‘Shrewd tempters with their tongues’ — Shrews in the Histories

MARY CUFF University of Saint Michael’s College Edna’s Sense of an Ending: A Rhetorical Analysis of Chopin’s Use of Narrative in The Awakening PETER RABINOWITZ, IN HIS EXAMINATION OF THE RHETORICAL POWER OF beginnings and endings in fiction, notes that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, beginnings and endings hold “privileged positions,” governed by a handful of metarules, one of which is “the metarule that leads us to expect balance in a text, to expect that the ending will somehow be prefigured in the beginning” (300, 305). The notion of a prefigured ending ties into Frank Kermode’s earlier concept of the “sense of an ending,” which he argues all readers develop as they encounter narratives. Rabinowitz and Kermode both acknowledge that the end of a narrative is rhetorically powerful because people have a natural inclination to organize and make sense of the entire narrative based on its ending. The beginning’s promises and the end’s fulfillment thus help the author to shape narrative expectations in order to get readers to sense a particular purpose to the story. However, Rabinowitz points out that there is also significant rhetorical power to narrative endings that upset the expected or promised ending, as in novels that begin conventionally and end unconventionally. Rabinowitz explains that such “novels often have endings that do not simply surprise . . . but that seem, when we get to them, flagrantly to defy what has come before—which end . . . with what musicians call a deceptive cadence” (305). This characterization seems particularly apt for the general perception of the ending of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Recent criticism of the novel has focused increasingly on its narrative and artistic elements, as opposed to the more thematic and social elements common to earlier readings. However, this approach has continued the deep scholarly divides over how to interpret the novel’s ending. The scholarly response to the ending typically falls into four camps. The first camp views Edna’s death as a suicide brought about by a crushing social script. There is a divide within this camp between scholarswhoviewEdna’ssuicideasaconventionaldeath-as-punishment ending that does not fit the novel and those who read it as essential to 328 Mary Cuff the novel’s social critique. This first subgroup includes many classics of Chopincriticism: for instance, Elaine Showalter’s complaint that suchan unconventional narrative concludes with an ending she believes to have beenexternallyimposeduponbothcharacterandauthor(81).GeorgeM. Spangler characterizes the end as “aconclusion for a novel other than the one she wrote, a conclusion for a novel much more conventional and muchlessinterestingthanTheAwakening.”(254).RachelBlauDuplessis provides the most direct comment on the narrative implications of the novel’s ending, noting that death, as opposed to marriage, is the ending merited by the female character who “has a jumbled, distorted, inappropriate relation to the ‘social script’ or plot designed to contain her legally, economically, and sexually” (295). More recent criticism from the second subgroup attempts to reconcile the ending to the rest of the novel by arguing that Edna’s death either subverts a patriarchal society or is her last method of escape. Catherine Mainland and Marion Muirhead argue that the ending depicts the arbitrary restrictions that society has placed upon a woman with as much natural talent as a man (Mainland 84-85; Muirhead 53). Jennifer Gray sees Edna heroically and tragically escaping from the dominant patriarchal ideology that would otherwise force her into the only socially acceptable role: motherwoman (71-72). The second camp, made famous by Sandra Gilbert, argues that Edna’s end is a creative return to the feminine realm. More recently, this strain has been continued by scholars such as Angela Hailey-Gregory and Jarlath Killeen. These scholars argue that Edna plunges into the sea not to die but to be reborn as a mythic Aphrodite or feminist Madonna, free from male models. A third camp insists that Edna’s end is deliberately ambiguous. Robert Treu is representative of this approach when he argues that the novel’s importance lies in the questions it raises, not whether Edna wants to die—or does die—at the end: “Kate Chopin had every right, I think, to deny her readers the pleasure...

The study focuses on a performance approach by Dinsman in his “Menunggu Kata Dari Tuhan” (Waiting for the Word of God's) (2016) and “Tamu Dari Medan Perang” (Guests of the Battlefield) (2017). Both theatres are analyzed based on the “Teater Fitrah” (Theatre of Fitrah) approach which outlined six principles in theatre production from the Islamic perspective. This approach is based on the principle that the essence of human life (nature) is to submit to the Creator i.e. Allah SWT including via theatre performance. According to “Teater Fitrah” (Theatre of Fitrah) approach, theatre performance can be a manifestation of man’s submission to the Creator through its content and implementation that is appropriate in the teaching of Islam. The six principles include story ending which in favour of the protagonist who believes in God, a character who is conscious about the nature of self-submission to Allah SWT, manifesting words about the human’s soul with good intentions, manifesting the faith in Allah SWT through particular actions, containing Islamic values that foregrounded with the purpose of submission as well as preserving ethics and etiquette in theatre staging. The research data is collected through observations on live staging practices or video recording. This study also pays attention to the issues and problems discussed. Both theatres are found to have raised different issues, but are closely linked to the issues, attitudes and thoughts among Muslim society. “Menunggu Kata Dari Tuhan” (Waiting for the Word of God) presents the issues of Muslim’s obedience and response to the commands of Allah SWT and His Messenger. The issue which directly relates to the actual behaviour of a Muslim, giving the audience an example of how they should react in a situation. Meanwhile, “Tamu dari Medan Perang” (Guests of the Battlefield) discusses on jihad and Muslim’s understanding about it. In conclusion, characters and story’s ending are in line with the principles outlined by pendekatan “Teater Fitrah” (Theatre of Fitrah). In the context of directing the performances, both theatres feature a relatively small number of characters. This strategy makes easy for the director in controlling the movements and interaction between one actors to another actor, especially among female and male characters.

