind of
male impersonator ”, learning how “to write like a man ” (Savran , A Queer Sort of
Materialism 191). Hence, she imitates, but hall -marking her w ritings, the strategies used by
male playwrights, and advisedly she reimagines relevant texts, such as Albee ’s Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 191). Dissatisfying a lot of
1980s feminists, Vogel develops a “complex, subt le, and deconstructionist mode of male
impersonation ” (Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 193).

43
2.2 Sibling Violence in The Mineola Twins

As a person with a permanent hawk eye, aware of the influence and power that
history and past have over the pre sent; Paula Vogel uses her “enormous emotional
repercussions ” caused by her connections with time to break through the “psychic life ” of
her characters in order to attain the possibility of a different and discrete connectivity
(Pellegrini 473 -474). Like B recht, according to Savran ’s observations in A Queer Sort of
Materialism (189), Vogel “relishes the political potential in the formalist concept of
defamiliarization ”, insisting on historical disclosure and ideological predisposition of those
details taken for granted.
In The Mineola Twins , Vogel deals with “the ‘schizophrenia ’ of American cultural
identity ” (Saddik 164) and the political cleavage between liberals and conservatives,
pointing out the importance of sexual identity, especially for women, fol lowing up three
American administrations – Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush Senior . During the 1950s the
siblings are separated by their sexuality, in the 1960s they are split by political beliefs and
in the 1980s they are divided by their cultural values and li festyles (Mansbridge 107).
According to Pellegrini (481), the American ‘political schizophrenia ’, which caused
the creation of The Mineola Twins , gave Paula Vogel the feeling of division and
segregation of people and communities, “into warring factions, into enraged siblings ”, as
she herself asserts in an interview in 1997. Thus, the identical twins from the play, Myra
and Myrna, became divided by politics, and their twisted sisterhood embodied in a
“gravity -defying farce ” transforms into a “time bomb – of social and political upheaval in
the United States in the second half of the twentieth century ” (Pellegrini 480).
The play has a hilarious hubris that functions as a “dizzying commentary on the
straightjacket of gender roles and the limitations o f binary thinking ” (Pellegrini 480) ,
arisen from the play structure and performance. The play is A comedy in six scenes, four
dreams and six wigs , as the subtitle of the play suggests , revealing its tone that include a
“formal symmetry ” and an “imaginative theatricality ” (Mansbridge 108); with actresses
and actors that perform the same role, Myra and Myrna, Kenny and Ben, Jim and Sarah.
The farce of The Mineola Twins is the only play in which Vogel directs an actress,
impersonating Sarah, to literally cross -dress as a male, objectifying in Jim. However, the
idea of drag announces a woman incorporating a masculine identification (Savran 195).

44
The Mineola Twins shows that people, particularly twins, may be the same at
surface, whether they admit it or not, but actually, they are different. Their sameness is
only unsubstantial, and still, it can be used as a coercive tool in democratic societies that
generate violent social divisions . With this play, Vogel invites her audience to partake of a
democratic t heatrical vision which leaves space for those who are otherwise and act
different ly in public and private (Pellegrini 481) .
The Mineola Twins is a “mock morality tale ” (Bigsby 317) which features two twin
sisters, one – Myrna, conservative, naive and big-breasted that represses her sexuality; and
the other one – Myra, radical, worldly -minded and flat -chested that expresses her sexuality
irrespective of the context. The fact that they are played by the same actress presumes
some sort of fracture and do ubling, and the presence of potential two sides of the same
person suggests the fluidity of figures and identities, overreaching the aspects of the
divided nation (Bigsby 317).
Described by Amy Green in her essay, Whose Voices Are These? (153) as “a
pastiche of prefeminist stereotypes and sci -fi creepiness ” and “a camp hyperbole ” that
“winks at sex and sexual orientation ”, the play stars the story in the girls’ adolescence,
when they are seventeen. Myrna is going steady with Jim, an advertising agen t, age
twenty -two, and Myra hangs out with suspect young men and works, to family ’s shame,
“in a roadside tavern of ill repute – as a so -called ‘cocktail waitress ’“ (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 105). As Bi gsby highlights, Myrna, the “good ” twin, as Vogel rang es,
became “a parodic version of the 1950s housewife ” (317), preoccupied with cooking and
typing. On the other hand , Myra, the “evil” twin, plots a different future that threatens, in
Myrna ’s opinion, the family ’s good name, and of course her future. Char acterized by her
father, as a “Whore of Babylon ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 106), Myra seduces and
subverts her sister fiancée, which will trigger her sibling ’s hatred, offering him wh at the
puritanical Myrna, could not – the loss of his virginity before mar riage. In such moments,
the comic aspect is built based on sarcastic sayings, compared with those of Oscar Wilde
(Green 153): “So Virginity is a state of mind. It ’s a figment of imagination ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 123). Humorousness traces illogical cha nnels of “hyperbolic doom ”
(Green 150), when Jim loses his virginity:
So don ’t you see? The domino -theory? There goes virginity, there goes my promotion, my work
ethic, monogamy, mortgages, raising 2.5 children, truth in advertising, belief in a deity, li ving in the
suburbs, caring for my aged parents and saluting the flag. (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 123).

45
Myra ’s unexpressive response: “Wow. Heavy. ”, “Wanna cigarette? ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 124), creates discrete mockery. A volatile wit is generated by means of
language, starting with a serious speech that unexpectedly zings its audience with sudden
inputs (Green 153), as Sarah ’s ironical statement from the end of the play: “We almost
blew up together, just like any other happy nuclear family ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
185). The humor of the situation is mixed with the use of intentional language and resort of
exaggerated biased preconceptions and stereotypes. So, Myrna erupts when her son,
Kenny, considers his aunt, Myra, a nice person who likes to wear mauve: “I don ’t like
hearing the word ‘mauve ’ in your mouth. Only boys who grow up to be interior decorators
use words like ‘mauve’” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 140). But, when she tells her son
about her sister ’s robbery of the bank, where she and their mo ther had savings, Myrna
shows indignation and sarcasm: “My sister used my knockers as terrorist camouflage! ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 131).
As signs of popular culture, Myra and Myrna ’s breasts present a “vivid image of
divided postwar femininity ” (Mansb ridge 106), evoking unconsciously the two feminine
types which American popular culture prefers to preserve definitely segregated – the
sexualized women and the idealized mother, the whore and the virgin. With such purpose
Vogel declares: “Breast jokes are rife with cultural anxiety about female sexuality ”
(Mansbridge 106). As an illustration of Butler ’s social construction of identity and its
problematic aspects, the twins “incongruous embodiment suggests that the social body (an
object constructed by hist ory and culture and the condition of subjectivity) can be at odds
with the lived body (the experience of subjectivity) ” (Mansbridge 106).
Depicting a production of the play, Mansbridge argues that The Mineola Twins
presents gender as formed out of learned , performed acts, gestures and attitudes, making
visible its performative codes and signs . The travesty and deformation of gender and
sexuality is heightened by the theatricality of the gender switch, which the cross -gender
casting offers, promoting “fluid political and gendered dispositions ”, and giving “the
seemingly natural, neutral postures of masculinity and femininity a historical context ”
(Mansbridge 110 -111).
Whe n Myra exposes her plans to Jim, which would encapsulate a future without
children and marriage, he opposes her draughts, justifying: “But you ’re just a girl! You

46
can’t do that! ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 122). Jim embraces traditional gender roles,
associated with the historical period :
Men are defined by what they do – their actions in the world. It ’s different for you – you’re a girl.
There are…absolutes in their world for girls. Girls don ’t do, they just are. (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 125).
He also swims between two waters and dates both twins – one, Myra, for physical
satisfaction and the other one, Myrna , for social sobriety and personal composure
(Mansbridge 112) . Probably from a position of power and egoist considerations he chooses
this way – because Myrna ’s chastity offers him a certainty that he will be respected in the
society a nd that he will be never be cheated by his future wife, although he does that with
his future sister -in-law. Jim share s dysfunctional relat ionships, but the audience does not
have access to his personal, distant history. So t hese relationships can be read as social
constructions that include his personal strife to fit in with a patriarchal society.
The scene in which Jim encapsulates his misogyny marks a subliminal aggression,
and came to light precisely in a vulnerable moment, after sexual intercourse. Th is moment
shows some men ’s despair to maintain their hegemony, manipulating by indicating and
teaching women where there place in society is. The challenge arises from the fact that
Myra does not belong to the big mass obedient group; she is part of the re sistance, of the
alternative way of thinking and living , which includes the risk of marginalization . Thus,
the play suggests, ironically, “to take more seriously women ’s central roles in culture and
history ” (Mansbridge 114) and “to see women as both subje cts and objects of history ”
(Mansbridge 115). Isolated from the social world, Myrna and Myra become alienated one
from another, and finally from their own selves.
The construction of postwar middle class compulsory heterosexuality is revealed in
The Mine ola Twins , by means of resonant icons of the 1950s, such as Ford cars, which are
used as feminine symbols of masculine power and symbolize wealth, potency, fertility,
resilience, fluidity, liberty and independence. Jim, a young man, is driven by his libido ,
with which he associates the cars, in contrast with the twins ’ sexualities that are coerced by
social norms. He is excited when he talks about his implication in a project of a new car
model :
The firm ’s even hiring this poetess to come up with lyrical n ames – like Fiesta or Bronco or Ford
Epiphany! – And wait till you see the grille on this baby – well, I helped a little to come up with the
design – it looks like … like- (Jim gets flushed ) – Well, I can ’t say. Guys are gonna go crazy over this
buggy !” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 109).

47
In the 1960s, Jim has failed to achieve his plans, and the social movements,
including feminism, divided the twin sisters, either as crazy or criminal. Their politicized
attitudes draw out from their heartstr ings the seed of envy, vengeance and anger. From a
desire of balancing accounts, Myrna gets her revenge for being committed by Myra, and
she denounces her sister to the police. During her time spent in jail, for her countercultural
behaviour, Myra changes her sexuality, becoming a lesbian, and moving in with Sarah.
Thus , the two sisters cannot communicate, being very strong ly polarized, by their political,
social and cultural choices . However, they share an unconscious dialogue, by the agency of
The Voice, as it will be emphasized in the next chapter. But this dialogue is raised to “the
level of consciousness, thereby highlighting its comic absurdity and implicit violence ”
(Mansbridge 117).
The 1980s, after the experience of Cold War, got the American nation into a
competitive and paranoiac disposition , and the American women involved in the political
conflicts of the divided nation. The Mineola Twins demonstrates that women become “a
political ‘issue ’ when significant social changes begin to occur ” (Mans bridge 117), and
shows how violent politics plays out through women ’s bodies and their choices , as popular
culture reinforced, during that period, conservative image s of women as sexual objects or
maternal figures. In this context, the relationships among the characters shift between the
radical and conservative, apparently reversing polarities.
Therefore, the radical Myra has settled into a comfortable domestic life with her
lesbian partner, Sarah, and the conservative Myrna, now divorced, has joined the Reagan
feminists and became a right -wing radio shock jock. Kenny, Myrna ’s son, rebels against
his mother, and turns to left -wing doctrine, looking for his aunt guidance. His cousin, Ben,
Myra ’s son, predictably, react against his mother and endeavour to f ollow his right -wing
aunt as a model, and her book, Profiles of Chastity , as life manual . Lacan ’s unconscious
desire for object petit a is challenged and transformed ; the haunting idealized mother of
infancy is not desired anymore, but substituted by other surrogates, such as aunts and
twins.
There is no trace of Oedipus complex in this new relationships ’ framework. Both
children get estrange d from their mothers and look for substitutes, in their aunts. When, at
the beginning of scene five, Ben gladly e ncounters his aunt, Myrna reacts vengefully and
satisfact orily: “There is a God! (Myrna laughs) Your mother doesn ’t know you ’re here? ”

48
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 157). On the other hand Kenny helps Myra to escape to
Canada. Nobody seems to be satisfied with her or his near reality, except for Sarah, who is
filtered , ironically, as the “straightest character ”, making “homosexuality to seem
ordinary ” (Mansbridge 118) and challenging gender roles and sexuality.
Notions such as madn ess and sanity, related to the siblings ’ irrational and violent
linkage are also challenged and queried. Myra ’s dirty socks on Myrna ’s side of the line
from their bedroom are symbols of their union and mental sanity, as children, “Ages ago.
Back in Mineola ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 149) – as Myra confesses to Kenny, in
scene four. Her f ailure to tease her sister, as in their childhood, brings her breakdown as an
insider of the society. At the same time, her dirty socks are badges of her betrayal, because
Myra forgot “a single dirty sock ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 128) in Jim ’s motel room,
years ago, that Myrna found it and “saved it all these many years, for moment like this ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 141). Thus, the dirty socks become symbols of their rupt ure
and mental illness, from which Myrna suffered a long time, and which Myra took from her.
Myrna ’s inability to forgive triggers her incapacity to cope with trauma, her
ineffectiveness to move further and to leave behind past scars in order to tur n her steps to
healing. Myrna ’s desire for revenge and payback smouldered all th ese years , but macerated
her on the inside, and in the end did not get her any satisfaction. Anyway her anger and
hatred is embodied in Myra ’s dirty sock, which Myr na returns t o its owner with the help of
her son, when she finds the proper time for vindication:
“I want her to transport this dirty sock over the Canadian border. I want her to take her disrespect
and her dirty sock with her. And when she misses all wonderful things America has, she can finger
this dirty sock and think about the choices she made .” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 141)
The play does not construct the gendered opposition of bad and good, as they
correspond to capitalist, patriarchal societies; on the contrar y it presents the feminine , not
as altruistic, nurturing, and self -sacrificing, but as acquisitive, aggressive and selfish,
impersonating women with traditional male features (Savran 190 -191). The young women
from the play are not “taught to fear their des ire and feel shame at their bodies ” and men,
“to be fearless in their pursuit of desire ” (Aldama 2) , as stereotypical gender roles
proclaim. Jim does not manage to otherize neither Myra nor Myrna; even though his plans
looked different in his early years o f manhood . He even asks for help from Myra to
manage the situation regarding their adulterous affair.

49
Hence, for Vogel not only men accomplish things – afterwards Jim does not
accomplish anything. W omen also achieve personal satisfaction, turning the mal e gaze – as
Myra does in her relationship with Jim. Thus, Paula Vogel deconstructs, once again, the
social function of gendered norms, and exposes reasons for which social construction of
gender and sexuality is just an outdated way of manipulation and mai ntenance of
patriarchal hegemony.
After all, both Myra and Myrna are aggressive, violent women, even if one is the
embodiment of the conservative, traditional woman, and the other one is the image of the
radical, rebellious woman. Myra is po rtrayed by Jim as being “full of hate ” right after they
had sex , in their adolescence . And e ven if one would expect to find Myrna as angelic,
perfect wife and mother , she fails both roles. Her violent nature emerges in her language
when she finds out about her siste r’s adventure with her boyfriend:
MYRA! I ’M GONNA KILL YOU, MYRA! WAIT TILL I GET MY HANDS AROUND YOUR
SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK! YOU SUCK, MYRA! I ’M GONNA RIP OFF WHAT LITTLE
THERE IS OF YOUR KNOCKERS, MYRA! I ’M GONNA USE YOUR ITSIES FOR MY KEY
CHAIN, MYRA! I WILL NEVER TALK TO YOU AGAIN! (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 127)
What seems to be just a childish, fraternal threat, at the end of the scene undertake s
a very serious, frightening tone, when Myra throws herself into the motel room with a
injunctive “Medea-scream ”: “I’LL KILL YOU! ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 128).
However, until the end of the play, this violent urge fades away, but never entirely, as it
rather suffers a projection and a diminishing of its intensity.
Becoming a member of the Reagan conservative feminist movement, she transfers
her guilty desire of revenge to an ideological struggle, and thus she creates a defence
mechanism that protects her of public shame and judgement. After all , she is portrayed as a
“good ” twin – a victim, not a vic timizer, as her “evil” twin sister. But then , when all is said
and done, Myra is the one who regrets th at things have come to a pretty pass and wishes
for conciliation and redemption. This siblings ’ rivalry seems to create their adult identities,
and becom es a source of developing social polarities and biases.
Myrna ’s absence from the end of the play suggests either her assimilation into the
mainstream or personal failure of adaptation, including her delicate mental state. On the
other hand, Myra ’s avoida nce of responsibility of the trauma that she produced to her
sister, reflected in her selective memory regarding her dirty socks, which involves only
happy memories of siblings ’ fooling and teasing, highlights her defence mechanism that
includes a select ive perception. Maybe, Myra did not know that her sister found her dirty

