ABSTRACT Between Reality and Mystery: Food as Fact and Symbol in Plays by Ibsen and Churchill Stephanie J. Pocock Mentor: Richard R. Russell, Ph.D. In Henrik Ibsen’s and Caryl Churchill’s plays, food is both fact and symbol, a reminder of both the shared physicality of the actors and spectators and of an equally powerful human desire for symbolic significance. This thesis examines the depictions of both facets of human consumption in Ibsen’s A Doll House and The Wild Duck and Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. By emphasizing the physical hunger and subsequent fulfillment of their characters, the playwrights draw audience and actors together in a community based on the recognition of shared human needs and experiences. Simultaneously, by exploring the variety of symbolic understandings that give those experiences meaning, they create unpredictability, individuality, and creativity. Through this balance, Ibsen and Churchill demonstrate the potential of theatre to construct a site where communities of actors and spectators can continually re‐
examine the dynamic space between reality and mystery. Copyright © 2006 Stephanie J. Pocock All Rights Reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHAPTER ONE Introduction CHAPTER TWO Teacups and Butter: Food as Fact and Symbol in Ibsen’s A Doll House and The Wild Duck CHAPTER THREE “God’s in this apple”: Eating, Spirituality, and Community in Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire WORKS CITED iii
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my readers, Dr. DeAnna Toten Beard and Dr. Jay Losey, both for the time they graciously donated to this project and for their insightful comments. Dr. James Wardwell introduced me to modern drama and to the work of Caryl Churchill. I am deeply grateful to him for many kindnesses, not least for directing the independent study that resulted in the paper that eventually became the second chapter of this thesis. Dr. Kristina LaCelle‐Peterson fielded my theological questions with warmth and humor, and guided me to many useful sources for this chapter. During my two years at Baylor University, Dr. Richard Russell has been unfailingly generous with both his time and his intellect. I am extremely thankful that, despite a well‐deserved sabbatical, he agreed to direct my thesis. It has benefited from his careful and perceptive criticism, but not nearly as much as I have benefited from his guidance, insight, and encouragement. CHAPTER ONE Introduction In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin describes the act of eating as one of the most enduring and significant preoccupations of the human imagination: The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself. (281) The wealth of cultural, psychological, political, and religious symbolism that has accrued around this most basic of human activities has, especially in the past few decades, proven fertile ground for literary scholars. Works like Maggie Kilgour’s From Communion to Cannibalism (1990) and John Wilkins’ Food in European Literature (1996) have provided broad historical overviews of the relationship between food and literature, while others, like Chris Meads’ Banquets Set Forth: Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama (2001) and Sarah Sceats’ Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2000), have illuminated the significance of eating in the literary works of specific authors, groups of authors, or time periods.1 Increasingly, however, critical studies that focus on food are in fact more concerned with not eating, with the social and
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psychological disorders revealed by characters’ attitudes towards consumption.2 Yet despite the upsurge in critical interest, surprisingly little has been written on the relationship between literary genre and the ways in which physical consumption is portrayed or discussed. For most genres, this is perhaps not a significant oversight; descriptions of food appear on the page much like any other words, requiring a reader’s imagination to transform them into the physical objects they represent. In drama, however, the act of eating takes on new layers of significance: it becomes at once the literal action of a human being on stage and a ritualized performance, prescribed by the words of an unseen text and author. To stage physical consumption is to remind an audience of what Bert States calls an “elementary” but often disregarded fact: [T]heater—unlike fiction, painting, sculpture, and film—is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be. In theater, image and object, pretense and pretender, sign‐vehicle and content, draw unusually close. (20) Eating, on the one hand, has the potential to destroy theatrical illusion, to remind the audience of the literal physicality of the actor on stage whose character is a pretense but whose body is real. Conversely, the very same act of eating can enhance the illusion that the character on stage is an actual human being, going about the physical business of daily life. Just as drama, in its conflation of literal human presence and fictionalized performance, is at once realistic and symbolic, 3
so eating often fulfills both a physical need and a symbolic function. While this thesis cannot possibly explore the myriad significances of the relationship between the dramatic medium and portrayal of physical consumption, it will use plays by Henrik Ibsen and Caryl Churchill as examples of the ways in which the theatrical portrayal of eating reveals the potential of drama to be at once literal and symbolic, both grounded in specific performances and artistically enduring. Though Churchill’s plays are distanced from Ibsen’s by a century as well as by profound cultural differences, the Norwegian playwright’s impact on modern drama is so pervasive that it is possible to trace Ibsenian influences and echoes in Churchill’s work. This project, however, rather than tracing such resonances or attempting to establish a direct connection between the two playwrights, will examine their plays as examples of the various ways in which modern drama has employed the theatrical potential of physical consumption. Interestingly, despite their location at opposite ends of the chronological and ideological spectrums of modern drama, the playwrights both use food in ways which demonstrate a desire to integrate a deep belief in the immediate socio‐
political significance of theatre with an equal commitment to the imaginative and symbolic potential of dramatic art. For both playwrights, the personal imperative to stage contemporary social problems is mediated by a simultaneous exploration of the mystical, the poetic, and the symbolic. This dual commitment 4
is clearly manifested in their representations of eating, which maintain both the physical necessity of consumption and hence the individual embodied reality of their characters, and the multiplicity of symbolic and communal meanings that accrue when a character takes a bite of food. To adduce equal importance to realistic and symbolic elements in Ibsen’s plays may seem a stretch to English‐speaking readers familiar primarily with his minutely realistic social dramas. As Ibsen himself has claimed, these plays attempt, through exactness in dialogue, setting, and costume, “to try and give the reader the impression of experiencing a piece of reality” (Ibsen, qtd. in Hemmer 72). In plays like A Doll House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), Ibsen peels away the layers of illusion and deception surrounding the bourgeois family unit, thereby exposing individual characters to a freedom only attainable through self‐
knowledge. Yet as a careful reading of these plays reveals, Ibsen never takes such “illusions” lightly. The stripping away of shared fictions results, not in complete freedom, but in ambiguity. In A Doll House, Nora walks out of the door towards possible emancipation but away from her children and any attempt at community. Hedda Gabler challenges the prescribed rituals and patterns of life available to a middle‐class woman, but only escapes them through suicide. Thus, while Ibsen’s plays certainly advocate the questioning of comfortable, accepted ways of living, they simultaneously acknowledge the extent to which 5
the physical existence of both individuals and communities depends on the maintenance of shared fictions. This ambiguity, the recognition of the interdependence of concrete existence and our symbolic understanding of that experience, culminates most clearly in The Wild Duck (1884), in which, as John Northam has argued, [T]he symbol is, for the first time, a physical reality on the stage, or near enough to it to suggest actual presence. It is therefore both fact and symbol, and from that fusion emerges the closer union of symbolism and reality which makes the play so complexly significant. (105‐06) This simultaneous on‐stage presence of symbol and fact, particularly revealed in the characters’ complex attitudes towards food and consumption, finally results, I will argue, in Hedvig’s tragic attempt to “feed” her gluttonous father’s affection with her literal suicide. The physical world of the Ekdals’ daily life, in which Gina serves plates of bread, butter, and beer, is inextricably interwoven with the symbolic world of the loft, in which Old Ekdal and Hjalmar hunt real animals in an imaginary forest. Through the intersection of these physical and symbolic realms, Ibsen creates both a realistic past and a symbolic context for the play’s events. Arthur Miller cites this “insistence on valid causation” as an exemplary trait for later dramatists to imitate: This is the “real” in Ibsen’s realism for me, for he was, after all, as much a mystic as a realist. Which is simply to say that while 6
there are mysteries in life which no amount of analyzing will reduce to reason, it is perfectly realistic to admit and even to proclaim that hiatus as truth. (227) Despite their temporal, cultural, and artistic distance from Ibsen’s plays, Churchill’s dramas, through a similar focus on the physical and symbolic significance of food, have continued this act of creating and proclaiming a dramatic space where reality and mystery can co‐exist. Whereas Ibsen’s social dramas interweave symbolic and mystical elements into the lives of carefully defined, realistic characters, Churchill’s plays consistently resist realistic techniques of plot development and characterization. They challenge conventional notions of individual identity, often by having single characters portrayed by multiple actors – at times, as in Cloud 9 (1979), demanding that the actors portray characters whose race, gender, or age differs from their own. This deliberate focus on the fluidity of identity may initially seem to make Churchill the exact antithesis of Ibsen, placing her in the camp of dramatists who, Arthur Miller laments, have lost Ibsen’s focus on “valid causation.” Miller argues that too often dramatic resistance to realistic characterization has resulted in a kind of theatrical defense of nihilism: Character itself, which surely must mean individuation, smacked of realism, and in its stead were interchangeable stickmen whose individuation lay in their varying attitudes and remarks about the determining force, the situation. [ . . . ] So that quality we instantly recognized as supremely human was not characterological definition, which requires a history, but its very absence; whatever 7
his personality, it is without significance because it doesn’t affect history – that is, his kindness, his dreams of a different kind of life, his love, his devotion to duty or to another human being simply do not matter as he is marched towards the flames. (230‐231) Although Churchill’s plays, in their challenge to individual personality, acknowledge such a sense of confused futility, they do not embrace it. For as her characters change from actor to actor, Churchill keeps a constant focus on their physical needs, which are both individually experienced and communally understood. Her particular focus on her characters’ need for food individualizes them as physical beings who hunger and are fed. Yet it simultaneously serves to unite them as they seek communal, symbolic explanations for their situations. By combining theatrical experimentation with an unflinching attention to physical need (and therein, to immediate socio‐political events), Churchill’s plays, like Ibsen’s, create a space in which characters and objects are simultaneously deeply themselves and more than themselves. In a production note to her 1976 play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Churchill comments that her technique of having actors switch roles insures that “what comes over is a large event involving many people, whose characters resonate in a way they wouldn’t if they were more clearly defined” (185). The intended effect is thus not complete anonymity or disorientation, the creation of Miller’s “interchangeable stickmen,” but rather the development of characters who have personal histories and, at the same time, are participants in the ritualized and 8