American drama has ever occupied a stepchild position in scholarship, its denigration rooted in the lure of domestic realism for even the most resistant of our playwrights. Maligned as solipsistic and regressive, this "leviathan" of mainstream American theatre putatively upholds through its content the unity of the mythologized family and through its form the closure of classical realism. Yet the legacy of this leviathan is an epistemological subversion and a transformative impulse. Those very plays which apotheosize American domestic realism ironically undermine its foundation in psychological causality, narrative linearity, transparent language, unmediated consciousness, and unified meaning. Destabilizing that objective reality perceived through a binary logic of subject/object, post-war playwrights prophesied a shift from a Cartesian/Newtonian epistemology and bequeathed a legacy of reality as uncertain and boundaries as blurred. Reflecting this postmodern shift in family, feminist, and scientific theories, contemporary playwrights have furthered this legacy of a liminal realism. Critics, however, persist in denouncing mainstream American drama; the most vitriolic among these are feminists who are willing to forego broad audiences so great is their fear of both domesticity's circumscription of women and realism's reinscription of dominant ideology. It is a feminist redemption, then, which proves most persuasive, emerging provocatively from family theory's and feminist film criticism's conceptualization of family and realism respectively as unstable systems. These echo chaos theory's concept of unpredictability in nonlinear dynamical systems, a perspective which reveals alternative futures on America's theatrical and cultural stages. Fittingly, as the imperative of feminism is transformation, its possibility is signalled by female characters in America's linchpin plays. Culturally scripted as ghosts or monsters, these (M) others haunt their houses and the stage as chaos haunts order and performance, text. Derridian "hymen" or Prigoginian "hypnon," they embody the systemic flux of a Butterfly Effect, pushing the family to evolve from a gendered hierarchy and realism from an Oedipal order. From O'Neill to Mamet, American playwrights have evoked a consciousness beyond binary logic and negative mimesis, a consciousness which begs a reevaluation of American drama and America itself as liminal realms.

In his chapter on the ‘Theatre of War’ in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, ch. 6), Paul Fussell notes a consanguinity between the participant’s view of warfare and of theatre: ‘Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place’ (p. 192). The participant’s position provides the fulcrum of Fussell’s discussion of theatre and the First World War from a range of perspectives: wartime audiences escaping the reality of war by immersing themselves in theatre, those with experience of war (the equivalent of soldier-poets) writing theatrically (but not necessarily only plays), representations of war participants in drama, the theatrical language of war participants (particularly class-conscious British soldiers). The catch-phrase ‘theatre of war’, in this view, is effective because it captures a double bind of location and participation in war. On the one hand, the war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers who are displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in an ‘irrational place’. On the other hand, the theatre stage and actors materialize an experience which temporarily draws audiences away from their everyday existence and ‘real’ selves — and under those conditions the dislocations of war can be effectively represented and conveyed, even if war is distant or past. Of course, the same could be said of cinema or television drama. Theatre and war zone meet in the locations and dislocations of participation in Fussell’s view, and indeed that is the dominant sense in which a ‘theatre of war’ is understood both in literary terms and in the metaphorical plethora of the catch-phrase.

Tough Reading:

