Expert answer:Discussion Board, English homework
Answer & Explanation:Having read plays from 1916 (Trifles), 1934 (The Children’s Hour) and 1978 (Crimes of the Heart),
consider this question: Do you see any common themes running through
these plays? Or do they stand as totally independent works that have
only the bare minimum of similarities? Are the issues raised in the
early 1900s the same as those in the 70s? How have they remained the
same or how have they changed? How has the state of women evolved in
that time?
Your
response should be 3-4 paragraphs in length and it should bring in
quotes from the plays for support, as well as bring in one of our
secondary readings to develop your ideas. laughlin_on_henley_feminist_analysis_1_.pdf
laughlin_on_henley_feminist_analysis_1_.pdf
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TYPE:
Article CC:CCL
JOURNAL TITLE:
Women & performance
USER JOURNAL TITLE: Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
ARTICLE TITLE:
Criminality, Desire, and Community: A Feminist Approach to Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart
ARTICLE AUTHOR:
Karen Laughlin
VOLUME:
3
ISSUE:
1
MONTH:
YEAR:
1986
PAGES:
35-51
ISSN:
0740-770X
OCLC #:
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This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)
Criminality, Desire, and Community:
A Feminist Approach to Beth Henley/s
Crimes of the Heart
by Karen L. Laughlin
I
N HER 1980 study of Women Who Kill, Ann Jones notes, “A
wave of attention to women’s criminality follows thunderously
on every wave of feminism and surely will continue to do so
until we can grasp the truth that free people are not dangerous”
(14). Since Jones made this statement, two plays by women playwrights have won the Pulitzer Prize-Beth Henley’s Crimes of the
Heart in 1981 and Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother in 1983. Interestingly, both of these plays present the Magrath sisters, Babe, Meg and
Lenny, as criminals and as victims of the crimes committed by themselves and others. One of the key crimes either committed or contemplated in each is suicide.
It would seem, then, that these plays reflect and in a sense respond
to the fears of female criminality that Jones has observed by
dramatizing violence by women that is inwardly-directed and therefore poses little threat to society at large. But in contrast to Norman’s
play, which ends with the protagonist’s suicide, Crimes of the Heart
takes this concept of self-destructive violence as its starting point.
Henley’s dramatization-and eventual redefinition-of the female
criminal builds toward a vision of feminine assertiveness and female
bonding as an alternative to self-destruction. The following essay
aims to test Henley’s play against the insights of several contemporary feminist theorists, to consider its place within a literary tradition
offering positive, even powerful models offemale community, and,
at the same time, to reflect on the extent to which the “criminality,”
experiences, and desires of the play’s central characters are paradigmatic of the situation of women in contemporary western spdety.
Discussing her playwrighting techniques with theatre critic Edwin
Wilson, Henley explained, “I always start … with an event … and
develop my characters from that” (138). The initial event of Crimes of
the Heart is the first of several crimes to which the play’s title refers:
the shooting of the small-town but big-time lawyer, ZackeryBotrelle,
by his young and see·mingly innocent wife, Rebecca. Becky, or as she
is more appropriately nicknamed, Babe, readily admits her guilt. “I
36/Laughlin
shot him all right,” she tells her sister, Meg, in Act I. “I meant to kill
him. I was aiming for his heart, but I guess my hands were shaking
and 1-just got him in the stomach” (32).
Babe’s criminal act occurs before the play begins. But soon after,
the audience either witnesses or learns of other “crimes” committed
by the play’s characters. In his review of the play, Wilson cites
Lenny’s self-sacrificing efforts to take care of her Old Granddaddy
and her jealously of her sister, Meg; Meg’s spurning of Doc Porter, “a
local man who married someone else” and her subsequent attempts
“to rekindle the affair”; and Babe’s adulterous encounter with “a
teen-aged black boy” named Willie Jay (138). To this list may, be
added Meg’s lies to her grandfather about the progress of her singing career and, significantly, the suicide of the sisters’ unnamed
mother, which took place several years before the action begins.