50
sock in that motel room; or maybe she realised what she did to her sister but the trauma is
so big, that she denies her guilt and projects on Jim . However, she constantly regresses into
her childhood, before their conflict and scission occurred, by means of dream sequences,
returning into a former psychological state that is emotionally secure and stabile.
This fear of recognition for the damage that she produced to her sister is proje cted
onto her son, Ben. Sometimes, Myra is scared of her own son, who paradoxically follows
his aunt ’s life doctrine. “Sometimes I think I ’ve born my sister ’s son ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 128), s he confesses to Sarah. She does not like the fact that he could
expect something from her. Likewise she does not feel comfortable with the f act that her
sister might have expected not be betrayed by her own twin sister.
Myrna ’s avoidance of Jim suggests her subjective and biased judgement and
reasoning of her be trayal. She does not see a shared guilt, of both Myra and Jim , or even of
herself . She revenges both, by avoiding Jim and marr ying another person, whom she
divorces, and by avoiding her sister and fighting against her “tribe”; and also as a co -lateral
victim, she banishes her son, Kenny. But she is very appreciated by her nephew, Ben:
Thank you for all you ’re doing. You ’re nothing like my mother .” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 166). In spite of all this, she never gets the interior peace that she longed for , and she
alienates her own sense of self. By all means, violence can be an aggressive defence
mechanism, as a response to a very traumatic event. Of course , the individual nature of
every person is a decisive factor which can generate the violent burst or not .
Sometimes, as Grosz asserts, violence is “simply equated with justice and the right
to judge ” (141) . Then someone can subscribe to Grosz ’s distinction between “bad” and
“good ” violence. Is it Myrna the one who makes “good ” use of violence and Myra the one
who makes “bad” use of it? Or , maybe, the roles have changed, from childhood to
adult hood , and Myrna , who is part of mainstream power , uses violence for maintaining
order and hegemony, and combat ing counter-cultural manifest ations , exactly what
patriarchal societies do. By means of legal violence, Myrna is bombing the abortion clinic
in which her sister is hiding. So, according to Grosz, this is the paradox of the law: “that
while it orders and regulates, while it binds and h armonizes, it must do so only through a
cut, a hurt that is no longer, if ever, calculable as violence or cut ” (140).
Therefore, their roles indeed have changed , as Myrna adopted Myra ’s part for a
period in scene six, confusing Sarah, in order to fulfil her mission. Furthermore, it must not

51
be forgotten the fact that Myrna ’s good, quiet, steady and unobtrusively attitude, which she
displays in her adolescence, in front of Jim, is totally transmuted into a violent, vengeful
position. After all, even fright ened by Myra ’s evilness in her adolescence, Myrna ’s
revengefulness and vindictiv eness enraged and helped her, at the same time, to survive a
psychical breakdown which could have had no returning.
As Aldama points out, “discursive and physical violence o n the body affects,
injures, and traumatizes the interior psychic formation of subjects ” (6), and Myra, the
“bad” twin, is affected by Myrna ’s violent response, as part of an entire political system . In
the end she realises that she “really really really f ucked up ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
145) and that “sometimes you ’ve got to use the system to crush the system ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 147). However, she failed , and Myrna, who is part of the Kafkian system,
is right. But there is no terror, no fear or a nguish sprung from unpredictable, because Myra
expects the violent urge, although she tries not to live it: “They ’re going to nail my ass.
Once you ’ve drawn blood from a pig, they really come crushing down on you. ” (Vogel,
The Mammary Plays 149). She final ly admits to Kenny that it was naive to believe that “if
we all just came together, the people, the cops, the narcs, the working class, the bankers –
then the war would just stop ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 150). She declares herself
defeated, and as a defe nce mechanism and exhaustion, she regresses into former
psychological state, adolescence where she was in control.
But this regret cannot be a simple declaration of defeat, because according to
Cynthia Enloe, who plead s for a vigilant feminist perspectiv e on the patriarchal
constructions of post -cold war 1990s nationalism, militarization of men and women is not
a process that implies natural inclinations or easy choices (Sangarasivam 64). The nearly
militarization of women that develops in the play, excep t for the uniforms and guns –
although they are suggested by FBI agents and specific clothes, but also by the continuous
foreboding sound of bombing, disciple their minds and bodies, but also transforms their
relationships with closer ones, such as sibling s or sons (Sangarasivam 65). Then Butler ’s
observations regarding female body as a site of struggle and cont estation , and the cultural
constructions of gendered categories, are no longer challenges that can be rejected, but
certainties that hegemonic struc tures still try to disavow.
Myra, unlike her conservative sister, uses intentionally her body for sexual
pleasure, but also for social recognition, although she knows that this will trigger some

52
repercussions – she confesses to Kenny that she brought Chl amydia form a sexual partner,
but she sarcastically concluded that this is “what happens when you sleep with the
leadership. Well, at least I ’ll have a keepsake ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 146). Her
personal disappointments with men, from her adolescence to adulthood brought her to the
only solution that remained valid in order to achieve some personal, sexual satisfaction –
lesbianism. After all, the play ends proposing an alternative solution to capitulation and
assimilation into the mainstream – another k ind of “happy nuclear family ”, with Sarah and
Myra, two lesbians, lying in their bed and comforting each other.
The Mineola Twins does not have the same good critical review as Vogel ’s earlier
plays How I Learned to Drive or The Baltimore Waltz . As Mansb ridge concluded, The
Mineola Twins was seen as an “unsophisticated attempt at political farce ” (119). Vincent
Canby of the Times described the political satiric humor of the play only as “rudimentary ”
and his suggestive title of the review “The Mad History of Women as Told by Twin
Barbies ”, announced a critical “sexis t snobbery ” (Mansbridge 120). So, when Michael
Feingold of the Village Voice targeted the “femaleness ” of the play as a trait that “some
male critics will no doubt resent ”, other female critics replayed by pointing to
“the limited vocabulary available to critics for talking about plays written by women ” and
to the positioning of these plays “only in relation to the ghetto genre of ‘women ’s theater ’“
(Mansbridge 120). In spite of some limited, s mall-minded critiques the play has been
produced regularly over the last period of time. In a well -received 2007 production in
Baltimore, one reviewer classified The Mineola Twins “as part of an expanding genre: the
critical history of post -war self -absorp tion” (Mansbridge 120 -121).

53
2.3 Gender Based Violence in How I Learned to Drive

Vogel ’s major success, How I Learned to Drive , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 , in
addition to the New York Drama Critics ’ Circle Award, Drama Desk Award, and Obie
Award for the best play (Saddik 164). The play tackles the subject of incest and sexual
molestation of a young girl by her uncle, from the age of eleven, until she becomes an
adult and has the courage and strength to stop it. Vogel uses driving lessons as a metaphor
for sexual initiation, displaying the complex process of seduction between Li ’l Bit and her
in-law uncle Peck (Saddik 165).
The narrator, Li ’l Bit, is also the protagonist of the play. Voice -overs announce
each scene, as being a lesson on drivi ng, whereas metaphoric allusions to sexual
negotiation are substantially marked (Saddik 165). Three different members of Greek
Chorus – Male Greek Chorus, Female Greek Chorus and Teenage Greek Chorus,
impersonate varied generations of characters : grandfath er, grandmother, mother, aunt,
cousin and Li ’l Bit eleven year old embodiment. Thus, How I Learned to Drive explores
and redefines the traditional concept of the American nuclear family (Martanovschi 100),
that needs dismantling and deconstruction. Paula V ogel herself remarks in an interview
that the construct is no longer applicable, if it ever was: “We’re not happy little nuclear
families with two children and Mummy and Daddy. We ’re not pretending that we ’re
perfect American sitcoms. But we ’re anomalies a t this point; we ’re all exceptions to the
rule” (quoted in Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights 297).
The play shows how Li ’l Bit constructs her female identity , in terms of sexuality
and the body, covering her life events from the age of eleven to her early maturity
(Martanovchi 100) . The construction of her identity s tarts with her name which is related
to a family tradition of nicknaming someone by his or her genitalia . Li’l Bit herself recalls
that: “Uncle Peck, fo r example. My mama ’s adage was ‘the titless wonder ’, and my cousin
got branded for life as ‘B.B’…For blue balls ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 13). Li’l Bit
was named because when she was born, as her mother reminds that: “whipped your diapers
down parted your chubby little legs – and rig ht between your legs there was ”, what
ironically Peck complements: “just a little bit” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 13-14).
Apparently, her identity as a woman is marked by her sexuality, as the other female
members of her family (Saddik 165). Even if she w as “so tiny that [she could] fit in Uncle

54
Peck ’s outstretched hand ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 14), when she was a teenage girl,
as her grandfather emphasized, she already “got all the credentials she ’ll need on her
chest ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 17), bec ause “five minutes before Li ’l Bit turns the
corner, her tits turn first ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 16). Because the oldest and the
most respected member of their family, the grandfather, considers that she has everything
she needs in order to be happy in life, namely her sexuality, he also believe s that she does
not need to continue her education, a ggressively questioning: “How is Shakespeare going
to help her lie on her back in the dark? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 17).
Her grandfather nicknamed “Big Pap a”, “not because he ’s tall ”, but because of his
excessive masculine sexuality, as Li ’l Bit’s grandmother appreciates: “Your grandfather is
just a big bull. A big bull. Every morning, every evening ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
36), regards women, including his own teenage granddaughter, only as sexual objects , and
only for men ’s pleasure. He embarrasses Li ’l Bit at the typical family dinner, with remarks
about her breasts: “If Li’l Bit gets any bigger, we ’re gonna haveta buy her a wheelbarrow
to carry in front of her ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 15).
The dysfunctional family, in which there are some kind of boundless sexual limits
transmitted from generation to generation, seems to avoid some past mistakes made by the
older members of the family. At the same ti me, the new members trip on their own faults.
Thus , Li’l Bit ’s mother fails to “prevent, detect or deal with the transgression that her
brother -in-law will embark upon in relation ” (Martanovschi 101) to her daughter , even if
she tries to be honest with her daughter regarding sexual issues, unlike her own mother:
TEENAGE GREEK CHORUS (As Grandmother) Don ’t tell her that! She ’s too young to be thinking
those things!
FEMALE GREEK CHORUS (As Mother) Well, if she doesn ’t find out from me, where is she going
to find out? In the street?
TEENAGE GREEK CHORUS (As Grandmother) Tell her it hurts! It ’s agony! You think you ’re
going to die! especially if you do it before marriage!
FEMALE GREEK CHORUS (As Mother) Mama! I ’m going to tell her the truth ! Unlike you, you
left me and Mary completely in the dark with fairy tales and told us to go to the priest! What does an
eighty -year-old priest know about love -making with girls!
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 42)
Three generation s of women, sitting at the kitchen table, expose their own views
regarding sexuality, views taught and transmitted from generation to generation , altered or
qualified. Li ’l Bit has her own discontentment regarding women ’s sexual behavior and
social attitude: “It’s not fair! Why does everything have to hurt for girls? Why is there
always blood? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 43). Although her mother tries to comfort her

55
and to reassure her that everything will be fine in the end, “It’s not a lot of blood – and it
feels wonderful afte r the pain subsides ”, Li’l Bit questions, indirectly, gender -based roles
and imposed relationships. Female sexuality is not exposed as a source of pleasure, but as
an experience of shame, misery and secrets . In these circumstance s Li’l Bit learns how to
defend, embrace and suppress her sexuality (Mansbridge 135).
But, as a young girl, she is confused and considers the moral dilemma of her
uncle ’s adultery, as a betrayal of her family, not as a manipulation and seduction of his
own young niece (Saddik 16 5). ”What we ’re doing. Is wrong. I t’s very wrong… It’s not
nice to Aunt Mary ”, she objects against her uncle ’s invitation to dinner. But he adjusts and
suppresses her opinions: “You let me be the judge of what ’s nice and not nice to my wife ”
(Vogel, The M ammary Plays 31). In other words, Peck is exercising his authority upon his
wife and his young niece, by means of disguised aggressive language and attitude. Thus,
the play shows how our sexualities and our subjectivities are products of our culture and
history, “something to flaunt and also to hide ”, something that defines women, and yet is
not theirs to define (Mansbridge 124).
The character of Uncle Peck is presented sympathetically, even sensitively to
women ; and the scene s between Li ’l Bit and Uncle Peck “resist a reductionist
interpretation as abuse ” (Saddik 165). He helps Aunt Mary with housework, makes sure
that he has Li ’l Bit’s assent, even if she is a young teenage girl: “Have I forced you to do
anything? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 32). He spea ks very kindly of women, even in a
manipulative and seductive way, aiming to relax Li ’l Bit in order to take sensual pictures
of her: “My wife is very beautiful woman. Her beauty doesn ’t cancel yours out. (More
casually; he returns to the camera) All the w omen in your family are beautiful. In fact, I
think all women are ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 63).
Uncle Peck is not por trayed as a villain, despite his clear seductive inappropriate
behavior towards a child who is also his relative, though not by blood (Saddik 166). There
is a suggested, tacit complicity of Li ’l Bit in their sexual relationship, even if she still
repeats that “Someone will get hurt ”, foreshadowing the end; and he involves her in their
adulterous and incestuous relationship, appealing to vulnerability and empathy: “It’s just
that I thought you…understood me, Li ’l Bit. I think you ’re the only one who does. ” (Vogel,
The Mammary Plays 32). His premeditated behavior and relapse are suggested by his own
wife, when she sends him to speak with Li’l Bit, after she left the room during the family

56
dinner: “Peck ’s so good with them when they get to be this age ” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 19).
Peck ’s method of seduction is indirectly exposed in one of the most disturbing
scene s of the play, during a fishing lesson this time, with Li ’l Bit’s male cousin, Bobby
(Bigsby 322) : “they’re very shy, mercurial, fish. Takes patience and psychology. You have
to believe it doesn ’t matter if you catch one or not … you don ’t want to get too close –
they’re frisk y and shy little things …Well, I don ’t know how much pain a fish feels – you
can’t think of that ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 34-35). The implication is that if he
would think of what his victim or victims would have felt he wouldn ’t do it anymore. He
performs alone on stage, to an imaginary young boy, coded lessons in how to perform
gender and sexuality (Mansbridge134) .
The moment when a fish is caught, his remarks are perceived as a displaced version
of his relationship with his niece: “I don ’t want you to feel ashamed about crying. I ’m not
going to tell anyone, okay? I can keep secrets . . . There ’s nothing you could do that would
make me feel ashamed of you . . . But it ’s a secret place – you can ’t tell anybody . . . least
of all your mom or your sist ers. This is something special between you and me ” (Vogel,
The Mammary Plays 35). The source of his seductive power seems to rely on his
“apparently genuine gentleness ” mixed with his “patient cunning ” (Bigsby 322).
However Peck exploits Bobby ’s vulnerab ility, mediated by their “secret place ” and
discoursed for public view, teaching him a lesson of heteronormative masculinity that
includes censoring emotional answers such as compassion (Mansbridge 134 -135). The
scene is also a hint of his sexual attractio n both to young boys and girls, as Vogel ’s
response to sexual prohibitions and a necess ity to counterbalance the assumption that all
paedophiles are gay (Bigsby 322) .
The play fails to trigger simplistic labels and stereotypes (Saddik 166) and
complicates life topics and issues. Even though Li ’l Bit becomes a lesbian who wants to
end up her relationship with Uncle Peck, she is reticent about the fact that she will lose
their closeness. In the end, the play is about complex issues as Jill Dolan wr ites in her
review of the New York production, “Vogel ’s play is about forgiveness and family, about the
instability of sexuality, about the unpredictable ways in which we learn who we are, how
we desire, and how our growth is built on loss ” (quoted in Sadd ik 166) .
Although t he play does not show directly, Li ’l Bit’s otherized body was disciplined,
regulated and traumatized, alongside with her interior psychic space (Aladama 6). Her

57
emotional subjugation and manipulation by Uncle Peck, as a form of pat hematic,
subversive violence, reinforce the structures of gender based oppression (Aladama 5). The
perpetuated authoritative behavior of men, although with a rather changed approach,
triggers the reliability of maintaining hegemony and power.
The aggress ive behavior is transmitted from generation to generation and is taught
by both the oppressors and the oppressed. Li ’l Bit’s grandmother teaches her daughter and
niece how the men act and how the women are expected to respond : “Men are bulls! Big
bulls!… No matter to them what they smell like! They ’ve got to have it, right ten, on the
spot, right there! Nasty!…Primitive! ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 38-39).
Whereas the perspectives change over time, and Li ’l Bit ’s mother suggests that:
“Men are like chil dren! Just like little boys. ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 38), the
grandmother still layouts a valid fact, that men, along with her husband, only care two
things: “have table set and the bed turned down ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 36).
Afterwards the grandmot her is a woman that never knew sexual pleasure, and she lived
only for her husband ’s satisfaction: “Orgasm! That ’s just something you and Mary have
made up! I don ’t believe you! ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 37).
The grandfather is seen not only as a bull , but also as a lion . As he describes
himself : “I picked your grandmother out of that herd of sisters just like a lion chooses the
gazelle ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 37). The aggressiveness and power is connoted not
only by the big animals with which he is f eatured, but also by the prey brought into focus
by the predator himself. The symb olic use of the gazelle image illustrates the role of
women in men ’s eyes.
His aggressiveness is associated with a powerful amplified sexuality, encapsulated
into his nickn ame, Big Papa, and his behavior. He does not care that they are at a dinner
family and he starts to undress his wife, he speaks loudly about Li ’l Bit blossomed body
that will captivate men’s mind, ignoring her intelligence or desires. He embarrasses Li ’l
Bit and the entire family with his attitude towards Li ’l Bit’s future sexuality and interest in
education. In such a family environment , without any respect for women, there is no
wonder that in searching for a father figure, Li ’l Bit was lured by the only figure that
seemed to be normal in such a context , at least at the surface. The family is “presented as a
hostile environment for the teenage girl who is constantly under adult attack ”
(Martanovschi 101). She feels that she does not fit in.

