Other Others: Dramatis Animalia in Some Alternative American Drama

Abstract

In his study of forests, Robert Pogue Harrison describes how Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “after his long, futile odyssey among the contemporary race of human beings who have yet to overcome their half-way natures… returns to his mountain and says: ‘Only now do I know and feel how much I love you, my animals’“ (45–46). As Harrison puts it, “Without his animals Zarathustra is nothing” (44). I want to suggest that in a manner akin to Zarathustra’s, we turn to animals, and what Harrison calls “their enduring, original nature in ourselves” (46), as a means of reimagining possibilities for human interaction. If my focus is, in the end, human, that is not to deny the originary quality of animalia that Paul Shepard suggests. The claim that animals prefigure human society underscores their autonomous existence outside the realm of “meaning.” And while we must always be aware of this prefiguring fact of animal existence, it is also the case that humans deploy “the animal” purposefully (and perhaps at times less so) in cultural production. This chapter investigates such representation in two signal works of the modern theater: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends. Each play treats the human /animal dyad differently, yet together they demonstrate how the confines of social positioning can be expanded and even potentially erased by the implied presence of animals, which moves us beyond accepted theatrical convention and social imagination.