Queer Affects: A Study of Madness in Postwar American Drama

Abstract

Since the Second World War, a normative citizenship pivoting around the white, middle-class, heteronormative family has developed in America. Those whose lifestyles fall outside of social norms are conceived as deviants to American society. While the white, middle-class, familial structure of wives as housekeepers and husbands as breadwinners is acknowledged as mainstream, legitimate, and desirable, the lifestyles of homeless women, childless couples, hybrid women, lesbians, and gays are stigmatized as marginalized, morbid, shameful, and mad. Madness thereby becomes a power mechanism centered on identity performance and family structure. Confronted with mainstream discourse’s denigration and oppression of the nonconformists, playwrights attempt to interrogate the postwar discourse of madness in America through dramatic portrayal of nonconformist characters in nonstereotyped and disruptive ways. Drawing upon Lauren Berlant’s and other theorists’ conceptualization of affect as a transpersonal capacity that transgresses the existing power relations and identity structures, this thesis examines American playwrights’ dramatization of affective performance and power negotiation in five dramas of madness. Through analyzing the following plays, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1962), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Paula Vogel’s And Baby Make Seven (1982), and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991), this thesis proposes that postwar American theatre of madness creates an affective sphere alternative to that of mainstream culture. According to Berlant’s study, American mainstream culture provides an intimate public sphere of affect for individuals to attach their feelings and lifestyles to a national sense of belonging and citizenship. This thesis argues that postwar American drama of madness creates an alternative affective space to present nonconformist characters’ struggle within and negotiation with the dominant structure of power and identity.

This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on female desire and gender performance in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In postwar America, to deal with the national crisis of veteran re-accommodation and manhood rehabilitation, women were propagated by government and media to shift from being wartime workers to conventional wives and mothers. Performing conventional femininity thereby, to a large degree, became the sole way for women to gain citizenship. Streetcar addresses the existential predicament of a working-class housewife, Stella Kowalski, and the madness of a single, penniless, middle-aged Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. While Stella has to stand her husband’s domestic violence for material protection and sexual fulfillment, Blanche performances double femininities of ideal belle and femme fatale so as to earn herself protection and shelter. During her doubled gender performances, Blanche undergoes intensive feelings of anxiety and fear as her excessive sexuality and manipulative femininity are conceived as threats to the stability of American family and society. As her complex femininity is condemned by Stanley and the male-dominated society to the status of a mad prostitute, Blanche adopts identity imagination—envisioning herself as an elegant belle rescued by a gentleman instead of a degraded woman taken away by a doctor to asylum—as a strategy to resist mainstream society’s denigration of female desire, although she could not escape the tragedy of being defined and confined as a mad woman.

Chapter 2 examines multiple masculinities and power games in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In the conservative fifties, a hegemonic paternalistic masculinity around man’s role as a successful breadwinner and an authoritative father was constructed. In Woolf, Albee concentrates on the dark power games played by his characters embodying different forms of masculinities, including George’s bookish masculinity, Martha’s female masculinity, and Nick’s ideal masculinity. Given that the games’ engagement with insult, violence, seduction, and fantasy poses a serious challenge to middle-class morality, the characters tend to be condemned by critics as “morbid” and insane. This chapter argues that the dark power games indeed provide the characters with an alternative space to parody and subvert the conventional gender role and power structure in white, middle-class family. In those games, such gendered attributes as physical strength, career ambition, sexual prowess, or wit and intelligence are simply demonstrations of their identity and their attempts at ascendancy. In particular, Albee foregrounds the affective energy involved in these performative negotiations, highlighting the role that improvised affect—public humiliation, righteous fury, and intimidation—play in putting power on display. Power positions are thereby taken, relinquished and subverted. Through power games, Albee reveals the performance of masculinity and femininity and the fluidity of gender positions.