These are some of the more obvious “crimes of the heart” committed by the women of the Magrath family-crimes of passion, in a
metaphorical sense at least, ranging from acts of physical violence to
the petty offenses of jealousy or betrayal. But whereas we normally
think of a crime of passion as an outwardly-directed act, resulting in
the death or injury of either the loved one or the third party, one of
the most striking features of the crimes in Henley’s play is their selfdestructive nature. Henley makes quite clear to us the cost of these
“crimes” for the “criminals” themselves. The mother’s suicide of
course provides the most obvious example of this. But we soon discov.er the resemblance between this action and Babe’s attempted
murder of Zackery. As she tells Meg the story of the shooting Babe
adn!its,
I went on into the living room, and I went right up to the
davenport and opened the drawer where we keep the burglar
gun … I took it out. The I-I brought it up to my ear. That’s
right. I put it right inside my ear. Why, I was gonna shoot off
my own head! That’s what I was gonna do. (49)
In Act II we actually witness two altempts by Babe to take her own
life, first by hanging and, when that fails, by sticking her head into
the gas oven. Confronted with frustration, fear, and uncertainty
about her own future, Babe’s first impulse is to attempt to destroy
herself.
Meg’s self-destructive tendencies are less clear-cut but she, too,
closely parallels her mother, especially in the scene in which she tells
her cousin, Chick, that smoking for her means “taking a drag off of
‘:Ieath … Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What
Crimes of the Heart/37
power! What exhilaration!” (28). As the play unfolds, we learn that
Meg, too, has made mighty efforts to control her own destiny, efforts
which included leaving Doc Porter in the middle of Hurricane
Camille to go off and pursue her singing career as well as forcing
herself to stare at the “poster of crippled children stuck up in the
window at Dixieland Drugs” and then resolutely spending her dime
“on a double-scoop ice cream cone” (66-67). These attempts to avoid
“being a weak person” (67) have taken their toll on her, however, and
have resulted in the mental breakdown she confesses to Doc Porter
in Act II:
I went nuts. I went insane. Ended up in L.A. County Hospital.
Psychiatric ward … one afternoon I ran screaming out of the
apartment with all my- money and jewelry and valuables, and
tried to stuff it all into one of those March of Dimes collection
boxes. That was when they nabbed me. Sad story. Meg goes
mad. (85)
Lenny, on the other hand, seems the most stable of the Magrath
sisters. While the other two have gone on to marriage or a career
(and have apparently failed at both), she has remained at home,
keeping house for Old Granddaddy. Yet she, too, has rejected a
would-be suitor, not to proclaim her strength but because, as she tells
Meg,
I have this underdeveloped ovary and I can’t have children
and my hair is falling out in the comb-so what man can love
me? What man’s gonna love me? (80)
Lenny’s fear of rejection, then, and perhaps also her sense that she
needs to stay home and take care of her grandfather, lead~ to her
“crime of the heart”; and the fact that she suddenly becomes Ill at the
revelation of her unwillingness to continue her love affair graphically illustrates the self-injurious nature of her action (81). She, too,
has internalized her anger and frustration and, though she may also
have broken the heart of Charlie Hill (as Meg broke Doc’s and as
Babe shot at Zackery’s), we see Lenny herself as the principle victim
ofthis crime.
Throughout the play, the three women enga~e in various _cr~el
ties, ranging from the forgetting of Lenny’s all-Important thtrt1eth
birthday to a large-scale exchange of accusations, be~raye~ confidences, and bitterness. Another family member, Cousm Chtck attacks all three of the Magrath sisters with a steady stream of verbal
38/Laughlin
abuse, harping on the humiliation she has suffered because of “all
the skeletons in the Magrath’s closet” (6).
In a metaphorical sense at least, Crimes of the Heart flows into that
“wave of attention to women’s criminality” Jones identifies as a common response to the women’s movement. Perhaps this fact in itself
offers a partial explanation for the play’s critical and popular success; 1 Crimes of the Heart not only picks up on the current fascination
with the female criminal but also takes steps toward assuaging society’s fears of female violence. Zackery, after all, survives Babe’s attack, and most of the female characters’ crimes are self-destructive
rather than being turned toward the patriarchal forces feminism has
defined as the rightful objects of women’s rage. Though Meg, Babe,
and Lenny have each tested or transgressed the limits society places
on female behavior, they have in a sense been punished (or have
even punished themselves) for doing so.
Moreover, the women’s petty jealousies and bickering fuel the
widespread notion that “females … cannot develop solidarity,” an
idea which, as Dale Spender notes, “is not inconsistent with patriarchal order” since it helps forestall the power and independence such
solidarity might very well produce (38). Like the feminine destructiveness implied in the references to Hurricane Camille, this threat
of betrayal from within is itself embedded in the play’s imagery. As
they sit down to a game of cards, Lenny reminds her sisters of the
rules: “Hearts are bad, but the Black Sister is the worst of all-” (74),
an image which suggests not only the sisters’ potential for betrayal
but also the dangers inherent in “having a heart,” in feeling love for
themselves, for each other, or for outsiders.
