4

Th e Rol e of Fe m a l e Bon di ng on
t h e Stage of Viol e nc e
María Dolores Narbona-Carrión

P atriarchy has traditionally promoted a very negative perspec-

tive of any type of solidarity between women, an attitude sup-
ported even by popular sayings such as “[w]omen are each other’s
worst enemies.” Added to this, as Nina Auerbach concludes in
Communities of Women, whereas men traditionally benefit from
male bonding, sisterhood “looks often like a blank exclusion,” and
communities of women “may suggest less the honor of fellow-
ship than a society, an austere banishment from both social power
and biological rewards” (3). Nevertheless, the silence that has also
helped negative and misguided ideas about female bonding to grow
is being broken by the recognition of the necessity to make society
discover and recognize the real nature and importance of women’s
solidarity. In fact, the relevance of bonding among women, a pow-
erful instrument in the fight against gender violence, has been
studied in depth at a theoretical and at a practical level, dealing,
for example, with its portrayal in literature. However, in most of
the studies dealing with this subject, the focus is set exclusively on
the narrative genre: here I extend the field and look at how women
dramatists treat female bonding in their plays.
Traditionally, cultural manifestations have contributed to the
propagation of the content of the previously cited saying, includ-
ing the dramatic art. A number of American plays and dramatists
that offer an image of women who are distrustful and competi-
tive among each other readily come to mind. Clare Boothe’s The
Women might be considered an archetype of this conception of
62 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

woman, as its female characters are so hostile to each other that

the play can be described as a savage catfight. Besides, most of
these examples are created by canonical writers who either portray
the type of women described above or reduce the possibilities of
female characters to trivial roles that humiliate them by ignoring
their real capabilities and potentials, thus leading the audience to
the wrong impression that other alternatives for women in the-
ater and maybe in real life are nonexistent or disastrous. In the
first case, when women are depicted as strong-willed or with a
complex psychological base that differentiates them from their flat
and passive models, they usually end up being unsuccessful, frus-
trated, or unfulfilled, as Sue-Ellen Case explains (122). We have
witnessed this in relevant plays that range from classic times to
the present, among which August: Osage County, winner of the
2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, by Tracy Letts, stands out. This
play represents just the opposite effects of solidarity among women
that I am going to focus on in this chapter: in August: Osage
County, female characters are linked by blood ties, but there is a
distinct lack of female bonding; instead, they hurt each other time
and time again. Besides, the female protagonist, who competes in
strength with the rest of the characters and eventually “wins,” is
shown at the end of the play as a completely isolated, miserable,
and destroyed person, giving the impression that if she had been
weaker, more humble, and passive, she would have enjoyed a hap-
pier denouement. Among the playwrights that seem to promote
this female attitude—which corresponds to the second feminine
model previously indicated—is Sam Shepard, in whose plays the
commonest victims of violence are female characters confined to
roles that tend to be so limited that they can be described as “weak,
dependent, problematic, and missing in every way” (Görmez 142).
In addition, Case denounces how even certain techniques for the
inner construction of a character rely on Freudian principles that
promote the passivity of female characters and their isolation from
the social community (123). It seems as if these types of plays and
playings tried to hide the potential that women actually possess
and how it increases enormously when they join forces, because, as
another proverb says, “unity is strength.”
However, fortunately, there are prestigious contemporary
American playwrights who have offered us other versions of
female behavior, following the example of Susan Glaspell, Sophie
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 63