symbolic events repeated throughout human history. In Light Shining, Churchill explores this dual significance of her characters by balancing their literal need for physical nourishment with their equally powerful reliance on the symbolic significance of spiritual food in the Christian rituals of fasting and the Eucharist. While the influence of the Eucharistic meal is far more directly evident in Churchill’s play than in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, my readings of both plays will assume that the communion ritual can serve as a model for theatrical representations of eating, and more generally, for theatre itself. Christ’s use at the Last Supper of the signs of the bread and wine to signify the body and blood that would create the community of the Church could in itself be read as a kind of drama—an oft‐repeated performance in which the sacramental elements are simultaneously themselves and more than themselves. This comparison is not meant to trivialize the religious rite, or to overextend the definition of ritual.3 Rather, it is intended to suggest the potential of theatre as a communal site where symbol and reality can co‐exist. Much as the physical experience and shared spiritual understanding of the Eucharist unite its celebrants to form the Church, the audience of a play, in its shared effort to imaginatively enter the physical situation and the symbolic world of the drama, forms a temporary community. The interaction between symbol and reality in the Eucharist provides an important model for the simultaneous presence of symbolic and literal meanings 9
in theatrical representations of eating. In After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Catherine Pickstock argues that the Eucharist, as communally celebrated through word and action, restores meaning to language. This restoration is possible because the words of the ritual meal, by calling bread “the Body,” acknowledge the gap between sign and signifier and yet simultaneously refuse to accept the gap as truth: The Eucharist situates us more inside language than ever. So much so, in fact, that it is the Body as word which will be given to eat, since the word alone renders the given in the mode of sign, as bread and wine. Yet not only is language that which administers the sacrament to us, but conversely, the Eucharist underlies all language, since in carrying the secrecy, uncertainty, and discontinuity which characterize every sign to an extreme (no body appears in the bread), it also delivers a final disclosure, certainty, and continuity (the bread is the Body) which alone makes it possible now to trust every sign. In consequence, we are no longer uncertainly distanced from “the original event” by language, but rather, we are concelebrants of that event in every word we speak. (262) In this restoration of linguistic meaning, the Eucharist also, Pickstock suggests, instantiates community, as celebrants return repeatedly to the ritual meal and to the powerfully ambivalent use of language that it enables. This model has important ramifications for theatre, particularly for theatre that resists the urge to separate symbol and reality into exclusive categories and to privilege one over the other.4 10
If, as Pickstock argues, the Eucharist creates a meaningful space where certainty and uncertainty come together in the simultaneous presence of symbol and fact, theatre creates a potential space for a similar effect to occur in political and artistic realms. Pickstock writes that the sacrament entails a “genuine outwitting of the metaphysical dichotomies,” made possible because, according to a reading of the Eucharist as an essential action, and not as an isolated presence or merely illustrative symbol, the (mystical) unknown is not reductively confined to a negative nothing – which amounts to the known – but is traversed as a genuinely open mystery. (253) Responding to a 1995 performance of Light Shining, Janelle Reinelt makes a similar claim for the potential of theatre to confound human dichotomies, citing “the ability of performance to operate politically at the boundaries of undecidability and decision, possibility and impossibility, chaos and stabilization” (42). This openness to both certainty and mystery, she argues, makes the theatre a uniquely democratic institution, whose primary effect is to create a kind of momentary community in which “it is not so much a question of truth in representation as a question of the fruitfulness of the vision or the power of the representation to address the spectators as a community” (43). The Eucharist thus creates community through the shared experience of a meal whose reality is simultaneously physical and symbolic. In Ibsen’s and Churchill’s plays, eating is both fact and symbol, a reminder of both the shared 11
physicality of the actors and spectators and of an equally powerful human desire for symbolic significance. In their attention to both facets of human consumption, Ibsen and Churchill create a space that allows their plays to avoid both certainty and chaos. By emphasizing the physical embodiment of their characters, the playwrights draw the audience and actors together in a community based on the recognition of shared human needs and experiences. Simultaneously, by exploring the variety of symbolic understandings that give those experiences meaning, they create unpredictability, individuality, and creativity. Through this balance, Ibsen and Churchill demonstrate the potential of theatre to construct a site where communities of actors and spectators can continually re‐examine the space between reality and mystery. 12
NOTES In the interests of brevity, I will use the terms “food” and “eating” in this thesis to refer more broadly to all consumables and acts of consumption, including drinking. 2Maud Ellmann’s disclaimer in The Hunger Artists could perhaps be applied to a number of recent critical studies of consumption: “This book, by way of warning, is concerned with disembodiment, not bodies, with the deconstruction of the flesh, and with writing and starving as acts of discarnation” (4). 1
Christopher Innes notes in Holy Theatre that all theatre, since it is rooted in social activity, could be described as ritualistic, and warns that “such syllogistic thinking is far too commonly accepted, so that terms like ‘ritual’ have become almost meaningless as critical clichés describing anything and everything non‐naturalistic” (4). 4This reading of the parallel between the Eucharistic ritual and the theatre assumes a doctrine of transubstantiation, without which, Pickstock argues, the symbolic and the real become separated and so lose their combined force: “If this epistemological coincidence of the mystical and the real becomes fissured, the Eucharistic signs perforce become either a matter of non‐essential, illustrative signification which relies upon a non‐participatory similitude between the bread and the Body, and the wine and the Blood, or else, in dissociation from the realization of the Church, an extrinsicist miracle which stresses the alienness of bread from Body, and wine from Blood. These alternatives, in disconnecting the symbolic from the real, in an attempt to prioritize either one or the other, are both equally reducible to a synchronic mode of presence which fails to allow the sacramental mystery its full, temporarily ecstatic potential within the action of the Church.” (255).
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CHAPTER TWO Teacups and Butter: Food as Fact and Symbol in Ibsen’s A Doll House and The Wild Duck The trend towards minimalism in the twentieth‐century theatre has given rise to a generation of dramatists, directors, and critics who, while acknowledging a deep debt to Ibsen’s psychologically motivated dramas, dismiss his realistic techniques as antiquated and clumsy. As Frederick and Lise‐
Lone Marker observe in their study of twentieth‐century interpretations of Ibsen’s plays, this ambivalent attitude has resulted in a variety of anti‐realistic productions that seek to “present a heightened conceptual image of the inner thematic rhythm and spirit of the work at hand, rather than a photographic reduplication of its surface reality” (183). These interpretations reject the minutely detailed Victorian parlour settings popular during Ibsen’s lifetime, attempting, through simplified sets, to emphasize the characters’ internal dramas. Michael Zelenak, founder of the American Ibsen Theatre, claims that overly realistic settings distract from Ibsen’s psychological drama: “The disservice that the drawing‐room, teacups, wallpaper productions do to Ibsen is that the drama becomes invisible. It gets lost in the teacups and the ‘pass the butter’ and so on” (qtd. in Marker and Marker 191).
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As Marker and Marker ably demonstrate, these anti‐realistic productions have been successful both in revealing the vast interpretive potential of Ibsen’s work and in bringing that work to contemporary audiences. However, Zelenak’s claim that removing the teacups and butter from Ibsen’s plays clarifies the psychological drama, an argument on which many reinterpretations are based, ignores the playwright’s own techniques of psychological development. Removing the teacups and butter may signal to contemporary audiences that they are supposed to pay attention to the characters’ internal struggles, and, in that sense, may reveal the psychological drama. But without such “distracting” props, the psychological drama revealed will be a far different one than Ibsen wrote. This is not to argue against creative productions and revisions, which are an indispensable part of his plays’ continued vitality. Yet it is important to recognize that Ibsen’s realistic techniques are not easily separable from what recent revisions have attempted to highlight—the psychological development of characters and their situations.1 In Ibsen’s plays, objects on stage are the realistic trappings of everyday life, serving to bring on‐stage events into the audience’s world. Yet they are often equally important as symbols, used to reveal the unspoken nature of an individual character or the characters’ shared understandings of the world. Virginia Woolf aptly describes this quality of Ibsen’s plays: 15
A room is to him a room, a writing table a writing table, and a waste paper basket, a waste paper basket. At the same time, the paraphernalia of reality have at certain times to become the veil through which we see infinity. (168) The “paraphernalia of reality” is, for Woolf, a vital part of Ibsen’s dramaturgy, enabling the stage to encompass both an ordinary, believable world and sudden glimpses into a deeper reality. She goes on to describe the careful, gradual technique by which the playwright creates this dual effect: When Ibsen achieves this, as he certainly does, it is not by performing some miraculous conjuring trick at the critical moment. He achieves it by putting us into the right mood from the very start and by giving us the right materials for his purpose. He gives us the effect of ordinary life, as Mr. [E.M.] Forster does, but he gives it us by choosing a very few facts and those of a highly relevant kind. Thus when the moment of illumination comes we accept it implicitly. We are neither roused nor puzzled; we do not have to ask ourselves, What does this mean? We feel simply that the thing we are looking at is lit up, and its depths revealed. It has not ceased to be itself by becoming something else. (168) Ibsen’s ability to illumine everyday objects as symbols while maintaining their essential nature is precisely why removing the teacups and butter from his cluttered realistic stage is less likely to reveal a hidden psychological drama than to diminish or obscure the one that is already present. This use of on‐stage objects both as realistic props and as symbols that provide insight into the characters and their psychological development is one of the primary techniques that John Northam highlights in Ibsen’s Dramatic Methods. According to Northam, Ibsen’s insistence on realistic dialogue in his social 16
dramas led him to seek new techniques of character development. While abandoning the lengthy soliloquies of poetic drama and limiting his characters to “broken, repetitive, incoherent utterances,” Ibsen began to develop implicit, often nonverbal techniques to replace or supplement explicit character revelation (16). In A Doll House, for example, Ibsen exposes Nora’s true nature and her emotional state less through her words than through “the method of ‘concealed psychology’ according to which an action or a gesture ‘will realize inevitably the character’s state of mind in a given situation.’” (16). Ibsen uses a rich variety of nonverbal indicators to reveal his characters’ internal states, ranging from more obvious costumes and gestures to nuances in lighting and staging. Yet while such symbols as Nora’s shawl or the mill‐race in Rosmersholm ultimately remain distinct from the characters whose psychology they reveal, others, such as Nora’s macaroons or Hjalmar Ekdal’s bread and butter in The Wild Duck, are incorporated into the body of the character. Thus the bread and butter, physical symbols of Hjalmar’s greed, literally become part of him, blurring the line between the symbol and the psychological truth it reveals.2 This fusion of symbol and fact recalls the pre‐modern understanding of symbolism that Adolph Harnack attributes to the early church: “What we nowadays understand by ‘symbol’ is a thing which is not that which it represents; at that time ‘symbol’ denoted a thing which is in some kind of way 17
really what it signifies” (qtd. in Kilgour 80). Ibsen’s social dramas consistently use food and eating as clues about individual characters and their relationships, allowing for at least a partial reunification of symbol and fact. As characters eat on stage, the symbol becomes what it has symbolized. In both A Doll House and The Wild Duck, the symbolic and the real significance of food coexist on the stage, creating a space between the reality of physical objects and the psychological and symbolic significance that human beings accord to them. Ibsen recognized eating as one of the most common actions by which human beings come to understand each other. His own eating (and drinking) habits were the subject of much speculation; contemporary accounts vary wildly, some suggesting alcoholism while others detail an abstemious daily routine.3 Demonstrating his own interest in the connection between character and eating habits, Ibsen wrote in a letter to his wife Suzannah of his deep concern for a young painter friend, Marcus Grønvold, a concern based largely on his culinary excesses: “It is not just that he eats excessive quantities; everything must be of the best and most expensive, and that for both lunch and dinner; he spends twice as much each day as I do” (qtd. in Meyer 529). Ibsen’s attention to eating as a simple, non‐verbal indicator of personality extends into his plays, where character revelations based on eating habits abound. In A Doll House, Nora’s first on‐stage action, having returned from a 18
