2014, Vol.27, No.3

“The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”: Homosexual Love in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love

Hye-Gyong Kwon | 2014, 27(3) | pp.5~34 | number of Cited : 1

In Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, the key word, love—more concretely, homosexual love—exists in different contexts. Denounced by late Victorians as “the love that dare not speak its name,” it was also lauded by the ancient Greeks as an ideal relationship between males, and it is this classical aesthetic to which the Victorian poet and scholar A. E. Housman appeals in the play. Although his dear friend Moses Jackson, who was not homosexual, felt some discomfort in his relationship with Housman, Housman himself compared their friendship with the idealized male-male type found in Greek classics and attempted to persuade Jackson that their relationship was “the pattern of comradeship, the chivalric ideal of virtue in the ancient world.”In ancient Greece, the male-male relationship was considered to be the ideal, superior to that between a man and a woman. The Greek conception of idealized male partnerships also allowed loving relations between mature men and adolescent boys. While Socrates saw virtue in the admiration of beautiful youths, his acceptance did not extend to sexual contact between males. Housman, in order to circumvent negative late Victorian views of homosexuality, found in the Socratic Eros a way to justify his love for Jackson, recasting it as the pinnacle of male relations. Yet no amount of confession and effort by Housman could induce Jackson to return his feelings, and Housman was doomed to a lonely life of concealed homosexuality, unable to free himself from that first flame of passion. In spite of the social persecution of homosexuals, Oxford University was seized by a homosexual craze in the late 19th century, and at the center of this was Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s relationship with Alfred Douglas led to a trial which scandalized London and resulted in his being sentenced to two years’ hard labor. In the play, Housman meets with Wilde, who suggests that Housman has allowed himself to become a victim of Victorian-era repression. Housman felt only the pain of love unrequited; to his death, he clung to the idealized invention of love and condemned himself to “an emotional imprisonment.” In contrast, Wilde experienced his love and invented himself through the act of loving.

Cinematic Adaptations of Shakespeare's The Tempest and their Contemporary Meanings: the Films of Derek Jarman and Julie Taymor

김민정 , Kang Kim | 2014, 27(3) | pp.35~78 | number of Cited : 0

The aim of this paper is to examine the contemporary meanings and cinematic features of the two critically-acclaimed films based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Derek Jarman’s The Tempest in 1979 and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest in 2010. It is commonly believed that The Tempest is one of the most unrealistic plays and consequently far more appropriated for a variety of cinematic translations and adaptations than any other plays attributed to Shakespeare. Furthermore, the play contains problematic modern discourses of racism and colonial ideologies rooted in the social conditions in which it was written, and universal themes such as family, power, revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation. These issues and themes provided many of the creative directors in film with a significant foundation so as to materialize their distinct imagination and artistic craftsmanship. As being the main targets of our slightly wordy argument about Shakespeare on screen here in this paper, the two Tempest movies are regarded as the outstanding works by film critics in terms of cinematic interpretation and hermeneutic adaptations. In his queer Tempest, Derek Jarman seeks to interpret Shakespeare’s original play-text on the perspectives of non-mainstream and counterculture tendencies at his time, which stands against the dominant bourgeois high-brow culture inclusive of the works of Shakespeare. Jarman suggests all the episodes in the movie being a painful dream to which not-yet-coming-out Prospero’s repressed homosexual desire and self-attachment are aggressively reflected, portraying Caliban as a symbol of his alter ego of gay sexuality. Taymor’s Tempest dangerously crosses a border line of gender politics with the change of the male protagonist’s sex in the original play into a female one. Here a stubborn father Prospero becomes a caring mother Prospera and the father-daughter relationship purposedly set up by Shakespeare in the play get reversed in the mother-daughter one in the movie in compliance with today’s female-oriented gender roles and social change. Prospera as a mother of untarnished daughter decides to throw away her womanly magical power and to return to the place to which she formerly belonged for her daughter’s happiness and growth. By means of a new genre, critically-dubbed ‘Shakespeare on screen’, the works of Shakespeare are incessantly being renovated and rejuvenated by accommodating the social and cultural values of the period when the films are made and circulated among the public. As in the cases of two Tempest movies discussed above, analytical approaches to the cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays will also bring a new different understanding of the contemporary themes that any society faces and his original texts as well.

