The Politics of Gender, Language and Hierarchy in Mamet's “Oleanna”

Abstract

Ever since it was first staged in May 1992, Mamet's Oleanna seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, to have been perceived, publicised and reviewed almost exclusively as a manifestation of backlash sexual politics — that is, as a work characterised by outrage and hostility towards the agenda of contemporary feminism. Although the play entered the public arena too late to be addressed in Susan Faludi's 1992 study Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, its attitudes have typically been read as symptomatic of the same aggrieved and aggressive masculinity which Faludi diagnoses in such exemplary texts as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). The play also lends itself with deceptive ease to a comparison with one of Faludi's most alarming paradigms of backlash popular culture, the Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction. Both narratives depict a fundamentally decent man, loyal to wife and family, who becomes the target of and is almost destroyed by the machinations of a vengeful single woman. In both cases the action culminates in an explosive physical assault on the offending female character. And, in performance, the violence of both denouements releases and apparently sanctions a similar surge of vicarious male aggression. Howls of “Kick her ass!” and “Kill the bitch!” were a regular occurrence at screenings of Fatal Attraction, and audience reaction to Oleanna has often followed the same pattern: Elaine Showalter reports a male acquaintance saying “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”