Christmas shopping trip, is to furtively consume a few macaroons, taking great delight in her secrecy: NORA shuts the door. She continues to laugh quietly and happily to herself as she takes off her things. She takes a bag of macaroons out of her pocket and eats one or two; then she walks stealthily across and listens at her husband’s door. (201) According to Northam, through this simple action, Ibsen “tells us in a matter of seconds several important things about Nora’s character: it is a childish one; it goes in awe of authority; it is willing to deceive” (16). While this assessment seems oversimplified and unfair, it demonstrates the sheer number of assumptions an audience may make about a character based on her eating habits. Ibsen’s use of eating as an “illustrative action” capitalizes on the human tendency to judge others by what they eat in order to provide quick, realistic character exposition. Yet the technique is not limited to individual character revelation, but simultaneously provides insight into the social milieu of the play and into the characters’ relationships with one another. Nora’s behavior in the first scene intrigues an audience not because eating macaroons is a curious habit, but because she does so furtively, wary of a person who has yet to appear on stage, but who apparently dictates her eating habits. Her nervousness over eating macaroons immediately raises questions about her husband and their relationship. Their initial dialogue is affectionate, if patronizing on Torvald’s part; yet the macaroons hint at a relationship which is almost entirely 19
authoritarian. Not only does Torvald dole out money to Nora, a practice which would have been common between husbands and wives at the time, but also he attempts to regulate the food she puts into her own body. Traditionally, the preparation and consumption of food has been, even in the most patriarchal relationships, an area in which women exert some measure of control over the family. Nora, although she apparently shops and attends to household needs, does not possess even this indirect power. Instead, Torvald greets her with an insistent, if ostensibly playful, interrogation: HELMER. Look me straight in the eye. NORA [looks at him]. Well? HELMER [wagging his finger at her]. My little sweet‐tooth surely didn’t forget herself in town today? NORA. No, whatever makes you think that? HELMER. She didn’t just pop into the confectioner’s for a moment? NORA. No, I assure you, Torvald . . . ! HELMER. Didn’t try sampling the preserves? NORA. No, really I didn’t. HELMER. Didn’t go nibbling a macaroon or two? NORA. No, Torvald, honestly, you must believe me . . . ! HELMER. All right then! It’s really just my little joke . . . (205) What may initially seem affectionate banter is rendered sinister by Torvald’s almost Pinteresque rapid‐fire questioning, and his refusal to back down until Nora is obviously distressed. Seen in light of this relationship, Nora’s secret consumption of macaroons becomes, as Northam notes, a “revolt against the masculine control of her husband” (17). 20
Yet Nora’s revolt is not straightforward, a petty gesture of defiance against an authority figure. On the second appearance of the macaroons, she reveals that Torvald’s ban against sweets is not arbitrary; she says, “He’s worried in case they ruin my teeth” (219‐20). The rule is thus seemingly in Nora’s best interest, as a parental prohibition against candy may be for a child. It simultaneously, however, represents Torvald’s concern for his “property”; the pretty wife he delights in displaying would be considerably devalued by blackened or missing teeth. While, on Nora’s part, consumption of macaroons is largely a simple matter of pleasure, it reveals the dilemma of her situation. Because Torvald cares for her and wants to protect her, her acts of defiance against his “rules” are at least mildly self‐destructive. The site for her resistance is her own body, as indicated by her lengthy contemplation of suicide near the end of the play. The one exception, of course, is her “really big thing,” her one secret venture into the business world for the loan that saved her husband’s life (212). This loan is Nora’s insurance policy against the inevitable process of aging; she tells Mrs. Linde that she will only inform Torvald about the loan when she is older and less physically attractive: In many years time, when I’m no longer as pretty as I am now. You mustn’t laugh! What I mean of course is when Torvald isn’t quite so much in love with me as he is now, when he’s lost interest in watching me dance, or get dressed up, or recite. Then it might be a good thing to have something in reserve . . . (215) 21
Nora thus recognizes that, besides the secret loan, her body is the only area in which she exerts control over her husband. As symbols of resistance, Nora’s macaroons initially seem frivolous and harmless, much like her character. Yet as she swallows the sweets that Torvald has “forbidden,” her resistance becomes inseparable from her body and her character (219). Ibsen deliberately parallels her situation to that of Dr. Rank’s father. Though all of the play’s major characters are aware that Rank is dying of inherited syphilis, they euphemistically circumvent the uncomfortable fact by linking the disease to his father’s fondness for rich foods: RANK. Yes, really the whole thing’s nothing but a huge joke. My poor innocent spine must do penance for my father’s gay subaltern life. NORA. [by the table, left]. Wasn’t he rather partial to asparagus and pâté de foie gras? RANK. Yes, he was. And truffles. NORA. Truffles, yes. And oysters, too, I believe? RANK. Yes, oysters, oysters, of course. NORA. And all the port and champagne that goes with them. It does seem a pity all these delicious things should attack the spine. RANK. Especially when they attack a poor spine that never had any fun out of them. (246) The detail with which Nora and Rank describe his father’s culinary excesses seems odd at first glance, even when considered as part of their covert flirtation. Since Nora has already revealed to a shocked Mrs. Linde her knowledge that Rank’s disease is because of his father’s penchant for “mistresses and things like that,” her persistence seems singularly insensitive (237). The scene, however, 22
demonstrates the importance of food to the play, not just as a useful tool of character revelation, but as a symbol of seemingly insignificant choices which become part of the body, with profound and irreversible effects. The parallel situation of Dr. Rank’s father goes a long way towards explaining one of the critical quandaries of the play, the seeming suddenness with which Nora transforms from a childish nibbler of forbidden sweets to a tormented adult woman, able to contemplate suicide and to choose instead to walk out on her husband and children. Errol Durbach notes that Nora’s rapid change particularly troubled early critics of the play: “Nora’s transformation was pronounced an impossible, a ridiculous and ill‐prepared transition from ‘a little Nordic Frou‐Frou’ (as Erich Bøgh described her), into a “Søren Kierkegaard in skirts” (16). Durbach cites Frederick and Lise‐Lone Marker’s observation that this impression may be traceable to the original Nora, Betty Hennings, who “failed to rise to the challenge of discovering the mature and self‐respecting woman in the frivolous macaroon‐nibbling child‐wife of act 1” (16). Implicit in this statement is the assumption that the macaroons clearly belong to the “old Nora,” that they are no more than symbols of her childishness. Yet the macaroons, despite their obvious connotations of a childish selfishness, provide the play’s first hint that Nora is capable of a surface resistance to Torvald and the doll house, and that the more important resistance 23
must take place within herself, against the doll‐like ideas and behavior she has incarnated.4 When Torvald unwittingly convinces Nora that her secret forgery has tainted her irredeemably, that, like Dr. Rank’s father, her choices have become so much a part of her that her presence may “poison” her children, she begins to contemplate suicide (233). This dark transformation, felt as a shock by so many critics and audiences, is rendered more psychologically convincing by the continued presence of the macaroons. As Nora plans to kill herself following her tarantella, she does not discard her macaroons as symbols of her doll’s life; rather, she brings them into the house openly: HELMER. But tomorrow night, when your dance is done . . . NORA. Then you are free. MAID [in the doorway, right]. Dinner is served, madam. NORA. We’ll have champagne, Helene. MAID. Very good, Madam. [She goes.] HELMER. Aha! It’s to be quite a banquet, eh? NORA. With champagne flowing until dawn. [Shouts.] And some macaroons, Helene . . . lots of them, for once in a while. (260). After Torvald, Mrs. Linde, and Rank leave the room, Nora stands “as though to collect herself,” and counts the hours until her suicide, concluding, “Thirty‐one hours to live” (261). With thirty‐one hours to live, she demands a party with rich food, reminding the audience that, since the first scene, Nora’s potential for resistance has been localized in her body. By having his heroine eat “forbidden” sweets on‐stage in the first scene, Ibsen makes rebellion, however petty or sugar‐
24
coated, a literal, embodied part of her. Attention to the symbolic significance of food and eating in the play thus reveals that her profound change is not one of character, as early critics complained, but of degree. Nora, of course, does not commit suicide, unlike Hedda Gabler, Rebecca West, or Hedvig Ekdal, making this play a much more hopeful statement of the potential for individual change. Yet as Nora’s consumption of macaroons is simultaneously an assertion of self and a mildly self‐destructive gesture, so her departure at the play’s end is ambivalent. In one sense, her exit asserts the importance of community, of egalitarian relationships that combine self‐
knowledge and mutual understanding. Her doll house with Torvald is not “a real marriage”; by leaving it, she expresses hope for a better kind of marriage and community. Her departure, however, simultaneously destroys a community, almost certainly leaving her husband and children with painful psychological scars. The ambivalent balance between destruction and creation within the community of the play is powerfully foreshadowed and paralleled by the play’s portrayal of the effects of eating on the individual. The food in the play retains its reality as a material object while accruing multilayered symbolic and psychological significances, creating a space between physical reality and the symbolic understanding of that reality. 25
The space created by the food symbolism of A Doll House is further opened in The Wild Duck, where Ibsen uses gustatory devices even more clearly to provide insight both into individual characters and their community. As in the earlier play, eating habits allow for quick character exposition without awkward or unrealistic conversation. Early in Act One of The Wild Duck, Hjalmar reveals his status as an uncultured outsider at Werle’s fashionable dinner party by expressing his ignorance of wine vintages: WERLE [by the fireplace]. I can certainly vouch for the Tokay you had today, at any rate; it was one of the very finest vintages. Of course you must have seen that yourself. THE FAT GUEST. Yes, it had a wonderfully delicate bouquet. HJALMAR [uncertainly]. Does the vintage make any difference? THE FAT GUEST [laughing]. By Heavens, that’s good! WERLE [smiling]. There’s obviously not much point in putting good wine in front of you. (140) Although in the context of the play as a whole, this interchange seems slight, Ibsen’s surviving notes suggest that this was the first bit of dialogue he penned for the play.5 Hjalmar’s lack of knowledge about wine effectively reveals his social distance from his host, and links him immediately to the far more obviously pathetic Old Ekdal, who is similarly unaccustomed to fine beverages. Shortly after Hjalmar’s faux pas, his father makes an embarrassing entrance into the party, but is quickly dismissed with a bottle of brandy: MRS. SÖRBY [softly, to the servant who has returned]. Well, did the old fellow get anything? PETTERSEN. Yes, I slipped him a bottle of brandy. 26
MRS. SÖRBY. Oh, you might have found him something a bit better than that. PETTERSEN. Not at all, Mrs. Sörby. Brandy is the best thing he knows. (143)6
These exchanges, Ibsen’s first attempts to introduce the play’s characters, reveal the importance of food and drink within the play as an indicator of both social status and relationships. The dinner party, where the sumptuous meal is followed by courses of coffee, liqueurs, and punch, provides a startling contrast to Act Two, which opens with Gina and Hedvig sitting in their modest attic studio. There is no food in sight; the two women have foregone dinner since Hjalmar is out. Yet though absent from the stage, food dominates the conversation as much or more than at the dinner party. Gina is tallying up the grocery bill for butter, salami, cheese, ham, and beer, dismayed by “the amount of butter we go through in this house” (152). Hedvig is clearly hungry, and though she puts a brave face on it, offhandedly mentioning that she “might even be a little bit hungry,” her comments return inexorably to the dinner party and the treats her father has promised to bring her (152). When Old Ekdal returns, the women coax him to eat, but he “can’t be bothered with any supper,” and retires to his room to nurse his newly acquired bottle of brandy (154). The insistent presence of food and drink in the Ekdals’ thought and conversation prepares the audience for Ibsen’s characterization of Hjalmar. 27
