Staging Infanticide: The Refusal of Representation in Elizabeth Robins's "Alan's Wife"

Abstract

In his review of the London Independent Theatre's production of Alan's Wife in 1893, A. B. Walkley objects to what he calls the persistent aggravations of [the play's] horrible circumstances. We are shown the stretcher, the mangled corpse, the child.' Alan's bloody corpse borne on a stretcher and the murdered infant are indicated in the script, but neither was represented on stage. The action of the play must have aggravated the critic into seeing what he could not have seen, what he considered artistically unrepresentable, what might be called today an excess of representation. Walkley witnessed a feminist play aware of its own excess, which staged the violent but bloodless disruption of the nineteenth-century mechanics of representation keeping women captive in the role of idealized motherhood. By writing and performing the New Woman character of Alan's wife, Elizabeth Robins both personified and subverted the nineteenth-century stage version of the feminine subject, a subject whose expression was denied by the very discourse that defined her. Hle'ne Cixous writes of the theater that it is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin, meaning that representation necessitates the erasure of woman and her replacement with the symbolic law of the father.2 Robins's character rejects this law, ruptures representation, and the male critic watching her cannot believe his eyes.