SWEETEST SWING RESEARCH: 2010

AB Gupton, Janet L.
AT Crimes of the Heart
AT The Debutante Ball
AT Debutante Ball
AT Crimes
AT The Land of Little Horses
IC 1100083180
PS Beth Henley
RM 2002
SU Criticism
SU Document
SU Essay
SU Critical Essay
TN Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism,
XX Biographical/Critical Introduction to Beth Henley
ZZ

Author Name:         Henley, Beth

Variant Name:        Elizabeth Becker Henley

[(essay date 2002) In the following essay, Gupton studies the comedic
       treatment of feminist issues in Crimes of the Heart and The Debutante
       Ball along with Rebecca Gilman's "Canannie and Alice" and The Land of
       Little Horses, while pointing to the uniquely southern ethos of both
       playwrights.]

       To be a feminist in the American South might seem an anomaly. No doubt
       the South has earned its reputation well as a patriarchal society
       where women don't sweat--they perspire--and where the men have placed
       them on a pedestal so high that the women either enjoy the view or are
       afraid to jump. The idealization of the white Southern "lady" is not
       new. The following homage to the Confederate Southern lady shows how
       the patriarch not only has placed her on a pedestal but also has tried
       to sculpt her into a silent statue: "The Confederate Woman.
       Imagination cannot dwell too tenderly upon a theme so inspiring.
       Reverence cannot linger too fondly at so pure an altar. ... It took
       the civilization of an Old South to produce her. ... The Confederate
       woman in her silent influence, in her eternal vigil, still abides. Her
       gentle spirit is the priceless heritage of her daughters" (Knight
       221-22). Words such as "produce," "silent," "pure," and "gentle" here
       emphasize how the South has constructed the concept of white womanhood
       to fit a conservative patriarchal notion. And, although the concept of
       the Southern lady has changed during the twentieth century, vestiges
       of the abiding, quiet, unassuming Southern lady still manifest
       themselves in current dramatic literature as well as in popular
       culture.

       Despite this tight girdle placed on them, Southern women writers have
       wrestled free to point out the ambiguities and discontentment that the
       role of Southern lady engenders. Southern women playwrights also have
       addressed the inconsistencies that arise for Southern women who don't
       fit this mold. Certain playwrights, creating their own style of comedy
       that pokes fun at Southern traditions such as the Southern lady, skew
       patriarchal paradigms. These playwrights combine an interesting
       mixture of the gothic and the grotesque to create "unruly women"
       characters who affront the notion of the Southern lady. In creating
       their plays, these playwrights break the rules of traditional comedy
       and un-rule the women characters in their plays. Because traditional
       play analysis falls short in appreciating this rule-breaking, these
       plays deserve further investigation and a feminist reading strategy to
       discover how they exemplify the new paths that contemporary Southern
       women playwrights are forging in comedy.

       Two contemporary playwrights, in particular, have captured this style
       of comedy that speaks specifically to and of Southern culture--Beth
       Henley and Rebecca Gilman. While Henley's plays are more widely known,
       Gilman's plays evidence some of the same whimsical yet sardonic
       elements that characterize Henley's work. Both of these playwrights
       are invested in analyzing certain aspects of Southern culture, and
       both examine some of the same issues such as family, relationships
       between sisters, community standards, eccentric relatives or in-laws,
       and relationships, in general. Their plays manifest the complexities
       of Southern culture and the delicate power structures that exist in
       the South, but do so while making us laugh and sometimes cry at the
       same time. This article examines Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart and
       The Debutante Ball and Rebecca Gilman's "Canannie and Alice" and The
       Land of Little Horses to illustrate a reading strategy for comedy and
       its feminist possibilities.

       Traditional approaches that view comedy as a social preservative that
       brings societal outcasts back within the confines of "proper" behavior
       overlook the power of comedy as a disruptive, transformative challenge
       to the status quo. While the final aim of socially preservative comedy
       is to reinstate the status quo, socially transformative comedy focuses
       on the anti-authoritarian liminal phase of the genre that turns social
       orders upside down. As Regina Barreca notes in New Perspectives on
       Women and Comedy, "Certain forms of comedy can invert the world not
       only briefly but permanently ... [and] can effectively channel anger
       and rebellion" to show that the "world turned upside down ... has no
       rightful position at all" (6).

       Henley and Gilman's plays demonstrate how comedy creates socially
       transformative outcomes for Southern women. In particular, the
       dialectical tension between the content of the plays and the comic
       forms the playwrights employ necessitates a new reading strategy for
       women's comedies. In these four plays, the female protagonists seek to
       break free of traditional roles and redefine themselves in Southern
       society. However, the structure of traditional comedy does not meet
       these needs. Thus, Henley and Gilman experiment with comic form to
       supply their comic heroines with alternative outcomes.