Despite his ignorance of wine vintages and his complaint that the dinner party guests do “nothing but go from one house to the next, eating and drinking, day in and day out,” Hjalmar is a voracious consumer. Throughout the play, he eats bread and butter almost constantly, beginning only moments after the lavish dinner party. His most idealistic or impassioned speeches are consistently interrupted by stage directions indicating that he “helps himself to another sandwich” (173). The audience is thus never allowed to forget that Hjalmar’s primary loyalty is to his body. His greedy appetite shapes his character much like the bread and butter shape his body, which, as Gregers notes, is growing stout (134). Beyond simply revealing Hjalmar’s self‐centeredness, a character trait which could hardly go unnoticed, his consumption of bread and butter reveals the underlying relational structure of the community. Hjalmar never eats unless his wife brings him food, a fact which highlights the dynamics of their relationship. Gina acts as a servant to her husband, catering to and often anticipating his needs and whims. Yet her practicality makes her the more powerful figure in the relationship; not only does she make and serve the bread, but she is, despite Hjalmar’s misplaced pride, the breadwinner.7 Throughout the play, she and Hedvig do most of the photographic work which brings money into the household, a fact of which Hjalmar, ever an idealist, seems blissfully 28
unaware. Seated passively at the table, awaiting the arrival of his lunch, Hjalmar tells Gregers, “I am an inventor, you know . . . and a breadwinner too. That’s what keeps me above all these petty things—Ah! Here they are with the lunch!” (190). The irony of his attitude, while lost on Gregers, does not go unnoticed. When Hjalmar boasts to Relling about his devotion to his “splendid mission,” Relling reminds him: “And then you’ve also got your clever little wife to look after you, pottering about in her slippers all nice and cuddlesome, and making the place all cosy” (193). By unobtrusively providing and serving food, Gina sustains the comfortable fictions that make up Hjalmar’s life. During the same lunch scene, Hjalmar’s dreams of being an inventor and a breadwinner are paralleled to his father’s fantasy world in the loft, and opposed to Gina’s actual, practical provision. Hjalmar has just demanded that Gina replenish the butter on the table, when, out of the loft, “OLD EKDAL enters carrying a fresh rabbit skin”: EKDAL. Good morning, gentlemen! Had some good hunting today. Bagged a big ‘un. HJALMAR. Have you gone and skinned it without me . . . ! EKDAL. Salted it, too. It’s good tender meat, rabbit‐meat. And sweet. Tastes like sugar. Enjoy your lunch, gentlemen! (192). Hjalmar’s eagerness to join in his father’s “hunting” indicates that both men operate under delusions of their own roles as providers. Old Ekdal hunts animals stocked and confined in his attic, unaware that, directly outside of his 29
fantasy world, his family is sitting down to a meal of herring salad obviously not provided by his hunting prowess. Hjalmar, similarly, believes himself to be the family “breadwinner,” but has little concept of where his food comes from. He blithely assumes that inviting Gregers, Molvik, and Relling to lunch will pose no difficulty to Gina, even directing her not to be “too stingy about it” (176). He also appears ignorant of the strain his voracious consumption of bread, butter, and beer places on the family finances, and of the fact that his wife and daughter neglect their own meals when he is out. Gina and Hedvig, are, in fact, the only two major characters who never eat or drink on stage. During the lunch scene, the stage directions read: “The men sit down at the table, and eat and drink. GINA and HEDVIG go in and out, waiting on them” (190). Though Gina never complains of the arrangement, when Hjalmar confronts her about her affair with Werle, she reveals that she had just begun to hope that her deprivation was coming to an end: “And we’d made things so nice and cosy, and Hedvig and me were just starting to manage a little bit extra for ourselves in the way of food and clothes” (204). As previously noted, Hedvig begins the play hungry, waiting anxiously for her father to bring her “something nice” from Werle’s dinner party (152). He disappoints her, understandably distracted by his disheveled father’s unexpected appearance at the party, but then unfeelingly compounds his mistake by handing her the menu and 30
promising to describe how the dishes taste. Moi perceptively points to this scene as “the ethical, emotional, and philosophical center of The Wild Duck” (676), noting that “Hjalmar gives Hedvig words instead of food, and expects her to be as delighted with one as with the other” (679). This confusion of words and food is at the heart of Ibsen’s symbolic technique in the play, and eventually becomes one of the major factors leading to Hedvig’s suicide. Significantly, Gina’s restraint is self‐imposed; Hjalmar seems unaware of her eating habits and would probably coax her to feast on bread and butter if he sensed her hunger. Yet her self‐control indicates, unlike Nora’s rebellious macaroons, her influence over her husband and household. Nowhere is this power more apparent than in Act Five, when Hjalmar confronts Gina with his intentions of leaving. Calm as always, she offers him a tray of breakfast, at the sight of which he exclaims, “Meat? Never again under this roof! I don’t care if I haven’t had a bite for nearly twenty‐four hours‐‐” (230). Inexorably, however, he begins to eat, and the food weakens his resolve until he is unable to leave: GINA. What are you looking for? HJALMAR. Butter. GINA. I’ll get some straight away. [Goes out into the kitchen.] HJALMAR [calls after her]. Oh, you needn’t bother. I can just as well eat it dry. GINA [brings a butter dish]. There you are, now. Supposed to be freshly churned. [She pours him a fresh cup of coffee; he sits down on the sofa, spreads more butter on the bread, eats and drinks in silence for a moment or two.] 31
HJALMAR. Would I, without being disturbed by anybody—
anybody at all—be able to move into the living‐room for a day or two? (233) Gina’s power is no mystery; she knows her husband’s desires and is willing to work and sacrifice to see them met, thereby maintaining her own comfortable household. Gina’s pattern of control through sacrifice is unremarkable enough until Hedvig adopts and magnifies it, committing suicide in a desperate attempt to secure her father’s love. Moi reads The Wild Duck as a depiction of the struggle between the metaphysical language of Gregers and Hjalmar, who “do their best to empty words of meaning” (658) and “ordinary forms of life, everyday activities” that “give meaning to our words” (661). Gina, of course, represents “the everyday”; her constant attention to the details of the household grounds her and makes her aware of the needs of others. Hedvig’s suicide is one of the “disasters that ensue when we turn our backs on the everyday”; it is ultimately Gregers’s use of metaphysical and metaphorical language that is to blame, for he “shows Hedvig the way out of the ordinary, and so lays the foundation for her ultimate suicide” (671). This argument is compelling, yet it neglects Gina’s role in modeling self‐
sacrifice to her daughter. Moi blames Gregers for “preaching sacrifice to Hedvig,” yet if this is the case, his sermons only build on a lifetime of Gina’s 32
lessons (672). Hedvig has grown up in a home where love is demonstrated through hunger, where her mother neglects her own meals not just to sustain Hjalmar, but to support his excess. Long before Gregers’s extravagant talk of “the genuine, joyous, courageous spirit of self‐sacrifice,” Hedvig has adopted her mother’s pattern of demonstrating love through self‐sacrifice (227). When Hjalmar disappoints her by forgetting to bring her a treat from Werle’s party, she reacts not by assuaging her own hunger but by offering to bring her father a bottle of beer (160). Remaining hungry while ensuring that her father is completely satisfied is the clearest proof that Hedvig knows how to offer of her love and forgiveness. Gina’s self‐sacrifice provides a model for her daughter’s, but it is ultimately Gregers’s metaphorical confusion that prompts Hedvig to enact that sacrifice as suicide. Prior to Gregers’s entrance, Hedvig lives in a world in which symbol and fact are treated as equally real and allowed to coexist. She helps her mother in the kitchen; she is aware of the household expenses and the financial strain caused by her father’s gluttony. Yet she also plays with her father and grandfather in the fantasy world of the loft, which she fancifully calls “the briny deep” (183). Perhaps because of the opposite influences of her practical mother and her idealistic father, Hedvig sees no problem with allowing these two worlds to exist side by side.8 She can imagine that the attic is “the briny deep,” but it is 33
also simply the loft, until Gregers suggests that it must be one or the other, either symbol or fact: HEDVIG. Every time I catch myself wondering about things in there—it always strikes me that the whole room and everything in it should be called ‘the briny deep’. But that’s just silly. GREGERS. No, you mustn’t say that. HEDVIG. Yes, of course, because it’s really only a loft. GREGERS [looking hard at her]. Are you so certain? HEDVIG [astonished] That it’s a loft? GREGERS. Yes. Do you know for sure? (183). Hedvig has grown up juxtaposing her mother’s insistence on the practical meaning of objects with her father and grandfather’s penchant for the symbolic, believing that things can be both themselves and more than themselves. For Gregers, on the other hand, the wild duck or the attic loft, once they become symbols, lose any significance as physical objects. As Hedvig says after their first meeting: “All the time it was just as though he meant something different from what he was saying” (172; my emphasis). Her surprise is not because she is a stranger to symbolism, but because she is unfamiliar with symbolic language that must operate “all the time,” to the exclusion of lived reality. Disoriented by Gregers’s separation of symbol and reality, Hedvig confuses the two in her suicide. Whereas Gina had gone hungry to ensure that Hjalmar’s appetite was fully satisfied, Hedvig offers her own body in a misguided attempt to satisfy her father. It is deeply significant that Hedvig’s suicide takes place in the loft, where her grandfather plays at being a hunter and 34
providing food for the family. Trapped between the world of the kitchen from which her mother literally feeds the family and the fantasy world of the loft in which her father and grandfather play at being “breadwinners,” Hedvig commits a literal act of sacrifice in the symbolic world of the attic. As she stands in the sitting‐room, holding her grandfather’s pistol and contemplating the sacrifice of “the wild duck,” her mother enters and admonishes her, “You’d better go into the kitchen, and see if the coffee’s keeping hot; I’ll take his breakfast on a tray, when I go down to him” (339). Instead of preparing food for her father, Hedvig sacrifices her own body. By her suicide, Hedvig brings the daily sacrifices of her mother into her father’s symbolic realm, confusedly attempting to “feed” her father’s affection with her own death. Both the Ekdals’ attic apartment and the Helmers’ doll house are rendered more vividly realistic by the fact that their inhabitants eat on stage. Nora’s macaroons and Hjalmar’s bread and butter maintain their realistic status as food objects, physically present on stage and literally incorporated into the bodies of the actors. Yet simultaneously, they serve as symbols: of the psychological state of individual characters and of the nature and quality of their relationships. By allowing fact and symbol to co‐exist on stage without according primacy to either, Ibsen allows objects to be both themselves and more than themselves. This technique creates space in the theatre for both reality and mystery, a space 35
that deserves a second look before the teacups and butter of Ibsen’s dramaturgy are dismissed as insignificant clutter. 36
NOTES 1Martin Esslin comments on the importance of this dramatic technique in facilitating Ibsen’s shift from his early poetic dramas to his later realistic plays: “When Ibsen made the decision to devote himself to realistic prose drama these dream and fantasy elements were ‐‐ on the surface – suppressed. Yet they are continuously present, nevertheless. They emerge above all in what has come to be regarded as Ibsen’s increasing resort to symbolism. Having renounced the use of poetry in the theatre (in the form of verse or grandly poetic subject matter) Ibsen made more and more use of poetry of the theatre which emerges from a sudden transformation of a real object into a symbol, from the metaphoric power of an entrance or an exit, a door opening or closing a glance, a raised eyebrow or a flickering candle. It is my contention – and conviction – that the continuing power and impact of Ibsen’s plays spring from precisely this poetic quality” (81).