The Exploration of the African Citizen in Gem of the Ocean

Soim Kim | 2014, 27(3) | pp.79~105 | number of Cited : 0

August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean dramatizes Aunt Ester and Solly’s process of educating Citizen. Aunt Ester, a “285-year-old” former slave, embodies the African wisdom and history. Solly, a former slave and an Underground Railroad conductor, symbolizes the African nomadic life and the spirit of resistance. Citizen, whose name evokes the idea of citizenship, lacks a sense of both the African-American tradition and the American system of law and freedom. The background of the play is Pittsburgh in 1904. The year 1904 is the time of the great migration of the blacks from the South to the North where the Jim Crow Laws enforcing segregation are more lenient than in the South. But even in Pittsburgh, the living conditions of the blacks are harsh: the mill where Citizen has worked broke the original contract, and a series of mishaps lead to a riot and Solly’s setting the mill on fire. The paper illuminates in this difficult time, what values the two African mentors, Ester and Solly, present to Citizen, and what kind of citizenship they intend to build up. Ester’s counsel includes the purification of the soul, the expansion of life, and finally, the embracement of the history of black slaves. Solly provides a unique view on freedom and law based upon his personal experience as a runaway slave and as an Underground Railroad conductor. Significantly, Ester and Solly’s guidances merge into the ritual heading to “the City of the Bones” with the boat called “the Gem of the Ocean.” In the ritual, in which all the black community participates, Citizen is proclaimed to be “reborn as a man of the people.” Both Ester and Solly believe in the power of the African community, which is expected to overcome segregation and inequality. But the effect of the ritual is tested just after it ends. Caesar, the black constable, raids Ester’s place, eventually arrests Ester, and kills Solly. While the play endorses the sense of the African tradition and the support of the community as the bases for Black citizenship, the sacrifice of Solly and character weakness of Citizen provide more questions than answers. As there is a gap between the idealistic vision of the community power and Pittsburgh reality, there certainly exists a gap between the message the play endorses and the still harsh reality the Black people confront now in the USA. As the starting play of ‘The Pittsburgh Cycle,’ Gem of the Ocean provides the agendas to dwell upon throughout the10-play cycle rather than a compact answer.

Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood: Quantum Mechanics on Stage

KIM,TAI-WOO | 2014, 27(3) | pp.107~129 | number of Cited : 0

apgood is unique in that it attempts to introduce and explain on stage the basic concepts of quantum mechanics. Its failure, however, was in a way anticipated. The world of particles is so extraordinary to the extent that it goes beyond our imagination, and it seems virtually impossible to weave a convincing plot around the ideas of quantum mechanics. Even so, Stoppard showed his ingenuity by making the play a spy thriller with double spies and twin spies in it. Stoppard’s attempt to introduce quantum mechanics to people demonstrates that he must have thought certain aspects of quantum mechanics should not go unnoticed. Without quantum mechanics Hapgood would remain a rather forced spy thriller piece, and therefore it makes an important part of interpreting Hapgood to examine what is Stoppard’s intention of introducing quantum mechanics through a drama. Certain basic concepts of quantum mechanics cannot be explained in terms of classical physics, and the uncertainty principle among others has become a formative idea of the postmodern era from the mid-20th century onward. However, it does not seem appropriate that Stoppard is the champion of those concepts of relativism, probability and uncertainty derived from quantum mechanics. It is because Hapgood itself is not so innovative a play in style and Stoppard’s coherent position since his early days as a dramatist is not completely in accordance with those concepts. What is called the quantum mystery has not yet been successfully proved, and therefore an indiscreet application of some concepts of quantum mechanics to the macroworld will cause confusion and misunderstanding. Yet, the microworld of quantum mechanics is without doubt part of realities, so that we have to consider the microworld of quantum mechanics to reach a true understanding of the world we live in. That will be in the ultimate sense the significance of quantum mechanics in Hapgood.