58
How I Learned to Drive represents a play whose concern with child abuse and
paedophilia “can too easily distract from a subtle portrait of two people who bear the
burden of their own nature and come to an understanding of themselves only by degrees”
(Bigsby 318). It is male nature to be aggressive and to control women, but the play exibits
the ambivalence of human nature. The empowered Lolita, Li ’l Bit, challanges the
collective female unconsciousness and stores a kind of neutrali ty until the en d of the play.
It is not the shadow of Li ’l Bit that decides to put an end to her relationship with her uncle,
it is a conscious decision that will trigger Peck ’s compasion, in as much as he loses his
own patriarchal ‘nature ’ and power. But the audience ’s attitude towards Peck is partially a
result of the “broken chronology ” of the play (Bigsby 321).
Peck ’s behaviour makes him younger than he is (Bigsby 321), and dependent on
their relationship, substituting, probably his mother issues. Peck is not the o nly one who
seems to understand Li ’l Bit, but she also, in r eaction , seems to penetrate and sense his
difficulties and interior struggles: “Li’l Bit: So why is your mother dissapppointed in you,
Uncle Peck?…Peck: Well, missy, she wanted me to do – to be everything my father was
not. She wanted me to amount to something ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 28). She also
supports and comforts him, as if their relationship was reversed, Li ’l Bit being the adult
and Peck the child: “But you have! You ’ve amounted a lot. ..I’l bet yo ur mother loves you,
Uncle Peck ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 29). His mother ’s “Great Expectations ” and Li ’l
Bit’s response freeze him a bit, predicting his final freeze , beyond death, in a poignant,
haunting image in his victim ’s mind .
The play exposes “the effect before we understand the cause, detect [s] the trauma
before being told its root ” (Bigsby 321) . Beside her suggested suicidal impulse, his
calculated process of seduction , his despair and their mutual empathy and understanding ,
Vogel pu ts him in a ‘heroic ’ position, leading Li ’l Bit to her rejection of him: “I see him as
teaching her ego formation, as giving her the tools to grow up and reject him and destroy
him” (Vogel, quoted in Bigsby 321).
She learns from her abuser how to s educe young teenage boys and how to feel
pleasure and thrill from it , exercising her sexual authority and power. She becomes from
the victim the victimizer, from the student the teacher, playing her own part and pointing
out to the necessity of her relatio nship with Uncle Peck . The scene is both “metatheatrical

59
and metasexual, emphasizing gender, power and sexual desire as learned roles ”
(Mansbridge 140) :
And dramaturgically speaking, after the faltering and slightly comical ‘first act ’, there was the ver y
briefest of intermissions, and an extremely capable and forceful and sustained discussion – I lay on
my back in the dark and I thought about you, Uncle Peck. Oh. Oh – this is the allure. Being older.
Being the first. Being the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded. This is how the giver
gets taken.
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 41)
Thus Vogel uses a theatrical metaphor through which she tries to manip ulate and
seduce her audiences , giving them a ride to places where they wouldn ’t dare t o go by
themselves, threatening their innocence (Bigsby 323). The central metaphor, from the title,
disguises their intimate moments and the development of their relationship, and Li ’l Bit
increasing autonomy (Bigsby 323). The driving lessons taught by Unc le Peck are lessons
of responsibility, life, sexuality, strength and power: “When you are driving, your life is in
your own two hands . Understand? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 50).
Close enough to a nemesis , Li’l Bit is trained by Uncle Peck to punish him for his
past, actual and future sins, and also to survive without him in a patriarchal society (Bigsby
324): “There ’s lot of assholes out there. Crazy men, arrogant idiots, drunks, angry kids,
geezers who are blind – and you have to be ready for them. I wa nt to teach you to drive like
a man. ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 50). Although she seems to be confused at the
beginning, Peck ’s skills as a teacher direct him to fulfilling his assumed role. He explains
to her, patiently that “Men are taught to drive with confidence – with aggression ” (Vogel,
The Mammary Plays 50).
The context in which Vogel makes use of b iased gender based stereotypes – that
women have to be taught what violence is, and cars have female gender, suggest s Li’l Bit’s
sexual inclination to l esbianism, when she decides not to change the gender of the car, after
her uncle exposed the reasons for which the car is a ‘she’: “when you close your eyes and
think of someone who responds to your touch – someone who performs for you and gives
you what y ou ask for – I guess I always see a ‘she’“ (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 51). The
metaphor of driving lessons reinforces the idea of gender, as something that emerges in the
attitudes and acts someone learns and internalizes, and “not something that originate s from
the body ” (Mansbridge 132).
Li’l Bit’s masculine identification starts before her driving lessons with Uncle Peck,
from her own mother, who “entitles her to a different relationship to the Phallus ” (Savran,
A Queer Sort of Materialism 198), from h er birth, fashioning her as a man. Her mother is

60
the one who advises her to “stay away from the ladies ’ drinks ” and to “drink, instead, like
a man ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 24). Li’l Bit chooses to identify with her uncle, who
teaches her how to be a desi ring subject and to “have ” the Phallus that he offers her .
Therefore, she learns how to be, both the aggressor and the aggressed, the abuser and the
abused, the one who offers power and who takes it, the desiring subject and the desired
object (Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism 199).
The scene in which Li ’l Bit breaks up with Uncle Peck in order to take control over
her life and intimate relationships, places Peck in a reversed vulnerable and desperate
position. Feeling sorry for Peck, she concedes and lies down on the bed with him, while a
“poignant convergence of broken memories and embodied sensations ” invades her body, in
a recollection of fragmented, sensual memories , in which Peck becomes the object of Li ’l
Bit’s desire: “warm brown eyes ”, “warm ha nds”, “the slouch of fishing skiff in his walk ”,
“sweat of cypress and sand ”, “his heart beating Dixie ”, “his mouth ” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 82-83). Even though Peck tries in his last attempt to subordinate her, asking her to lie
down beside him, “Becaus e sometimes the body knows things the mind isn ’t listening to ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 81), he fails to exercise power over her, he fails to influence
and manipulate her, as he did in the past.
The last scene theatricalises the dislocation of body and voice, creating a sense of
distance between the encounter and its remembrance. Li’l Bit confronts her past, while t he
Teenage Chorus speaks her lines. Her “disembodied voice is replaced by her direct voice ”
(Mansbridge 141). The adult actress sits on Peck ’s lap, connoting both childhood and sex
work, bringing together images of a daughter sitting on her Dad ’s lap and a lap dance. The
absent figure of the father, of which Li ’l Bit was in need, is embodied in Peck ’s picture.
Finally, Li ’l Bit perceives, in re trospect, her uncle ’s conflicted desires, which all
encapsulated a form of aggression. He wanted to protect her of dangerous situations, to
train her for life ’s possible difficult moments , but also to satisfy his sexual desire and
exercise control over her .
Bringing back her audiences to the beginning of the play, by revealing the secret,
Vogel proposes a different tackling of subjects such as sexuality, gender and hegemony.
Li’l Bit’s narrative voice encapsulates Peck ’s legacy , which is her agency to give meaning
to her memories and story. Her empowered position that gives her authority to shape and
change her unknown future is a reflected image of Peck, “part of her remade, recollected

61
self” (Mansbridge 143) that redirects traditional narratives towards a different, unknown
route, with the car in the first gear and Uncle Peck ’s ghost.
How I Learned to Drive is one of Vogel ’s most praised and contested play. The
greatest achievements of the play, according to Mansbridge (144-145), are its ambiguity
and effective aftermath. By Mansbridge ’s account, Vogel ’s quest was to look for moral
complexity, not for moral certainty, which becomes outdated in the contemporary world,
“situating ethical questions within the flux and interconnections of history and cultur e and
in the unpredictable movements of shame and desire. ”
Paradoxically, the play, as Robert Brustein writes, was canonized in a traditional
manner, as a play that transcends moral issues, not as a play that challenges or
problematiz es them: “Vogel move s her characters out of the provisional world of morality
into the timeless world of art ” (quoted in Mansbridge 145).
How I Learned to Drive does not expose direct violence on stage , like Hot ‘N’
Throbbing does. It plays with hidd en, subversive contents , such as gender based behaviour
and relationships, which are propagated from generation to generation, without even
considering them violent acts. In this manner, the play demonstrate s that violence is so
intrinsically inserted in our life, that sometimes we take it as normal , conventional , for
granted and bequeathed from our ancestors.

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2.4 Domestic Violence in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing

Hot ‘N’ Throbbing examines the line between ‘dirty ’ pornography and ‘harmless ’
adult entertainment and the ir impact on the imagination, making use of hybrid dramatic
forms “that weave expressionistic theatre conventions with realistic crime drama ” (Saddik
164). The play also explores “the aggressive and the literal nature of violence and
sexuality ” (Bigsby 299 ). As Bigsby suggests, Hot ‘N’ Throbbing was regarded as a
deliberate affront to Senator Jesse Helms ’ request of creating art that could not offend
people of the community (312) , in which Paula Vogel uses extreme violence and
pornography in order to depict another cruel topical issue of the society , namely domestic
violence.
Facing censorship during her struggle to find a stage for Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , Vogel
points up the “lack of moral courage ” (Paula Vogel quoted in Bigsby 312) of those “who
wished to den y what they should have confronted ” (Bigsby 312) . As Mansbridge
highlights, the play ’s motto exposes heterosexual privacy that censorship protects: “Hot
‘N’ Throbbing was written on a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship – because
obscenity begins at home ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 228). Hereby, the
play analyses the personal and the social meanings of physical violence on women , as well
as the ways in which emotional scars can manifest themselves in and on the physical body ,
as Jone s and Hearn accentuate in their essay:
Men continue to perpetrate most interpersonal violence in intimate relationships, especially planned,
repeated, heavy, physically damaging, non -defensive, premeditated, non -retaliatory and sexual
forms of violence . (Jones and Hearn 53)
Far from being an almanac of male violence, the play links sexuality, violence,
eroticism and pornography, in a hazardous domain of fantasy. The playworlds of fantasy
and reality are overlapping, but as they alternate are separated by stage lights, which are
normal for the real universe and blue lights for the fantasy environment. The play presents
a dysfunctional family, in which women are used to project male fantasies. Charlene lives,
separated by her abusive and violent husband, Clyde, against whom she obtained a
restrictive order, with her two adole scent children, a girl, Leslie Ann, and a boy, Calvin.
She makes a living from writing stories for Gyno Productions that is specialized, as she
likes to call it in “women ’s erotica ”, whic h seems to be synonymous with pornography.

63
It has been revealed that children are used by couples to avoid and project their
problems (Davis 255). This would be a way of coping with their struggles. So, Layla, as
Leslie Ann prefers to be called, performs in the nearby dance hall, following in a certain
way her mother. Calvin is a voyeur, like his father, unable to relate to women except
through pornography. He makes up the story of his sister ’s erotic job, to compete with his
mother ’s creation of literatur e (Bigsby 313 -314). Only that in the end the adults do not
cope with their lives, even if their problems are projected on their children on a certain
level .
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing challenges its own assumptions, as Bigsby (314) underlines.
Charlene becomes a victim of her own fantasies, as well as her husband, Clyde. The
fabrication of pornography is a n ironical claim for autonomy and power , the world of
pornography being male dominated. The words Charlene writes are amplified by a Voice –
Over, a wom an who dances in a glass booth and “an embodiment of Charlene ’s inner voice
and a projection of her thoughts as well as an extension of her erotic prose ” (Bigsby 314).
There is also a male Voice that infiltrates other kind s of perspectives – either directi ng the
actions or playing various roles from bouncer to peep show operator .
The eclipse of women is suggested by Charlene ’s death from the end of the play,
while the Voice recites from Molly Bloom ’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce ’s Ulysses . The
scene may b e regarded as a male attempt to understan d something of female sexuality and
vision of life or relationships. The end scene, when Leslie Ann enters and dresses to the
music and continues to write at the computer her mother ’s script, is a mirroring of the
beginning scene. She and the Voice -Over ironically assert: “She was hot. She was
throbbing. But she was in control. Control of he r body. Control of her thoughts. ” (Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 295). This was the only way a woman could be in
control in a patriarchal world – either dead or writing, dressed up, lacking her sexuality and
desires, not permitting herself to be objectified by men. The scene is ambiguous, as Bigsby
(315) observes. On the one hand she avoids the male gaze a nd on the other hand she
replicates her mother ’s actions, seemingly, learning nothing , repeating the same mistakes,
engaging in the same roles. But, adopting this role, she seems to become the manipulator
of the narrative, not the manipulated one, although the differen ce sometimes looks
undistinguishable. So, Lacan ’s assumption, underlined by Davis (247), that “woman ’s
position does not ex -ist”, still remains an open challenge. However, both Charlene and

64
Clyde fail to adapt to the society. They do not have clear positio ns in it and they are unable
to function as members of it; rejecting the Symbolic Order required as compulsory.
The play reveals the roots of family violence as sexuality, but transmuted into
brutality . It also triggers some sort of erotic aesthetic an d a great pleasure in writing
pornography, as a woman, as Vogel herself admitted (Bigsby 315). She also recognises
that the line between eroticism and pornography is initiated by the power posi tion of who
is writing. Thus Vogel brings into question gender issues , patriarchy and hegemonic tools.
Displaying the language of pornography, Charlene takes the role assumed by men,
traditionally, and her daughter seems to reiterate the story. As some of Vogel ’s students
highlighted, in a moment of pure shock, there is no way out of the cycle of violence .
Therefore, she decided to cha nge the ending , “to show the possibility of breaking the cycle
of violence, of identifying a language and a mechanism for understanding that violence and
hence obviating it ” (Bigsby 316). The daughter will be empowered ; she will be a professor
of critical legal studies in domestic violence and talking about language , sexuality,
violence and law.
Later, as a third attempt to a satisfactory ending, Vogel shows Leslie Ann as a
literature pro fessor and Calvin as a Hollywood screenwriter. This end ing makes reference
to Heiner M üler’s technique of the synthetic fragment, which comprises time and overlaps
images, ideas and themes, replacing the logic and structure of linear plot . The e mphasis is
on possibility of change that c omes out of intellectual engagement with the past, a critical
questioning and a revision of the canonical and cultural narratives and ideologies that still
inform our bodies and imagination and haunted Charle ne’s consciousnes s. The ending
indicates ways of educating dialogue and awareness beyo nd the categories of good and bad
or victim and victimizer , although it is difficult for anybody to claim full authority and
control over their words and thoughts (Mansbridge 87 -88). Afte r all, the end that suggests
control of Leslie Ann ’s thoughts also implies a strange, haunting bond between the
daughter and the mother that irradiates the play ’s epigraph: “Some plays only daughters
can write ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 228).
Although Hot ‘N’ Throbbing fails to safeguard the violent death of Charlene by the
hand and belt of her estranged husband , the play “parrots second -wave feminist platitudes
about female sexual liberation ” (Green 147). Moreover, Vogel inverts Joyce ’s technique
used in the passage of Molly Bloom ’s stream of consciousness monologue, in which she

65
celebrates her sexual awakening. By the end of Molly ’s interior monologue, read and
recorded, ironically, by the male Voice , Charlene is running out of breath, g asping for air,
losing consciousness , slipping down into death. Vogel ’s twist of tape recording, from calm
to broken divulges her “poignant quoting and manipulation of Joyce ” which intensifies the
brutality and senselessness of Charlene ’s suffocation (Gree n 156). Only that “inversion
does not in itself fundamentally alter oppressive formations ” (Savran, A Queer Sort of
Materialism 192). Vogel ’s intention is to understate and not to perpetuate the patriarchal
hierarchical structures .
Nevertheless, Charlen e practises a kind of male impersonation. The parodic use of
writing pornography and its material effects redeploy a genre that was monopolized by
men. The play, as much of Vogel ’s playwrights, embodies “a revision and repossession of
highly masculinised t extual practice ” (Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism 191). Thereby,
Vogel reflects on and criticises the masculine literary modernism, from D.H. Lawrence,
James Joyce, and Henry Miller to Vladimir Nabokov and David Mamet, who immortalize
and romanticise v iolence against women.
In the end of Hot ‘n’ Throbbing physical violence annihilates the erotic language ,
unlike the masculine paradigmatic texts which con join violence and sex into an aesthetic
apparent art. Merely , the “mundane or empirical violence reveals by effraction the
originary violence, whose energy and form it iterates and repeats ” (Grosz 138). The
brutality of domestic violence shows that violence indeed belongs to the realm of ordinary
experience (Pellegrini 478). The play also highlights h ow canonical texts and writers shape
our identities and fantasies, how they “provide the language with which we define ou r own
desires ” (Mansbridge 86), so that the structure of violence becomes itself “marked by the
very structure of the trace or writing ” (Grosz 137).
As a victim of physical and sexual abuse, Charlene practices a range of self –
destructive practices and suffers from the traumatic effects, internalizing her trauma in
terms of self -blame (Aldama 12) . She receives Clyde in the house even if she has a
restraining order against him, as a result of his past violent behaviour. She feels pity for
him when he recognises that he has no money to afford a prostitute. At the same time she
feels wheedled, and thus, sexually attractive. She engages in an erotic play with her ex –
husband, ignoring his signs of reminiscent violence. No matter how much rage, repulsion