2
English‐language critics have taken only passing notice of the significance of food and drink in Ibsen’s drama, most, like Northam, including food items in a long list of other symbols. Dutch critic Henk Schouwvlieger, however, reads Peer Gynt as a tale that centers on alcoholic consumption: “Drink and alcoholism play a central role in the work from the beginning to the end” (16; my translation). He concludes that, when read in the context of the Norwegian tendency towards alcoholism, the play stands in a new light (3). Peer is an alcoholic; the play details his vivid hallucinations: “Peer proves to be neither a dreamer nor an artist, but a typical Norse alcoholic” (3; my translation). This conclusion, while questionable considering the almost hallucinatory nature of the Norse legends that provided Ibsen’s source for the play, is certainly intriguing, and highlights the undeniably central role that drink plays in Peer Gynt. 3
Meyer’s biography contains examples of both types of accounts. On Ibsen’s excesses, see the description from Frederik Knudtzon’s memoirs of Ibsen’s behavior during the winter of 1871 (qtd. in Meyer 263). For his ascetic daily routine, see Marcus Grønvold (qtd. in Meyer 409). While Ibsen’s fame motivated such polarized accounts, it seems likely that Ibsen, like many people, lived a fairly moderate lifestyle punctuated by moments of excess. Meyer cautions that “the idea that Ibsen was a semi‐alcoholic for most of his life is another of the myths that need to be exploded,” citing a medical doctor, Ibsen’s daughter‐in‐law, and William Archer as reliable witnesses to this point (516).
4
See Terry Otten, who argues, by examining the changing role of Dr. Rank in various drafts of the play “that the real ‘villain’ in the work is not Helmer, or even the patriarchal system he represents, but Nora herself, and that she must shatter her own ‘mind‐forg’d manacles’ before she can gain a measure of freedom” (510). Nora must struggle, Otten continues, against prostitution, “the willful selling of one’s self to gain some advantage,” the means by which she relates to both Torvald and Rank (515).
5
The appendix to the Oxford edition cites a page of the conversation at Werle’s party as the first known fragment of the play. Although the draft has Gregers, not Hjalmar, asking about the differences among wine vintages, it remains largely unchanged, demonstrating that Ibsen’s first conception of the play included the various metaphorical significances of consumption: “The host: You can take your oath on that. It’s one of the very very best vintages, I can tell you. Gregers. Is there any sort of difference among the vintages. The host: Well you are a fine one! It’s not much good putting good wine in front of you. 2nd Cham. It’s the same with hock as it is with 37
. . . with photographs, Mr . . ., it’s a matter of sunlight. Or am I wrong? Gregers. No indeed, the light certainly has something to do with it . . . H.L. The past few years haven’t been particularly good for the production of chamberlains. 1st Chamb. No the weather’s been a bit cloudy as you might say; not enough sunshine.—Gregers. So it is a bit with chamberlains as it is with different sorts of wine. 2nd Chamb. How do you mean, my dear sir? Gregers. Not all the vintages are equally good.” (432). 6
This short exchange is written on the same sheet of notes with the previous conversation about wine vintages: “Mrs. S. Well, did he get anything? P. Yes, I slipped him a bottle of cognac. Mrs. S. Oh, you might have found something a bit better than that. P. No, Mrs. S., cognac is the best thing he knows” (432‐33).
7
In an article exploring the opposition of metaphysical language to everyday life in The Wild Duck, Toril Moi calls Gina “a veritable saint of the everyday, an oasis of practical sense and human consideration in the midst of the wild schemes of the madmen around her [ . . . ] the incarnation of women’s everyday heroism” (663). Yet she goes on to observe that Gina, perhaps because of her lack of “existential distress,” (662) fails to achieve full humanity, but is rather “much like one of Hegel’s undifferentiated women, human beings who cannot become individual subjects, who cannot therefore gain access to the universal, (to political participation, for example), and who are therefore defined exclusively by their function in the family, as Mother, Wife, or Sister” (663). 8
Hedvig’s parentage is another way in which Ibsen allows physical and psychological truths to merge and intertwine on stage. While her inherited blindness leaves little doubt that she is Werle’s biological child, her combination of practicality and idealism makes it equally clear that, in character, she is Gina and Hjalmar’s child. Ibsen allows for the significance of both influences, resisting both an unrealistic dismissal of biological factors and a Strindbergian overemphasis on genetics.
CHAPTER THREE “God’s in this apple”: Eating and Spirituality in Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire The danger inherent in Ibsen’s dramatic technique, as Zelenak points out, is that actors and audiences, overwhelmed by the wealth of realistic detail, will miss the subtle development of the psychological drama. If Nora’s macaroons are seen as realistic elements of an elaborate Victorian parlour‐setting but not as indicators of her potential to use her own body as a site of rebellion, her transformation may seem unexpected, even unrealistic. Ibsen’s dramaturgy, in plays like A Doll House and The Wild Duck, begins with the physical object and gradually reveals the layers of symbolic and psychological significance that surround it until fact and symbol co‐exist on stage. Churchill’s plays most often reverse this realistic dramatic movement. In her surreal stage world, the symbolic or psychological essence of a character or object is often far more immediately apparent than their physical reality. In Cloud 9, for example, the characters’ appearance reflects not physical but psychological reality—Betty, who Churchill writes “wants to be what men want her to be,” is played by a man, while Joshua, the black servant who “wants to be what whites want him to be,” is played by a white man (Plays: One 245). Christopher Innes claims that this reversal of interior and exterior identity “offers 38
39
a key to Churchill’s dramatic approach in which subjective states are externalized, creating a hallucinatory reality” (Modern British Drama 515). Thus, instead of probing on‐stage objects for symbolic significance, Churchill’s audience is given a subjective scene and forced to imaginatively build and maintain a picture of the physical reality. They must consistently make an effort to remember, when looking at the white actor playing Joshua, the expository speech in which he announces, “My skin is black but oh my soul is white” (251). This technique challenges the human tendency to conflate the real and the visible, to characterize a person’s embodied existence in the physical world as more real than the psychological or spiritual elements of her experience. The externalization of “subjective states” results in the dreamlike quality of many of Churchill’s plays, which may seem to link them more closely to Strindberg’s surrealism than to Ibsen’s social dramas.1 Her 1994 play The Skriker, a retelling of the Persephone legend, swarms with a dizzying assortment of kelpies, fairies, and hags, who seem equally at home in the underworld and on the streets of London. Yet while the mythological creatures are, on one level, manifestations of the psychological distress of the two female protagonists, the play is not purely a Freudian representation of an internal landscape. Though Josie has been sent to a mental hospital for killing her infant daughter, the mythological creatures are not only her hallucinations, but also have an existence 40
of their own, going about their business whether Josie and her friend Lily notice them or not. Innes notes perceptively that the presence of “monstrous shapes” on the streets of London symbolizes a physical as well as a mental disintegration: “their hideous appearance is implied to be both the result of ecological breakdown, and of mental disturbance” (Modern British Drama 527). The notion that mythological and psychological events influence and are influenced by the physical world is particularly appropriate to a retelling of the Persephone legend, in which one woman’s decision to eat three pomegranate seeds determines the seasonal cycles of the natural world. Yet Churchill’s integration of mythological and psychological realms with the physical world extends beyond this play, saving her plays from a disembodied and disorienting surrealism. Like Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, food in Churchill’s plays provides a space where symbolic meanings converge and interact with the physical world. Despite her attempts to deemphasize individual personality by requiring actors to switch roles several times throughout a given play, Churchill keeps a constant focus on her characters’ most basic human needs: for shelter, for bodily comfort, and most consistently, for food. This focus serves both to realistically delineate boundaries between characters—one is a glutton, another seeking nourishment for her infant—and to unite them as they resist being reduced to their physical 41
needs by seeking communal, symbolic explanations for their situations.2 Thus in Churchill’s plays, as in Ibsen’s, food and eating reveal the stage as a space where fact and symbol can co‐exist. In her 1976 play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, her careful portrayal of her characters’ literal need for nourishment poignantly reveals the economic disparity that allows a few to feast while the majority hungers. Yet the importance of eating and starving within the play transcends the political realm, deriving spiritual significance from the characters’ attention to the Christian rituals of fasting and the Eucharist. By staging the intersection of physical, socio‐political experiences of eating and starving and spiritual traditions of feasting and fasting, Churchill creates a complex theatrical space between reality and mystery. The act of eating in Churchill’s plays not only serves as a realistic reminder of a character’s physical body but also suggests the political and social bodies that determine what and how much any given person can eat. Both hunger and gluttony, she suggests, are of political and social origin; the growing, preparing, and consumption of food make far‐reaching political statements. By considering the similarities between hunger caused by economic deprivation and by female socialization, her plays emphasize the inseparability of capitalism and patriarchy. Those whom a hierarchical society values, it feeds well. Of necessity, such a system relies on maintaining a majority that consumes less without 42
significant rebellion. Whether this majority is forced into hunger through economic want or is socialized into self‐starvation is of little consequence to those at the top. Thus feminism and capitalism, in Churchill’s understanding, find themselves irreconcilably at odds. In an interview the playwright said, “Of course, socialism and feminism aren’t synonymous, but I feel strongly about both and wouldn’t be interested in a form of one that didn’t include the other” (Betsko 78). Woven into Churchill’s food symbolism along with her signature feminist and socialist statements are the language and traditions of Christian spirituality. In such diverse plays as Vinegar Tom (1976), Fen (1983), The Skriker (1994), and Blue Heart (1997), religious traditions clearly influence the characters’ attitudes towards eating. It is in her treatment of the English Civil War, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, however, that Churchill most fully explores the act of eating as an insistent symbol of the paradoxical messages of the Christian tradition. For the play’s characters, the act of eating in a religious context functions both as a form of self‐realization and an extreme form of self‐denial or even loss of self. Through experiences of poverty, starvation, and fasting, they cultivate a spirituality based on the acceptance of suffering as mortification of the flesh. Simultaneously, through the Eucharist and acts of charity, they realize a mystical union of body and soul, a feeding of the body that leads to fulfillment of the 43