Treadwell, or Rachel Crothers, among others. This is the case, for

example, of Heather McDonald and Lynn Nottage, who have por-
trayed women from different origins and epochs who react against
violence and oppressive circumstances and have allowed them to
speak overtly about the injustices that they suffer. This chapter
focuses on plays written by these two dramatists, concretely on
Poof! (1993) and Ruined (2009), by Nottage, and on Dream of
a Common Language (1992), by McDonald. These three plays
reveal that women are not always mere passive sufferers of vio-
lence, but that they can react in a variety of ways against injustice;
the plays also show the positive effects of women uniting their
forces through female bonding. This selection demonstrates the
richness of theater, as it can spread the same message by using a
variety of forms. I consider that these three plays share the inten-
tion of making the audience reflect about the power of female
bonding to fight against gender violence in diverse contexts and
circumstances and to make it “act,” as Nottage explains to Dayo
Olopade, talking about Ruined. However, the plays do this in dif-
ferent ways: Poof! uses comic elements as a vehicle to reach the
audience more easily; Ruined is based on true stories narrated to
Nottage by Congolese victims, and shaped in a more tragic form;
and Dream of a Common Language, without renouncing either
humor or realism, includes magic elements and practices close
to ritual to emphasize the richness of the female sphere, a strat-
egy that betokens McDonald’s admitted attraction to metaphor,
images, dreamlike world, and ritual (Stoudt 36). This affluence of
dramatic expressions follows Patricia Schroeder’s conclusion that
feminist playwrights may use a variety of dramatic forms, includ-
ing realism, to liberate their creativity and portray the story of
female experience that they want to express (154).
Despite the above mentioned differences in form, these three
plays have female bonding as one of their common threads. They
show that it is possible for women who suffer violence to have an
active role, that there has been an evolution in the options por-
trayed on stage, which has transformed the passivity that is tradi-
tionally associated with victimization to more dynamic and active
positions. These offer alternatives to mere resignation or lamenta-
tion, attitudes that do not lead to the improvement of unjust situ-
ations. Female bonding is one of those options promoted by some
American women playwrights that not only enrich the theatrical
64 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

scene with its tactics related to content and strategies, but also,
given the didactic potential of this art, they highlight the fact that
possibilities of improving our society with respect to the violence
perpetrated against women exist. Besides, Nottage and McDonald
lead us to consider that the use of female bonding is a driving force
for useful initiatives against gender violence, which is shared by
women playwrights from different ethnic, cultural, and geograph-
ical origins, as Nottage is an African American and McDonald
is Caucasian. I agree with them and consider that literature in
general and theater in particular has the responsibility of portray-
ing, promoting, and stimulating the creation and reinforcement
of female bonds, because they have the possibility of constituting
one of the political means of neutralizing violence against women.
It is my purpose to demonstrate here how this selection of plays
shows that female strength and rebellion can derive from this pow-
erful bond.
In my analysis, I have been influenced by Judith Kegan
Gardiner’s theories of female bonding related to novels, accord-
ing to which, as Donald J. Greiner explains, female authors write
in such a way as to stress bonding not only between the hero-
ines that they create, but also “among female author, reader, and
character” (46). I consider that this statement can be applied to
certain plays written by American women, as they too reinforce
the bonding between the playwright, the reader/audience, and
the characters’ personal experiences. This is what happened to
Nottage, for example, as she explains referring to Ruined: “I real-
ized that I am telling a story not just about these women, I am
telling a story about myself . . . And I also feel a tremendous sis-
terhood with these women” (Olopade). Besides, if actress Rosie
Perez’s confession is taken into account, other participants can
also be added to this process of bonding. Perez has declared that
when she played the role of Loureen, a battered woman in Poof!,
she felt that this problem is shared by women from different social
classes, races, and cultures, and that it affects all women, includ-
ing herself (“Rosie Perez”).
In fact, there are many plays written by American women which
portray the positive effects of solidarity among female characters
in diverse ways and with different consequences, in some cases
even showing some of the activities and practices traditionally con-
nected to female bonding, such as meeting in consciousness-raising
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 65

groups and participating in demonstrations in favor of women’s

rights, as some of Wendy Wasserstein’s plays do; celebrating their
female experiences in what might represent almost a ritual, full of
beauty and magic, as in Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves
and in Heather McDonald’s Dream of a Common Language; unit-
ing women who are broken by pain with ties that are stronger
than the ties of family, as Ruined portrays; or simply highlighting
in more subtle ways how important it is for women to receive the
support, help, and empathy of other women, as Poof! and Dream
of a Common Language demonstrate.
In the same way as the three plays on which this chapter focuses
use different dramatic forms to emphasize the importance of female
bonding, they are also related to several types of gender violence,
including physical or direct violence, which is present in Ruined
and in Poof!, and what has been described in the Introduction
as structural violence, defined by Marta Torres-Falcón as “vio-
lence that originates in the institutions, in the assignment of
hierarchies . . . and in the uneven distribution of power” (50; my
translation).
In her plays, Nottage offers a wide spectrum of themes related
to violence, but I am focusing on Ruined and Poof! because they
deal concretely with gender violence, the main theme of this book.
Ruined, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and seven Best
Play awards, including the New York Critics’ Circle, Drama Desk,
and Obie awards, certainly leaves nobody indifferent when fac-
ing the atrocities that Congolese women have suffered. And this
seems to have been the playwright’s purpose: she has recognized
Brecht’s influence in the use of distancing in the play, but, instead
of using it to make the audience engage intellectually with her
drama, she preferred to engage people emotionally, because she
thinks “they react more out of emotion” (McGee). With this inten-
tion, Nottage recommends careful casting of the actors (Olopade),
some of whom have even had firsthand experience of war zones in
Africa (McGee).
This search for the public’s emotional response has brought
about some critiques that highlight that the play is not “form-
shattering” or “an intellectual epic” (Brantley) and consider its
sentimental elements as the main flaws of Ruined, among them
its ending and the distressing monologues. In any case, Nottage,
in a play where both psychological and physical consequences
66 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