66
or abjection she stored up, she is still a victim of historical oppression and violence that
enslaved and isolated her in the domestic gendered sphere (Aldama 12) .
The bodied and disembodied narrators offer a surrealistic atmosphere in which
Vogel creates a “production of multiple selves [that] will always problematize and
undermine the autonomy of the subject ” (Savran, A Queer Sort of Materiali sm 189-190).
The Voice Over utters some of Charlene ’s thoughts and opinions. But sometimes the Voice
Over does not want or cannot speak on behalf of Charlene.
One of the feminist achievements of Hot ‘n’ Throbbing , according to Ann
Pellegrini (479), is that it indicates the woman ’s participation in the gendered dynamics of
violence. Far from blaming Charlene for her death or considering her an innocent victim of
her husband ’s violence, Vogel portrays a Woman ’s lived feelings for her abusive partner,
paradoxical and contradictory, such as pity, anger, rejection and desire. This dilemma is a
reflection of real life into the drama. Not showing direct implication of domestic violence,
or absolutely empowered abusers and powerless victims, Paula Vogel uses th eatre “to
shock audiences out of their complacencies in order to challenge our accustomed ways of
seeing the world ”, including the feminist views (Pellegrini 480).
The anti -pornography position of some feminists of the time did not stop Vogel to
assign t o her character, Charlene, a difficult role – a single mother that writes erotic
screenplays for a living. Even if Charlene is doomed to failure, she, at least, debunks a
reality of the dominant culture, a reality that is spoken in a straightforward way : “It’s only
pornography when women and gays and minorities try to take control of their own
imaginations. No one blinks an eye when men do it ” (Mansbridge 70) . Here, Judith
Butler ’s approach to pornography becomes essential for decoding the repetition and
circulation of graphic, violent sexual images, challenged by the play itself, in an attempt to
disrupt the reality of family and fantasy and create a new language of female pleasure and
sexual agency:
“[…] a feminist reading of pornography that resists th e literalization of this imaginary scene, one
which reads it instead for the incommensurability between gender norms and practices that it seems
compelled to repeat without resolution. … To read such texts against themselves is to concede that
the perfor mativity of the text is not under sovereign control. … This raises the possibility of
resignification as an alternative reading of performativity and politics ” (Butler quoted in Mansbridge
71).
The play dethrone s the conventions of motherhood and femal e sexuality, as
Charlene ’s authority as a mother is in opposition with her authority as a pornographer. The
limited autonomy of women ’s erotic imagination and capacity of imagining themselves as

67
sexual subjects, not objects , is questioned from the beginnin g of the play. Even though
Charlene posits the man as a dominated erotic object, she changes the dynamics of power
and relations, and by revising the script, shakes up her authority (Mansbridge 73).
Leslie Ann , as any adolescent , learns her sexuality, bo th inside and outside the
home, iterating her mother behaviour and the conventional heteronorma tive femininity.
Her mother is worried about her daughter, but watches “the expert teasing dance for an
imaginary male clientele ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 246) which
becomes a material and an aid for her script and lack of inspiration . Calvin, watches her
striptease, too, and he “parallels their movements ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other
Plays 246), suggesting his role as a consumer in a s exualized marketplace and as a student
who must learn how to perform his future male behaviour (Mansbridge 74). Lacan ’s
endless “mirror stage ” is assimilated by Calvin to continuous social identifications, shaped
by fictions and hetero sexual norms.
Charle ne’s career becomes a subject of mockery for her ex -husband, reflecting his
humiliation and the threat he feels regarding her writing job. He tries to intimidate,
aggressively, his ex -wife, making fun of her work: “Erotica is just a Swedish word for
porn, Charlene. Just face what you are doing. Take pride in it ” (Vogel, The Baltimore
Waltz and Other Plays 261). In a parodic performance, Clyde also mocks Charlene ’s
career and his own humiliation, when he breaks in his ex -wife’s hou se, drunk, lonely and
pathe tic: “I’m here to audition. To give you. New material. The E -Rot-icly
UnEmployed…Ta -Da!!And Now! The Burlesque Theatre of Langley Park! Presentin ’!
SEX -ON-WELFARE! ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 251-252).
Charlene ’s calm response, getting a gun and shooting him in the buttocks, inverts the
parody, into a self -defence spoof. Here, female stripper and male gaze are reversed so that
Clyde mocks his own erotic failure (Mansbridge 80).
Clyde maintains his masculine power through physical force and verbal
humiliation, even in his vulnerable moments he admits Charlene ’s qualities: “You taught
me all about desire ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 263). But Charlene does
not let herself drawn into regression. She tells Clyde that he devel oped an obsession with
her, especially now that he has no work. She reminds him: “It could have been anything,
just as long as it kept your mind off from your job. And now that you ’ve lost your job,
you’re obsessing about me to keep your mind off the fact that you don ’t have a job ”

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(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 263). But his vulnerability will trigger her
compassion and indulgence , which will lead to her tragic end.
Clyde ’s performance of a failed masculinity – drunken, alone, without a job,
induces a kind of empathy, the same as uncle Peck does, from How I Learned to Drive . He
is powerless over his words and actions. All he has left was his brutality, his primitive
force that, unlike Peck, made him survive this narrative. Clyde ’s disruptive behaviour as a
criminal and sex offender , according to psychoanalysts, employs , as a person with
disordered habitus , some rigid, primitive defences, such as denial and projection, refusing
to acknowledge his actions and abuses (Greer and Stuart, Introducti on viii ). After all he
projects his culpability on the victim , considering Charlene guilty for his own behaviour.
He denies having any blame for all that happened. He even considers Charlene guilty for
the judge ’s decision regarding the restriction order: “You shouldof never – never gotten
that restraining order – kicked me out of my own home!…A man ’s home is his Castle. His.
fucking. Castle. What we do in here is our business It ’s our fucking sacred business…Not
the goddamn judge ’s.” (Vogel, The Baltim ore Waltz and Other Plays 293).
Clyde ’s evacuation from his own home and “castle ” touches sensitive spiritual and
inviolable issues. It is as if Charlene stepped on his ancestral masculine values. As a matter
of fact , social psychologists regard sexual a ssault, and thus violence, as a “learned
behavior, conditioned by the attitudes and examples of the growing boy ’s milieu ” (Greer
and Stuart, Introduction i x). So, the intergenerational transfer of patterns of male -female
relations hips has a great power, in fluencing not only the individual sexual behavior, but
also the social attitude towards violence and aggression. This is the reason for which he
considers himself entitled to give the last lesson to Charlene.
The woman ’s body is marked as a public, co llective, social category by the
cicatrisation and scarification of emotional and physical traumas produced by violence
(Grosz quoted in Jones and Hearn, 53) . The women’s experience of abuse and wounding,
as well as the traces of violence, have specific so cial and cultural implication s, of which
Vogel is aware whe n she exposes and challenges its problematical aspects in a public
performance context ( Jones and Hearn 54).
Theater is a place in which the audience is implicated. By means of thi s play, the
audience is invited to engage in voyeurism, which seems to be the apparent subject of the
play, but, by the end of it, the audience is driven, by a relentless logic to the climax, which

69
provided by primitive, elementary violence. Composing to m usic, Paula Vogel constructs
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing from erotic to ‘terorrific ’, in a movie, cinematic manner . She started
writing, as she explains, with Janet Jackson ’s Control and Kuoma ’s World Beat in the
early scenes, and Michael Jackson ’s Thriller and the sound -track to The Silence of the
Lambs in the later ones. Thus , something from the rhythm and tone of the music is
reflected in her play (Bigsby 316). Vogel plays with the stereotype, in searching of Jung ’s
archetype s (Bigsby 317). Her characters are acto rs that perform their lives in a world
which stages its own drama and enacts its own myths , drawn by their own fictions and
fantasies.
By all means , Vogel argues, as Grosz does, for a reconfiguration and redefinition of
the wom en’s body and mind, whereby both the inside and outside are valued – “two
surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously blend
with and support each other; a model where the join, the interaction between the two
surfaces, is always a question of powe r” (Grosz quoted in Jones and Hearn 54).

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CHAPTER 3

VIOLENCE IN THE FANTASY SEQUENCES OF VOGEL ’S PLAYS

3.1 The Visionary Realm in And Baby Makes Seven

Vogel’s play entitled And Baby Makes Seven is a reverberation of Edward Albee ’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , which push es forward its audience into a visionary realm,
“jumping from one story to another, transforming and exploring parallel possibilities ”, and
overlapping fantasy on a hypothetical reality (Bigsby 297). Setting up “the retrospective
irony ”, Vogel creates “the fiction -making power of the imagination ”, although imperfect,
but necessary as a defense against anxiety, fear, and even, absurdity (Bigsby 303). Unlike
Albee who invokes an illusionary “reductive but redemptive r eality ”, Vogel envisions
imagination as the source of meaning, not only of consolation , thus “giving concrete form
to shared fantasies ” (Bigsby 293 -294).
Asking more questions than looking for answers, the play revises not only the
American family ’s fut ure, but also its unburied past, confusing reality with fantasy, and
creating a new visionary family, as David Savran explains in his “Loose Screws: An
Introduction ” to The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays :
For me, the play ’s rather eccentric nuclear family functions as an utopian fantasy, an ideal
community in which even the wildest desires can be satisfied, in which personal histories can be
invented on the spot, and in which adults are free to play like children. […] it is a celebration of
narrative, of the power of the theatre to make fantasy real. It commemorates the childhood one never
had, the friends wished for but never gained, the desires never acknowledged. (Savran, “Loose
Screws: An Introduction ” xv)
Cecil is played by An na, and Orphan and Henr i are played by Ruth. As Bigsby
observes, the fantasy children seem to represent conjunctively future probabilities for the
unborn child, reified in “the effete intellectual at one extreme, the romantic symbol or
animal force at the other ” (303). One possi ble explanation for this phantasm is that it could
be emanated from the needs and anxieties generated by these needs, which belong to the
real persons, Anna, Ruth and Paul, and affect their relationship, but also are influenced by
their relationship, by pr egnancy and birth coming. Vogel herself, according to Bigsby
(304), envisaged in the fantasy children a personification of id, super -ego and libido.
Since the fantasy children are played by the women, the killing of them becomes a
difficult task, because it is part of their own destruction. Bigsby compares the killing of the

71
imaginary children with a writer ’s completion of a book (306), as Ruth remarks at the end
of scene five of act one: ‘Look, I want to get my last inch of fantasy out of them. […]
We’re going to tidy up the plots. No loose ends dangling ’ (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and
Other Plays 84).
He also considers that the play is metafictional and proposes “a parallel between the
creation of a text and the creation of a child ” (306), in which references from other literary
works , such as Hamlet , Julius Caesar , The Waste Land or Tea and Sympathy, proves not
only Julia Kristeva ’s concept of intertextuality, but also the possibility of recreation of
myths, stories, plots, or future and past. The i dea is sustained by Orphan ’s death of rabies,
correlated with his raising by dogs; by Cecil ’s passing similarly to Brutus, falling in his
sword; and by Henry ’s disappearance, carried off by balloons, like his film protagonist. In
this manner, Vogel adopts a strategy, as playwright, which “revises canonical texts and
cultural attitudes” (Mansbridge 54), and accentuates the instability of authority , as well as
the flexibility of narrative .
Thus, being pa rt of life, fantasy is difficult to be taken apart an d isolated in order to
be analytically tested. So, the visionary realm of the play is part of the characters ’ lives, but
at the same time estranges them from reality, unravelling the nature of the unconscious.
When Vogel was asked why the imaginary childre n are male, she explained that inside
every woman there is a masculine part whi ch itches for exit. S he was assailed by the gay
community because of her decision to make her imaginary characters males (Bigsby 306).
In her answer Vogel made a n indirect refer ence to Yung ’s concept of animus, this leading
the way for an expanded psychoanalysis of the play.
Anyway, Vogel ’s “bad” feminism is also discussed by Ann Pellegrini in her essay
“Repercussions and Reminders in the Plays of Paula Vogel: An Essay in Fi ve Moments ”
included in Krasner ’s A Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama . Pellegrini
shows how And Baby Makes Seven breaks through “safe”, “correct” and complex social
realities, but also “cozy ” lesbian and gay families , for which Vogel does not o ffer an
idealized version of the traditional family. I nstead, she challenge s all that is considered
normal, and ultimately “offers something far richer and more complex than mirror images:
a deliriously queer vision of kinship outside the bounds of the exp ected ” (480).
If in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , everything, even sex, fall s apart under “the
greater pleasure of aggression ” (Davis 210), in And Baby Makes Seven , even the imaginary

72
children ’s deaths are part of a comedy, being portrayed in a “mock -tragic style ”
(Mansbridge 56). The convergence between child ren and adult s, reality and fantasy, self
and other is theatricalized by Vogel during the whole play, but it surfaces in scene 4, when
Henri prepare s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, singing a “medley of Maurice Chevalier
hits” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 79), and is absorbed by Orphan, Ruth ’s
other persona. The scene provides a comic version of psychic conflicts, enclosing
inconsistent impulses that break down any sense of stable selfhood (Mansbridge 56).
On the whole, the three boys represent, as Paula Vogel suggested, and Bigsby
articulated, the id (Orphan), the libido (Henri) and the superego (Cecil). They also
“playfully subvert the conventional beliefs in and appeals to the “innocence ” of the child ”
(Mansbridge 57), featuring and mirroring Anna and Ruth ’s affects and urges. As
psychoanalysis has shown, and Davis usefully pointed out, the “suppressed truth of
parenting emerges ”, and as effect, he sustains, all adults ar e fantasy children, because
“parents act out and reproduce their sexual conflicts in and through their relationship to the
child ”, and “to be a child is to be the clash and paralysis of parental projections ” (235).
The play implies that the model of the Oedipal relationship between the c hild, the
mother and the father is no longer sustainable for conceptualizing the American family,
and thus the classic psychological paradigms of sexual development and family frame are
disrupted. Mansbridge also sustains t hat even Lacanian interface between Imaginary Order,
associated with the mother, and Symbolic Order, associated with the father is not
distinguishable anymore (57). The Imaginary is pegged in the m aterial, linguistic, and
social, as the Symbolic, and the S ymbolic is impregnated with visions and fantasies as the
Imaginary. In such narrative s, where the voidness of the Imaginary and the Symbolic is
secured, the validity of the Real does not remain an open question. So, Vogel inverts the
hierarchy of reality o ver fantasy, heteronormative over queer or suppressed.
The imaginary children proclaim their right to exist, as the birth of the real baby
approaches, claiming the role of the visionary realm in everyday life. Thus, Henry ’s
statement, “I hate that baby ”, as a response to Cecil ’s observation, “They ’re not
themselves. Ever since that baby ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 94),
denote s the invariable struggles and tensions for legitimacy , between reality and fantasy
(Mansbridge 57 -58). Notable is that Cecil, who materializes in Anna, the future mother
who will deliver the baby, does not affirm that he hates the unborn chi ld; but Henry, on the

73
other hand , impersonating Ruth, is full of hatred and envy. Plainly , the children hypostatize
the adults ’ deepest and darkest impulses, emotions and thoughts.
The play suggests that sex uality and gender are complete fictions, although these
“cultural conceits ” have real effects on humans (Mansbridge 59). The transposed sexual
identities, from adults to im aginary children, are not fixed . So, reflecting the adult ’s shift of
sexual identity, Ruth -as-Henri tries to seduce Peter, declaring, “I want to have your baby! ”
(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 66). The conventional belief that children
are not sexual is dismantled by the agency of imaginary children who generate sexual
fantasies among adults (Mansbridge 59).
If Albee ’s play is full of aggression, anger, fears and unconscious envies, which
pull off all masks (Davis 214), Vogel ’s play beco me a serious parody of tragic ending
when the imaginary kids are murdered in a grandeur, canonical style (Mansbridge 60).
Even if a crime is triggered by violence , Vogel does not call on it. Anna is frightened from
the beginning, in scene six, when Ruth ar ranges Orphan ’s death, declaring th at Ruth almost
made her break her water. When Anna is engaged in Orphan ’s death, trying to speak to
him, in his last moments, she is very affected, maybe as a result of her pregnancy and
future motherhood. She asks Orphan if he is in pain, and later on she begs Ruth to end it
rapidly because she can not stand it anymore: “Ruthie! I can ’t go through with this! This is
too awful! ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 88). Therefore, even though
Orphan ’s death is a mock ery, dying of rabies, bitten by a dog which walked like a crab, the
dog that bit him reminded him of his mother, thus becoming a tragic death, which Anna
could not indulge.
“Orphan ’s melodramatic death scene ” (Mansbridge 61) is a burlesque mad scene, a
parody of deaths and “a comic dramatization of what it means to be possessed by cultural
narratives ” (Mansbridge 62). A mixture of quotes from The Exorcist , Macbeth , King Lear ,
Romeo and Juliet , Ibsen ’s Ghosts , A Streetcar Named Desire , and Lassie, shapes a n
intertextual assembly of popular and cultivated icons of possession, death and madness ,
which accompanies Orphan ’s primal fear of death, dissolved into some kind of psychosis
(Mansbridge 62), conveyed by expressions such as “Fuck Me, Jesus! ”, “Out, d -damned
spot”, “Mother, give me the sun ”, “that unwashed gggggrrr -grape has transported her
soul”, or “woof, woof, woof ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 88).