spirit. Food thus becomes a discordant symbol, serving as both a means of communion with God and the ecclesial body, and as a base necessity, a means to please the ever‐lusting flesh. Although the rituals of Christian spirituality play a significant role in Churchill’s canon, critics have tended to focus instead on the influences of Buddhism on her work. In an interview with Judith Thurman, Churchill mentioned that while studying at Oxford she was “strongly influenced by Buddhism, and that sort of thing,” and that as a playwright she finds herself “constantly coming back” to Eastern thought (54). Mark Thacker Brown has explored the ramifications of this rather nebulous statement, discussing Churchill’s tendency to oppose Western thought, focused on individuality and ownership, to Eastern, centered on harmony and contentedness. These two modes of thought interact in a yin/yang flux; the active and aggressive yang characters providing perfect contrast to the peaceful, passive yin. Brown illustrates this technique by citing the epigrams to the play Owners, one a line from a Christian hymn: “Onward Christian soldiers / Marching as to war” and the other from a Zen poem: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing. / Spring comes and the grass grows by itself” (36). He concludes that Churchill sets the values of Buddhism against those of Western capitalism: Churchill does not ‘constantly come back’ to Buddhism in any overt way, but she surely has been influenced by Buddhist, Taoist, 44
Jain, and Hindu thought. For her, the enemy is the status quo in Western, bourgeois society, and the tenets of Buddhism, with their emphasis on disciplined denial of the validity of sensory impressions and passive resistance to the cravings of the world, provide formidable opposition to the acquisitiveness of western capitalism. (45) As Brown acknowledges, Churchill’s plays, while drawing on Buddhist thought, rarely do so overtly. Far more often, their religious references are to Christian traditions and ideals. Though acknowledging the militant use of Christianity in the spread of capitalism, Churchill recognizes the tensions between communal religious ideals and individual practice, between a “passive resistance to the cravings of the world” similar to Buddhism, and an individualistic appropriation of spiritual ideals to serve material ends. This complex treatment of the paradoxical traditions of Christian spirituality, depicted in the rites of fasting and the Eucharist meal, permeates Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire follows the course of the English Civil War from pre‐war political and religious fervor to the disillusionment of the lower classes following the anticlimactic Putney Debates. The characters, ranging from an impassioned female Ranter to the aristocratic members of the political debates, are never portrayed twice by the same actor, a move which Churchill says “reflect[s] better the reality of large events like war and revolution where many people share the same kind of experience” ( Plays: One 184). The play operates as a series of vignettes, beginning with scenes of the dissatisfaction 45
of the lower classes and moving through the recruitment process, in which men were encouraged to join God’s army and help overthrow the king, labeled the Antichrist. With the refusal of Cromwell’s elite to change existing policies of property ownership, the revolutionary enthusiasm spirals into confusion and disillusionment. The subsequent vignettes depict the failure of continued attempts at change, including the Diggers’ communal farm and the Ranters’ efforts to channel their spiritual zeal into a present, tangible form. The play ends with a section entitled “After,” in which the characters give short glimpses into their lives following the war. Although the play takes place in the 1650s, its characters, attempting to discern tangible effects of the revolutionary ideals, often return to the language and traditions of medieval Christianity, with emphases on rites of feasting and fasting. The scarcity of food among the lower classes lends it immediate importance apart from any religious significance. Yet the language with which they understand and describe their hunger remain remarkably spiritual. Starvation takes on the significance of a self‐imposed fast, a mortification of the flesh in hopes of attaining higher reality. Food is both predicated on human initiative and able to be capriciously granted or withheld by uncontrollable environmental factors. Thus it combines the most basic human and physical activities with the essence of the 46
supernatural. Fasting is a means of acknowledging both. Early in the Judeo‐
Christian tradition, as in many pastoral religions, fasting corresponded to seasons of planting and reaping, drought and plenty. The Old Testament writer Joel, whom Churchill quotes, links current fasting with a future surplus. He writes, “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.” After an appropriate period of fasting and repentance, Joel records, “In response to his people the Lord said: I am sending you grain, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied” (Joel 2:12, 19, NRSV). Fasting was an activity undertaken by a nation to acknowledge the power of a God who could give or withhold food at will. By this acknowledgement, the fasting community hoped to secure the favor and providence of God in the future. Prior to the war, Churchill’s characters espouse this view of physical suffering as a communal activity endured in order to reap future rewards. The army recruiters utilize this view, subsuming the momentary individual experience of pain or death in the war to the greater end, the destruction of the Antichrist and the advent of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Star, a corn merchant turned army recruiter, promises his audience that when Christ’s kingdom arrives, they will inherit a newly fruitful earth: We have just had another bad harvest. But, it is written, when Jesus comes ‘the floors shall be full of wheat and the vats overflow 47
with wine.’ Why did Jesus Christ purchase the earth with his blood? He purchased it for the saints. For you. It will all be yours. (195) Later, Star adds the hope of a new identity to this promise of future abundance, saying, “You are nobody here. You have nothing. But the moment you join the army you will have everything” (195). Briggs “gives his name” to the army, becoming one of a nameless mass dedicated to present suffering in the name of God in hopes of improving the future. Through the language of religious choice, even inevitable suffering holds the elusive promise of a new identity and future abundance. This promise of spiritual reward for suffering, though in some cases an encouragement to community, simultaneously provides justification for the disparity between rich and poor. In the third scene, a vicar lectures his servant whose baby is dying of malnutrition, saying, “It must have been a comfort this morning to have the Bishop himself encourage you to suffer. ‘Be afflicted and mourn and weep.’ That is the way to heaven” (192). The involuntary starvation of the infant takes on the significance of pious fasting, a choice to suffer rather than an economic imperative. The vicarious suffering of the parents through the starvation of the child, the vicar intimates, ensures them a place in heaven. Although the vicar offers an orange for the baby, he does little else to help, reminding the servant, “If it is not spared, we must submit. We all have to suffer 48
in this life” (193). Thus the baby’s suffering not only promises the parents eternal rewards, but also creates a bond, however artificial, between the vicar and his servant. The oppressed find solace in the hope that their pain will lead to future glory, while the oppressors comfort themselves in the thought that to alleviate the suffering of others would be to deny them a greater spiritual good. This preference of spirit over flesh lends consolation to those who suffer physically, but concurrently hints at a division between self and body. Despite the central Christian narrative of the Incarnation, gnostic traditions have emphasized the separation and opposition of the body and the spirit. This tendency to oppose body and spirit centers on passages like the following from the book of Romans: I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? (7:22‐24) The “inmost self” becomes irretrievably trapped in the “body of death,” with its passions and lusts that war against the “law of the mind.” Claxton, the servant from the earlier scene, experiences this concept of selfhood independent of the physical body as he travels to hear an unconventional preacher. Along the way, he becomes increasingly disconnected from his own body: Though I’d thought of going for weeks, the day I went I didn’t think at all, I just put on my coat and started walking. […] I wondered if it even mattered to me. But as I walked I found my 49
heart was pounding and my breath got short going up the hill. My body knew I was doing something amazing. I knew I was in the midst of something. I was doing it, not standing still worrying about it. (220) His body is a being apart from him, to be observed with detachment, its vital signs taken to determine his level of excitement. The division of spirit and body and subsequent preference of spirit lead to the desire to cultivate the spirit and reduce the flesh in an attempt to ultimately unite with God. The apostle Paul writes, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:50). Claxton concludes the retelling of his out‐of‐body experience: “Still my heart pounds and my mouth is dry and I rush on towards the infinite nothing that is God” (221). Only by escaping the tyranny of the fickle body can the spirit gain oneness with the divine. Thus the doctrine of fasting assumes a literal facet; the starvation of the body reduces the barrier between the spirit and God. Churchill quotes a historical pamphlet by Abiezer Coppe, read by the character Cobbe in the play. It describes a spiritual experience in which Cobbe’s flesh is stripped away in preparation for a divine encounter: All my strength, my forces, were utterly routed, my house I dwelt in fired, my father and mother forsook me, and the wife of my bosom loathed me, and I was utterly plagued and sunk into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mother’s womb) out of which I came naked, and whereto I returned again naked. (206) 50
Stripped of outward ties, “utterly plagued and sunk into nothing,” he is consumed by Eternity. Continuing the metaphor of being eaten, he says, “I was thrown into the belly of hell” (206). Spiritual experience requires a devouring of the body by the soul. Fasting thus indicates that, instead of consuming, the worshipper is open to being consumed, emptied of the body and submerged in the realm of the spirit.3 This loss of physicality becomes particularly important when applied to the female body, which many of the characters believe carries the sin of Eve. One of the play’s most poignant scenes involves two women in the act of abandoning a child. The mother blames herself for her body’s inability to provide milk, saying “If I drunk more water. Make more milk.” The second woman responds, “Not without food. Not how ill you are” (227). Despite illness and starvation, these women think first to blame their own bodies, not the system which deprives them. Claxton’s wife tells Hoskins, an outspoken female Ranter, that the sinful female body negates women’s right to speak: Women can’t preach. We bear children in pain, that’s why. And they die. For our sin, Eve’s sin. That’s why we have pain. We’re not clean. We have to obey. The man, whatever he’s like. If he beats us that’s why. We have blood, we’re shameful, our bodies are worse than a man’s. All bodies are evil but ours is worst. That’s why we can’t speak. (204) Tainted with blood and sin, the female body demands increased discipline. Whether by refraining from food, drink, or speech, the play’s women restrain 51
their appetites in apology for their bodies. Susan Bordo writes that the physical hunger of women is symptomatic of a social system which seeks to limit all areas of female need: the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity that female hunger—for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification—be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited. (18) Women in the play who eat, drink, or speak in public seem aware of committing uncouth reminders of their fleshiness. When fed or verbally expressed, their bodies take on an inescapable solidity that ties them to the inferior world of flesh. The idea of eating as a link to a dangerous realm of flesh recurs as Churchill rewrites the myth of Persephone in The Skriker. A shape‐shifting mythological creature, the Skriker lures Josie to the underworld, where she witnesses an unholy feast. The banquet initially appears lavish, but “here and there it’s not working – some of the food is twigs, leaves, beetles” (34). A lost girl takes Josie aside and warns her not to eat: Don’t eat. It’s glamour. It’s twigs and beetles and a dead body. Don’t eat or you’ll never go back. Don’t drink. It’s glamour. It’s blood and dirty water. I was looking for my love and I got lost in an orchard. Never take an apple, never pick a flower. I took one bite and now I’m here forever. Everyone I love must be dead by now. Don’t eat, don’t drink, or you’ll never get back. (36) 52
