What Happened to the Angel in the House?: The Violent Female Lover

Abstract

In this chapter Taylor Porter analyzes information and perspectives regarding particularly female-initiated domestic violence as an introduction to plays depicting female characters who fight with past and present intimate partners. She discovered that a significant proportion of women engage in not only low-level, mutual violence with their partners, but some also reverse the traditional model and become “intimate terrorists.” The plays discussed include Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1930), Paula Vogel’s Hot ’n’ Throbbing (2000), and Frank Canino’s The Angelina Project (2000), ending with a brief look at Pearl Cleage’s Flyin’ West (1995). Coward depicts mutual partner violence with a lack of both political agenda and sensitivity in a comic genre, whereas Vogel and Canino focus on female protagonists’ responses to intimate partner abuse, doing an admirable job of presenting women’s various and complex relationships to physical force. They recognize the cultural stereotypes but move audiences beyond them. Less successful is Cleage’s melodramatic play.