Laying Blame: Gender and Subtext in David Mamet's Oleanna

Abstract

"The Bitch Set Him Up" — that's what Daniel Mufson thought the working title of Oleanna could have been, after he appraised the critical responses to the play's 1992 New York production, adding that "one can expect few other reactions when Carol is such a viper." Marnet's presentation of the conflict between a professor and his female student is marked by ambiguous discourse, troubling physical contact, and subsequent charges of sexual harassment. Mufson found, in the seventeen reviews of the play he considered, two typical responses: some critics, including John Lahr, seem to defend the play's political message because they "[loathe] what Carol represents," while others, Elaine Showalter among them, lament the construction of a play which "targets a woman as an ugly representative of the group that challenges the white masculine ruling class." Each condemns Carol, some feeling that Mamet went too far in creating such a harridan in order to support his misogynistic views. As Deborah Tannen wrote, "we don't need a play that helps anyone feel good about a man beating a woman." Mufson shares Tannen's view, remarking that "Oleanna's aesthetic merit, if it has any, has become parenthetical to its Polemics.” Significantly, none of these reviewers seems to have found any justification for Carol's actions. Mufson mentions "the annoying little problem. that one of the two characters in Oleanna is a cardboard cut-out, a nightmarish phantom conjured by the paranoid fantasies of a patriarchy peering over a cliff to see ... egalitarianism." He quotes approvingly Tannen's observation that Carol is "all surface: just a stereotype that audiences can join in hating," and David Richards's remark that Oleanna is "rigged" so that its action "slips out of control without our really understanding how or why.” Mufson also cites John Simon, who voices three possible interpretations: "Was [Carol's] near imbecility in Act One ... an elaborate act of entrapment? Or is she a genuine idiot savant whom the Group has coached in some fancy lingo? Or is Mamet simply playing fast and loose with authorial responsibility?"