of violence against women can be seen in the external scars and

internal wounds that the female characters bear, has achieved her
goal of helping to raise awareness of the suffering of women who
are victims of war without being depressing, as Chris Jones’s and
Adrienn Gecse’s reviews of the play point out. Gecse adds that,
even if you have read a lot about African civil wars and its terrible
effects on people, “seeing it on stage makes you aware that this is
not only a story, but the cruel reality for millions of people in many
parts of Africa even today.”
In effect, Nottage has managed to portray the appalling expe-
riences of a group of women on whose bodies men have fought
their battles, to use the words of one of the protagonists, without
making the audience reject the cruelty of their stories, thanks to
the crafty way in which the playwright has constructed the plot.
Besides, as McGee explains, Nottage had the intention of suffus-
ing the play with the utmost authenticity, and she considered that
this implied the depiction not only of the violence that character-
izes the African continent, but also of cultural constituents like
its own language—Nottage includes some Swahili terms—music,
and songs, which emphasize how beautiful and gorgeous it is. This
positive perspective affects the setting, especially the whorehouse,
which represents a kind of oasis in the middle of the Congolese
war, where clients have to wash their hands and feet before enter-
ing the place, soldiers have to leave their bullets at the bar, and
where people come “to leave behind whatever mess they made out
there” (76). Ben Brantley compares it to a “gaudy sanctuary sur-
rounded by abstract trees,” and it certainly works in the play as an
idyllic refuge from the terrible dangers that threaten the characters
outside. Inside this bar, even the songs sung and danced by the
prostitutes invite one to forget the sufferings derived from the war,
as this extract shows: “You come here to forget,/ you say drive
away all regret/ And dance like it’s the ending/ The ending of the
war” (20). It is only near the end when this brothel seems to be
more real, when the light and war sounds from outside invade the
stage. But, before that, in this shelter, ten women, among whom
Josephine, Sophie, and Salima stand out, develop a very close con-
nection under the patronage of Mama Nadi. She is the madam,
who remains neutral in political terms with respect to the war and
protects her girls against the outer threats, which, far from being
imagined or exaggerated, have already been experienced by these
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 67

women. Sophie is “ruined” after having been raped by soldiers

with a bayonet, Salima had been the victim of multiple rape that
made her husband and family reject her, and Josephine is a chief’s
daughter who has become a prostitute trying to find the security
that she had lost after her home was raided by the soldiers.
These atrocious stories, which are based on those narrated by
Congolese women that Nottage and Kate Whoriskey interviewed,
appear gradually, in the sisterly atmosphere that these women cre-
ate as the play develops. The audience witnesses how these women
help, support, and try to console each other as they spend time
together. But this experience takes place not without the pres-
ence of ambiguities and conflicts, as happens in everyday life. This
affects especially Mama Nadi, who seems to be very commanding
and domineering, giving the impression that she treats her girls as
merchandise; but the audience soon discovers that this attitude is
required by the harsh context in which she has to manage her busi-
ness. She demonstrates that she really cares for the women who
work for her on several occasions, for example, when she accepts
Sophie even though she is “ruined,” allowing her, on the whole, to
entertain the soldiers with her songs and getting her to help with
the brothel’s accounts. Moreover, Mama Nadi shows her generos-
ity and love for the women who work for her when she renounces
the opportunity to start a new and safe life because she does not
want to leave her girls unprotected.
However, Ruined does not reserve positive attitudes exclusively
to women: Christian, a travelling salesman, reveals that his love
for Mama is authentic, as he does not reject her when she con-
fesses that she is also “ruined.” However, the general impression
given by the rest of the male characters is very negative, and it is
even increased by the fact that several of the male actors are cast
in multiple roles, as if implying that they all share the same nega-
tive essence: they can be interchangeable and can even belong
to opposing armies. In any case, Christian seems to be differ-
ent from the other men, and contributes to the open ending of
the play in which “Mama and Christian continue their measured
dance ” as “the lights slowly fade ” (102). This beautiful and poetic
scene contrasts with the dramatic quality of previous scenes and
the horrific effect of the war sounds that seem to be approaching
the brothel as the play develops. Besides, even if this conclusion,
taken out of context, might seem to belong to a conventional
68 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