But where do these crimes of self-destructiveness and fear originate? A closer look reveals that another type of crime has been committed here as well, not by the on-stage women, but rather by the
powerful off-stage men, particularly the patriarchal character, Old
Granddaddy.
In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Girard argues against “the lie
of spontaneous desire” and the “illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted,” offering in place of this illusion a
model of what he calls “triangular” desire (16). 2 Starting from the
example of Don Quixote’s worshipful imitation of Amadis, or, more
precisely, of the chivalric model Amadis holds out for him, Girard
proposes a new understanding of the workings of desire in literary
structures. According to his analysis, Don Quixote (and other literary figures like him) desires “according to Another” (4); in other words,
since Quixote’s desire imitates the model of chivalry, this desire is not
freely or spontaneously directed toward its object. Rather, it is bor-
Crimes of the Heart/39
rowed or “mediated”: Quixote “no longer chooses the objects of his
own desire-Amadis must choose for him” (1).
As his title implies, Girard focuses his analysis on narrative fiction,
but in her pioneering study of theatre semiotics, Lire le theatre, Anne
Ubersfeld presents a strikingly similar argument about the mechanism of desire in dramatic works (see esp. 67-118). Like Girard,
Ubersfeld bases her study on a structuralist paradigm. Analyzing
the formal links between the various “actants” or basic units of
dramatic action, Ubersfeld also focuses on a variety of triangular relationships involving the subject’s desire for an object as well as the
intervention of a third figure. The most significant of these for our
discussion is what Ubersfeld calls the “psychological triangle,” consisting of subject, object, and what she (following A.J. Greimas and
Etienne Souriau) identifies as the “sender” (destinateur), a designation which corresponds roughly to Girard’s mediator. Although her
emphasis on the psychological nature of the subject’s desire at first
seems antithetical to Girard’s concern with mediation, Ubersfeld
quickly goes on to show how this subject-object r.elationship “is directly dependent on ideology” (87, my translation). Using the example of Corneille’s The Cid, she underlines the validation of the hero’s
choice of object (his beloved, Chimene) by both feudal values and
the ideas of the monarchy. In other words, Rodrigue does not
merely choose the object of his desire on the basis of his own
“psychological” preferences; his desire is also ideologically determined or mediated. In thus emphasizing the ideological nature of
the mediation process, Ubersfeld’s observation provides an important refinement of Girard’s theory. .
As we shall see, the mediation of the protagonist’s des~re in Crimes
of the Heart, like the mediation of the desires of women in patriarchal
society as a whole, carries with it a strong ideological component.
Neither Girard nor Ubersfeld comments on the feminist implications of his/her model; but wherea~ Girard’s. focus on individual
protagonists is essentially non-politicized, Ubersfe~d’s :sug~estion
about the impact of ideology has .the advantage of htghhghtmg the
institutional and social ramifications of the notion of mediated desire. Her remarks thus open the way to connecting this mediation
with the patriarchal ideology which serves as a focal point of feminist
theory and criticism.
,
·.
Looking back at Henley’s play through the lens of these nottons of
mediation we can more easily perceive the central characters’ dependency ~n the off-stag{) patri;u:ch, and the sig~ificant role h.e plays
in determining each sister’s desire: ~abe’s. situatt~n once aga,n~ pr~c
vides the most obvious example. Dtscussmg thetr younger sisters
Crimes of the Heart/ 41
40 I Laughlin
wedding, Lenny reminds Meg, “Old Granddaddy used to call [Babe]
his Dancing Sugar Plum. Why, remember how proud and happy he
was the day she married Zachery…. He remarked how Babe was
gonna skyrocket right to the heights of Hazlehurst society. And how
Zachery was just the right man for her whe.ther she knew it. or not” (21-~2,
emphasis added). Babe, it seems, had virtually no say m the select~on
of her own husband; on her wedding day, she only remembers bemg
“drunk on champagne punch” (71).
The arugument over Meg’s lies about her singing career reveals
the extent to which this decision, too, was determined by Old Granddaddy:
.•• I hate myself when I lie for that old man. I do. I feel so
weak. And then I have to go and do at least three or four things
that I know he’d despise just to get even with that miserable,
old, bossy man!
MEG:
Oh Meg, please don’t talk so about Old Granddaddy!
It sounds so ungrateful. Why, he went out of his way to make a
home for us, to treat us like we were his own children. All he
everwanted was the best for us. That’s all he ever wanted.
LENNY:
MEG:
Well, I guess it was; but sometimes I wonder what we wanted.