The legendary playwright William Shakespeare is the greatest English dramatist in the world. His plays are widely read and enacted all over the world. In Shakespeare’s plays women are well etched and reflected the universal human nature. In the plays of Shakespeare we come across many strong, resourceful and self confident women who, at times are stronger than men, and they create their own space and represent a spirited independence. The construction of female characters in Shakespeare’s plays reflects the Elizabethan image of women in general. Women of that era were supposed to represent virtues like obedience, silence, sexual chastity, humility, constancy and patience. There were several women in Shakespeare’s plays who assert themselves in very different ways, like-Cleopatra, Portia, Desdemona, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Miranda, Olivia, Rosalinda and Viola. In ‘King Lear’, Cordelia embodies all the angelic and nurturing qualities that the other two Regan & Goneril lack. Regan & Goneril, King Lear’s two monstrous daughters, are archetypal villains from the onset of the play and although they serve well their purpose, they are not as developed as other Shakespeare “Villains”, such as Lady Macbeth. Women is the plays of Shakespeare are the most individualistic heroines and displays a certain poise and maturity even in the tough times and saddest scenes. Women show the “feminine” virtues of love, sacrifice and piety. Few heroines show a loving nature, a tender heart, resolution and dignity like Portia in the merchant of Venice. Evil is the disruptive force and the tragedies show the hellish consequences, which always lead to deaths of the innocent and good. Women appear as supporting and central character in Shakespeare’s play, and these characters, as well as the so called “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, have elicited a substantial amount of criticism, which received added impetus during the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. Early criticism of female characters in Shakespeare’s drama focused on the positive attributes the dramatist bestows on them and often claimed that Shakespeare realistically captured the “essence” of feminity

Iraqi Ghosts in the Heart of America:Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo Ana Fernández-Caparrós (bio) 1. Iraq and the Crisis in Representing War on the American Stage In the contemplative place theater provides, we might become citizens of the times in which we live. It is at the intersect between public moral dilemma and the individual capacity to understand and feel that theater of war and witness enters, useful and meaningful, to create a communal gathering space in which we might consider together the sorts of societal choices, their reasons and consequences, we fail to fully grasp in isolation. —Karen Malpede, Acts of War xvii Warfare, which might be considered the most radical expression of conflict and crisis, has been from ancient times a topic of theatrical representation.1 In fact, as Karen Malpede argues, dramatic art arose as a complement to and perhaps also as an antidote to war: "Athens, a warrior democracy, needed its great theater Festival to Dionysius (god of ecstasy and madness), in order to remember, reflect upon, and, perhaps, to somehow mediate if not actually redeem the multiple losses and sacrifices of its people" (xv). Over 2,500 years later, the ultimate reasons—if there can be any—that might justify the need to engage in the perversions, barbarities, betrayals, and pain produced by current wars that are so different from those ancient battles, and even from the military engagements of just a few decades ago, still need to be understood and negotiated. Drama might be thought of as an inevitably displaced and obsolete medium to understand war in the twenty-first century, amidst a mediatized reality of digital culture where the hegemony of images is hard to defy. Yet, despite its relegation to the fringe of American cultural imagination, I want to argue that drama and performative representations still have the power to engage with current military conflicts in ways that differ from traditional narratives and the manner in which conflicts are portrayed by mainstream media channels, thus opening up a space for the emergence of critical [End Page 35] assessment, ethical judgment, and resistance that should not be overlooked. In what follows I will focus on one of the most original responses to the Iraq war, Rajiv Joseph's Pulitzer Prize-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a play whose "use of an animal figure to explore something as troubling as George Bush's 'pre-emptive,' 'regime-change war' in Iraq, and the strange, unwanted alliances that it forced into existence" is turned into a surprising and powerful means to bring up "questions that arise from the radical displacements and dismemberments that characterize global warfare" (Chaudhuri 135, 136). Joseph's play, which premiered in May 2009 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, is, to my knowledge, the only American play set in Iraq and openly portraying the Iraq War to have reached Broadway. In fact, it was the 2011 Broadway production directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring the late Robin Williams as the Bengal Tiger (in his last theatrical performance before his death in 2014) that put Joseph in the national spotlight.2 This unique achievement raises a few questions as to why a bizarre war play with a loquacious tiger in the leading role is likely to be the sole play set in war-torn Iraq that more conventional American theater audiences might have come across as well as to why Iraq has been generally neglected as an apt crisis to be publicly examined on the stage, considering the magnitude of the conflict. The invasion proved to be catastrophic, undermining, as Kitchen and Cox argue, "America's soft power appeal in several countries and causing immense damage to the international order more generally—damage that will take several years to repair, if of course it can ever be repaired at all" (65). The claim made by theater critic Alexis Solosky that "few would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced any great American plays" could still be made, but that these wars have motivated some good pieces produced at regional not...

Scholars are witnessing a dramatic confluence of faith, politics, and gaming. On the stage of this war theater, the players are indistinguishable, the simulations just one mission removed from real war. One is immersed in war as game, the other in war as eternal battle. The military has invested millions in developing games as strategic communications tools, hiring real soldiers and officers as consultants to ensure optimal realism in game play. Nowthat the harmonic convergence of faith, politics, and computer games has been graphically (and brutally) realized, specifically, made real in the dueling holy wars— ours and theirs (jihad)—what now? This article proposes a game modification of the god mode of the game, America’s Army, as a critical response to the reality ofwar and the use of computer games as military recruitment tools.

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

From the Theater of War to the Theater Stage: The Militarization of the State Theatre Pretoria (1981)