       Restructuring traditional comic form places Henley and Gilman in a
       delicate position. They must adhere to certain structures or
       conventions when writing so that their work is considered comedy while
       simultaneously attacking these very conventions in order to avoid
       reinforcing traditional outcomes. For example, a traditional comic
       play ends happily. This, in turn, often translates into the
       heterosexual marriage of the comic hero and heroine as the play's
       resolution. Comedy that does not end happily or that provides an
       alternative ending risks not being identified as a comedy. In
       challenging the traditional roles afforded women protagonists in
       Southern culture, Henley and Gilman modify the comic narrative
       structure to avoid closure and the reinforcement of the status quo,
       sometimes leaving their characters with a "recognition" rather than
       with a tidy happy ending.

       Resisting Traditional Roles for Southern Women

       In Crimes of the Heart, The Debutante Ball, "Canannie and Alice," and
       The Land of Little Horses, the female protagonists redefine their
       roles as Southern women and defy the stereotype of the genteel
       Southern lady. While thoroughly evaluating the role that the Southern
       lady plays in the American South's construction of itself is beyond
       the scope of this short article, a brief description of the social
       hierarchy of the Old South as well as of the traditional Southern lady
       within this hierarchy helps illuminate the stereotype that Henley and
       Gilman subvert in their comedies.

       Traditionally, the South has separated itself geographically and
       ideologically from the rest of the United States. In particular, it
       idealizes notions of chivalry and a simple agrarian life-style. In
       colonial times the South identified its way of life as a "natural
       aristocracy" in which the plantation owner was a stern but fair
       patriarch who cared for his white and black families. The residual
       effects of this notion of a "natural aristocracy" resonate in how the
       present day South sees itself and enforces behavioral codes.

       The Southern lady is the natural companion to the patriarch and the
       one to whom a Southern gentleman should pledge his life. In Caste and
       Class in a Southern Town, John Dollard describes a fraternity ritual
       in which the members march in procession and their leader stands and
       delivers the following toast: "To woman, lovely woman of the
       Southland, as pure and chaste as this sparkling water, as cold as this
       gleaming ice, we lift this cup, and we pledge our hearts and our lives
       to the protection of her virtue and her chastity" (89). The protection
       and containment of the Southern white woman closely aligns with the
       identity of the Southern white male. The Southern white man feels
       obligated to keep the female pure because "she represents her
       culture's idea of religious, moral, sexual, racial and social
       perfection" (Jones 9). In her work on the concept of white Southern
       womanhood, literary historian Anne Goodwyn Jones describes the
       Southern lady as one who is chaste, "embodies virtue," and is
       sometimes lacking "sexual interest altogether" because "it is
       unthinkable for her to desire sex, much less sex with a black man"
       (9). The white man must protect her from "the black man's presumably
       uncontrollable sexual desire" to keep her genes "pure white" (Jones
       9). Jaquelyn Hall in her book Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Ames and
       the Women's Campaign against Lynching identifies the Southern lady as
       "the most potent symbol of white male supremacy" (155) because, as
       Louis Westling corroborates in her work, the Southern patriarchy needs
       its vision of the "inviolate" Southern lady to sustain its "elaborate
       fiction of aristocratic civilization" (39).

       In Henley and Gilman's plays, the women characters are not Southern
       ladies. Instead, they become unruly women--the "disorderly one[s] par
       excellence" (Davis 124). The unruly woman, as described by Natalie
       Zemon Davis in her seminal work on early modern France, makes a
       spectacle of herself without fear of retribution and through her acts
       initiates cultural and/or political disobedience. She works outside
       the definition of "acceptable" characteristics for a woman and turns
       qualities such as boldness, bawdiness, and defiance into weapons. An
       unruly woman making a spectacle of herself creates a "multivalent
       image" that "widens behavioral options for women" (131).

       Mary Russo in "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory" expands on
       Davis's image of the unruly woman by incorporating Mikhail Bakhtin's
       theories of the grotesque body but particularizes his theories to the
       female body. In short, for Bakhtin the grotesque body contests notions
       of stability and tidiness because it cannot be contained nor can its
       materiality be ignored. The grotesque body celebrates the everyday
       biological happenings of life, such as eating, drinking, and other
       bodily functions, as opposed to the lofty and static ideals found in
       the concept of the classical, individualized, bourgeois body. The
       grotesque body shows the relativity not only of the body, but also of
       life itself. For Bakhtin, the body becomes a metaphor for the
       ever-changing social state and the fragile, malleable structures on
       which a culture constructs itself.