Traumatic Disruption of Family Melodrama Tradition: A Rereading of David Rabe's Sticks and Bones

박노출 | 2014, 27(3) | pp.131~164 | number of Cited : 2

This essay reviews David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones (1971) in the light of family melodrama and trauma theories. It offers an alternative reading of the play in opposition to the dominant view which takes the drama as a social commentary of the 1970s America, particularly of the middles class captivated by capitalistic materialism and manipulative mass media. Such a synchronic perspective enacts top-down approaches to the text only to repeat the preconceived social criticisms in the final analysis. This study proposes a historical or diachronic perspective in conjunction with bottom-up approaches for the interpretation of the narrative and character traits. Featuring the story of conflictual family relationships, Sticks and Bones follows the tradition of American family melodrama. This study initially examines Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) to show that the family melodrama presumes continuities from the past to the present, consciousness to unconsciousness and the individual to the group. Sticks and Bones deviates from the genre convention by replacing the take-for-granted unities with traumatic ruptures. The plot unfolds psychic confrontations between a Vietnam veteran and his families. The returned soldier, David, has experienced in war crimes the shattering of his world upheld by familism and nationalism. However, his parents, Ozzie and Harriet, strive to recuperate their son’s pre-war identity. It is argued that the parents see their son’s war trauma as a curable illness while the latter questions the ideological grounds of human identity such as the family and the nation-state. The dual aspects of psychological trauma, mimetic and diegetic, are introduced to compare the two distinctive positions. The final discussion elaborates on David’s messages to maintain that his spiritual odyssey outside of familism and nationalism presages the global state after 9/11. Wars and terrorisms have nullified state protection, mass-producing prisoners and refugees. David’s trauma in Sticks and Bones has become part of our daily experiences. The conclusion is that David’s flight from the dominant ideologies inspires us to imagine new forms of human relationship and collective identity.

Overcoming the Fear of Death through Epictetus’ Prohairesis in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and W;t

Sohn, Yoon-Hee | 2014, 27(3) | pp.165~192 | number of Cited : 0

This paper aims to explore a paradigmatic model of (post)modern death in the thanatology of Western society which is based on the death of individuals in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Margaret Edson’s W;t. In order to do that, first of all, this paper will investigate “dirty death” in our age which dying Ivan Ilyich and Vivian experience by medical doctors and all kinds of tube devices installed at the ICU (intensive care unit) in the hospital. As part of the dirty death, they experience not only hypocritical care and indifference by their family and the people around them, but also reification as a tool used for experiments in medicine. Secondly, this paper will take note of ancient philosopher Epictetus’ prohairesis against dirty death based on scientific materialism. Epictetus’ prohairesis sticks to the immortal soul’s vision and awakens impressions, i.e. a social reputation, material possession, and status. Through prohairesis, reflecting on themselves regarding their own strong attachment to life, Ivan Ilyich and Vivian overcome their fear of death. In conclusion, this paper will illuminate how this prohairesis subverts a perception gap of death between the dominators and the dominatees based on a cultural capital which is present as symbolic entities and their power in the reproduction of a hierarchical relationship other than an economic capital. The governing classes, represented by Ivan Ilyich and Vivian who have cultural capital, are unaware of the existential death of themselves on account of obsessing about secular things. However, like Susie and Gerasim who represent a different class of people that support spiritual life, Ivan Ilyich and Vivian know their place, be satisfied to be poor but honest, and experience “spiritual conversion” i.e. the protagonist’s vision of redemption by seeing a light which symbolizes the immortal soul before the moment of death. Thus they calmly accept death.

