Feminist readings of beckett

Abstract

Who speaks? Who hears? In what language? These questions rise persistently from the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, and have driven not only poststructuralist literary theory since the 1960s, but also, and perhaps more insistently, the theorizing of the major ‘French feminists’ of the early 1970s and 1980s: Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva.2 To link Samuel Beckett with the latter writers may seem, at first blush, improbable. Beckett had no known allegiance to feminism per se and he consistently denied any political or social motives to his deracinated characters and bleak landscapes. Beckett’s early critics helped to sustain his demurral, emphasizing the great author’s solitary brilliance and the universal humanism of texts. Yet, if the dispossessed speakers of Beckett’s fiction and plays seem to defy social even metaphoric labeling, they have, despite their fright wigs and greatcoats, gender. In fact, the displaced gender signifier — Krapp’s banana and Winnie’s pearls (from, respectively, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days) — is one of Beckett’s more playful gestures. Further, the central tropes of French feminist theory, the hysteric, the maternal semiotic, and the performative parler-femme (speaking [as] woman) are contemporary with and, I will argue, at play in three brief, beautiful Beckett texts, Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976), and Rockaby (1982). This essay does not assume cross-influences among Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, and the ascetic Irishman who wrote in their midst.