       Russo applies Bakhtin's ideas to the female body and posits that the
       grotesque female body becomes an unruly public spectacle when it is
       too old, or too irregular, or too pregnant (214). Further, she uses
       the grotesque female body to challenge the ideals of female beauty and
       femininity and to deconstruct imaginary identities based on the
       idealization of a certain kind of body, an untouched, sleek,
       individualized body. Russo's notions of the privileged, idealized type
       of body mirror the body expected of a Southern lady. For Russo,
       femininity becomes a masquerade and those who master the game can, of
       their own volition, put on and take off the mask "with a vengeance"
       (228). The ability to "perform" femininity and recognize it as
       performance can empower a woman to create her own subjectivity as long
       as she realizes that she is performing and controls that performance.
       In this regard, many a Southern woman has realized and reaped benefits
       from performing the role of the Southern lady. Many a Southern woman
       also has learned to put on and take off the mask of femininity with a
       vengeance.

       In these four plays by Henley and Gilman, the female protagonists make
       spectacles of themselves, and in doing so, challenge the tropes of
       femininity validated by traditional Southern culture and offer models
       of transgressive, alternative behavior. The characters' anger and
       rebellion at being placed within restrictive behavioral codes of
       femininity illustrate that the white Southern patriarchy "has no
       rightful position at all" (Barreca 6).

       In Crimes of the Heart, Babe, Lenny, and Meg all exhibit unruly
       behavior and commit crimes against Southern culture. They perpetrate
       cultural and social disobedience that threatens the Southern
       hierarchy. Babe's crime stems from her need to defend herself from an
       abusive husband. When Babe has a sexual relationship with a young
       black man and shoots her husband after he finds the two together, her
       actions strike deep at the very foundation of the white man's
       supremacy. When Zackery Botrelle, "the richest and most powerful man
       in all of Hazlehurst," is shot "slap in the gut" by his wife, the town
       is in an uproar and all the newspapers report it (15). Babe's act of
       rebellion turns the town upside down and shakes the very foundation of
       the Southern aristocracy. She debunks the myth of the white Southern
       patriarch and his identity in Southern culture. As her husband,
       Zackery should be able to govern his wife as inviolate sexual property
       and protect her from the black male. Thus, Babe's transgressive
       behavior not only redefines her role from obedient, submissive
       Southern lady to unruly woman, but also challenges her husband's
       identity.


       Meg's crime, her ability to put on the masquerade of femininity with a
       vengeance, grants her the right to flout notions of pure and
       submissive Southern femininity by being sexually uninhibited, or
       "cheap Christmas trash" to use Chick's words (7). She refuses to be
       chaste and pure, and she does not lack "sexual interest altogether"
       (Jones 9). Instead, she devastates her lover, Doc, leaving him in the
       wake of her desire to be a singer. The community criticizes Meg's
       behavior because she leaves the relationship. Her act of leaving is
       behavior normally allotted a male in a traditional narrative. When Meg
       abandons Doc, whose leg is seriously hurt in the hurricane that she
       insists they stay and experience, she literally and figuratively
       leaves Doc a "cripple" in the eyes of Southern society. To the
       community, Doc's manhood has fallen prey to female vengeance and he is
       the one who deserves sympathy, not Meg. Further, Meg's unruliness
       toward her grandfather represents a threat to the Southern hierarchy
       because she contests the family patriarch's authority to control the
       sisters' lives.

       Lenny's unruliness appears less flamboyant than her sisters'.
       Nonetheless, by the end of the play, the audience has watched the
       eldest daughter learn to laugh at the absurdity of her grandfather's
       condition and to deny his insistence that she can't find a husband
       because of her "shrunken ovary." In the beginning of the play, she is
       convinced that she does not live up to the ideals of female beauty
       because of her ovary. With the help of her sisters, Lenny comes to
       realize that this supposed defect is how her grandfather has tried to
       keep her as his nurse-maid rather than allow her to pursue a
       relationship. As Russo would suggest, Lenny learns that the shrunken
       ovary does not make her any less of a woman, because the concept of an
       ideal woman remains imaginary. Instead of deferring to her
       grandfather's wishes, Lenny musters the nerve to telephone the suitor
       whom she initially rejects. Defying her grandfather's wishes signals a
       step in her social disobedience, culminating in her chasing her cousin
       Chick (the keeper of traditional Southern values) with a broom out of
       the house and up a tree by the end of the play.