Chapter 3 probes into Kennedy’s presentation of black women’s identity and madness in Funnyhouse of A Negro. In the turbulent sixties of Civil Rights movement and Black Power movement, a racial confrontation between white hatred for the black people and black pride of their ethnicity permeated American society. While scholarship tends to regard Sarah’s madness—the fragmentation of her selfhood into four figures—as Kennedy’s criticism on racial binarism, this chapter explores Sarah’s split selves as manifestations of black woman’s complex affects and critical reflections on whiteness and blackness on stage. In Funnyhouse, Sarah imagines herself as four influential characters of black and white, male and female: Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus. This imagination manifests Sarah’s aspiration for beauty, nobility and power epitomized by white aristocratic women and her admiration for back liberation movement led by black men. Nevertheless, Sarah’s identity as a mixed-race woman makes her subordinated in both white and black community. Sarah deforms the visualized embodiment of influential figures to interrogate the racial and gender structure in America. Through the disruptive black performances, Kennedy presents Victoria’s and Hapsburg’s whiteness as hybrid and frightening, Sarah’s and Lumumba’s blackness as injured and tormented, and Jesus’s Christianity as racist and vicious. Kennedy’s black performance of deformation subverts the power discourse of racial binarism, white supremacy, and male dominance in American society.

Chapter 4 attends to lesbian identity and gaiety politics in Vogel’s And Baby Make Seven. In the Reagan era, the traditional family structure and gender/sexual roles were recuperated as essential measures to save American society from moral decay, purportedly caused by nonconformists and their liberal movements. In Baby, Vogel represents a queer home to unsettle the affective and power structure in the conventional family. The queer home consists of two lesbian mothers, one gay father, one impending baby, and three imagined boys. The playful parenthood and dynamic familial relations improvised by three queer characters challenge the power hierarchy of solemn and authoritative fatherhood in the conventional family. The two lesbian characters’ campy enactment of boyishness with their female bodies subverts the binary assumption of masculinity as authentic and superior and the femininity and boyhood as immature and secondary. Besides, Vogel also makes a burlesque of classical mad scenes in drama, deconstructing the authoritative representation of madness as tragic and exploring the creative and redemptive potential of a fictional world, such as role playing and parodic performance.

Chapter 5 deals with issues of national catastrophe and affective community in Kushner’s Angels in America. In the 1980s, as the AIDS epidemic became rampant in gay communities, an intensive discrimination against gay men as “abnormal,” “diseased,” and “dangerous” permeated in mainstream America. Until 1987, the Reagan administration begun to address the topic and rendered a major policy concerning AIDS control. In Angels in America, Kushner challenges Reagan era’s homophobia, conservatism and progressivism. Performing the “madness” of Harper and Prior as manifestation of their suffering and loneliness neglected by mainstream discourse, Kushner interrogates the national myth of progress as a cruel fantasy upheld and practiced by the privileged white, middle/upper-class, heterosexual men. The national catastrophe in Reagan era is not AIDS epidemic, but rather the political discrimination and indifference against tormented groups. Kushner further affirms the potential that nonconformists’ affects, such as fear, hope, kindness, and forgiveness, possess in initiating multicultural political groups and inclusive spaces of belonging.

In postwar America, madness is concentrated as a kernel theme of dramatic representation. In representing madness, American playwrights foreground the nonconformists, who are marginalized and subordinated in mainstream culture, as central subjects of discussion and exploration. The modern and contemporary plays of madness in particular address nonconformist characters’ wrestling with mainstream discourse, highlighting their feelings and sufferings, and emphasizing these affects’ disruptive effect and the characters’ negotiation with it. This thesis argues that postwar American drama of madness initiates an alternative affective sphere to explore, present and affirm nonconformists’ existence in American society. In this theatrical space, these playwrights not only uncover the way that affects participate in the national construction of power hierarchy, but more importantly, acknowledge the role that nonconventional affects and desires play in interrogating national fantasy of homogenous identity and constructing diversified modes of being and living. In performing characters’ affective struggles, identity negotiations, and power reconstructions, the postwar American drama of madness not merely subverts mainstream discourse’s denigration, confinement and silencing of nonconformist characters, but also represents a more multifaceted picture of American society beyond mainstream narrative of middle-class monolith. A more dynamic space of belonging and power relations is also constructed as a potential part of American society and culture.

Date of Award	21 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Xiaofei WEI (External Supervisor), Joanna Gwen MANSBRIDGE (Supervisor) & Hiu Yen Klaudia LEE (Supervisor)