happy-ending play, one must not ignore that the plot leaves many
matters unsolved and includes more tragic conclusions for the
secondary characters. This apparent paradox follows the intention
of Kate Whoriskey, director of the play’s premiere production,
who has explained her wish to stage complexity and contrasting
elements (xii–xiii), which can be interpreted as a consequence of
Nottage’s purpose to make audiences reflect and react after seeing
the play.
In any case, it is my impression and that of several theater crit-
ics and members of the audience that even if the play portrays a
very poignant story— and it turns out to be even more so because
it reflects real history— the audience discovers, as Nottage herself
predicts, “a surprising sense of hope” in Ruined (McGee). And I
think this sense of hope, one of the admitted focuses of the play
according to both Whoriskey and Nottage (Whoriskey xii), derives
in great part from the realization that all women can escape their
fates as victims of violence and oppression, and that a means to
reach this goal can be the strength derived from their female
bonding, from caring for each other, as much as Mama Nadi does
for her girls in the play.
As I affirmed previously, Lynn Nottage reflects different types
of violence in her plays, and Poof! serves to illustrate this statement.
The playwright seems to have been influenced by the impetus to
address domestic violence that came out in the sixties and the sev-
enties and continues at present (O’Toole, Schiffman, and Kiter-
Edwards 243). Despite the seriousness of this subject, Nottage
is not afraid of ignoring theatrical conventions when she decides
to portray the drama of battered women in a humoristic tone.
Therefore, instead of focusing on the tragic elements of violence, in
Poof! she subverted traditions, as Mikhail Bakhtin proposed, and
has written a short comedy. In effect, Bakhtin promoted the liber-
ating force of laughter and considered that parody is full of creative
potential and is the “corrective of reality” (55). It is very easy to
imagine how attractive these virtues of humor are for women play-
wrights like Nottage, who hope to improve women’s lives through
their artistic creations. Nottage has been writing plays since she
was eight and has found her inspiration in the women in her fam-
ily and neighborhood: nurses, teachers, activists, and artists, who
used to gather in her mother’s kitchen, sitting at the table and tell-
ing their stories (“A Talk with the Playwright”).
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 69

In Poof!, which premiered in Louisville and won the Heideman

Award in 1993, Nottage focuses on what happens after an abused
wife condemns her husband to hell and he actually goes, leaving
behind simply a pile of ashes. As stage directions indicate, gender
violence can occur in any domestic setting, since the only specif-
ics given are literally: “Time: The present”; “Place: Kitchen” (91).
Consequently, the above mentioned production at the Humana
Festival did not need sophisticated scenery to set the story in
motion; as Nottage explains: “Only two actresses and a pile of
ash were enough to capture the imagination of the audience”
(“A Talk with the Playwright”). I consider that this reduction to
basic elements has been possible due to the universality of the
terrible problem of domestic violence, which affects women from
all social classes and races. In addition, this global quality is sup-
ported by the fact that the play has been produced all around the
world— in places such as Japan, Austria, Singapore, Mexico, and
Spain— to the point of making Nottage amazed by the power
of this story; she considers that it has made women around the
world connect with these issues and “find some resonance for
their lives” (“A Talk with the Playwright”).
In this typically feminine setting, Loureen, the protagonist,
shares with her female neighbor and best friend, Florence, not
only her surprise when they discover her husband’s spontaneous
combustion, but also the suffering derived from a marriage in
which they represent merely home servants without initiatives of
their own, and their respective husbands’ habit of abusing them.
Loureen is convinced that she and Florence share these problems
with so many women that, when they might get to know about her
husband’s miraculous disappearance, she would become for them
a kind of a new saint, as she tells her: “All that needs to happen
now is for my palms to bleed and I’ll be eternally remembered as
St. Loureen, the Patron of Battered Wives” (97). Even if Nottage
uses humor to deal with the serious subject of gender violence, it
would be wrong to infer that she does not give this problem its
deserved magnitude; on the contrary, the playwright has overtly
recognized her interest in denouncing the situation of victims of
domestic violence that she had the opportunity to meet when she
worked with Amnesty International for four years. In the same
interview, she has spoken about her concern for abuse of women,
highlighting the importance of making it public, as she does in
70 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