       In The Debutante Ball, Henley continues to challenge the foundations
       of Southern patriarchal society by "carnivalizing" a Southern
       tradition--the debutante ball. The main character, Teddy, appears as a
       young Southern woman who has returned home from college to make her
       debut into Southern society, an event which signifies her eligibility
       for marriage and her readiness to fulfill the role of Southern lady.
       Teddy, however, seems unsure if conforming to the dictates of a
       Southern debutante is either possible or desirable. As her masculine
       name implies, she seems ill-suited to wearing a white gown and to
       performing the tropes of femininity that the debutante tradition
       promote. Furthermore, Teddy conceals her pregnancy when she returns
       home for the ball.

       At first, Teddy tries in vain to construct herself as a debutante. She
       applies make-up, puts on the dress, and practices "acting" like a lady
       (Henley 12). Through the course of the play, however, she fails
       miserably at becoming a debutante. Her debut at the
       ball--unfortunately, not shown on stage--becomes a fiasco. The
       audience learns from other characters recounting the event that
       Teddy's gown flies over her head when she takes a bow, toilet paper
       gets stuck on her shoe, and her hairpiece falls into the punch bowl.
       Eventually, Teddy abandons all attempts at performing femininity and
       becomes an unruly woman, crawling under tables and spreading cream
       cheese on the shoes of other guests. In short, she makes a spectacle
       of herself.

       The act of making a spectacle frees Teddy from the tyranny of
       unrealistic cultural expectations. Armed with this new-found freedom,
       Henley's heroine also finds the confidence to reveal the truth--that
       she, in fact, killed her abusive father to protect her mother. Until
       this point, her mother, Jen, has taken the responsibility for the
       father's death and has used this as leverage to get Teddy to conform
       to the debutante way of life.

       Teddy is not the only female to find freedom from social constraints
       in The Debutante Ball. Bliss, Teddy's half-sister and Jen's
       illegitimate daughter by an itinerant fruit picker, takes advantage of
       the disruptive liminal state of affairs in this Southern household to
       venture into a new type of relationship. Bliss, denied her own debut
       because of her father's disputable identity, has recently split from
       her husband and enters a sexual relationship with Frances, a deaf
       woman, who, until Bliss, also has been neglected by society and men.
       Bliss and Frances's lesbian relationship undoubtedly defies
       traditional Southern roles for women.

       In The Debutante Ball, Henley highlights the construction of
       femininity and the imaginary identity of the debutante, filling her
       play with images of grotesque female bodies shaving underarms and
       legs, plucking eyebrows, and applying ridiculous amounts of cosmetics
       as they prepare for the ball. In her preface to the play, Henley
       argues that such images are imperative to her play about facades: "I
       wanted my characters to be seen as animals fighting to pluck and spray
       and shave away their true natures--adorning themselves with lies"
       (xii). Under Russo's theory, the highlighting of the grotesque female
       bodies in The Debutante Ball destabilizes ideals of beauty and
       challenges the idea of the Southern lady (or debutante) and the
       "natural aristocracy" that produces her.

       While Henley's The Debutante Ball lampoons Southern "high society" and
       the debutante mentality, Rebecca Gilman's "Canannie and Alice"
       examines the consequences that two older, unruly women face in a
       small, rural Southern town. In "Canannie and Alice," a jealous
       neighbor publicizes that the two women (the title characters) are
       lesbians because her young (somewhat mentally challenged) son, whom
       she grossly mistreats, prefers their company to hers. The neighbor
       first seeks revenge by trying to blackmail Canannie and Alice, but
       when they refuse to deny the information, she tells the rest of the
       town. The community eventually isolates Canannie and Alice.

       These protagonists' unruliness arises not only from their
       nontraditional relationship but also from their advanced ages. At the
       beginning of the play, the two women celebrate their anniversary by
       dancing around in their slips, drinking wine, and openly acknowledging
       their affection for each other. They realize the danger, however, that
       their relationship represents to the small community in which they
       live:

       Alice:

       To our silver anniversary.

       Canannie:

       As tarnished as it may be.

       Alice:

       Be nice for a second, can't you?

       Canannie:

       Happy Anniversary. (They look at each other for a moment, drink.)
       Think they'll put our picture in the paper with all the other couples?

       Alice:

       They'll put our pictures in the post office.

