THE MODERNIST INFLUENCE ON QUEER VISION: MARK RAVENHILL'S MOTHER CLAP'S MOLLY HOUSE

Abstract

Queer theory is one of the theories that is regarded as an outcome of postmodern condition and its philosophical questionings. Its rejection of stable gender identities develops out of post-structuralist challenges to a binary understanding of the world, while its inclusive approach to marginalised and unrepresented sexual identities is linked to the postmodernism’s proliferating and decentralising politics. This closely-knit connection between postmodernism and queer, however, usually shadows the deeper and less recognised legacy between modernism and queer. When the literary modernism and queer theory are re-examined side by side, it becomes possible to interpret queer as an offspring of both modernism and postmodernism. Queer theory and queer works benefit highly from modernism. Both modernism and queer present sexuality as fluid, challenge the linear and heteronormative understanding of time and both are politically assertive. This paper analyses this connection from both a theoretical and a literary perspective. Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House, one of the earliest queer plays of British theatre, illustrates this connection as a representative queer text with modernist undertones.