2018, Vol.31, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

Thomas Stewart Denison’s farce Patsy O’Wang(1895) presents a Chinese-Irish or ‘Eurasian’ mixed-blood cook Patsy O’Wang, who differentiates himself from traditional mixed-blood stage character types. He embodies a new pattern of racial-cultural amalgamation. The protagonist’s body blurs racial and biological boundaries. His hybrid identity serves as a self-defense weapon that disturbs the white gaze and control. His Eurasian identity, through strategic ambiguity, frustrates the white’s top-down control to fix him as a Chinese man. Patsy’s voluntary act of choosing and determining his own Irish identity taunts and provokes the prejudiced racial ideology of a white mainstream society that seeks to keep him within control. This play is valuable as a socio-cultural material that enables us to assess the status and American society’s perception of the Eurasian mixed-blood in the late 19th century. In particular, this play shows insights into the changing phases of racial hierarchy in the United States during the turn of the century, and the consequent changes in the status of Chinese and Irish immigrants. At the same time, in addition to exploring racial issues, this play anticipates the future direction of American society, which is the formation of ethnic identity based on cultural amalgamation. Transformation and evolution of identity performed by Patsy visualizes this formation effectively.

This paper focuses on the dissolving of sexuality binaries in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and the psychoanalytic criticism that tries to interpret M. Butterfly’s sexual issue. Most of the psychoanalytic approaches to M. Butterfly have focused on Rene Gallimard’s castration anxiety and Song Liling’s queer activities. Though these attempts interestingly show Song and Gallimard’s respective problems of identity, they ignore the issue of the body and still follow the binary structure of sexuality. I argue that Song’s sexuality is an expression of his/her existence and Song’s body is the space of his/her sexuality. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body has an indivisible relationship with human existence, and sexuality is inseparable from the body. In this context, I argue that when Song’s naked body is perceived by Gallimard, the binary structure of sexuality that Gallimard’s fantasy has maintained is eventually dissolved. Before the division between sex and gender, Song’s body shows us that his/her sexuality does not belong to the binary structure that divides man from woman. As an expression of human existence, Song’s naked body can be the most decisive tool for deconstructing the binary structure of sexuality.

This paper aims to examine feminist implications of Sarah Ruhl’s dramaturgy, which follows the Ovidian model of metamorphosis, resisting and transforming the rigid power of gravity. Analyzing intersections between Ruhl’s anti-gravity dramaturgy and philosophies of Camus, Nietzsche, Weil, and Bergson, who have delved into human existential problems in relation to the concept of gravity, this critique demonstrates how Ruhl’s drama, armed with the spirit of child(Nietzsche’s Übermensch) and the descending power of grace(Weil), changes the solemn battle against gravity into a dancing of elan vital(Bergson) that continues to generate spontaneous metamorphosis leading to new communities across boundaries. This work also uses the metaphor of “a perfect joke”(The Clean House) to illuminate Ruhl’s Ovidian dramaturgy that is untranslatable, collective, liminal, and transformative. Freed from the gravity of the Aristotelian “unities,” Ruhl’s Ovidian drama expresses and embodies the dynamics of vital energy with no chain of causality in plot or psychological details of characters. In conclusion, this paper argues that Ruhl, like Bergson, emphasizes the importance of action and challenges the audience to interpret her unconventional play from their own perspectives and thereby participate in the duration of elan vital with their on-going “differences.”