Ruined and in Poof!, and emphasizing the necessity of considering

this problem in community, as something that women, joining
their voices, must eradicate (“A Talk with the Playwright”).
In the play, Loureen uses this voice, a voice her husband had
prevented her from using, as she confesses to Florence: “Samuel
always said if I raised my voice something horrible would happen”
(97). This is just one of the threats made by Loureen’s husband.
In the conversation between the two women, Nottage reflects the
support that they give each other and gives many details of the
oppression that both their husbands exerted over them, some-
times with dramatic tones, as happens when Florence explains
to Loureen with these words why she should not call the police:
“Why? What are you gonna tell them? About all those times they
refused to help, about all those nights you slept in my bed ’cause
you were afraid to stay down here? About the time he nearly took
out your eye ’cause you flipped the television channel?” (102).
Here, Florence, impotent, seems to suffer what Lenore Walker
calls “learned helplessness,” explained by O’Toole, Schiffman, and
Kiter-Edwards as “the result of women’s becoming psychologi-
cally conditioned to the experience of abuse over a period of time”
(250). But this quotation reflects as well the ineffectiveness and
passivity of the government, the police, and other institutions that
should help the victims of violence, as Nottage denounces overtly
in “A Talk with the Playwright.”
Despite these difficulties, Poof! has broken the stereotypes that
commonly represent abused women as isolated, sad, and passive
human beings and has shown, instead, supportive female charac-
ters who use humor, which functions as a vehicle to transmit the
playwright’s message more clearly. In Poof!, Nottage demonstrates
that abused women should not resign themselves to accepting
their unjust conditions of life, that, if they use their inventiveness
and join forces, they might be amazed, as Loureen was, at the
results. In effect, even if the spontaneous combustion of Loureen’s
husband seems to have come as a surprise, as the play develops, the
spectator discovers that these two battered women have had many
conversations in which they have considered how to get rid of their
respective abusive husbands. In the play, Nottage focuses on the
importance of communication among women in cases of domestic
violence, and she highlights it overtly, too, in the previously men-
tioned interview with sentences like: “I would encourage women
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 71

who find themselves in that situation to find a close friend and

discuss it.” However, she tries as well to make the audience con-
scious that you cannot depend exclusively on your female friends
in order to change your own unjust life: every woman has to con-
vince herself, first of all, that “mornings are going to be different”
(102; emphasis added). Thus, Loureen helps her friend with her
example, with her testimony, with her words, and her support, but
she refuses Florence’s invitation to go upstairs with her “and spit
out your words and . . . ” (102), because she considers that this is
something that Florence has to do personally.
In the same way as some female characters, like Loureen, have
dared to react against certain traditions and conventions in order
to escape passivity and oppression, also some women playwrights
have opted to violate classical theatrical rules such as those dealing
with the fixed organization of action to obtain a concrete effect.
Nottage shows herself as one of them again when she, in Poof!,
turns to a free structure where the climax comes early, instead of
allowing the action to build up to it. Besides, Nottage manages
to make it happen quite abruptly by making use of lightning: the
play opens in darkness, and the audience can only hear Samuel’s
voice threatening Loureen, and Loureen sending him to hell; then
there is a bright flash, and it is only after this that the spectator can
see the stage as the lights rise. By doing so, Nottage stresses the
surprising and almost miraculous disappearance of Loureen’s hus-
band and brings to focus what really matters: the decisions taken
by the protagonist after the explosion, and the feeling of release
and freedom that she enjoys and shares with her friend.
The ending leaves the spectators with a positive sensation, too,
created through humor, but also because the protagonist is liber-
ated from her husband’s tyranny, without them being able to blame
her for having killed him, as she was not conscious of the tremen-
dous power of her voice, a voice she invites her friend and the audi-
ence to use. Loureen helps Florence to think about her possible
reactions toward domestic violence in the same way as Nottage
manages to make the public realize allegorically that there is hope
for battered women, that if they believe in changes and work for
them, the miracle will take place. Loureen, after sweeping her
husband’s ashes under the carpet, sets the table and sits down to
eat her dinner jubilantly. Florence cannot share Loureen’s meal
because she is still afraid of her spouse, who wanted her always at
72 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

