The Circle Game: Gender, Time, and "Revolution" in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia

Abstract

The Circle Game:Gender, Time, and “Revolution” in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia Roberta Barker (bio) I [D]on't you ever have the feeling that while real time goes galloping down the road in all directions, there are certain moments … situations … which keep having their turn again? —Stoppard, Shipwreck 4 These words sound a rather surprising note when the ill-fated Natalie Herzen speaks them in the opening moments of Shipwreck, the second play in Tom Stoppard's 2002 trilogy The Coast of Utopia. After all, as members of the nine-teenth-century Russian intelligentsia, Stoppard's main characters are men committed to social change. At the end of the trilogy's final play, Alexander Herzen sums up the meaning of their quest by maintaining that "history has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind […] We need wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us. But that is our dignity as human beings" (Stoppard, Salvage 118). Natalie's earlier question stands in stark contrast to this vision: while Herzen sees human existence as dominated by the struggle to advance through history, his wife sees it as haunted by cycles of repetition in which "certain moments […] keep having their turn again." Thus, husband and wife express their disparate experiences of life in terms of two distinct modalities of time – reminiscent of those described in Julia Kristeva's seminal essay, "Women's Time," as "linear" or "obsessional" time and "cyclical" or "hysterical" time (17). The tension between these two modalities appears throughout much of Stoppard's work, both in the competing models offered him by the tight linearity of the well-made play and the circular structures of absurdism and in the dialectic he presents between the ongoing march of human knowledge and the losses that so often leave us back at square one. In The Coast of Utopia, the division between historical time and [End Page 706] hysterical time also appears as a division between masculine and feminine: while the trilogy's men seem to move forward, its women are often condemned to frustration, stasis, and repetition. Nevertheless, I will argue that it is Natalie's time – "women's time" – that finally conquers both genders in The Coast of Utopia. Although Stoppard's intellectuals cry out for progress, their author's perspective fixes them in a world of parallels and repetition. Similarly, the kinetic passion of the actors in Trevor Nunn's National Theatre production of the trilogy was counterbalanced by the action of the revolve stage, a permanent reminder of the eternal recurrence of the same. Even the play's reviews re-inscribed many of the constructions of gender and social identity repudiated by Stoppard's real-life models. The triumph of repetition in the text, performance, and reception of The Coast of Utopia emphasizes the ambiguous nature of the "revolutions" espoused by all the play's characters. II The distinction between "men's" and "women's" time is an unstable one. In "Women's Time," Kristeva asserts that "female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations" (16). She bases this observation partially on the notion that female subjectivity is centred in "cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature" (16). She notes, moreover, that "female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival – in other words, the time of history" (17). This linear time, which Kristeva associates with "that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences" (17), is constructed by many cultures as masculine. Nevertheless, Kristeva writes, the notions of repetition and eternity often associated with femininity "are found to be the fundamental, if not the sole, conceptions of time in numerous civilizations and experiences"; therefore, "the fact that certain currents of modern feminism recognize themselves here does not render them fundamentally incompatible with 'masculine' values" (17). Moreover, she notes, "the hysteric (either male...