Death and Desire, Apocalypse, and Utopia: Feminist Gestus and the Utopian Performative in the Plays of Naomi Wallace

Abstract

In the final scene of Naomi Wallace’s Depression-era play The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, the two youngest characters—Dalton Chance, the 15-year-old protagonist, and Pace Creagan, the 17-year-old young woman whose presence literally and figuratively haunts the play—engage in a highly erotic sex scene without touching. This scene, like the prologue, book-ends the play in a kind of ‘no-space,’ which is neither the place of memory (the ‘when’ of the majority of Trestle) nor the present moment, as indicated by Wallace’s opaque stage direction: “[Dalton] is in a place that is both the past and the present at the same time” (2001, 340). During the course of the scene, Pace completes her arm’s-length seduction of Dalton from beyond the grave, commanding him to lie down upon her dress (a material presence that complements—and complicates—her own ghostly presence), and to “touch” her by touching himself. Dalton complies, and audience members watch both characters climax, a charged and complicated “looking” that, for audience and actors alike, balances on the thin edge between radicalism and voyeurism. Pace’s last line, and the last line of the play, is particularly lyrical and complicated, apropos of Wallace’s writing throughout Trestle. After a few “quiet moments,” she observes: “There. We’re something else now. You see? We’re in another place” (342).KeywordsSocialist PoliticsThin EdgeGestic ActionAmerican TheatreWhite FeatherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.