home; but surely, she goes upstairs reflecting about what has hap-
pened to her friend and “the hundred things” she has told her that
she can “think up” (101).
The protagonists of Poof! and Ruined are victims, in the same
sense in which Miriam López- Rodríguez uses this term in
chapter 5, of direct gender violence, whereas in the analysis of
Dream of a Common Language, I am going to focus on more sub-
tle ways of abuse, connected to structural and systemic violence.
In this case, the benefits of female bonding are reflected in the
reaction of a group of women artists who have been victims of
gender discrimination. The development of the play reveals how
this unfairness had taken place in the past, and it portrays the
negative effects that it has on these women.
McDonald seems to have decided to write this play parting from
the creative anger that Charlotte Canning describes in connection
with the creation of feminist plays, as indicated in chapter 2. In
effect, McDonald explains that her initiative was triggered by her
visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. On a
placard beneath one of the paintings shown there, she read a list
with the names of the participants at the dinner celebrated to plan
the first impressionist exhibit. McDonald was astonished when she
realized that not even one woman was included in that list, and
she tried to imagine how impressionist female painters must have
felt as a consequence of that exclusion. This discrimination reflects
the structural violence suffered by these women, following the
definition offered by Torres-Falcón, because it originates in the
institutions (in this case, of art), in the assignment of hierarchies
(men in the highest positions), and in the uneven distribution of
power (held exclusively by men). In McDonald’s own words, after
her visit to the National Gallery, she reflected on “what it’s like
not to be taken seriously” (qtd. in Robinson). Dream of a Common
Language recreates the distressing stories that hide behind this
unfair situation, thus bringing them to light and giving voice to
its victims, for whom their solidarity is crucial, as happens in the
two previous cases.
Dream of a Common Language is set in Paris, in 1874, on the
night of the dinner previously indicated. The adult men of the
play, Victor and Marc, are described in the list of characters as
“painters,” and it is symbolic that Clovis, the protagonist, is intro-
duced, first, as “Victor’s wife,” and only then as “a painter who
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 73

hasn’t painted in some time” (128). On the contrary, to high-

light the fact that Victor still works professionally as an artist, he
is repeatedly shown on stage carrying his paints, easel, and gun,
which symbolize his power. These and the rest of the characters
are situated in two main settings, separated by three large win-
dows, which appear and disappear by means of stage lighting:
one inside the protagonists’ house, where most of the events deal-
ing with men take place, and another one outside the building,
where the public can distinguish the garden and a graveyard in the
woods, which is Clovis’s sanctuary. These two outdoor locations
shelter mainly female experiences, including Clovis’s dreams, men-
tal digressions, fantasies, and rich artistic visions, thus illustrating
her valuable skills as an artist.
Nevertheless, as the play begins, the spectator might not be cer-
tain whether Clovis is really a woman or is rather a ghost, as she
“appears almost as an apparition in her white nightdress,” beside
a burning window (130), and later she “drifts past the windows”
and is described as a “dreamlike, fleeting image” (131), with a
pale face, messy hair, and shadowy eyes. Stage directions indicate
how lights and sounds contribute to create a chaotic atmosphere
and frenzy, in the climax of which Clovis’s arms are ripped off,
representing the fact that her artistic skills have been also “muti-
lated” by her family’s demands. Nevertheless, order reigns again
when the audience discovers that this has been a nightmare, a
representation of the psychological damage that the protagonist
suffers. Therefore, McDonald sets Dream of a Common Language
in motion, eschewing classic and realistic theatrical conventions
with the purpose of making the spectator see directly what is
inside the traumatized mind of the main victim of structural vio-
lence in the play. However, Clovis does not always suffer so much
in her parallel and abstract world of dreams, remembrances, and
thoughts. These joyful experiences are shown directly on stage
and help not only the audience but also Clovis become aware of
how much she has been changed. Besides, dreaming and remem-
bering are shown in the play almost as therapeutic and liberating
activities used by the female characters, which will reach their
best effects in the second act, when the women share them with
other women.
Unfortunately, Clovis has to come back down to earth from her
idyllic world of thoughts to confront a much sadder and unjust
74 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