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His death , as those of the other male imaginary children, becomes a necessary
mortality , imperative for cleaning and purifying the society of “patriarchal power that
sustains itself through the violent enforcement of its heteronormativity ” (Aldama 13). And
thus, Orphan ’s death, even if it is the most violent of all three , cannot be envisaged as ‘bad’
violence, destructive and negative, as Elizabeth Grosz categorizes it in her essay, but as a
‘good ’ violence that is “justified by virtue of its constructive force ” (141). What does it
construct? By challenging society ’s norms and values, it cons tructs a new type of reality
which transcends the barriers of imposed normality.
As Davis asserts, “Speech is verbal aggression, and because it is indirect it works
best through ambiguity ” (217) , and “Playful aggression always hold in reserve a deepe r
aggression which it primes ” (222) . Far beyond the aggression recognized in Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf , which became “the explicit target ” of speech and action in the play, And
Baby Makes Seven pictures a different kind of fantasy, which supports its own reality and
“logical trajectory ” (Mansbridge 60). The women “kill off ” their imaginary children, one
by one, at Peter ’s suggestion, unlike George ’s allusive murder of Martha ’s child. Ch anging
roles not only challenges notions of power and authority, bu t it also gives a sense of a more
tragic drama. Anna, as prospective mother, also attends to her, even if imaginary,
children ’s homicide. She has mixed ambiguous feeling s. On the one hand she agrees with
the fact that the birth coming and the arrival of th e real child is a good reason to get rid of
the fantasy children, but on the other hand she is very upset, frightened and angry. Her
anger is reflected on her behavior and her speech.
For example, she is very annoyed, app arently without any reason, when Ruth wears
Peter ’s shirt, even if he is not disturbed , and finally she explodes: “AND DON ’T YOU
DARE TELL ME IT ’S HORMONES !” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 97).
Maybe this reminds her of Orphan ’s fight with Henry, when Orphan wanted to wear
Henry’s shirt, thus deepening her suffering. Or maybe that episode was just a mirroring of
Ruth ’s habit or even a foresight of Orphan ’s death, as Henry (Henry being played by Ruth,
who kills him in the end) anticipates: “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU ORPHANNE! ”
(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 83). But the episode describes, furthermore,
a siblings ’ fight, which sometimes end s up violently.
Although she is the one that suggests that they cannot stop now, “Not in the middle
of the story ” (Vogel, The Balt imore Waltz and Other Plays 105), Anna is the one who will

75
be, again, very affected by their next child ’s death. When Peter asks her about the moment
when Henry will be ‘bumped off ’ by her, as a result of a rotation agreement between the
women, Anna hardly controls her irritability, biting Peter ’s nose off: “Want front -row
seats? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 95). Worried about Orphan ’s pain,
Anna is now preoccupied with Henry ’s. She does not want Henry to be hurt, and she
prefers for him a d isappearance, rather than a ‘real’ death.
As Brechtian devices, the imaginary children, symbols of safety valves for the
adults ’ psyches, project the adults ’ conflicts and struggles, binding the children ’s psyches
with the desires of the parents (Davis 2 27), and pulsating in Jungian collective memory.
The fantasy boys are representations of women ’s animus archetype, not only blurring
society ’s gender boundaries, but destroying its limits and reconstructing them in the end,
with the sudden revival of the c hildren.
Collective memory is what Peter calls on when he has the “inverted ” father -son
conversation, and he expresses to Cecil his anxieties and fears about his future role as a
father figure and how this role could be influenced by his own fa ther, leading to a
reiteration of the same pattern. But Cecil, played by Anna, the forthcoming mother of
Peter ’s child, with his advice, “just make it up on your own, this father thing, okay, Uncle
Peter? ” guides Peter to imagine the world outside the Oedi pal paradigm which was
traditionally used to understand family (Mansbridge 60) . Cecil not only suggests to Peter
that he can act differently, but he also invests him with power and authority to make his
own story of parenthood: “do think maybe we could … change the ending? ” (Vogel, The
Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 113).
Cecil ’s shaping by Anna , not only from her desires and fears, but also from her
affection for Peter, as Cecil himself admits, “Anna mode lled me a little bit on you ” (Vogel,
The Balti more Waltz and Other Plays 122), proposes “porous boundaries between
identification and desire, creation and imitation ” (Mansbridge 61), proliferating the
definition of parenthood and subjectivity, reversing parent -child hierarchy in such a way in
which pa rents can learn from their children. And thus, Cecil supports and guides Peter until
his final sword dance, comforting him, “I think you are going to make a wonderful father ”,
and orienting him outside the classical framework, “Don’t … be afraid … to p lay with your
child ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 114)

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As a result of this scene, Peter not only appreciates Cecil and Anna ’s help, “Thank
you Cecil. I feel a lot better ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 113), but he
also feels c loser to women ’s imaginary life; and even if he offers Cecil a noble death, Peter
is the one who brings back to life the fantasy children . This revival is an offspring with
divergent causes , such as his guilt or his new understanding of his role as a fathe r. Only
Peter could offer Cecil a noble, steady death, being the male who resorts to honour in order
to free himself and save others, as following a traditional fairy tale pattern . But the
provocation stands in Peter ’s homosexuality, and acc eptance of new roles.
Being the one who proposed to get rid of the imaginary children, Peter ’s first
position regarding the resurrection is sprung from his own guilt and fear: “Orphan!
Revenge! Oorrrppphannnn… ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 121). At the
end of the play he accepts his different role as a non -traditional father, playing with his real
child, Nathan, and his imaginary brothers, Cecil, Henry and Orphan.
Far from being a violent play, And Baby Makes Seven challenge s not only social
norms a nd psychoanalysis, but also violence patterns and typology. It is noticeable that the
most violent character from the play is Ruth, a lesbian, and not a male character, real or
imaginary. Anna, the mother archetype, is the least violent and the most compa ssionate,
kind-hearted person ; even if sometimes she also embraces aggressive , destructive
behaviour . Even though she is the one who will get rid of Henry, she assures him, after
Orphan ’s death, that : “I would never hurt you ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other
Plays 102).
Ruth ’s aggression appears in her direct planned actions and attitudes towards the
children ’s deaths, especially Orphan ’s death, but it is also disguised in Henry ’s catchy,
manipulative approach of Orphan ’s death. Henry threatens Anna with telling Peter that he
is the real father of the baby , who is a girl, Emma : “But who will Peter believe if I tell him
I am the father? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 103). The gender of the
baby, embodied by Ruth -as-Henry, is female, as a symbol of her sexuality and her struggle
with masculine power and hegemony; instead, Peter ’s image of the child is male oriented,
as a symbol of patriarchal order, but problematized by his homosexuality.
A subconscious envy and jealousy make Ruth offensi ve and virulent , mirrored in
Henry ’s attitude, whereas he is apostrophized by Anna: “Whoa. Time out, Ruthie. We
agreed never to […] Are we feeling a little bit jealous? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and

77
Other Plays 102). Anna ’s verbal response is not devo id of aggression even though she
controls her words and her emotions: “Are you threatening me? Are you daring to – listen,
I can send you home to Paris so fast it will make that little froggy of yours swim ” (Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 103), but she recoils from that violent possible path,
trying a different reaction to provocative violence, one that will soften that subversive fury :
“Henri, listen honey – do you remember that night? […] Do you remember what I said as I
unbuttoned my blouse ? ‘Years from now, when you speak of this – and you will – be kind. ’
Now I ask you. Is this kind? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 103). It is not
clear whether Anna ’s relationship with Henry is based on an Oedipal complex, “I will
always treas ure that night. My ‘education sentimentale. ’ And no one has to know ” (Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 102), or an incestuous, paedophilic mother desire for
her boy: “And you begged me, and against my better judgement, I gave in ” (Vogel, The
Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 103).
Ruth, the one who accepts representations of heterosexuality, even though she is
lesbian, masks her violent urge not only in planning the dramatic death of Orphan, but also
in his imaginative character, being Orphan ’s impersonator, too. Orphan ’s animalistic
impulses lie in his personal history, being raised by dogs, and in his exorcising reaction to
death that conjur es ancestral forces , and collective primitive memories. In spite of all this,
Ruth ’s aggressiveness prevai ls and Orphan dies, although in the end of the play the
audience imagines a world without violence, in which death is replaced by reviv al, reality
and fantasy coexist , and hope for a different kind of society is not suppressed anymore.
The imaginary children are the creation of the women in the play, not of Peter, who
is the one that propose s to disembarrass everyone of their fantasy burden , but finally
understands that they are part of their reality , helping them to cope with life issues and
struggles. Thereby, Vogel ’s play empowers sexual minorities and sights possible
alternatives to patriarchal hegemony , which sometimes is imposed by violence or force ,
and many times triggers that ‘German sadness ’, as Peter himself names Cecil ’s angst,
paradoxically motivated by Darwin ’s evolution: “‘Thus, from war of nature, from famine
to death, all organic beings advance by one general low – namely. Multiply, Vary, Let the
Strongest Live, and the Weakest Die… ’“ (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays
100).

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3.2 Dream Sequences in The Mineola Twins

As Mansbridge underlined, The Mineola Twins is a rethinking of And Baby Makes
Seven , with the nuclear family as central social unit, but questioning its ideological
meaning and construction (106) . A “family comedy within a political satire ” (Mansbridge
106), the play comes from a “place of incongruity and irreverence , of questioning ”, from
the same source as tragedy , as Vogel herself sustains and fears, mixing campy, clever, and
always disarming humour with t he darker side of it, which is not meant to reinforce the
audience ’s assumptions, but to overturn them ” (Mansbridge 105).
Using as theatrical strateg ies dream sequences and split roles, The Mineola Twins
allegorizes a divided America, split between polari zed right and left politics, and female
absent and excessive sexuality. Presenting women as virgins and whores, products and
producers of history, politics and popular culture, the play resembles a psychomachia
(Savran 190) alienated from the idea of gende r division , questioning this bisection .
Vogel does not offer “a radically different vision of society ”, but she insinuates “an
alternative model of subjectivity ” (Savran 203). The ambivalence of Vogel ’s engagement
is embodied in narrative voices, such as Myra or Myrna, “Paula the writer or Paula the
critic, Paula the feminist or Paula the male impersonator ” (Savran 204).
The play yields a “comic -book version of American history, an ironic account of
changing manners and morals, commitments and self -deceits, ideologies and betrayals ”
(Bigsby 317) of private and public history. The relationship between the twin sisters is a
Manichean paradigm, as they mirror each other: Myrna, willingly conservative, and the
other, Myra , subconsciously radical.
The spiri tual anarchist, Myra, is “making it up from scratch. No marriage. No
children. No suburbs. Just freedom! ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 122). She revises the
American Dream , in contrast with Myrna ’s worldview:
Once I ’ve learned stenography and typing – when my rising young executive -husband comes home
with work from the office – he can put his feet up on the hassock while I take dictation. We ’ll have a
son, and by the time he ’s three or four, we can afford a three bedroom house in Great neck with an
office do wnstairs. Then we ’ll have a dog, and maybe a daughter too – (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
122)
Their antagonistic future vision, along with their shared confident, Jim, make of
Myra and Myrna ’s prospects, a parody of the American Dream, accompanied by the
popular Doris Day ’s song “I’ll See You in My Dreams ” (Mansbridge 111).

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But it seems that Myrna refuses Jim, after she finds out about the intimate
relationship between him and her sister. However, she still suffer s from the effects of the
electro -convulsive treatment . She rebukes her son , Kenny, for his failure to understand
moral relativity and his resonance with Myra ’s rebel ideology , and she returns her sister ’s
favour , by informing the FBI of Myra ’s location, as a result of Myra ’s decision to commit
her to a mental hospital.
The apple of discord, Jim, who later becomes a clerk at a local bank which Myra
raids , saw from his youth that his moral world was falling down , and he tried to stick to his
cultural centrality, but with his attitude towards women, he failed : “I mean, girls are born
the way they are. Men become .” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 125).
Anyway, two decades later, after some years in prison, Myra has become a lesbian
and her sister, Myrna, became a “right -wing radio shock -jock” and an examp le for Myra ’s
son, Ben, after she published her book, Profiles of Chastity . “Deeply intolerant of one
another ”, the siblings “represent two different Americas joined by violence ”. This joint is
achieved at conscious level, in real life, and at unconscious level, in dream sequences, until
“stereotypes are driven to the point of exhaustion ” (Bigsby 318).
By means of “sci-fi infused, surrealistic dream sequences ” and technical regularity
(Mansbridge 107), Vogel situates her play in the field of a ba ttle of warring twins that
creates the basis of a political satire, she herself punctuates:
We used our fear of aliens to mask our terror at what was the heart of America. I used the image of
twins that war: Jacob and E sau, a blood hatred bet ween them. It ’s where we are em otionally as a
country. (quoted in Mansbridge 108)
Substituting the brothers with rival, competing sisters , Vogel evokes a separated,
conflicted postwar America, divided and polarized by politics and paranoia. In this way,
The Mineola T wins is a play with “feminist focus ” (Mansbridge 109), that call s on episodic
structure, double -role pl aying and usage of history , as theatrical devic es, to distort gender
and sexuality, “exposing the acts and gestures as historically constructed and varia ble”
(Mansbridge 109).
Vogel ’s suggestion for the performance of the play ( “With good wigs ” and “With
bad wigs ”) and her preference for “the second way ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 97)
propose the engagement of different types of femininity in distinct historical ages, “linking
femininity as a masquerade to historical and cultural forces that construct it ” (Mansbridge
109). A hint of fantastic, shocking fears and sexual energy is implied in Vogel ’s pointer:

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“With the single exception of Sarah, all character s should be played in a constant state of
high hormonal excitement ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 96).
“The Voice ”, a final casting element, functions as the “shared consciousness of the
twins ”, making reference to Jung ’s collective memory and feminine arche type, unlike “the
Voice ” from Vogel ’s Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , that serves as an “omniscient mouthpiece of male
authority ” (Mansbridge 110). Definitely , their shared consciousness is formed from the
history and culture within they perform: “Either brainwashing o r subliminal seduction, this
voice is the way the sisters talk to each other. In dreams. ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
97). To stress the common aspect of the sisters ’ consci ousness , the director is allowed to
choose whether Myra or Myrna will speak in tandem with “The Voice ”, which will be an
“amplified prerecorded version of the actor who plays Myra and Myrna ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 97). The Voice symbolizes everything they share : culture, history and
consciousness, being a n authoritative, “unifying force of the sisters ’ schizophrenic
subjectivity ” (Mansbridge 118), unlike the helpless warning Voice Over from Vogel ’s Hot
‘N’ Throbbing . The siblings listen to each other by means of this shared Voice, which
emerges only when the immediate threat of annihilat ion of one of them generates a
delirium climate.
The swing between lust and paranoia is suggested throughout the play as political
engagement in a postwar American culture (Mansbridge 112) . The twins react against one
another from their adolescence to their adulthood. They communicate and resonate one
with the other only irrat ionally. Myrna confesses to Jim that her sister scares her because
she has “something … evil in her ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 106), and later as a
boomerang effect, Myra has a similar feeling, but regarding her right -wing son, Ben,
admit ting to Sarah that he scares her, when she looks into his eyes: “The way he looks at
me” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 176). The external paranoid enemy , the threatening other
is detected among the congenital figures, and it is challenged to fight in order to bear out
those feelings of worthlessness , that Myrna carries and helplessness that Myra experiences .
Their subliminal conveyance during their dreams remains, paradoxically, a form of
maintaining their mental sanity and individuality.
The Mineola Twins “resists mimesis and realism in favor of a frenetic surrealism ”
(Mansbridge 113), parodying the dream femininity and dream nation promoted by the
1950s popular American culture. The caricature is c reated by replacing and exhibiting the

81
promised conditions, such as beauty, sex appeal, security and prosperity, with the disturbed
feeling of anxiety, fear, competition, aggression, and paranoia , caused by those dreams.
The play succeeds in satirizing the codes of gender and sexuality that were constructed and
conserved to preserve a sense of political security and stability.
The American postwar consciousness is theatricalized in the play ’s second dream
sequences, entitled “Myrna in the Hospital. Myr na in Hell ”, which mixes dream with
nightmare , Hollywood musical with horror film (Mansbridge 113). The setting is a mental
hospital, in which Myrna is committed by her sister, “two psychiatric aids run in slow
motion behind Myrna; they catch up and restra in her […] [They] are unable to fasten
Myrna into a straitjacket ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 142).
Myrna ’s monologue, pronounced by The Voice, shifting from the future tense to
the present tense, provisionally displaces her murder fantasy in a dreamlike pattern
(Mansbridge 114). Even if she is in a dream, she creates the illusion of consciousness,
looking for signs of mental health, such as the hygiene suggested by the chimeri cal Dr.
Prior. This illusion of awareness is entertained , conjuring “Daddy ’s Hu nting Rifle ” and
waggishly confessing: “I giggle, because I ’d never held anything more dangerous than a
soup ladle ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 143).
Myrna ’s unconscious desire to murder her sister is presented by means of black
humor – “This is real, you a sshole, this is happening ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 143) – a
statement which will be repeated by Myra when she has the revelation of truth , during the
next scene, in front of her enthusiast nephew, Kenny . But this gallows humor highlights
Myrna and Myra ’s absurdly violent bondage: “There ’s bad blood between us, Myra. No
one could clear up the bad blood ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 143). As Mansbridge
emphasizes, “they cannot escape the other, cannot destroy each other, and cannot survive
without each other ” (114). They “squeeze the trigger together ” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 144), but when Myra is shut down, her brains blooms, absurdly, into Les Fleurs du
mal, as Myrna envisions it. The irrationality of a violent dependency is circumscribed by
“the two psychi atric aids who finally restrain Myrna in the jacket ” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 144), and her “beatifically ” smile offered to them in a moment of wit. This flight of
wit comes from “The truth ” that Myrna will tell her nephew, Ben, about his mother ’s
disappe arance, as Kenny sustained earlier about his “counter -cultural nonsense ” (Vogel,
The Mammary Plays 131).

