Abstract
Abstract Venus, a play written by Suzan-Lori Parks, employs unconventional theatrical approaches in retelling the history of a 19th-century freak show attraction. This study examines how the critique of gender bias and sexual manipulations in Venus is explored and projected in ways that can be described as postmodern. Through the subversion of conventional forms and language, the blending of fact and fiction, the pastiches of both low and high generic and linguistic presentations, the liberating of a marginalized voice, and the revision of the philosophical premises that subordinate the female to the male order, the play questions the masculine determinacy inherent in social institutions and traditions and invites a conscious reconsideration of default meaning and truth.
Highlights
Breaking the FrameFiction writing has been ‘colonized’ by authority that could be said to represent white male supremacist thinking in its conventionalized genres and generic boundaries, orderly linearity and gender-biased linguistic codes
Venus is an experimental play written by American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, first performed in 1996 and published in 1997
This study’s objective to investigate how the critique of gender bias and sexual manipulations in Venus is explored and projected in ways that can be described as ‘postmodern.’ The investigation employs as its conceptual framework the features that characterize postmodern fiction proposed by Geyh, Leebron and Levy in their 1998 anthology of postmodern American fiction, as illustrated
Summary
Fiction writing has been ‘colonized’ by authority that could be said to represent white male supremacist thinking in its conventionalized genres and generic boundaries, orderly linearity and gender-biased linguistic codes. The Baron Docteur expands his territory by laying claim to this feminine practice When he repeats the stanza to The Venus Hottentot just a little while later, he claims ownership of the poem: “I made it up myself” (Parks 1997, 102). By disrupting the chronological convention of the narrative with an unorthodox sequence of scene numbers and intermittent extracts, and obfuscating the gender expectations with a mimetic reversal of hysteria and verbal eloquence from a female character, the play invites a reconsideration of the determinacy of a conventional authority as well as empowers a realignment of ideological paradigms from a fresh view of the oppressed
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