       (6)

       Canannie and Alice defy the traditional narrative of a heterosexual
       marriage, creating their identities through their desire for each
       other and their non-traditional marriage. Further, their age and
       comfortableness with each other afford them the right to contest
       standards of femininity by discussing bowel movements and other bodily
       functions, not to mention their use of derogatory language such as
       "bitch" and "whore" (Gilman 17). Canannie and Alice flaunt the freedom
       and irreverence that come with the aging, grotesque female body and
       widen behavioral options for Southern women.

       Jean Louise in Gilman's The Land of Little Horses uses her youth to
       create unruliness by refusing to accept the tropes of femininity
       assumed by young Southern ladies. Like Canannie and Alice, she defines
       herself through her own interests, rather than by desiring the company
       of a man. The youngest of three sisters, Jean Louise spends much of
       her time taking care of her eccentric Aunt Dot and, supposedly,
       writing a dissertation. Unlike her sisters, Jean Louise eschews men
       and marriage. Rather than follow the Freudian Oedipal narrative of
       rejecting her mother and aligning herself with a man (via marriage),
       she remains in the liminal stage of virginity.

       In "The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes," Nancy Huston proposes that
       virgins possess a certain power from their liminality because they
       remain outside the social and symbolic dictates of marriage, and,
       thus, can participate in activities usually afforded only to men
       (128). Judith Wilt in "The Laughter of Maidens, The Cackle of
       Matriarchs: Notes on the Collision between Comedy and Feminism,"
       corroborates Huston's position by proposing that the virgin has unique
       powers because she "expresses, rather than represses" ideas, thoughts,
       and actions, and "exposes and deflates" the superficialities and
       misconceptions of a world built around the traditional marriage
       narrative. For Wilt, the virgin remains in a liminal stage because she
       can find "no role in the world which totally satisfies her" (179-80).

       In The Land of Little Horses, the virgin, Jean Louise, cannot find a
       role in her current situation that satisfies her, so she and her aunt
       run away from home to follow miniature horse racing. Upon finding out
       the sad existence of these horses--how they are bred to be objects of
       display and freaks of nature--the two women free the horses in the
       middle of the night. Activities such as running away from home and
       freeing horses generally are reserved for the male hero in traditional
       comedy, but because Jean Louise remains outside the social constraints
       of marriage and "respectability," she can commit these unruly acts.
       With the power of the virgin on her side, Jean Louise exposes the
       mistreatment of the horses, and, by releasing them, deflates the world
       that makes money off of them.

       The women characters in Henley and Gilman's plays, through their acts
       of unruliness, offer models of transgressive behavior for other
       Southern women. Their resistance to the patriarch's definition of a
       Southern lady challenges the social structure on which the patriarch
       bases his aristocracy. Instead of having chaste and pure bodies that
       (em)body the ideals of a Southern lady, they have Bakhtinian flesh and
       blood bodies, ones which breathe, bleed, have sex, give birth, and
       die. Their bodies rub up against the notions of the idealized, static,
       and contained body of the Southern lady. The destabilization of the
       identity of the Southern lady sends shock waves through the rest of
       the South's social structure. These plays ask the question: if the
       Southern lady is an imaginary identity, what other imaginary
       identities lurk behind the Southern patriarchal paradigm?

       In addition to questioning the traditional roles for Southern women,
       the acts of unruliness by Henley and Gilman's female protagonists
       occur in the company of other women. Acting together to support and
       validate the other's actions, Babe, Meg, and Lenny; Teddy, Bliss, and
       Frances; Canannie and Alice; and Jean Louise and her Aunt Dot join
       forces to redefine themselves, thus assuming roles not normally
       allotted them in the traditional Southern narrative. Traditional comic
       form generally reserves the status of protagonist for a single male
       hero. In Henley and Gilman's plays, however, the protagonist comes in
       the form of a "group of women."

       Resisting Closure and Traditional Comic Endings

       Employing a group protagonist instead of a single protagonist
       exemplifies one way that both Henley and Gilman play with comic form.
       Another way in which their plays challenge the writing of traditional
       comedy is the subversion of a traditional linear narrative. A linear
       narrative presupposes a neat cause-and-effect approach to plot. In
       general, women writers of comedy have chosen a much looser conception
       of plot. Susan Carlson in Women and Comedy uses the term "texture,"
       instead of "plot," to refer to the weaving together of many discrete
       items (184), while Regina Barreca in Last Laughs: Perspectives on
       Women and Comedy suggests that women who write using "multiplicity and
       diversion" open the door for all kinds of possible outcomes (17-18).
       Texturing and multiplicity allow for the reframing of events and
       issues in the women characters' lives, possibly leading the audience
       to a greater understanding of the conditions in which the women
       characters find themselves.

