2021, Vol.34, No.1

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

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

This paper presents a close-reading of Enola Holmes (2020) with intense focus on the movie’s representation of a historical event, the women’s suffrage movement in Britain. While the nineteenth-century gender discourse of separate spheres strictly prohibited women’s engagement in public activities, the same period also witnessed women’s efforts to venture into what was traditionally male-dominated spaces. One of the most intensified efforts to gain political rights was women’s struggle to win the right to vote. Based on the 1884 Reform Act, Enola Holmes’s message is clear-cut. The movie starts with a straightforward agenda that supports women’s suffrage movement. Ironically, however, it makes no direct reference to it. While portraying the women’s suffrage movement ensures the movie’s political correctness as the movement is a historical event whose cause and legitimacy has already been proved, this paper questions the validity of the movie’s seeming celebration of the heroine’s “victory” in bringing about a meaningful change in the electoral system. One of the inexplicable things about the movie is that it remains unclear whether the movie is set in 1884 or 1900. The opening scene claims that Enola was born in 1884 and is now 16 years old. As the movie goes on, however, it contradicts itself by presenting the 1884 Reform Act as its contemporary political situation. With this confusion over its timeline, the movie erases the critical time period during which women’s suffrage movement took on a violent turn. Put differently, without a recognition of this period, the militant suffrage movement that the movie aims to explore is not justified. The distortion of historical events eventually undermines Enola’s apparent achievement. By helping Tewkesbury and ensuring the passing of the Reform Act, Enola assists the “lord in distress” and vanishes from sight.

This paper explores 9/11 and collective memory from abroad in Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s musical, Come From Away (2013). As a musical written in a verbatim style, it stresses its distinct feature of being based on the true story of people who experienced 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland. Sankoff and Hein edited, rearranged, combined, and recontextualized the interviews, which they collected in 2011, and used them to create a moving communal story with verbatim spoken text and music. In this process, the selected interviewees’ individual stories are staged from multiple perspectives and then merged into a communal experience, creating emotional support. Through Avishai Margalit’s collective memory theory, this paper examines how individual memories based on fear from terrorism turn into collective memory with humanistic caring. Using an examination of the universal trauma spread through the media during 9/11, this article traces individual traumas of the American come-from-aways by focusing on how their private and fragmentary memories represent the voices of a particular group of people in America and analyzes the screech-in ritual that motivates people to create collective memories and shared strength to overcome trauma. Focusing on the come-from-aways’ traumas and collective memories of the 9/11 attacks and how these memories are recreated through the authors, I argue that Come From Away stresses that solidarity beyond nationality can overcome terrorism through humanism.

Alfred Kreymborg was a bohemian intellectual in Greenwich Village, New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century. He experimented with a poetic experiment called ‘free-verse dialogue’ that was not bound by the traditional set-form poetry writing, which developed into an experiment on prose poem, and ultimately the writing of Lima Beans (1919). This one-act play has a simple plot depicting the daily life of a newlywed couple on their second week of marriage. The stage experiment requites more attention than the plot or story development in the play. Lima Beans is a short play piece that combines a new playwriting technique of ‘free-verse dialogue’ and a theatrical experiment called ‘a play with puppets.’ In the play, a couple of human mannequins dismantle traditional language and poetic practices while uttering fragments of words in staccato fashion. Their action and movement are jerky, wooden, and exaggerated. The stage set is surrounded by the black and white and cubist pastiche of geometric pattern, which reproduces a fanciful but abstract middle-class home. The whole picture woven with the setting, characters, and language of this play presents a blueprint for the new trends, non-realistic theatrical experiment, that would be attempted by the Provincetown Players, especially starting with Eugene O’Neill.