reality: Victor is organizing a dinner in which no woman would sit

at the table because it was “a meeting for painters” who were “plan-
ning an exhibit” (138). Dolores’s surprise at the news of women’s
exclusion from the table is similar to that of Clovis’s, but at this
point of the play, the female characters do not enjoy the benefits
of their bonding: each of them has a rich world of thoughts and
memories that are portrayed in the form of dreams, visions, and
mirages on stage, but which are not shared yet.
Nevertheless, in act I, scene vii, the visit of Pola, another painter
and a friend of the family, changes the tone of the play to a more
realistic and cheerful one, including comic passages, as in Poof!
Pola represents the bravery that Clovis so far lacks and needs, but
she has been affected by male discrimination in her profession, too.
However, she dares, for example, to correct Victor when he calls
her works of art “illustrations” instead of “paintings” (156–57).
The fact that Victor does not give those creations serious value
symbolizes the little respect that male artists had for their female
colleagues. And this can be seen almost as a logical consequence
of the discrimination that female artists suffered as students, since
they were not allowed to attend life painting classes, which gave
them a deficient professional training when compared with their
male colleagues. This succession of discriminatory treatment
toward these women made them almost accept that they were in
an inferior position with respect to men, thus facilitating the exis-
tence of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence” (37–47)
in which the dominated, after suffering for a very long period of
time an unjust and submissive situation, finally consider it normal
and accept it.
In any case, Pola demonstrates that it is never too late to react
and fight for a more just situation. In her initiatives, Pola reflects
her intention of transforming the world of art, so that it would
not maintain the structures and operations that make women art-
ists suffer discrimination that ends too often in frustration, even
reaching dramatic extremes. She has witnessed at least two cases
of female artist friends who have considered suicide: one of them
successfully, Madeleine, Tissot’s mistress, whom “no one ever took
seriously” (148) as an artist; the other one was Clovis, who tried
to take her life by setting fire to herself. The play portrays some
examples of the “little things” (161), as Pola calls them, that might
have caused such desperation in Clovis, but its main spark came
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 75

from the humiliation she suffered when she exhibited one of her
favorite paintings and she discovered her own husband and male
colleagues laughing at it overtly because it represented typically
feminine objects. These are the same type of elements that appear
on stage adorning Clovis’s altar, such as “colored glass jars, a string
of glass beads, a ladies’ hand mirror, half-filled bottles of perfume,
silver earrings, shiny stones, a ruby ring, a piece of Venetian carni-
val glass, glittering pieces, reflective surfaces” (133).
Up to this moment, Clovis is shown as a victim, affected doubly
by structural or systemic violence: she, as Pola, had been excluded
from life lessons simply because she was a woman, but she is as
well a victim of a marriage based on patriarchal foundations that
have allowed Victor to keep on growing as a professional painter,
whereas it has prevented her from fulfilling herself as an artist.
One of the consequences of this type of gender discrimination
is that Clovis and the rest of the women are not allowed at the
male dinner. Consequently, the women will have to hold their
own feast. As a result, act II gives way to the contrast between
the coarse male dinner in which men are shown arguing and the
beauty of the “Sopranos’ dinner.” In this act, praised by review-
ers such as Aaron Riccio and Mel Gussow, the magic scenes that
were exclusively connected to Clovis in the first act now involve
all the female characters; for example, the inclusion of visions and
mirages of little girls when they are remembering their respective
happy childhoods. They enjoy a pleasant atmosphere in which all
of the participants in the dinner are at peace and start opening
their hearts, first in the way of crossed monologues that include
repetitions, which remind one of the circular language that
Linda Walsh Jenkins considers as common in women’s plays (see
“Locating”). Bakhtinian echoes are apparent in this carnivalesque
scene in which the female characters are happily dancing, play-
ing, and laughing: bonding activities whose positive effects for
women are shown in other plays, such as Ntozake Shange’s for
colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf,
Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, or Josefina Lopez’s
Real Women Have Curves. These initiatives, as carnival, provoke
a “clearing away of dogma so that new creation can take place”
(Morson and Emerson 95; emphasis in original). Accordingly,
the female characters manage to get rid of male impositions and
rules (the patriarchal “dogma”), and the “new creation” that takes
76 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