Geneva: ‘On the Jewish Question’ of Shaw

Eom Tae-yong | 2014, 27(3) | pp.193~223 | number of Cited : 0

Geneva is a political play by George Bernard Shaw to pursue a peaceful solution to international problems of the 1930s. With dramatizing conflicts between Fascist countries and Western democracies, Shaw’s viewpoint on the Jewish question seems to stand out more than any other subjects. This drama begins when the Jew visits the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva to appeal to the International Justice Court against a ruler who has been persecuting Jewish people. The Jew is on stage as a deliberate character never to give up his target and interest. Wooed by the Jew, the Widow abhors him in that she believes Jews crucified her Savior and would cut a child in pieces and sprinkle its blood. Such a misconstruction has been a usual understanding about Jews, who were the only pagans in the European Christian community, since the Renaissance. Besides, the Jew is described as an economic animal to appropriate huge profits for his materialistic greed even before the crisis of human extinction. Shaw points out the sense of superiority of Jews from their elitism of God’s chosen people and believes that it has led to their diaspora and persecution as well as provided the anti-semitism with a cause. It is paradoxical that Battler[Hitler], who has assaulted, expelled and even massacred Jews, puts emphasis on Aryan purity and superiority while criticizing the Jewish elitism. The sense of ethnic superiority of the Jew and Battler extends to the national egoism of the great powers including Britain. To resolve these problems, Shaw ever suggested eugenic marriages and humane edification between classes, ethnic groups or races. Engaged mainly in commerce and finance for hundreds of years, Jews have represented a negative aspect of capitalism since the modern economic structure began. It is significant that the Jew in Geneva and Jansenius, another Jew in An Unsocial Socialist, are socially condemned for their heartless conduct as financial capitalists more than their Jewish features. The perspective of Shaw to regard the Jewish question as a capitalistic problem is more clearly expressed in ‘On the Jewish Question’ by Karl Marx, where it is stated that practical need of Jews turned so secular that money became their God and this God has dominated the world. Shaw’s connotations in Geneva can be said to be still valid in the present state of affairs that Israel, the Jewish country, has perpetrated another holocaust and the United States supporting them has ruled over the world system of capitalism.

A Study on the Dissolution of American Family in A Lie of the Mind

Yu Ho-Jun | 2014, 27(3) | pp.225~255 | number of Cited : 0

This paper examines the dissolution of American family and the violence in A Lie of the Mind, the last work of Sam Shepard’s family plays. This play presents the issues of love and struggle between wife and husband and those of both families. The conflict among the family members is revealed through violence, which leaves the victims of violence with the incurable trauma both physically and psychologically. Jake, convinced that his wife, Beth, is having an affair with her acting partner, beats her near to death because of his fierce jealousy. Beth is diagnosed with brain damage and suffers from aphasia and amnesia. Jake’s sister, Sally, tells her mother, Lorraine, that Jake is closely involved in the death of their father who was killed by car accident on the road in a state of inebriation. Lorraine complains of her husband’s disappearance from home and has shown excessive obsession over his son, Jake. Jake’s house is full of men’s stuffs, which signifies the patriarchal family order of this family. Beth resists against the patriarchal and violent attitude of her brother, Mike, and her father, Baylor. who are absorbed in deer hunting. Their violent attack on the animals is expanded into that of persons. While Mike threats Frankie and Jake with a rifle, Baylor shoots Frankie, mistaking him for a deer. As a playwright noted for his performance-oriented plays, Shepard makes use of various kinds of violence in this theatre, such as physical violence, verbal violence, domestic violence, and even the homicide inside family. Like Antonin Artaud who longed for the Theatre of Cruelty, Shepard tries to create total theatre that appeals to all the senses, by using violence, rituals, and audio-visual effects. This play also shows the changing process of protagonists’ identity after the brutal violence. Jake allows Beth to choose Frankie as her new partner, though he still loves her. Admitting that most American families are hopeless, the author suggests ‘pretending’ and ‘becoming soft like a woman’ as the new art of love.

he Mechanics of Doubt and Absence of Communication in Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable

So Young Yoon | 2014, 27(3) | pp.257~278 | number of Cited : 2

ohn Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable(2005), a play and film, opens with Father Flynn’s line “What do you do when you’re not sure?” Well-known for winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, this play aims to show the gap between certainty and doubt by contrasting religious characters including Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius and Sister James. The political background in its setting is one during various civil rights movements for minorities like African Americans and women during the 1960s. As indicated in the title, this play has a sub-title, ‘a parable’. According to Mark Turner, a parable, a source for many stories, is connected with the operation and production of a person’s doubt stemmed from her distorted perspectives and recognition. Doubt as a title and main theme of Shanley’s play, which was filmed, operates as an element of numerous scattered doubts. It is symbolized by feathers that are thrown into the sky by a woman who cut a pillow on a rooftop. Doubts like feathers from a pillow floating in the air cannot be grasped but spread quickly to any place. In this vein, doubt arises from the contexts made up of rhetorical tension. Also, contextual meaning is coined by functions of the signifier and cognition. Sister Aloysius’s conjectures based on doubt motivate to expel Father Flynn from the parish by accusing him of homosexuality and pedophilia. In the end, Sister Aloysius approved her stance by saying “I have doubts. I have such doubts.” Therefore, doubt as a signifier, woven like a parable, has operated like political offense and defense by producing other groundless doubts. Also, the mechanics of doubt can cause relationships to be broken; moreover, doubts lead to the lack of communication between characters. Thus it is recognized that the signifier ‘doubt’ has a tremendous power to produce far more doubts through human cognitive operations and results in a huge gap between them.

A Study of Arthur Miller's All My Sons through Levinas's Philosophy of Otherness: The Violence of the Same and the Forgetting of the Other

Yoon, Hee Oyck | 2014, 27(3) | pp.279~302 | number of Cited : 2

Dramatic Transformation of Afro-American Music in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Plays: The America Play, Venus and Topdog/Underdog

Yon-hee Chun | 2014, 27(3) | pp.303~343 | number of Cited : 5

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This paper aims at researching Suzan-Lori Parks’ original and aesthetically pleasing dramatic methodology of incorporating various genres of music in her three plays, The America Play, Venus and Topdog/Underdog. By adopting philosophical concepts and musical inspiration from the Blues, Jazz and Rap, Parks practices re-production, re-imagination, and re-definition of the master ideologies which have dominated black history. The distinctive traits of these three genres of African American pop music that all find their roots in African culture and the tragic context of slavery after the forced immigration of Africans to America. The narratives of the African Americans are presented through sub-contextual contours in Blues, Jazz and Rap resources. Parks reconnects the juncture of African history by means of a form of rhizomic structure that adopts the dramatic strategy of incorporating musical inspiration from the three genres of music where African-American are not oppressed by someone. In The America Play, Parks pursues and cites the core philosophy of the Blues as a theory of “Black and Whole,” a concept which identifies a perfect state where the volume of dominant white ideology can be turned off to zero. By adopting the theory, she exposes the instability of African American history that has been veiled under the Lincoln myth. In Venus, Parks widens her concern about black history to a universal level, borrowing the technique of the universally enjoyed African American music genre of Jazz. She bestows upon Sartijie Barrtman, a black girl who was on a freak show, a new version of life; the girl is given an opportunity to recover her sense of subaltern subjectivity by singing Jazz in the dramatic frame of Jazz’s philosophy and format. Lastly, a ‘rapper’ takes the role of a significant character in Parks’ Pulitzer winning play Topdog/Underdog to foreground the life of young urban African Americans. Rappers in the play give voice to the existential pain associated with modern American society by adopting extreme formats of gangster rap, which shows a paradigm of Black on Black violence and magnifies the social alienation of African Americans. With these adaptations of three musical genres, Parks surmounts the limits of a subordinate system involving victim/victimizer and challenges the boundaries of dramatic expression in African American theater. She shows experimental and original dramatic methodology through her exploration of using diverse languages to interface with a drama text. She has suggested a new model of relations between theatre and performativity and has tried to represent “Black and Whole” as an independent, unique, and African American cultural heritage. She has transformed conventional textual language into musical lyrics from African American tradition by means of creative mis-en-scene on stage. Parks suggests a new direction for African American theatre by taking it beyond a marginalized, regional audience to a place in mainstream theatre culture that embraces diverse audiences that look beyond racial politics. Her work signifies significant changes in the direction of American theatre.