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Myrna ’s violent unconscious urge climax es in a kneeling , but mischievous ,
invidious, confession: “Then I brace the riffle at a jaunty angle so that he r big toe jams the
trigger while her mouth sucks the double barrel – just like old times with the football team ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 143). What seems to be a siblings ’ rivalry at the surface, it
might actually represent Freud ’s dream condensation of all Myrna ’s wounds and interior
conflicts created by an oppressive society , which operate s upon her, so that she could
mainstream. Myrna ’s manifest dream content is a proof of some unconscious changes
brought to dream ’s latent content in order to further p rotect herself from too painful truths,
such as society ’s manipulation, patriarchal hegemony, and objectifying women. In such a
context, “Daddy ’s Hunting Rifle ” becomes a phallic symbol that kills a woman which tries
to subvert its authority , by the agency of other women; and more than that, her own sister .
It seems to be easier to bear with a sibling ’s envy and hatred than with the idea of an entire
cultural system ’s subjugation and repression.
Not t otally different, the first dream sequence, named “Myra in Homeroom. Myra
in Hell ” is the opening scene of the play and foreshadows Myrna ’s dream or Myrna ’s
version of the Hell. The dream sequence has Myra as the protagonist. On a larger scale it
represents the postwar cultural anxieties and fears regarding Co mmunism and the Atomic
Bomb, but also social tensions created around the different “other ”. Myra ’s monitoring
gives a breathless initial tone, full of a continuous violence, fear, uncertainty and
abandonment :
I just kept walking. I checked my watch. Five minutes to the Apocalypse. I could hear the bombs
humming louder now. I thought of crossing against the lights and getting home. But there ’s not hing
lonelier than watching your parents hug while you curl up on the rug alone (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 100)
The unfailing , horror picture of this “Christmas in Hell ” is supplemented by sexual
allusions and questionable gender roles, triggered by the ambiguity of a war context:
I just kept walking. Kids ’ bodies were mangled everywhere. O ur principal, Mr. Chotner, was
hypotenusing under Miss Dorothy Comby ’s skirt, in the middle of the hall. And the kids in the
Detection Hall were watching. (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 100)
The same illusion of consciousness, retain ed later in the play, is used to transcend
dream barriers and to reach Jung ’s collective memory embodied in the “voice from the
crypt ”, to be aware of a collective trauma of the Real which included the war: “And We all
got real scared [. ..] Somehow we knew it was For Real ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 99).
Myra ’s violent nature and shadow emerge from the beginning of the play, as a

83
reaction to her colleague ’s misogynistic response to the absurd problem of “calculating the
hypotenuse of hygiene ”: “it’s the sam e angle as the triangle under your skirt ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 99). As a defence mechanism, she returns violent behaviour, by means of
aggressive language ( “Shut-Up Creep! ”) while she imagines that her “metal straightedge
took off the top of his crani um” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 99), causing phy sical pain to
her opponent, as he caused her emotional pain ; and predicting her resistance and struggle
against an oppressive mainstream society. The “hygiene ” becomes, during the second
dream sequence, a recur rent symbol and a metaphor of mental sanity , in a world which
proves to have absurd and counterintuitive norms and rules, and the line between sanity
and madness is marked by violence and human aberration. That is why the question
addressed by Mrs. Hopkins to Myra – “what is the hypotenuse of hygiene? ” – remains a
rhetorical query until the end of the play, challenging deeper aspects of human thinking.
The dream sequence can be read as a regression into the intra -uterine life of the
siblings, and their st ruggle to survive, “Just like Old Times in the Womb. A Little O trying
to float away from me ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 100). But they are doomed, by
ancestral unknown forces , to search one for another; they cannot exist one without the
other, although one ’s heart is “trying not to beat ” and the other one “thunder [s]”. Even if
Myrna is hiding from Myra, she knows that her sister is there, and as in a scary movie ,
Myra communicates with her twin sister, in a creepy, threatening dreamlike utterance: “I’m
coming, Myrna. I’m coming … to Find …You… ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 101).
During this dream sequence, The Voice interpretation shifts between a symbol of an
authority which must be conformed to and a symbol of an ancestral bondage which
someone cannot struggle with ; either way, pointing out a collective content of the dream.
Whichever case would be, the submissiveness is unavoidable and compulsory : “I had to
obey The Voice ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 100).
The Voice brings us to the third dream sequence , entitled “Talk Back, Get Back,
Bite Back. Myrna O ’Brien Will Take Your Calls. ” This dream sequence is a premonition
of scene six, by the agency of displacement. While this dream sequence ends with Myra ’s
protecting admonition addressed to her sister: “Myrna? Myrna? Get to the Door Now. ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 170), scene six ends with Myrna ’s saviour guidance: “Myra.
Get to the door NOW ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 182). The same advice appears in the
first dream sequence, by means of The Voice: “…Get. ..To…The…Door…Now. ”

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Thus, the recurrent symbol of the door directs its users, Myra and Myrna, to a path
of escape, liberation , security and self-gratification. This personal breakout is transposed at
a larger scale to a national survival after a “nuclear holocaust ”; a fear that embraced the
entire American society and the entire map of the world, after the Second World War. The
person that reach es at the door is saved. The sisters are thought by their parents to protect
each other and to survive eve n for “six months of nuclear winter ”, as both assert in chorus,
at the end of the dream sequence: “We’ll take care of each other. Okay? ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 170). The sequence , just as the first dream sequence, reveals a regression
into their childho od, a constant returning of the repressed – the ini tial fear of losing one
another, from their inception and t heir initial home – the womb , to their real childhood
home ; but this time the one who ’s dreaming is Myrna, not Myra.
If the end of this scene is shocking, obsessing the audience with the constant and
horrific nightmare of nuclear attack, or its unconscious terror that generates, the beginning
is more related to consciousness and reality. The initial stage of the dream sequence deals
with Myrna ’s engagement to protect American cultural values, which are “eradicated to
make room for illegal immigrants and militant feminists who want to rewrite the Anglo –
Saxon, Christian history of this country ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 167), and to stop
“multi -culturalism ” in schools. She argues, during her radio show, that countless women
from American history who served the great presidents of the country are good examples
of positive behaviour, and thus counteracts their political opponents. She insists on the
need of encouragement and promoting “American Traditions ”, instead of embracing
cultural tolerance, acceptance and peace. With this aim, she tries to crea te a radio debate,
but she does not manage to get into the topic, because her personal past and present
interfere.
Unable to forgive Jim for his betrayal, or her son, Kenny for his revolt against the
mainstream , she internalises the responsibility of her choice and she projects it on social
and cultural propaganda. Her inability of forgiving Jim, even whe n he calls her on the air :
“Myrna, can ’t you just talk to me a little ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 168) is transferred
to her son Kenny, who refuses to talk to her , even on the air, and even if his mixed Spanish
blood daughter, Carmela, would like to keep in touch with her grandmother . This time
Myrna is the one who reiterates the question: “Kenny – can’t you just talk to me a little? ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 169). Myra and Myrna ’s voice , “Stay away from the

85
building ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 169) announce s an imperative which will be
reiterated in scene six by Myrna, when she tries to protect her nephew, Ben, of the building
blowing out which she planned.
The violence embodied in this dream sequence sits suppressed in moves and
language. Myrna disconnec ts Jim, snapping a button, and Kenny ’s voice roars “No-no-no-
no-no-NO”, when Myrna wants to talk to him. Myrna ’s starting monologue reveals the
aggression associated with the conservative discourse that promotes racism, anti -feminism,
Puritanism and patria rchy. The scene culminates with a moment of absolute violence,
during a nuclear holocaust that echoes into the next scene, but started in the first dream
sequence, and probably , the sound will be heard until the end of the play, blurring the line
between d ream and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness, sanity and madness.
A very artistic dream sequence is the last one, in which Paula Vogel uses the
strategy of ‘dream in dream ’ that creates the illusion of reality and fantasy melting
together, as Myr a and Myrna are together again and they become one, the same as in their
inception. As said before, The Voice is the only mechanism through which the twins
communicate, by the agency of their dreams. The sequence is suggestively named “Myra
in Mineola Drea ming of Myrna in Mineola Dreaming of Myra. Together Again ”. It’s
expectedly that the setting starts in Mineola , Myra and Myrna ’s home , during their
adolescence, as a result of a constant returning of the repressed, of the moment of the
rupture, of the trau ma. The ‘dream in a dream ’ strateg y suggests a further descent into the
unconscious, alienating the powerful antagonistic super -egos that swallowed, entire ly, both
sisters. The play starts with Myra ’s dream and also ends with her dream, cyclically and
obsessive ly.
The sequence goes back to Myra and Myrna ’s adolescence . This is the moment
which marked their entire life, where the split from their womb amplified, in such a way,
that the rupture followed them their entire life. The trauma generated makes them wishing
to come back to the moment of rupture, in order to resolve their conflict, to repair the
wound. Usefully, Myra, though in a dream , that becomes the only way in which she can be
sincere with her sister, begs Myrna for forgiveness and conciliation: “I’m sorry. Okay? I ’m
sorry… for every thing. […] And I really wish … I wish we could be closer ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 184). But again, the lack of answer, hints Myrna ’s coldness and
alienation, but also her inability of forgiving the closer ones. The recurrent question:

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“Can’t you just talk to me a little? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 183) is now addressed by
Myra, in her dream, to her sister, but underlies the same fear of abandonment that Jim and
Myrna felt before. This fear is expressed by means of dream content, in which unconscious
urges are surfaced.
Myra is able to recognise that she misses her childhood and adolescence only
confessing to Sarah: “Sometimes I miss the fifties ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 185), in
the last dream sequence; but there is an ambigui ty whet her the dream ended or not, that
lasts until the end of the play . The only reason for admitting that, she argues, is that the
dangers changed and enlarged their coverage area: “We weren ’t scared of riding the Long
Island Railroad or working in clinics ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 185). In fact, she longs
for that moment, when her fears and anxieties were smaller ; she misses the security and
wholeness that was offered by the relationship with her sister.
The collective trauma of the atomic bomb is chasing her, and the iterative
command, “Get To The Door Now ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 186), used
interchangeably, by both sisters, suggests their care and concern for each other, visible in
difficult times. The p erception of the trauma and past scars receives a violent angle in
Myra ’s mind ’s eye. It is reflected in her insights into the collective content of dreams, and
theatricalized into a “stormy night ”, with “violent crash thunder ” (Vogel, The Mammary
Plays 183). The two twin sisters are the alter -ego of each other ; the dark archetype of the
shadow that both expose is protective from each other , and, at the same time , one with the
other.
But, a s adults are “never too old for nightmares ” (Vogel, The Mamma ry Plays 184),
Myra still suffers after them and the trauma that triggers them. Feeling as being watched
and heard by her sister, Myra invokes a telepathic communication with her sister, peculiar
to twin siblings. Even though Sarah comforts her: “Your sist er doesn ’t have tha t kind of
power, Myra ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 186), Myra cannot remove this feeling of
transcendental, mystic communion with her sister, that veil the end of the play , when The
Voice answers as being Myrna and only Myra seems to hear the answer: “Sweet Dreams ”
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 187).
It seems that Myra spends a lot of time dreaming about her adolescence and her
sister, and in the end of the play she lives there entirely. Her dreams may be interpreted as
an immersion into the Imaginary Order, as a result of rejection of the Symbolic Order,

87
pointing out Myra ’s inability to function as a member of society. She is drawn in her
dreams, where she finds a sign of happiness and fulfilment. The line between delusional
world and realit y no longer seems to be hard to cross, even if is difficult to be
distinguish ed, either by Myra or Myrna; same as the blurry “line between ‘real’ politics
and social satire ” (Mansbridge 121) .
This dream sequence , which invites its audience to reverie, uncurtain s an
awakening of Myra, but also a revealing of truth , as Myra realises that she would do
anything to wake up in her bed in Mineola again, without any of these to have happened,
as she earlier forecasted: “It’s like I woke up ” (Vogel, The Mammary Pla ys 149). Anyway,
Myra realises that, as part of the resistance, she is devoured by the mainstream, although
some cha nges occurred and everything will not be the same. But the questions that
challenge the audience, at the end of the play, are : did she reall y wake up or does she still
live in a dream; if norms and values are really true and honorable, why do they imply a
form of coercion.
The “apocalyptic nightmare ” and the play end “on an unsettling tone that highlights
the (still) deeply conflicted nature of American politics ” (Mansbridge 119), but also
disclose, although in a dream sequence, the image of a non -traditional family that does not
obey the heterosexual norm – Sarah and Myra lying in bed.
Yet, p ublished in company of How I Learned to Drive , in The Mammary Plays , The
Mineola Twins is part of a microcosm/macrocosm dichotomy, of late -twentieth -century
American culture, with one play, as Vogel herself asserts, “looking at the culture from the
outside and one … exploring how the culture feels on t he inside ” (Mansbridge 121 ). In
other words the plays are counterparts of one another, as they both present the rupture
between the sexualized female bodies and their subjective voices . The divided twins from
The Mineola Twins ’ macrocosm fused in L ’il Bit ’s microcosm from How I Learned to
Drive . Therefore, similar to a molecule which preserve s all its substance proprieties, L’il
Bit’s microcosm conserved all political and cultural issues of a split society, in the context
of a postwar American social histor y, which is depicted in The Mineola Twins (Mansbridge
121-121).

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3.3 Memory Shifts in How I Learned to Drive

Rewriting Vladimir Nabokov ’s Lolita , How I learned to Drive retells a story of
pedophilia, but changing the narrative perspective, from the abuser to the abused
(Pellegrini 476). The play unfolds as a succession of memories related by the protagonist
of the story, Li ’l Bit. The narrative begins in an “indeterminate present and then we travel
with Li ’l Bit both backward and forward in time, vi ewing snapshots – out of sequence, out
of time – as her story comes together and falls to pieces ” (Pellegrini 482) . The end of the
story finds its audience and protagonist back in the present, but in a different present,
aware of the implications of drivin g lessons. As Mansbridge suggested, Li ’l Bit ’s
“memories function like an embodied archive, an individual library of cultural messages
and affective traces ” (129), which, in certain contexts, are used as either defense or
seduction tools, in order to fabri cate a surviving strategy.
According to Pellegrini (482), the complex relationship between Li ’l Bit and her
Uncle Peck cannot be reduced to “incest ”, “child abuse ”, “pedophilia ” or “trauma ”,
although these terms support the grounds on which their re lation is built. Uncle Peck lets a
legacy of love and loss, recognition and refusal, seduction and trauma, confidence and
uncertainty. He is the only relative that seems to understand her, probably with a certain
interest. As his wife, and Li ’l Bit aunt, M ary observes: “Peck, go after her, will you?
You’re the only one she ’ll listen to when she gets like this ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays
18).
He teaches her how to drive a car with “aggression” and “confidence , like a man ,
even as he strips her of confidence in her body ” (Pellegrini 482). The first lesson, when
Li’l Bit was eleven, is a lesson that she will never forget, being “the last day [she] lived in
[her] body ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 18), as herself confesses. Even so, at the age of
confession , when she is thirty five years old , she believes in family and forgiveness –
things that “a younger self vowed never to believe in ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 91),
although she still remembers the moment when she sto pped to live in her body: “I retreated
above th e neck, and I’ve lived inside the ‘fire’ in my head ever since ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 90). In this manner Vogel explicitly splits Li ’l Bit into several selves –
younger and older, innocent and experienced, objectified and objectifying multiple selves
(Savran, A Queer Sort of M aterialism 189).