The notion that eating forges an unbreakable chain to a world of horrors, of “blood and dirty water,” corresponds to the religious fear of eternal damnation incurred by an overindulgence of physicality. Cobbe expresses this fear in the prayer that opens Light Shining: At table last night when father said grace I wanted to seize the table and turn it over so the white cloth slid, silver, glass, capon, claret, comfits overturned. I wanted to shout your name and damn my family and myself eating so quietly when what is going on outside our gate? Words come out of my mouth like toads, I swear toads, toads will sit on me in hell. (191‐92) Both the food he has ingested and the words he has spoken torment him, condemning him to an eternity of physicality. They function for Cobbe as Persephone’s pomegranate seeds do for her, eaten “so quietly,” but bearing such weight. Eating not only chains the characters to the hell of physicality, but also links them to the oppressive ruling class who feast while the majority starves. The characters in the penultimate scene sing verses from Ecclesiastes, concluding with: “The sleep of the labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep” (239‐40). Like Cobbe, who damns his family for feasting sumptuously without noticing the suffering outside their gates, several of the play’s characters view self‐denial as a means of social justice. Briggs, through his experiences with “God’s Army,” has grown disillusioned about the return of Christ for which the other characters hope. In 53
response to Claxton’s assertion, “But in us. I know we can be perfect,” Briggs replies, “Then we must do it” (234). Briggs attempts to realize this dream for universal social justice by restricting his own consumption. In the “After” scene, he describes his increasingly ascetic lifestyle: I thought I must do something practical. I decided to bring the price of corn down. A few people eat far too much. So if a few people ate far too little that might balance. Then there would be enough corn and the price would come down. I gave up meat first, then cheese and eggs. I lived on a little porridge and vegetables, then I gave up on the porridge and stopped cooking the vegetables. It was easier because I was living out. I ate what I could find but not berries and nuts because so many people want those and I do well with sorrel leaves and dandelion. But grass. It was hard to get my body to take grass. It got very ill. It wouldn’t give in to grass. But I forced it on. And now it will. (240) Briggs’s fast borrows the form and language of religious ascetics, who often practiced self‐denial in stages, training their bodies to greater and greater hardship. His hunger is partially a reaction to failure, a mode of self‐
punishment. Yet his self‐starvation is simultaneously a final attempt to achieve 54
what the war failed at, the redistribution of property so that everyone has something to eat. He fasts not in hopes of Christ’s victorious return, but for the creation of an equitable society in the present. Briggs’s fast poses a redefinition of the motives of religious behavior concomitant with the passage quoted from Gerard Winstanley earlier in the play: True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and that is in the use of the earth. A man had better have no body than have no food for it. True freedom lies in the true enjoyment of the earth. True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have earth to manure. There can be no universal liberty till this universal community can be established. (219) Fasting in this sense unites religion and political concerns to create a spirituality concerned not with individual fulfillment or nebulous future rewards but with universal social justice. With its combined messages of appeasing God, escaping fleshly constraints, and pursuing equality on earth, the religious rite of fasting swarms with paradoxes. For some characters, it appears a form of self‐expression, a personal choice made to embody spiritual longings or to pursue a more just society. At the other extreme, fasting seems the most severe self‐denial, a needlessly harsh punishment of the body for its natural desires and failings. The tension only becomes more pronounced when the Eucharist is taken into account. The practice of fasting seems bizarre in a religion in which the central rite is a meal. Contrasted with asceticism, the Eucharist is shockingly physical, a 55
type of cannibalism, as the God who had become human flesh in the Incarnation repeatedly descends to inhabit human flesh through the consumption of the bread and wine. While fasting can be read as an attempt to escape from or at least subdue the body, the Eucharist resituates the worshipper in her own body. Pickstock writes of the Eucharist and the liturgy surrounding it that it ensures that the “inward journey” of worship “is not to be interpreted as a crudely metaphysical escape from our embodied character towards a spiritual interior, for it serves to intensify the physicality of our bodies, reminding us that we eat and drink, and are situated within a community” (231). For Churchill’s Ranters, the paradox of the sinless God becoming part of the flesh of the worshipper through the Eucharist signifies the redemption of the body. They focus on the physicality of Jesus Christ, using images simultaneously blasphemous and reminiscent of Catholic meditation. Cobbe cries, “They say Christ’s wounds, wounds, wounds, wounds. Stick your fingers in. Christ’s arsehole. He had an arsehole. Christ shits on you rich. Christ shits. Shitting pissing spewing puking fucking Jesus Christ” (230). By acknowledging the humanity of Christ’s body, they implicitly redeem their own flesh. If divinity can be contained in “shitting,” “puking “ human flesh, its presence among them, and indeed in them, is not impossible. 56
Historically, the fleshiness of the Eucharist has awed and frightened outsiders, leading to the mistaken identification of early Christianity with cannibalism.4 Christ’s request at the Last Supper that his followers remember him by eating the bread and wine which are his body and blood confuses the comfortable distinction between the human body and the food it consumes. The image of eating disguised human flesh is a bizarre one, which Churchill twists and perverts through many of her plays. The feast in The Skriker becomes a diabolical mockery of the Eucharist as a hag wanders on the scene and accuses the assorted creatures of eating her. HAG They cut me up. They boiled me for dinner. Where’s my head? is that my shoulder? that’s my toe. SKRIKER They chopped her to pieces, they chipped her to pasties. She’s a hag higgledepig hog. She’s a my my miser myselfish and chips. (35) Food and human flesh run together in the Skriker’s singsong language, as they do when Christ proclaims at the Last Supper, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26: 26). With this command, the borders between food and body blur, the purposes behind even normal acts of eating rendered uncertain. In Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, a butcher refuses to sell meat to his wealthy patrons, accusing them of cannibalizing the poor. He asks, “What do you need it for? No, tell me. To stuff yourself, that’s what for. To make fat. And shit. When it could put a little good flesh on children’s bones. It could be the 57
food of life. If it goes into you, it’s stink and death. So you can’t have it” (227‐
28). Food in the bodies of the rich becomes fat and feces, while to the poor it represents unattainable life. He continues berating his customers, accusing them of devouring the children of the poor: You’ve had your lifetime’s meat. All of you. All of you that can buy meat. You’ve had your meat. You’ve had their meat. You’ve had their meat that can’t buy any meat. […] I said give them back their meat. You cram yourself with their children’s meat. You cram yourselves with their dead children. (228) The significance of food thus greatly depends on the consumer. For the rich, eating is an act of gluttony, a choice to callously ignore the starving around them. To the poor, eating is an act of faith that some benevolent force will provide their next meal. During the scene mentioned earlier between the vicar and the servant, the vicar downs several glasses of wine and eats from his bowl of oranges. His behavior seems despicably gluttonous in light of the conversation of a starving baby. Yet the orange taken from the same bowl and given to the hungry child represents hope and succor. The play’s penultimate scene consists of an unorthodox communion service that combines a loathing of gluttony with a great respect for the simple act of sharing and eating food. To Churchill’s characters, eating together becomes a truer way of encountering God than any taught by the church or government. A mismatched collection of social outcasts, they meet in a bar to 58
share their food. The atmosphere and the others’ casual blasphemy shocks Brotherton, used to traditional religion and its rejection of her: CLAXTON. Christ was a bastard. HOSKINS. Still is a bastard. BROTHERON. I thought you said this was a prayer meeting. CLAXTON. This is it. This is my one flesh. (229) The unifying ethic quickly becomes clear. Traditional blasphemies or sins are accepted, even encouraged, as long as the person is willing to share his or her body and food with the others. A drunk sitting in the corner of the bar is drawn into the meeting with Hoskins’ admonition to share: HOSKINS. Give us a sip. He won’t give us a sip. CLAXTON. He’s not very godly. He needs praying. HOSKINS. Let us pray. Or whatever. (229) Godliness hinges on willingness to share food and drink, rather than on the traditional hierarchy of social worth. The Ranters continue their reordering of Christian spirituality by choosing an apple as their Eucharistic meal. They reclaim the apple, traditionally the symbol of the Fall, as a symbol of their hopes for communal holiness. Hoskins holds out an apple, proclaiming, “This is something held by a farmer. Then by a stallholder. Then by me. It comes to me God’s in it. If a man could be so perfect. Look at it” (231). It gains significance by its commonplace interaction with human being, indicating the connectedness of the farmer, the stallholder, and the 59
consumers. Brotherton, wary of the God who requires suffering and punishment, is confused by the apple’s newly acquired dual nature: I always like an apple if I can get it. I haven’t been to church for a long time. I don’t know if this is a church. It’s a drinking place. I always hide on Sunday. They notice you in the street if everyone’s in church so I go in the woods on Sunday. I can’t see God in this. If God was in it, he’d have us whipped. (231) Shaped by a life of starving, stealing, and begging, Brotherton has internalized the Church’s discomfort with mingling spirituality and physicality. She recognizes the human evil of suffering but also the religious evil of physical comfort. When Claxton asks her, “What’s not right? Touching or not touching?” she answers, “Both are not right” (231). Her uncertainty echoes Cobbe’s prayer in the second scene in which he ponders, “I sin in my fear of praying about that sin, I sin in denying my fear” (191). The tension between a Church that advocates the mortification of the flesh and allows for the starvation of the poor and a God who commands followers to eat his flesh seems insurmountable. The Ranters’ spirituality attempts to unify the paradox by picturing a God who finds joy in the physicality of the believing poor, but who also transcends and redeems the suffering of the physical body. This balance is achieved by a combination of the Eucharist and charity, a sharing of God’s body with the physically hungry. 60