The Shipment, A Minstrel Show in the Post-Racial Society

jung mi kyung | 2014, 27(3) | pp.345~370 | number of Cited : 2

The Reading The Young Man from Atlanta in Chekhov's Dramatic Poetics —Focused on the Pause and the Effect of Behind the Scenes

Jeong Youn Gil | 2014, 27(3) | pp.371~395 | number of Cited : 0

This paper investigates how Foote’s plays succeed Chekhov’s dramatic poetics. I think that their plays are witty, not comic, and though their characters talk at length, it very often appears on its surface to be piffle. Chekhov has structured his plays so that every reaction is set against an obliquely conflicting reaction. Similarly, Foote engages his audience with a troubling but provocative sense of mystery. They explored why some human spirits are able to survive tragedies, while others are utterly destroyed. Often referred to as the American Chekhov because of his dark humor and his compassion for flawed characters, Foote locates the small victories and defeats of everyday life in a spiritual and historical context. With Foote as with Chekhov, this paper emphasizes we have to listen between the lines and pay attention to the effect of the behind the scenes to hear the truth. The principal recurring motif in their plays is the pause. Static and nonprogressional, and comparable to the rest in musical composition, the pause is an essential and integral element of structure which effectively stalls the advancement of thought, action, and time in the theater. Pauses have the effect of speeding up or slowing down the tempo of the play. While realistic in their very nature, pauses can be seen as holes in the lattice of life, as breaks in fabric of the text, which allow the transcendent undercurrents of human existence to come forth from just below the surface of the ordinariness of life portrayed. Also, unseen events and characters act as sources of dramatic tension. “Despite their absence these unseen characters act as driving forces of the dramatic onstage action. These absent characters function as a proximate cause for the onstage action.” In other words, although these offstage characters are not seen in most events of the story, they still serve a strong purpose. They can be used effectively as methods of creating suspense, terror and anticipation in situation. And they points to an inner conflict in characters.

Answering Old Questions by Asking New Ones: A Number as a Continuation of Churchill’s Discourse on Power and Identity

Joohee Park | 2014, 27(3) | pp.397~423 | number of Cited : 1

This paper positions Caryl Churchill’s play “A Number” (2002) as a continuation of the playwright’s exloration of socialist/feminist views through theatre. “A Number” is a story about a father who has his son cloned after he fails to upbring his original child up to satisfaction and the outcomes of that cloning. Rather than being a play about the moral issues of cloning, the story asks questions of identity, originality, power, capital, and nature versus nurture. The play is set in a place and time where people are able to “reproduce” without sexual intercourse but are required to pay a hefty fee for the procedure. Churchill asks whether such newfound freedom actually brings more freedom or more oppression to human beings. Throughout the play, the “offspring” of the father confront their situation one by one, pondering whether one can claim originality or whether they can no longer claim authenticity. Unlike a piece of art, whose technical reproduction often lacks the aura of its original, Churchill seems to argue that genes are less important to original identity than experiences are. The dramaturgy of “A Number” takes a rather extreme departure from Churchill’s earlier and better known plays, as it is set in an ambiguous time and space, and only contains laconic dialogue between four male characters. However, I find “A Number” to be asking the same questions Churchill has asked throughout her repertorie, namely those on power and identity, only through a new appearance. Thus through the absence of the female body on stage, and through the sparse use of language, Churchill is commenting on this new reality in which female bodies are only needed for their uteri and the shortcomings of language as a tool to properly communicate one’s feelings and identities. The absence of stage directions also seem to make room for imagination of directors and actors who may produce the play, thus providing DNA for a play and asking other artists to give it an original identity through their own experiences.

Miscegenation and Hybridity in Diana Son’s Satellites

주경정 | 2014, 27(3) | pp.425~442 | number of Cited : 1

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Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

2014, Vol.27, No.3