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Offering a kind of psychoanalysis of paedophilia and incest, the play features,
among other things, a dramatization of the mirror stage – the transfer from the Imaginary to
the Symbolic, from the infant to the spl it ego , which according to Lacan, projects the
individual into history. Li’l Bit is split into a “non-subject ” still caught up in the Imaginary,
who has to experience differentiation and a “subjected subject ”, who became an object to
herself and others. The olfactory sensation from the beginning of the play, through the
power of memory, connects her past with her land and body, both maternal and her own
(Savran, A Queer Sort of M aterialism 196).
As Savran explains in A Queer Sort of M aterialism (197), the traumatic moment of
the mirror stage, identified with the moment when Peck puts his hands on Li ’l Bit ’s
breasts, alienates her identity, making herself an object for her Uncle Peck, but also for
herself, too. Savran justifies further, that the senses of ta ste, smell and touch are associated
with the Imaginary, as signs of intimacy and wholeness, but sight and hearing are
associat ed with the Symbolic, and thus with the theatre context. The scene of the photo
shoot symbolizes another entrance into the Symboli c, ma king Li ’l Bit the actor of her own
drama. During this representation s he learns how to perform as a sexual object, but also
how to transfigure , self -consciously, shame into seduction (Mansbridge 136).
Although she is an empowered Lolita, that put s an end to her relationship with her
Humbert, without hanging upon any men, s he “cannot escape her past; t hat is her burden
and her gift ” (Pellegrini 482). S he enters into the car of the memory and, in a final
haunting image, embraces and greets U ncle Peck ’s ghost:
Ahh…(Beat) I adjust my seat. Fasten my seat belt. Then I check the right side mirror – check the left
side. (She does) Finally, I adjust the rearview mirror. (As Li ’l Bit adjusts the rearview mirror, a faint
light strikes the spirit o f Uncle Peck, who is sitting in the back seat of the car. She sees him in the
mirror. She smiles at him, and he nods at her. They are happy to be going for a long drive together.
Li’l Bit slips the car into first gear; to the audience) And then – I floor i t. (Sound of a car taking off.
Blackout)
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 92)
Li’l Bit and Uncle Peck ’s relationship develops over several years, absorbing and
challenging complex concepts as trust, confession, collaboration and attraction
(Martanovschi 101). Their intimacy is conceived during the driving lessons that Peck
teaches his niece. The driving lessons represent steps in the process of her sexual initiation.
The play does not respect chronology, and thus the flashbacks drop out from her memory
and give an insight into the most important and traumatic events, whereas some critics
reckon that Li ’l Bit “remembers her past with the distance of a director observing a

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rehearsal ” (Mansbridge 126). Giving shape to her memories, Li ’l Bit creates a “newly
made self ”, by means of the “structuring power of narrative ” and “the reparative
possibilities of performance ” (Mansbridge 126).
One of her flashback s exposes the important corner in Peck ’s mind and soul that
Li’l Bit occupies (Martanovschi 102) . Thei r complex bond, far from being just in law
relatives or lovers, is suggested by Peck himself, who confesses that he considers her as a
son:
I don ’t have any sons. You ’re the nearest to a son I ’ll have – and I want to give you something.
Something that rea lly matters to me. There ’s something about driving – when you ’re in control of
the car, just you and the machine and the road – that nobody can take from you. A power. I feel more
myself in my car than anyone else. And that ’s what I want to give you.
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 50)
Offering his power to struggle with life problems, he gives her a precious gift, what
every father would give to his children, the authority over her own life. Her uncle ’s efforts ,
by means of “gendered language ” (Martanovs chi 102), become effective and externalize
into a form of male impersonation, as David Savran emphasizes in A Queer Sort of
Materialism . Assuming a masculine identity, Li ’l Bit rejects her uncle ’s marriage proposal,
by means of education and knowledge whic h empowered her, as a woman. The distance
and alienation from the closed space of her family gave her “the maturity to analyze and
comprehend the relationship with her uncle in different terms ” (Martanovschi 103): “I
realized that pedophilia did not mean p eople who loved to bicycle… ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 14).
Her identity as a woman is marked by her developing breasts, making her both an
object for mockery and desire, as the sensual photos which Peck plans to send to Playboy
magazine. As Gwynn MacDo nald underlines in her essay, the play shows “how the female
in society has internalized the male perception of her and how damaging that can be ”
(McDonald 114) . The objectification scene , the photo shoot, is marked by an “atmosphere
of violation and expos ure” (Mansbridge 137) , in which Li ’l Bit feels betrayed and
unprotected, realizing that she is on her own and must learn to defend herself.
Her vulnerable period of adolescence made her an image and a clear victim of
man’s consumption and pleasure. She did not know how to handle the situation, and Vogel
displays Li ’l Bit ’s angst and affection, using both humor and shock (Green 146), in a
personification that both estranges and terrifies . She becomes alienated, disgusted and
horrified by her body :

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But sometimes I feel like these alien life forces, these two mounds of flesh have grafted themselves
onto my chest, and they ’re using me until they can ‘propagate ’ and take over the world and they ’ll
just keep growing, with a mind of their own until I collap se under their weight and they suck all the
nourishment out of my body and I finally just waste away while they get bigger and bigger and –
(Li’l Bit’s classmates are just staring at her in disbelief)
(Vogel, The Mammary Plays 57)
Just at the end of the play, Li ’l Bit “recovers the memory of the first time she was
molested ” (Green 146) and she realises that: “That day was the last day I lived in my
body ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 90). All the years of molestation, sexual objectification
and tacit aggressi on and manipulation by her uncle, although with her candid assent, had
grave repercussions on her body and mind. But, How I Learned to Drive is “not a
psychological portrait of sexual abuse ”, but rather a “process of remembering, examining
the imprints and traces of the past, that turn up as memories in the present ” (Mansbridge
124).
The Voice , whose “disembodied authority ” (Mansbridge 131), initiates and guides
the audience in driving lessons, quoting and reading from the driving -safety manual Safety
First — You and Driver Education , creating a confident and emphatic “counterpoint to the
seduction and incestuous abuse that are the play ’s central focus ” (Green 155). Most of the
Voice excerpts are pieces of advice to prevent or deal with dangerous situatio ns
Defensive driving involves defending yourself from hazardous and sudden changes in your
automotive environment. By thinking ahead, the defensive driver can adjust to weather, road
conditions and road kill. Good defensive driving involves mental and phys ical preparation. Are you
prepared? (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 51)
The Voice might function as an alter ego for Li ’l Bit ’s personality, announcing,
from time to time, driving tips, which, ironically, co nnote or coincide with remarks that
inferred their rel ationship. Thus , the “Reverse Gear ” suggests only the memory flashbacks
for Li ’l Bit, while for Uncle Peck shows the involution and dissipatio n of his life, the
regression to former states of mind, where he was in control of the car, but also the refusal
to accept the reality and move for ward. The drive for Li ’l Bit continues, as the journey of
her life (Bigsby 324), even with “Vehicle Failure ” or “Idling in the Neutral Gear ”. The
Voice adds , such as “Good defensive driving involves mental and physical prep aration.
Were you prepared? ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 53), engage Li ’l Bit in a self
encouraging fight that she must take in order to learn how to survive. The repetition of
Voice ’s question: “Are you prepared? ” throughout the text, becomes a leitmotiv th at
infuses into deeper traumatic scars, but also into prospective empowering actions. Vogel ’s
dramaturgy works as a “kind of pedagogy ”, encouraging audiences to “expand their critical

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thinking ” (Mansbridge 129). T he unconventional structure of the play , which uses gear
shifts to signal scene changes, metaphorically enroll s time and direction, while
“reinforcing memory as the play ’s structuring principle ” (Mansbridge 128).
The multiple Greek choruses theatricali ze the bond between individual and
collectiv e, private and public, suggesting that one’s voice is like memory, not entirely
individual, but learned and internalized, integrating multiple contradictory cultural facts .
The gendered and generational choruses give advice, criticize, insult, witness and help,
providin g comic relief and complexity at the same time (Mansbridge 132 -133).
As Li ’l Bit promulgated at the beginning of the play, “sometimes to tell a secret,
you first have to teach a lesson ” (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 7), the Voice ’s
announcem ents are ironical insights into the deeper topic of incestuous sexual abuse,
anticipating the end. Li ’l Bit is not safe in the car, moreover, it proves to be in “the most
vulnerable position ” (Green 155). As Li ’l Bit exposes more of her memories, the Voice ’s
excerpts seem to be more cynical, pointing out to the usefulness of such an incomplete and
outdated manual. So, the play is “a fearless journey through previously uncharted dramatic
territory ” (Green 157), even if the appearance , which a driving book of fers, led initially to
a safe guided way .
Both Christian confession and psychoanalytic ‘talk therapy ’ have, as one of their
objectives, to disclose the sexual secret and get rid of the burden of caring it, as the deeper
secret of one’s identity . Vogel “exploits the seductive lure of a private secret, subverting it
with a public lesson ” (Mansbridge 129) . She teaches a lesson about the complexity of
sexual desire, the estrangement from heteronormative gender construction, and also about
the “formative and pe rformative function of memory ” (Mansbridge 129) , towards the self.
The journey in which Vogel engag es her audience is not a journ ey that they would
ordinary take, but a trip that becomes a lesson of understanding a delicate subject such as
child a buse in a grayer light, as the play “takes them into the world of the fantastic and the
bizarre [and] liberates them from a Manichaean frame of mind, from a binary mode of
thought ” (Bigsby 289). A mixture of resistance, forgiveness, reconciliation, pain, a nxiety,
confusion, death and humor (Bigsby 297) inserts into the itinerary of the drive.
The play dramatizes history as memory and reveals the changes those memories
bring to the present of the protagonist, directing its audience toward a broader
under standing of the way memory renders “porous boundaries between individual and

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collective, past and present ” (Mansbridge 125). All in all , both Peck and Li ’l Bit drink to
cope with their individual struggles in a postwar America, and with feelings of isolation
within their social milieu. Vogel constructs Li ’l Bit ’s subjectivity through memory ,
appears to be a latent “collaboration between present consciousness and the experience of
the past ” (Jonathon Boyarin quoted in Mansbridge 126).
Peck has the respons ibility of their relationship, but he puts a premium on his
impulses, desires and needs, subordinating hers (Bigsby 324). Although there is a kind of
innocence in his deeper corrupting power, his vulnerabilities are real, and this makes him a
victim, too. He is a victim of his love and obsessions for his Lolita, Li ’l Bit. As Bigsby
(325) underlines, there are no threats, no visible violence. Vogel exposes bot h, the girl ’s
vulnerability and the man ’s pathos. Peck looks always for Li ’l Bit’s consent, and Li ’l Bit
indicates new b orders, that Uncle Peck must respect in order to c ontinue the relationship.
Thus , their relationship is constantly renegotiated and changed.
Aunt Mary ’s speech, addressed directly to the audience, constructs a different
understanding of L’il Bit, as a treacherous young woman who tries to seduce and tantalize
a pure, innocent man (Mansbridge 133). Her message cultivates the empathy with which
Uncle Peck is accepted in the end of the play , and indicates two female sexual stereotypes:
(Shar ply) I ’m not a fool. I know what ’s going on. I wish you could feel how strongly Peck fights
against it – he’s swim ming against the tide, and what he needs is to see me on shore, believing in
him, knowing he won ’t go under, he won ’t give up – And I want to say this about my niece. She ’s a
sly one, that one is. She knows exactly what she ’s doing; she ’s twisted Peck around her little finger
and thinks it ’s all a big secret. Yet another one who ’s borrowing my husband until it doesn ’t suit her
anymore . (Vogel, The Mammary Plays 67)
As in another play written by Paula Vogel , Desdemona , the speech implies the
women ’s competition for male affection, and their internalized judgment influenced by
male gaze, setting up marriage and domestic sphere as primary zones for cultural
repression (Mansbridge 134).
Unable to address his needs, Peck ’s wife sees her niece as a manipulative girl that
tries to control his husband. Her nice, instead, cares about both, her Aunt Mary and her
disturbed Uncle Peck. The last encou nter with him, in the hotel room, at her eighteenth
birthday, when she finally decided to put an end to their relationship, empowered by her
legitimate age, unlike her female older relative that had to marry and obey men from an
early age , triggers her compassion and the audience ’s empathy. The doomed Flying
Dutchman from the opera, banned to wonder the sea, with which Li ’l Bit compares her
uncle, connote s an understanding of her uncle ’s emotional pathology and burden: “if he

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finds a maiden who will love hi m of her own fre e will – he will be released ” (Vogel, The
Mammary Plays 86). There is a sense of mutual love and recognition of one another ’s
loneliness in their relationship. Because, as Judith Butler points out, beside the desire for
seduction we have a desire for recognition, both necessary for our “sense of personhood ”,
but the se desires place “us outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not
fully choose, but that provide the horizon and resource for any sense of choice that we
have ” (quoted in Mansbridge 136).
Being destroyed, and ultimately, before his death, losing his driving licen se, Peck
loses his control and power over his direction and command of his life, that he once had,
when he both abused and loved the young girl whom he taught ambiguous lessons of life
(Bigsby 326). Ending in a reconciliation tone, Li ’l Bit is now exactly how her uncle
advised her to be, in control of her car, while the spirit of her uncle fin ds itself,
significantly, in the rear mirror, belonging to her past, not to her pres ent or future. Bigsby
explains further: “He is in the back and not the front of her mind ” (327). By putting h erself
in the driving seat, she also learns how to comprehend, to teach, to write and “remake the
theater of the self ” (Savran , A Queer Sort of Materialism 199) or “to direct the story ” of
her own life by the agency of her narrative voice (Mansbridge 127).
Li’l Bit follows her professor and urges for power and control, “driving her own
car, accepting her own memories, implicitl y confesses to her own collusions,
acknowledges her necessary cruelty in abandoning a man whose decline and death she
thereby made inevitable ” (Bigsby 327). He also accepts with responsibility his actions and
the price that he has to pay in the end. She do es not accuse or blame him of anything, but
she revises her past and understands her life must be lived without any regret.
Due to her acceptance of a “manipulative, exploitative, dangerous, but also
compassionate, understanding, self -sacrificing ” (Bigsb y 328) man, the audience does not
repulse him. After all, Uncle Peck ’s character is a man constructed by Li ’l Bit’s memories.
The audience is encouraged to identify with Peck, transforming the play into an experience
of recognition, in an attempt of “demon izing Peck for his ‘deviant ’ desire, which becomes
a way of defining heteronormative desire, as Andrew Kimbrough argued: “we recognize
that what we find most abhorrent and intolerable in others is really that which we find most
fearful and shameful about o urselves ” (quoted in Mansbridge 128).

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By exposing their relationship beyond the myth of pure victim and victimizer, she
can move on with her life , eliminating the labels that society imposes and displaying a
complex, paradoxical relationship, which final ly was based on a different kind of
loneliness and love.
Hence, Vogel shifts, again, the patterns of power in relationships, making her
characters either surrender or break free. With How I Learned to Drive , Vogel wins the
first Pulitzer Priz e without re cycling antifeminist clichés and misogynist stereotypes, and
most important ly, without excoriating masculinity or phallic authority per se (Savran, A
Queer Sort of Materialism 202).
By means of disjunctive memories, the play embodies and repeats social a nd
cultural norms, including violent behaviour, but also transforms and decomposes them,
offering a remoulded, different template, “a model of theatrical time understood as both
propelling forward and pulling back, a complex temporal movement in which the past is
encountered as part of the present, and the body operates as the site and means of that
encounter ” (Mansbridge 145). Therefore, memory perpetuate s violence, but also has the
power to deconstruct it and to convert its variables , changing positions.

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3.4 Imaginary Frames in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing

Just as And Baby Makes Seven , Hot ‘N’ Throbbing discloses the public nature of
the private space, “turning the famil y inside out to show the myriad words and images,
values and beliefs t hat go into its making ” (Mansbridge 67), showing the collective nature
of individual fantasies. Shifting from constructive cultural narratives, from And Baby
Makes Seven , the play delineates captures of destructive canonical narratives, families and
fantas ies, exhibiting the darker side of both fantasy and family, of collective and individual
consciousness and unconsciousness.
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing follows two worlds, a domestic reality and a fantasy world,
which is laid out as an erotic dance hall with peep shows and porno booths. The two booths
installed on the left and right sides of the scene, create an effect of “porousness of the
boundaries between fantasy and reality and between archetype (Woman, Man, Girl, Boy)
and lived particular (Charlene, Clyde, Le slie Ann, and Calvin) ” (Pellegrini 478) . The
scenes belonging to each realm get intertwined ; a fantasy world is juxtaposed to a reality in
which the Woman struggles for power with the Man, but she loses, the Boy and the Girl
witnessing their father murder ing their mother. The allusion to the repetition of a violent
history, from the disturbing end of the play, suggests a return to the beginnings, a cyclical
excursion into the “continuation of patterns of violence ” (Pellegrini 478) . Nonetheless, as
Pellegrin i signals, theater is a place in which different histories might unfold, indicating a
potential for change and for alternative endings , as the change of genre, in the shift from
the formulaic screenplays of the mother to the incomplete play of the daughter (479). Thus ,
the pattern may be altered, or modified completely.
The intersection of the real world with fantasy influences and shapes the desires
and thoughts of the characters, defining gender and sexuality, bodies and pleasures. The
embod iment of the male figure – the Voice, besides the embodiment of the female figure –
the Voice Over, they both remain the characters that stage “the history of male -authored
fantasies of female pleasure ” (Mansbridge 68) . The omniscient male voice, who narra tes
passages from canonical texts, such as James Joyce ’s Ulysses , Vladimir Nabokov ’s Lolita ,
and Shakespeare ’s Othello , always interrupts Charlene ’s own narrative voice. The
invocation of the canon of literature demonstrate s the way in which th ese texts sh ape our
imagination and teach women how to be objects of masculine desire, and also to find

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pleasure in this. Thus , there is no wonder that the Voice Over enacts the hyper -sexualized
female body – the stripper, and the Voice comprises literary history and dominant culture.
Charlene negotiates her place assigned by traditional norms of society. She tries to become
an author of female pleasure and desire, but she fails. Her daughter risks the same fate, but
she does not abandon the quest.
According to Ma nsbridge (71), in Hot ‘N’ Throbbing , fantasy is staged both as
private domestic drama and public spectacle. The psychoanalysts Jean Laplance and J. B.
Pontalis un derstand fantasy as a structure – a form that “is not the object of desire , but its
setting ”. Moreover, they consider: “ In fantasy, the subject does not pursue the object or its
sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images ” (Laplance and Pontalis
quoted in Mansbridge 71). Charlene tries to find a language to express female pleasure and
erotic desire, but her fantasies are shaped by cultural attitudes, images, narratives and
social relationships, undermining the distinction between private and public spheres,
between individual and collective realms . The play connects sexuality with violence, body
with voice, fantasy with reality, high culture with low culture (Mansbridge 72).
Only the children take part in both play worlds, interacting with, imitating and
learning from both. The stage spaces of the play worlds and their characters are constantly
in contradiction: the stripper and the single mother writing erotic fiction for living, the girl
dancing erotically and the praised daughter for her sexual appeal by her father. Vogel ’s
pornography and violence is not represented as obscene, but as being part of ordinary life,
“as a spectacle for public witness ” (Mansbridge 72).
The Voice Over is the embodiment of erotic discourse and the narrator of
Charlene ’s screenplay, which invites the voyeuristic gaze and then problematizes that ga ze.
Both the Voice and the Voice Over are ancestral gendered presence s, which help to disrupt
notions such as originality, individuality and immateriality of language, and to promote the
collective nature of individual identities . Mixing high culture with low culture, language
and bodies, domestic and erotic, the play tries to deconstruct the iconicity of sexual
heteronormative femininity and nuclear sacred family that enforce stability to American
culture (Mansbridge 74).
Father and son watch their objectified daughter and sister dancing lasciviously,
under the red fantasy light, and the son masturbates while watching his mother smoking a
cigarette. Her sister yells at her brother for peeping at her when she undresses , and the