       Linear narratives also seem suspect to feminist writers because the
       resolution of a linear narrative can create closure. In comedy, an
       author imposes closure when a return to the status quo through a
       traditional ending presents itself. Such an ending creates the
       illusion that all transgressive and "improper" behavior of the comic
       heroine during the disruptive liminal phase of comedy has been brought
       into line with societal norms, thereby placing the world back to its
       "rightful" position. This type of ending fails to address the cost of
       such a tidy denouement. In Crimes of the Heart, The Debutante Ball,
       "Canannie and Alice" and The Land of Little Horses, the playwrights
       supply no tidy, neat and happy endings. By doing so, however, the
       playwrights risk acceptance of their work as comedic.


       While a feminist playwright can reject a linear narrative completely,
       the strong desire for "story," particularly in Western drama in which
       audiences expect a logical sequence of events, makes certain narrative
       forms attractive to playwrights. Henley and Gilman both employ a
       narrative structure, but they often play with this structure to resist
       traditional outcomes. In "Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and
       Historical Experience," feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey proposes
       that feminists resist the "easy acceptance of closure" by rethinking
       their application of narrative to question the myths, symbols, and
       values of a culture (175). Mulvey proposes using narrative to reframe
       the issues through which the audience views the world.

       In Crimes of the Heart, Henley begins the play at the climax of the
       traditional narrative. Babe has shot her husband and Henley thrusts
       her audience right into the anti-authoritarian, liminal phase of
       comedy. The improper behavior has occurred and the town talks about
       those crazy Magrath women. Not only has the youngest Magrath sister
       turned unruly, but also Meg, her even more unruly older sister (who
       abandoned the South), has returned home and her "appearance isn't
       gonna help out a bit," Chick complains (7). Henley adds even more
       disruptive ingredients to the mix: the events occur on Lenny's
       birthday; Doc, Meg's scorned lover, delivers the news that Lenny's old
       horse has been struck by lightning; Chick's kids eat paint; Barnette
       Lloyd, the new attorney in town, has a personal vendetta to settle
       with Zackery Botrelle; Meg and Doc go on a ride to "look out at the
       moon" (51); and "Old Granddaddy's had himself another stroke" (53).

       By focusing on the middle, liminal phase of comedy, Henley seeks to
       sustain this phase and to prevent the "easy acceptance of closure"
       (Mulvey 175). In doing so, she addresses a large portion of the play
       to the anti-authoritarian events in which the Southern paradigm
       remains "upside down" due to the transgressive behavior of the three
       women. To satisfy the audience's desire for narrative, Henley allows
       the play to progress toward some kind of an ending; in defiance,
       however, of a traditional happy comedic ending, Henley leaves the
       three sisters in an ambiguous state of affairs, refusing to reinstate
       the status quo. The women's worlds have changed directions, but Henley
       resists giving the audience the unequivocal happy ending that
       characterizes traditional comic form.

       Criticizing the ambiguous ending of Crimes [Crimes of the Heart] and
       asking whether these Southern women remain dependent on the validation
       of men fails to consider an alternative reading strategy for comedies
       written by women. Henley's Crimes, more importantly than providing a
       happy ending, points up the complexities and inconsistencies these
       characters face within Southern culture. The culture teaches the women
       to validate themselves through the approval of the white male, but
       when such a validation does not satisfy the women, ready and suitable
       alternatives may not appear simultaneously.

       Henley resolves The Debutante Ball similarly with an ambiguous ending,
       having Teddy achieve a recognition of sorts rather than a pat
       resolution. At the end of the play, she loses her child in a
       miscarriage (occurring on stage) but does reconcile with her mother.
       The final image of The Debutante Ball presents Teddy rubbing ointment
       on her mother's psoriasis-ridden body as Jen takes a bath. Teddy says:
       "I don't have a feeling anymore like it's never gonna get better ...
       it's like I can smell the rain coming and I can feel it's gonna start
       to thunder. ... Yeah, and that ole snapping turtle's gonna let loose
       and I'll just be standing there in the rain and the thunder and these
       arms will want to hold onto somebody and have their arms holding on to
       me" (96). While Teddy's feelings appear hopeful, Henley refuses her
       comic heroine concrete resolutions, allowing Teddy only the
       recognition that life can get better and that it can be on her own
       terms.

       As in Crimes of the Heart, the many events and details about the
       characters' lives in The Debutante Ball may seem excessive or
       extraneous. Characters labor over their pasts and obsess over their
       presents. Henley's abundance of detail denies a linear narrative, but,
       instead, provides multiplicity. An examination of the characters'
       histories creates the necessary background for understanding how the
       female characters arrive at their current status in life.