Claxton gives perhaps the clearest voice to this new religious vision. To Brotherton’s assertion that neither touching nor abstaining are right, he responds: CLAXTON. They are, they’re both, whichever you want, when you want, is right. Do you want me to touch your hand? BROTHERTON. No. CLAXTON. That’s right. God’s in that too. God’s in us. The form that I am is the representative of the whole creation. You are the representative of the whole creation. God’s in this apple. He’s nowhere else but in the creation. This is where he is. (231‐32) Together with Hoskins, Claxton later assumes the role of priest, administering the sacrament to the others. The experience combines the traditional format of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ with the realistic acknowledgement of physical hunger: They laugh and start getting food out. CLAXTON holds out food. CLAXTON. Christ’s body. BROTHERTON. I’m afraid I haven’t anything. CLAXTON. There’s plenty. HOSKINS holds out wine. HOSKINS. This is Christ’s blood. CLAXTON. (to BROTHERTON). When did you last eat? Eat slowly now. (233) In this passage, the Eucharist becomes simultaneously a spiritual sacrament and an actual meal. Claxton’s simple reassurance that “There’s plenty” indicates the convergence of the self‐sacrifice usually represented by fasting and the filling, comforting experience of communion. 61
The Ranters recoil from the Church whose representatives have held on to property, first through the monarchy and now through Cromwell’s regime, while others starve. Cobbe argues that an act of charity can be the truest manifestation of God: If they could see God in this apple as I do now, God in the bread that they will not give to the poor who cry out day and night, Bread, bread, bread for the Lord’s sake, if they could see it they would rush to the prisons, and they would bow to the poor wretches that are their own flesh, and say, “Your humble servants, we set you free.” (232) The one flesh has become all of humanity, Christ’s mandate to eat his body a command to feed the hungry. The Ranters demand a practical spirituality, one that alleviates physical suffering. To this end, they propose a communal society, similar to the one hoped for before the war, but based on religion instead of government. COBBE. My coat’s yours. And I hope yours is mine. We’ll all live together in one family, one marriage, one flesh in God. That’s what we do. HOSKINS. Yes, everything in common. COBBE. All things common. Or the plague of God will consume whatever you have. CLAXTON. All goods in common, yes, and our bodies in common‐ BRIGGS. No. HOSKINS. Yes, we’ll have no property in the flesh. My wife, that’s property. My husband, that’s property. All men are one flesh and I can lie with any man as my husband and that’s no sin because all men are one man, all my husband’s one flesh. (234) 62
Just as Christ has become one with them through the mystical experience of the Eucharist, so they hope to erase all divisions between individual bodies and possessions and become one flesh. Their understanding of the Eucharist recalls that of the early medieval church, wherein the Eucharist served both as a symbol of the unity of the Church and as the means by which the ecclesial body was unified. In her study of the significance of food to medieval women, Caroline Walker Bynum writes that the communion meal both symbolized and created community: “Christ had said it was human life, was body and blood. From the very beginning the eucharistic elements stood primarily not for nature, for grain and grape, but for human beings bound into community by commensality” (48). Ironically, considering this lofty ideal, from the point at which the Ranters voice their hopes for communal life, the meeting increasingly grows frenzied and disorganized.5 In a symbolic return to Babel, each participant, claiming to speak for God or even to be God, expresses individualistic and often contradictory spiritual experiences. Cobbe continues to hope for transcendence through charity, relating the story of a poor man to whom he gave all of his money. Hoskins and Claxton maintain the imminent return, both spiritual and physical, of Christ to earth. Claxton preaches that the rich will repent their sins, after which “there’s no sin except what you think is sin” (237). Briggs, however, maintains that Christ will not return and life is hell on earth, crying, “I’ve done 63
all I can and it’s not enough” (236). The scene culminates with a speech by the drunk, who gives voice to the chaos of the paradoxical claims: I’m God. And I’m the devil. I’m the serpent. I’m in heaven now and I’m in hell […] I’m in hell, I’m not afraid. I seen worse things. If the devil come at me I kick him up the arse […] I’m in heaven. And I go up to God. And I say, You great tosspot, I’m a good a man as you, as good a God as you […] Plenty of beer in heaven. Angels all drunk. Devils drunk. Devils and angels all fornicating. […] And I say to God, get down below on earth. Live in my cottage. Pay my rent. Look after my children, mind, they’re hungry. And don’t ever beat my wife or I’ll strike you down. […] And I say to God, Wait here in my house. You can have a drink while you’re waiting. But wait. Wait. Wait till I come. (239) The surprising image of God living in a cottage, with children to feed and a wife to beat, makes clear the necessity of the balanced paradox at the heart of the Christian tradition. A God who is simply flesh, who condescends to be eaten and blasphemed and bossed around by a drunk, may provide comfort but no hope. Conversely, an ethereal deity impressed only by suffering and lack cannot explain the simple pleasure of food to the hungry. Hence the play’s rhythms of abstaining and eating, of encountering God’s spirit through hunger, then encountering God’s body through the Eucharist. Ameila Howe Kritzer writes of the play’s conclusion that the final monologues reflect the defeat of both the millennial vision and the communities it created: The dislocated and sparsely worded individual utterances of the final “After” scene, with their emphasis on food, confirms not only the defeat of 64
the millennial vision but also the death of the collective imagination in the face of yet more limiting material conditions. (101) Both experiments, the attempt via the war to abolish property, and the Ranters’ efforts to establish a communal religion, have failed. Instead, the characters’ speeches reflect a return to the old rhythms of life, of eating and starving, giving and stealing. Having been charged with blasphemy, Cobbe relates, “I was never God in the sense they asked me at my trial did I claim to be God. I could have answered no quite truthfully but I threw apples and pears round the council chamber, that seemed a good answer” (240). In a willful confusion of the Incarnation, he uses food and words interchangeably. Brotherton has returned to her previous life. She says, “Stole two loaves yesterday. They caught another woman. They thought she did it, took her away. Bastards won’t catch me” (240). The food she steals is a sort of grace, with the other woman suffering the consequences of her theft. Like the Eucharist, the theft represents solace and comfort, but also the distant threat of punishment deferred. The drunk recounts with pleasure the feast on the day the king returned, while Briggs lives like a wild animal in a field, eating only grass in an attempt to bring the corn prices down. The play ends with Claxton, who has moved to the Barbados, saying, There’s an end of outward preaching now. An end of perfection. […] I sometimes hear from the world I have forsaken. I see it fraught with tidings of the same clamour, strife, and contention that abounded when I left it. I give it the hearing and that’s all. My great desire is to see and say nothing. (241) 65
The tension of flesh and spirit remain even in Claxton’s final disillusionment, the need to eat and be satisfied conflicting with the desire to “see and say nothing.” Following the Ranters’ communion service, the worshippers sing together verses from Ecclesiastes 5, ending in the phrases, He that loveth silver shan’t be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. The sleep of the labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much; but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. (239‐40) The need for food ties Churchill’s characters to the physical realm, forcing them to work, beg, or steal in order to stay alive. Through control of their appetites or the definition of their sufferings as spiritual discipline, they give meaning to seemingly capricious periods of want. In turn, even ordinary experiences of eating become mystical unions of flesh and spirit, moments in which, physical needs having been satisfied, higher thoughts became possible. Sharing food with others becomes the truest expression of community. In her complex treatment of the significance of food, Churchill recognizes the ways in which physical experience both shapes and is shaped by spiritual traditions. Alongside the personal and political rhythms of hunger and fulfillment, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire voices the paradoxes that both challenge and perpetuate Christian spirituality. In the Ranters’ communion service, Churchill creates a model for the theatre as a place where the boundaries 66
between physical and spiritual realms of experience can be momentarily suspended to create a communal vision for the future. Even if this vision, like the Ranters’, fails, the act of bringing people together in a setting that explores the full range of human experience, from physical suffering to spiritual transcendence, is profoundly hopeful. For Churchill, as for Ibsen, the stage provides a space to explore both reality and mystery, to acknowledge physical experiences like hunger and fullness while simultaneously examining their psychological or spiritual significance. 67
NOTES 1In some important ways, her affinities do lie with Strindberg, as evidenced by her recent (2005) version of A Dream Play. Chief among the playwrights’ similarities is an emphasis on blurring the borders of individual identity. Strindberg writes in his preface to A Dream Play that “the characters split, double, redouble, evaporate, condense, fragment, cohere,” a description which could easily apply to Light Shining or Fen with their vast casts of characters played by relatively few actors (205). Yet while Strindberg uses his doubling, splitting characters to illuminate the “one consciousness […] superior to them all: that of the dreamer,” (205) Churchill writes that she adopts a shifting, fragmented technique of characterization in order to “reflect better the reality of large events like war and revolution where many people share the same kind of experience” (184). Ultimately, Churchill’s concern with portraying the reality of social situations bring her closer to Ibsen’s social drama than may initially be apparent through her surrealist dramatic techniques. 2For a theoretical exploration of this dual function of food metaphors, see the introduction to Kilgour’s From Communion to Cannibalism, in which she examines eating as an expression of the inside/outside binary, the opposition that Derrida claims underlies all other binary oppositions. She describes eating as a recognition of both individual identity and the need for community: “The body itself can be imagined (though it does not have to be) as a corporation of its members, which together form a unified and clearly defined structure whose boundaries separate the self from others and so mark off individual identity. But bodily needs also indicate that the appearance of autonomy is an illusion, for the body must incorporate elements from outside itself in order to survive. The need for food exposes the vulnerability of individual identity, enacted at a wider social level in the need for exchanges, communion, and commerce with others, through which the individual is absorbed into a larger corporate body” (6). 3 Though Light Shining specifically links the desire for the body to be consumed to a spiritual longing for oneness with God, Churchill’s 1997 play Blue Heart places a similar desire in a modern, secularized context. In the play, Brian expresses a “terrible urge” to eat himself , and describes how he would go about this self‐cannibalism, ending by saying, “I’ve swallowed my head I’ve swallowed my whole self up I’m all mouth can my mouth swallow my mouth yes yes my mouth’s taking a big bite ahh” (21). Brian’s daydream, like Cobbe’s vision, assumes a division between body and spirit, and longs for the reduction of the body. Yet while Cobbe envisions himself being devoured by Eternity, Brian, without a symbolic or spiritual understanding of the world, can only imagine his body eating itself. 4 For a short overview of this confusion, see the chapter on “The Reformation of the Host” in Kilgour’s From Communion to Cannibalism. 5Though Churchill openly espouses socialist ideals, this moment is characteristic of her tendency to balance her critiques of capitalism with a recognition of the impracticability of socialism. Thus Serious Money, a harsh depiction of the London Stock Exchange, is balanced by Mad Forest, which details the failure of the Ceausescu regime in Romania. 68
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