Abstract
Winning several important drama awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein (1950~2006) is one of the significant playwrights in the history of American theatre. Especially, Wasserstein stimulates the public’s attention to women’s issues by recording many successful female characters in her plays. Aware of the impact of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Wasserstein describes how the social movement influences women’s personal life and depicts the joy and pain that feminism brings them. While the backlash against feminism is saturated in the 1980s, Wasserstein also discusses this anti-feminist force in society to see women’s struggles and their awakening. This paper deals with three of Wasserstein’s plays, Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic (1983), and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), together as a quasi-trilogy to examine the development of feminism over three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s and to portray the women’s dilemma of marriage or career. Regarding the women’s predicament of being either “in” or “out” of the family, the paper argues that Wasserstein in the plays sketches different possibilities by emphasizing the diversity of women’s life experience and their autonomy.
Highlights
Wendy Wasserstein (1950~2006) is one of the most important female playwrights in the 20th-century American theatre; especially her Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Heidi Chronicles (1988), solidifies her reputation and turns her into the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Play
This paper aims to read three of Wasserstein’s plays, Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic (1983), and The Heidi Chronicles (1988), together as an inter-textual critique of the development of feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s and to see women’s dilemmas at the time
The protagonists in Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic, and The Heidi Chronicles are different, they together represent three stages of a woman’s growth: the confusion about the future at school, the dilemma of getting married or keeping a job in adulthood, and the decision to have a child in middle age
Summary
Wendy Wasserstein (1950~2006) is one of the most important female playwrights in the 20th-century American theatre; especially her Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Heidi Chronicles (1988), solidifies her reputation and turns her into the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Play. Braithwaite further explains, “In the rush to attain equality with men, feminism told them that they must stop being ‘women,’ that they must reject these interests of femininity—in short that they must be more like men—in order to achieve feminist change” (23) From this perspective, what makes women unhappy in the 1980s is that feminism wants them to give up some of women’s desires, such as having her own family and motherhood, whereas what makes critics unhappy with Heidi’s decision is that Heidi reclaims traditional femininity to be a mother in the family. Having children and family is one of the needs and desires of humans, so Heidi’s decision of adopting a baby cannot be simplified as a surrender to the backlash or the feminine mystique In light of her long-term connection with feminism, her decision puts her feminist idea into practice by raising a girl in her own way. As the last episode of the quasi-trilogy, The Heidi Chronicles indicates that the success of the backlash lies in the flaw of some radical feminist ideas, which over-devalue women’s desire for love, children, and family, and it concludes with a hope for a feminist future, like Heidi’s expectation for her daughter
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