       The multiplicity of events and the diversions created by retelling the
       past get reinforced through other plot diversions in The Debutante
       Ball as well. In particular, Henley incorporates references and images
       of the grotesque female body as important plot diversions that demand
       a reevaluation of what a Southern debutante represents. She sets much
       of the play in the bathroom, a potentially liminal space, because the
       women constantly put on and take off their Southern identities. Henley
       repeatedly parades these women's grotesque bodies as material flesh
       and blood rather than as a fetish or object of the white patriarch's
       desire, and thus destabilizes the idealization of a certain type of
       beauty validated by the debutante tradition. By incorporating and
       highlighting these images into the telling of the story, she questions
       the myths, symbols, and values of Southern culture.

       Like Henley, Gilman also resists traditional narrative closure by
       focusing on and sustaining the liminal disruptive phase of comedy. The
       disruptive phase of The Land of Little Horses begins when Jean Louise
       and Dot run away from home. While away from home, Jean Louise finds
       her purpose--to set free the miniature horses. In freeing these
       animals, she extricates herself from her past and from her mother and
       sisters, who believe her incapable of living on her own. Jean Louise's
       separation from family grants her the independence and confidence to
       return home by the end of the play at the heightened status of having
       proven herself.

       Furthermore, Jean Louise obtains this heightened status without
       submitting to comedy's traditional happy ending of a heterosexual
       marriage. Ironically, Gilman includes three marital-type relationships
       in her play, all three fraught with unhappiness. Evelyn, the oldest of
       the three sisters, is getting married, but it is obvious to the other
       sisters and to the audience that Evelyn feels obligated to get married
       to avoid being alone. Hers appears to be a marriage of convenience,
       not of passion. Laura, the mother, confesses that her second marriage
       is a contractual arrangement turned sour as of late, and Jessica, the
       middle sister, tends to move from one relationship to another but
       admits her dependency on relationships with men to create her own
       sense of self. Instead of marriage, Jean Louise and Dot choose to live
       in the family house and paint the "ceilings blue" and the "walls
       green," if they so desire (Gilman 83), while the mother and sisters
       reluctantly return to the men in their lives. Jean Louise achieves a
       happy ending on her own terms, not because of society or her family's
       expectations.

       In addition to resisting closure, Gilman also employs the soliloquy,
       which reframes the character of Jean Louise as different from the
       other women in the play. Gilman breaks the narrative flow on several
       occasions when the character of Jean Louise presents these monologues
       to the audience. She remains the only character in the play given
       soliloquies. Although the use of soliloquies obviously is not new, by
       limiting this technique to Jean Louise, Gilman allows the audience to
       gain further insight into the comic heroine's feelings.

       In "Canannie and Alice," Gilman provides another ironic, dark twist to
       the narrative and to the concept of a "happy ending" through marriage.
       She mixes elements of tragedy into her play and questions the cost of
       a "happy ending." When the neighbor blackmails Canannie and Alice for
       being lesbians, they refuse to deny the allegations. The community and
       church ostracize them, and the women withdraw from community
       activities. Eventually the townspeople realize how much they miss the
       two and invite them back to church. Canannie returns to church,
       deciding to make it "hard on them [the community]" rather than fade
       into oblivion, while Alice seems still reluctant to return (70). Upon
       leaving the church, Canannie gets struck and killed by a truck. At the
       play's end, after losing Canannie, Alice finally agrees to marry Mr.
       Beevies, a long-time, ill-suited suitor.

       The mixture of the happy and tragic in Gilman's play provides a "happy
       ending" in name only by including a marriage. Real happiness comes
       arguably not from Alice's union with Mr. Beevies, a potentially
       conventional ending, but rather from the community's recognition that
       casting out Canannie and Alice was both wrong and costly. Mr. Beevies
       evidences the community's recognition of its lesson:

       It was, well, Alice, it was that we were all mutually embarrassed
       wadn't it? I mean everybody was shocked, or surprised I mean. And I
       guess it's good ya'll didn't deny it, because it made me, well,
       realize some things. But then ya'll just got so quiet.

       We none of us handled it right. I didn't know how to call you for the
       longest time. How to get over that thing of well, do I say something
       or just chat. When maybe just chattin' is rude but maybe saying
       something is worse. Especially when none of us know much and would
       probably go puttin' our foot in our mouth. You see? Alice?

       Only maybe we did finally figure it out. That we missed ya'll. That
       was the thing. We missed ya'll a lot. And you wouldn't come to church
       Alice. Why wouldn't you come to church today?