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father teaches his son how to offer a dollar bill to the stripper woman. This dysfunctional
family links voyeuristic practices, both public and private, that reveal patterns in which we
learn and perform our compulsory sexuality. Acts such as masturbation and reading, as in
the sce ne when the Voice Over reads from Moby -Dick while Calvin masturbates , are
featured , even though as fantasies, to the public view; they are no longer private. The
Voice Over reads Cleo ’s striptease dance from Miller ’s Plexus , while the father teaches the
son how to give tips to dancers. The father -son bond crossing with pornography blurry the
line between normative and perversity, pointing out the way young men are trained as
aggressive sexual consumers. Although the line between fantasy and reality is not c learly
restricted, the highlight on “normalized ” female and male sexuality, within the nuclear
family and popular culture, with the female body coded as sexually consumed object and
male as sexual consumer and voyeur, becomes a disturbing reality with whic h the audience
is confronted .
Consequently, raised in a heterosexual culture, young men learn to become active,
violent consumers, while young women learn to become sexualized objects, even in
fantasy narratives. The father gives his son lessons about the female body, although the
body is of his daughter, accordingly, to his son ’s sister. Thus, Clyde teaches his son,
Calvin, that he has to watch out for his sister, because “that body of hers…you know what I
mean? You got to control her. Girl ’s bodies at her age…they should be licensed ” (Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 269).
Sexuality and gender is taught by their parents and the cultural texts, and only men
have access to real pleasure. Calvin reads his mother pornography and exposes his
admiration for Charlene ’s detective character. This genuine praise for his mother ’s writing
talents suggests Calvin ’s Oedipus complex and his sexual attraction towards his mother,
but also his identification with the fictional detective, and also with the ma sculinity and
authority that he represents (Mansbridge 75 -76).
Leslie Ann learns her sexuality from her mother and from genres of popular fiction.
She watches a horror movie with her girls and the violence seen triggers her unconscious
masochistic desires of sexual powerlessness. These sexual desires fit in with the scenario
that her mother ’s screenplay attempts to reverse and Leslie Ann finds them erotic, being
encouraged to identify with as spectator of commercial film (Mansbri dge 77) . She
excitingly dis closes her sexual fantasies to her friend: “Do you think of them, like,

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‘hurting ’ you? Well, I don ’t mean like hurting you, but like, you ’re tied down and you
can’t stop them and they do things to you that hurt you, that make you scream but you
can’t…and it makes you hot only it ’s ‘cause it ’s not for real? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz
and Other Plays 278).
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing exhibits “the way the women ’s bodies have as served sites of
male desire and violence and the way female spectators have learned to identify with and
adopt this dynamic as their “natural ” sexuality ” (Mansbridge 78). Charlene decision to
write pornography instead of working for minimum wage at a hospital is “self-serving ”, as
literary critic N. J. Stanley names it, only if motherhood w ould be defined as a kind of
selfless, sexless martyrdom , a desexualized Madonna that is the moral center of the
patriarchal family . Only in this context she needs to be “absolved ” of her sins of writing
pornography and being a mother, as Stanley requested (Mansbridge 78). Only that she
prefers imagining and creating fantasies of female pleasure. This work of creation gives
her a discursive authority that empowers her, even if temporary.
Literary critic Brian Richardson refers to Charlene ’s labor as an erotic film writer,
as “materialist metatheater ”, which he defines as “a creative, nonviolent recursivity [that
is] an alternative to the more deeply ingrained verbal habits and behaviors of the culture at
large ” (Mansbridge 79). Charlene is set as a produ cer of plots and stories that shake up and
specify female sexuality, controlling and directing her language, at least as long as she had
inspiration. Charlene gets stocked and searches other alternatives for the word “throbbing ”.
The feminine archetype, th e Voice Over, offers her words such as “Pulsating ” or
“Heaving ”, while the masculine archetype, the Voice, suggests synonymous with more
violent connotations, such as “Beating ” and “Bantering ”. The analysis of words associated
with erotic desire connotes “the way violence is embedded in the language we use to
define sexuality ” (Mansbridge 79). So, Vogel tries to find new ways of representing female
sexuality and approaching violence.
The relationship between language and bodies, between language and desir e, is
theatricalized through the characters of the Voice and Voice Over that perform the history
of discourses which defined the way females and males imagine and enact desire. They
enact the historical body of language, which Charlene has to master and ma nipulate in
order to gain authority of her words, thoughts and money. She writes to save her sanity,
and when she loses her words, her boy, guided by a mockery Voice, tries to help: “Boy:

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Writer block, Mom? Woman: I ’m running out of words. Boy: How about.. . The Voice
(Whispered): – Throbbing – Boy: Throbbing ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays
242). Charlene ’s response becomes a little aggressive, as fighting for power with all men ,
past and alive : “Don’t make fun of me son. My writing puts food in your mouth ” (Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 243).
The control over the language and words is presented as a complex, long -winded
historical struggle that shaped bodies and lives (Mansbridge 83). Charlene does not possess
the words she use s, the words possess her: “When I really get going, it ’s like a trance -it’s
not me writing at all. It ’s as if I just listen to voices and I ’m taking dictation ” (Vogel, The
Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 260). The characters invade Charlene ’s consciousnes s
and complicate the cleavage between sexualized bodies and literary voices: “Well, thery ’re
the characters speaking, or the script itself. … At first it spooked me a little. But now I
know when I hear them, it ’s a good sign. And I am in control ” (Vogel, The Baltimore
Waltz and Other Plays 260). Therefore, as the male Voice narrates a case study from
famed nineteenth -century sexologist Richard Von Krafft -Ebing ’s Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886), that categorizes all forms of sex and sexuality as pathological, Charlene explains to
Clyde, whose genuine question and worry triggers, again, his audience ’s empathy:
The Voice: “Case 103 continued. Subject, however, experienced constant excitation, due to what the
subject described as inner ‘voices ’ usually urging hi m to erotic acts. ”
Man: Doesn ’t that spook you? I mean, whose voices are these? Who ’s in control?
V.O.
But she was in control.
(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 260)

The control that the Voice Over suggests refers to narrative control, a part from
control of the body and its enjoyments . Charlene ’s quest is to find a proper language “that
does not return to the same script of male domination and female submission ” (Mansbridge
84): “Most importantly, we try to create women as protagonists in their own dramas, rather
than objects. And we try to appreciate the m ale body as an object of desire ” (Vogel, The
Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 262). But, their history of violence which include s the
restrain order against Clyde, his violent behaviour i n spite of all this – cutting the phone
lines, barging into the house and finally strangling Charlene, converges with Charlene ’s
erotic writings and the passages read by the Voice, in an implosion of pleasures, desires
and impulses.

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In the final section of the play the realm of fantasy and that of domestic space
converge into an uncontrollable, violent burst. Language and fantasy join together in an
unsettling overlapping dialogue, between Clyde and Charlene, the Voice and the Voice
Over, raising old woun ds and historical traumas:
MAN THE VOICE
(Lip-sync) (Live)
I’m going to have to teach you all over again
I’m going to have to teach you all over again
(The Voice starts to play rap music)
WOMAN V.O.
(Live)
(She is havin g difficulty breathing and only shakes her head) Please – stop

MAN THE VOICE
(Lip-sync with difficulty) (Live)
Shut. Up. Now… -get on the bed like a good wife.
Shut. Up. Now… -get on the bed like a good wife.

WOMAN V.O.
(Live , simultan eous) (Live , simultan eous)
Please – Please –
(Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 291)

Both, Charlene and Clyde lose control and power over their own thoughts and
fantasies. The catalyst that transformed the sexual desi re to violence that provides the
climax was not Charlene ’s sexual availability, but her ability for protection, protection
against pregnancy and against men. The male Voice is the one who intrigues: “She’s got
protection in the house…She ’s got plenty of protection. She ’s prepared ” (Vogel, The
Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 286). The suggestion is that “Charlene ’s sexual agency
crystallizes Clyde ’s feelings of powerless and failure ” (Mansbridge 84). His financial and
sexual humiliation combined with emoti onal vulnerability and discomfort regarding
Charlene ’s authorial power, gained by the act of writing, led to the violent outbreak that
seized them. His humble disclosure that he is not able to afford a prostitute paved the way
for his fu tility and impotenc e, and thus , his erotic imagination is invaded by Charlene ’s
authority and fiction.
Losing control of her own writing narrative and her fantasy, Charlene starts to be
under the command of the Voice who took over the filmic direction of the Voice Over
“CUT TO ” and replaced it with his own command of “Jump Cut ”. The male Voice and
authority foreshadows the progressive violent scenes that will unfold: “Listen, there is been
a change in the script…Since when are movies made by screenwriters? Directors make the

102
movies …Do we pay you to think? ” (Vogel, The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays 287). But
Clyde shifts the authority of his violent acts back to Charlene, as most of the aggressors do,
projecting the guilt and responsibility to their victims , in an attem pt of exercising
exploitative and manipulative power (Roy 4) . So, Clyde is out of control, too ; not only as a
result of his alcoholism, but also as a part of his unsettling coercive endeavor : “MAN
(Cryin): You’re the one making me do this, Charlene ” (Vogel , The Baltimore Waltz and
Other Plays 293).
Charlene ’s black hubris and Clyde ’s dark fantasy are possessed by violence, as a
disguised and misunderstood form of power. This “expression of accumulated aggression
that failed to be defused ” proves to be “the end product of pent -up frustration, denial of
perceived legitimate rights over a period of time, and the constant erosion of self -esteem
(Roy 3). Violent pornography , which the Voice resort s to in the end of the play , has
nothing to do with sexual pleasu re or gratification of desires (Roy 6) , but with power and
subjugation of its victims, from which the men apparently triumphs , even in fantasy and
subconsciousness. On behalf of all men, Clyde continues
[…] to carry on their ancestral tradition of emplo ying force and brute strength to gain the respect of
and domination over ‘their’ wives or companions . The bulk of these men fall into a non -pathological
for their behavior constitutes what is norm. The license to abuse their partners is felt today in a tac it
approval of such behavior by societies the world over . (Roy 13)
Yet, the exaggerated theatricality distances the audience and interfere s with the
“cathartic response traditionally associated with tragic ends ” (Mansbridge 86). The action
from the reali stic setting is removed into the public fantasy, amplifying its meanings and
implications beyond the private domain. As Nevitt puts it, “theatrical representations of
violence can often be ideologically reactionary, functioning to reaffirm power structures
that may be being threatened, questioned or challenged ” (48), and finally, “violence has an
enormous impact on the people and societies who experience it ” (41), either is the whole
world, a country, a town or the aud ience of a theater performance that dra matizes the
structure and historicity of gendered fantasy, as Hot ‘N’ Throbbing does (Mansbridge 90) .

103
CONCLUSIONS

The present analysis has revealed essential aspects of Paula Vogel ’s work, which is
representative for contemporary American drama. The current debates regarding American
identity are reflected and deconstructed by means of theater in general and by Vogel’s
plays in particular . The study traces connections betwee n Vogel ’s plays and real life,
analyzing her works in the context of the broader fiel d of American theater and
dramaturgy. The focus on the dynamics of violence in her plays reveals her talent to
expose the whole world by means of its marginalized, ignored people and issues. She
reveals reality through fantasy, the present through the past, ordinariness through diversity,
and thus , the nucleus of the world from its external cover . Violence is not a major theme in
her plays, as gender, sexuality, identity, authority, family, fantasy, memory and history are.
For Vogel, violen ce is just a tool with which she shows, directly and indirectly, by the
means of her plays, the heterogen eous reality of life.
Focusing on representations of violence and using the psychoanalytical perspective,
the study analyzes four of her plays , name ly And Baby Makes Seven , The Mineola Twins ,
How I L earned to Drive and Hot ‘N’ Throbbing . The investigation reveals some difficulty
in applying traditional psychoanalytical concepts and theories, such as those of Freud and
Yung, but also those of the more recent, but male -oriented psychoanalyst, Lacan.
However, there is no difficulty in applying Judith Butler ’s feminist concepts and theories
that seem to fit Paula Vogel ’s philosophy. How ever, the study needed to use all
psychoanalytical theories and concept s, proposed at the beginning, traditional and
nontraditional, in order to understand the notion of violence and gender that Vogel makes
effective use of , explain ing the politic al and social power in American society and the
possible change of power relatio nships and control.
The sphere of action in her plays is the domestic space, which reveals dysfunctional
families that are confront ed with different struggles such as homosexuality, incest,
domestic violence or sib ling rivalry. Her characters are portray ed sympathetic ally; there is
no villain and no rescuer, only human beings with different urges, desires , frustrations and
fears. Her thea ter is one of reconciliation. A lthough the violent aspect s of humanity are
sometimes discussed , Vogel does not indulge in embracing violence.

104
Her characters are either empowered or defeated by history and time, but there is
always hope and multiple perspectives. There is no polarity, straight or reversed, which
could instigate to violence. Howe ver, her work draws attenti on to imposed
heteronormative rules and marginalized po werless groups of people, such as gay and
lesbians, children and women.
The first chapter of the current study establishes the theoretical background on
which the analysis is based. Typologies of vio lence and the psychoanalytical theories of
Freud, Yung, Lacan and Butler are outlined in order to prepare the theoretical setting for
reading Vogel ’s plays. The chapter also points to the conjunction between theater and
violence, theater and Vogel ’s work, and, of course, Vogel ’s plays and violence.
The next two chapters analyze Vogel ’s plays , placing emphasis on the dynamics of
violence and how this shift might influence the relationships between characters and
human bein gs. The chapters are separated into two different sections that represent the
reality and fantasy realms , both of the theatrical world and of the human mind. The
disjunction is not intended to underline the big disparity between the two dom ains, but on
the contrary, as Vogel wished, to emp hasize the way in which the imagination and the facts
of life cooperate and converge into a distinct narrative of every individual or community.
Each subchapter dedicated to an individual play has identified types and forms of
violence, hidden or exposed , conscious or unconscious, with focus on the most
encountered one. The dynamism of the aggressive urge and behavior is analyzed and
discussed in connection to different scenes , applying a psychoanalytical reading and
relying on recent literary criticism.
The most important issues that appear in the plays analyzed a nd were triggered by
violence, are gender, sexuality, identity and power. Unfortunately, her plays irradiate a sad
reality of the actual world, in which aggression and violence push through the smallest
orifices they find and alter, imperceptibl y sometimes, human relationships and lives. But
her tec hniques make this exposure easier to digest, by the use of humorous situations and
parody, giving the audiences the feeling that every thought, idea o r situation can be
questioned or challenged, and why not changed, if someone wishes, certainly, with all
repercussions involved.
Far from being an elaborate and all -inclusive study, the present investigation has
looked for common elements in the selected plays. Indeed, there are other plays written by

105
Paula V ogel, Desdemona for instance, that uncover violent situations in which those in
control exercise power over the exploited, oppressed ones. But this play is not structured
into reality and fantasy sequences, as those selected, so it does not respect the proposed
plan of the study or the hypothesis that both realms unite in the wh ole complexity of life.
However, the analysis of violent aspect s and dynamics in Vogel ’s plays might be extended
to other play s, too , and alternative psychoanalytical theories and oth er types of literary
criticism might prove useful.
In all her plays, Vogel deconstructs various myths , while presenting different
perspectives and expectations from life events and narratives. The p laywright disregards
male authority and questions gender roles and imposed heterosexuality, as the study has
revealed. Assuming an important role in contemporary American dramaturgy, Vogel
fearlessly takes a plunge into the deep waters of truth and of patriarchal society , while
risking harsh critique, as people do not always care to expose or know the truth.
Reinventing family and sexuality, and thus human identity, Vogel engages in a kind
of political activism in which she fights for the disadvantaged pe ople’s rights, as she once
was, and maybe still is . For all her efforts and struggles, for all her implication in
conflicted areas of life, she gains her place in the American dramaturgical canon. And by
the aid of theatrical performances and dramaturgy, a s a literary form of art, she continues
to explore delicate topics, to challenge patriarchal order and to empower women and
sexual minorities.
In conclusion, by looking at violence with the help of the psychoanalytical
approach , the current research has reached its objectives and has developed strategies of
decoding Vogel’s drama and performance. The d iscoveries achieved by this dissection ,
some of them being already discussed by critics while others being fresh new ones,
channeled our attention towards o ur own se lves. As a part of the audience and sharing a
great passion for theater and drama, we satisfied our scientific and personal motivation,
though some pieces of information were difficult to obtain . All this , thanks to the shared
belief, starting wit h Shakespeare , that the entire world is a stage, and we are part of it,
playing our own roles. But, sometimes, according to Vogel, we can improvise and change
them.

106
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