(69-70, my italics)
Whereas Babe has been pushed out of the family home and into the
role of wife and social climber, Meg has been urged to seek stardom
in Hollywood, to get her “foot put in one of those blocks of cement
they’ve got out there” (23). Although she may have thought th~t she
left. for California of her own volition, both she and the audtence
come to see the pursuit of her career as an effort to please Old
Granddaddy, to satisfy or, as Girard would say, imitate his desire for
her success.
Lenny’s case is more complex. The most obvious object of her desire would seem to be Charlie Hill, the man she claims to have rejected because of her own infertility. But let us look more closely at
this rejection. Very early in the play Meg asks Babe whether Lenny
broke off the affair ‘”Cause of Old Granddaddy?” (37). In Act II,
she goes on to insist that Lenny will never be happy if she keeps living her life “as Old Granddaddy’s nursemaid” (79). Yet this model of
self-sacrificing behavior is the one Lenny, with perhaps more than a
little prompting from Old Granddaddy, has chosen to imitate. Early
in Act I, Babe confides to Meg that Lenny has begun wearing her
dead grandmother’s sunhat and garden gloves (34), and the play’s
frequent reference to Lenny’s homemaking activities indicate the
extent to which she has taken on the role of wife and mother in the
family home. But in emphasizing not only Lenny’s domesticity but
also her continued efforts to care for her grandfather, Henley shows
us the advantages of this model for the patriarchal figure. Lenny,
who has even taken to sleeping in the kitchen (the “woman’s place”
par excellence) in order to more quickly respond to Old Granddaddy’s needs, has embodied the common pattern of men using the
labour of women.
But we should note here that Lenny (like Babe, Meg, and countless women both real and fictional) feels she has made this choice
herself. She tells her sisters that she has rejected Charlie, before even
telling him about her “underdeveloped ovary,” because she wanted
to avoid giving him the chance to reject her. Once he has been rejected, however, her only option is to remain at home and “service”
her grandfather. Henley thus lets her characters “act and speak” but
subsequently shows us the mediator, re-establishing “the true hierarchy of desire while pretending to believe in the weak reasoning advanced by [her] character” in support of the notion of her own free
choice (Girard 15). Babe, Meg, and Lenny are in this sense victims of
the limited and oppressive models of behavior offered to them by
Old Granddaddy (and the patriarchal structure as a whole). These
connections between the female characters’ choices and the workings of mediated desire, however, not only reveal. the patriarchal
criminality, but also help to explain the self-destructive nature of the
women’s actions.
The example of Meg’s mental breakdown is instructive here.
Commenting on Phyllis Chesler’s study of Women and Madn.ess,
Shoshana Felman defines madness as “the impasse confrontmg
those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of
[outward] protest or self-affirmation …. a.r~quest for h~lp, ~.mani~es
tation both of cultural impotence and political castration. T~e Implications of this definition become clearer as F~lman co~tmues,
“this socially-defined help-needing and help-seeking behaviOr pattern is itself part of the female conditioning, ideologically inherent
in the behavorial pattern and in the dependent and helpless role assigned to the woman as such” (2-3): ~usan Griffi~ goes a step ~u~ther
in labelling the culture ruled by this Ideolog.y as porno~aphic an~
her work helps to clarify the nature of the Ideology which Henley s
characters imitate even as it threatens to destroy them. In Pornogmphy and Silence Griffin juxtaposes ·:sil~nce a~d the silencing o!
women” with the “creation of authonty m the tmage of the male
(201). Against the background of this silence is projected “society’s
42/Laughlin
image of what a woman ought to be,” an image which “women, who
live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically,
feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to” (202 and 204).
The woman’s own desires and aspirations, then, become lost behind
this image; and yet, Griffin suggests, in our fears, depression, and
even our madness, “our soul attempts to play out for us our own
knowledge ofloss” (206).
Meg’s madness comes upon her at a moment of impasse. Having
lost her job because she “couldn’t sing anymore” (85) she seems overcome by a sense of emptiness and failure. With the help of Griffin’s
insights, we can connect this experience both with Meg’s recognition
of the impossibility of truly becoming a “star” she had hoped to be
(since that, after all, is not her desire) and, more importantly, with her
sudden glimpse of the self under this false image of success and
glamour. Although initially we might be tempted to characterize
part of the particular image Meg has cultivated as “masculine” (at
several points in the play we hear of her attempts to avoid showing
signs of weakness), this quest for strength really amounts to a refusal
to care, a numbing rejection of her own powerful emotions; it is
another dimension of the silencing of her own desires and inner
being rather than a m …
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