       (72)

       Mr. Beevies's confession suggests a movement by the community toward
       acceptance and reconciliation, but only after paying too high a price.

       Alice, too, comes to recognize that the two women empowered each other
       when she realizes the depth of Canannie's love for her and her love
       for Canannie. Alice explains to Mr. Beevies: "I thought, before she
       went to church I thought she said something ... well, I thought no
       matter what we'd always be freaks here. But why stay here? Why be in
       this place. (Beat.) We'd go somewhere and start having fun again. All
       she meant to tell me was that ... she loved me and that ... well ...
       we shouldn't let anything stop us from ... each other" (76). The
       nominally happy ending with which Gilman ends her play forces an
       audience to resist the "easy acceptance of closure" (Mulvey 175) by
       demonstrating the high price of the community's prejudice.

       Because Henley and Gilman resist traditional roles for their comic
       Southern heroines, they also resist traditional comic narrative form
       and outcomes. These four plays typify both playwrights' work with a
       group protagonist of several women. Further, the protagonists achieve
       recognitions rather than orderly resolutions, which question the cost
       of a traditional "happy" status quo comic ending. Because the
       playwrights find more freedom and power for their protagonists in the
       liminal anti-authoritarian phase of the comedy, they sometimes leave
       their protagonists in that liminal stage at the end of the play,
       resulting in a disconcerting ambiguity for traditionalists who crave
       closure.

       Conclusion

       For many people, the reputation of the South as a patriarchal
       stronghold that keeps women within submissive, subservient roles rings
       true. Women playwrights of the South, nonetheless, have sought to
       illustrate the inconsistencies and undesirability of some of the
       social roles foisted upon them by their culture. Through their deft
       skills in the genre of comedy, Henley and Gilman destabilize the
       stereotype of the "Southern lady" and explore the anti-authoritarian
       aspects that can make comedy a socially transformative tool.
       Playwrights like Henley and Gilman, those who refuse to reinstate the
       status quo and make us laugh while doing so, should be acknowledged
       for their special use of comedy. Their work should receive a different
       reading strategy than that given to traditional comedy so that those
       who seek to employ comedy for only socially preservative outcomes and
       who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo might realize
       that the cackle of an unruly Southern woman may be only one emotion
       removed from toppling the patriarchal hierarchy.

       Works Cited

       Barreca, Regina, ed. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy.
       New York: Gordon, 1988.

       ------. New Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York: Gordon, 1992.

       Carlson, Susan. Women and Comedy. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991.

       Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France.
       Stanford: Stanford UP, 1975.

       Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Garden City, NY:
       Doubleday, 1957.

       Gilman, Rebecca. "Canannie and Alice." Unpublished play, 1992.

       ------. The Land of Little Horses. New York: Dramatists Play Service,
       1992.

       Hall, Jaquelyn. Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Ames and the Women's
       Campaign against Lynching. New York: Columbia UP, 1979.

       Henley, Beth. Crimes of the Heart. New York: Dramatists Play Service,
       1982.

       ------. The Debutante Ball. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

       Huston, Nancy. "The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes." The Female
       Body in Western Culture. Ed. Susan Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
       1986.

       Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the
       South 1859-1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

       Knight, Lucien Lamar. Introduction to Mrs. Bryan Wells Collier,
       Biographies of Representative Women of the South as quoted in The
       Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930, by Anne Firor
       Scott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

       Mulvey, Laura. "Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical
       Experience." Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
       1989.


       Russo, Mary. "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory." Feminist
       Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
       1986.

       Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravished Gardens: The Fiction of
       Eudora Welty. Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Athens: U of
       Georgia P, 1985.

       Wilt, Judith. "The Laughter of Maidens, The Cackle of Matriarch: Notes
       on the Collision between Comedy and Feminism." Gender and Literary
       Voice. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Holmes, 1980.

Source:               Janet L. Gupton, "'Un-ruling' the Woman: Comedy and the
Plays of Beth Henley and Rebecca Gilman." In Southern Women Playwrights: New
Essays in Literary History and Criticism, edited by Robert L. McDonald and
Linda Rohrer Paige, pp. 124-38. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Source Database:     Contemporary Literary Criticism

PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 1100083180
SWEETEST SWING RESEARCH

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Dog Days Are Over?

Articles on addiction, courtesy of Evelyn!

Monday, November 22, 2010

Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships

Strawberry Interviews

Saturday, November 20, 2010

(Very long but) great article about Gilman's "transformative" comedy

Friday, November 19, 2010

Fun Folk-Styled Birds!

Roy's boxes?

Grove Art Online