place on stage is the consolidation of a close bonding among these

women that is going to give them strength to rebel against the
discrimination they suffer. As a consequence, real communication
among them grows: after sharing this joyful experience, Clovis,
Pola, and Dolores learn to listen to each other and to pay attention
to the stories and experiences narrated by each of them, a practice
that reminds us of the consciousness-raising groups promoted by
the Second Wave of feminism, in which “women could interact
with a freedom of experience and expression not easily attained in
their daily lives” (Case 113).
The inclusion of this type of actions situates Dream of a Common
Language in the line of the feminist drama of the seventies, which,
“breaking the silence that keeps us complicit in our own destruc-
tion,” in Karen Malpede’s words (qtd. in Keyssar 128), and using
experimental energy, “move[d] beyond autonomy and the melo-
dies of single voices to the explosive sounds of women talking and
singing with each other” (Keyssar 128). All this delight felt by
female characters in their bonding activities is interpreted by the
men in the play as “chaos” (191), in the same way as they have
considered previously that anger does not become women, or that
rebellious females are crazy. It seems that, for these men, uncon-
ventional initiatives led by women are criticized and considered as
abnormal, maybe hiding behind this criticism their fear of their
reaction and resurrection from the mere state of objects or victims
in which they used to live. It is shocking to discover that a similar
response to these enriching scenes is present in some reviews of the
play, which superficially interpret them as mere “children’s games
and self-parody” (Gussow).
If Pola was the pioneer character of active initiatives against
gender violence, the most striking act of rebelliousness is finally
carried out by Clovis. The protagonist, after the healing experi-
ences that she enjoys with Pola and Dolores at their female dinner,
completely inverts traditional gender roles. This is shown on stage
metaphorically, as Clovis appears now with the painting tools and
the gun, which symbolize art and power, and were previously pos-
sessed by Victor exclusively; and in practice, as she now orders
Marc to pose nude for her. Victor tries to recover control of the
situation, but he is not successful. The audience experiences a
certain satisfaction when observing how this oppressed woman,
thanks to the close connection she has had with other women,
 Rol e of F e m a l e B on di ng 77

has finally regained her energy and self-esteem and has fiercely
taken the reins of her own life. As happened in the two other plays
examined here, Dream of a Common Language has a happy end-
ing, because the male characters seem to have finally understood
the message that their female colleagues have been trying to share
with them. Hence, Victor eventually takes his wife seriously and
decides to model for her.
Meanwhile, the magic atmosphere mainly present in the first
six scenes appears again accompanied by lighting effects that rep-
resent Clovis’s artistic illumination in the form of “the radiance
of the night butterflies ” (199) and then of the clarity of dawn.
In this fantastic context, Clovis describes, at the request of her
now-attentive husband, her artistic vision of a complete sphere of
the world made of glass, which is for her the image of wholeness
that she had so intensely desired. The two previously so separated
worlds of male and female artists—which were reflected even in
the two different types of settings of the play— are finally per-
ceived as belonging to the same sphere by the protagonist. This
would have been impossible had the female characters accepted
their submissive position as artists and as women, and had they
not rebelled against the structural and systemic violence they were
suffering. And this rebelliousness would not have grown without
the close connection between the women in the play, the female
bonding that was formed, thanks to the “Sopranos’ dinner.”
In this chapter, I have analyzed the different roles that female
bonding plays in the dramatic works written by Nottage and
McDonald, two women playwrights who seem to agree in their
recognition of its power when women try to eradicate gender vio-
lence. This violence appears in their plays in different versions,
but maybe because they are part of what we have called the con-
tinuum of gender violence in chapter 1, they are very closely inter-
connected. Besides, as O’Toole, Schiffman, and Kiter-Edwards
explain, “[T]he abuse of female intimates is possible with the
structural support of a system that maintains and reproduces male
dominance and female submission” (248). This might be the rea-
son why these three plays share what Elizabeth J. Natalle consid-
ers a constant feature of feminist plays, consisting in the fact that
female characters tend to reject the bonds of domestic service in
the context of the traditional marriage (77), to which I would
add that both Nottage and McDonald urge their audiences to
78 M a r í a D ol or e s N a r b on a- C a r r ión

appreciate the positive effects of female bonding to eliminate any

type of male oppression or violence.
Ruined, Poof!, Dream of a Common Language, and other plays
that I could have included in this chapter as good examples of
writings that emphasize the importance of female bonding to over-
come women’s victimization, prove in different ways the potential
enclosed in the union among women, the important weapon that
it might represent if women who suffer abuse or violence in any
of its variants foster it. Thus, it would not be far from the truth to
conclude that at least some contemporary American women play-
wrights, among whom Nottage and McDonald are included, have
seriously taken into account Nina Auerbach’s consideration that
literature has the mission of promoting and highlighting the ben-
efits of female bonding, thus contributing to the improvement of
our society.