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Re-imagined Nora and Hedda in The Wash and Wind Cries Mary

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2015, 28(3), pp.197-230
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yi,Jihoon 1

1창원대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In The Wash (1987) and The Wind Cries Mary (2002), Philip Kan Gotanda repeats obsessively his themes: the camp experience during World War II, racial discrimination, hybrid (racial) marriages, conflicts among generations, and preservation of Japanese cultural traditions in America. In these two works, however, unlike his former plays such as A Song For A Nisei Fisherman (1980), Yankee Dawg You Die (1988), and Fish Head Soup (1991), he presents female protagonists in dealing with his favorite themes. This paper argues that Gotanda reimagines Ibsen’s Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler in creating his female protagonists Mashi and Eiko. Nora is a female prototype who ‘leaves her house’ to be a human being, refusing to be a doll. Mashi, a 67-year-old Issei Japanese immigrant, also leaves her house and her patriarchal husband, Nobu Matsumoto, to be a human. A Doll’s House ends as Nora leaves, slamming a door behind her, while Mashi leaves the house quietly with her hands empty. Mashi’s independence is achieved by ceasing to wash Nobu’s laundry. Being an independent individual, her real immigration to the New World (America) is complete. These two female protagonists reveal Gotanda’s self-conscious relation to Ibsen: he considers himself the first Asian-American dramatist, as Ibsen was the first playwright of the Western Modern Drama. Hedda, one of the most complicated female characters in modern Western drama, is a woman who failed to leave and remained ‘locked in her house,’ in contrast with Nora. Gotanda’s Eiko, a Japanese Issei married to a white man, is trapped in the house. As Hedda, in the 19th century suburban Europe, has no way out socially except a marriage, Eiko has no way out either, due to her race and gender, even though she is confronted with the revolutionary period of change in 1968 America. Eiko/Hedda has no choice but to kill (shoot) herself to be free. In The Wash, props such as the wash, fishing, and coffee are used metaphorically; in The Wind Cries Mary, as the title indicates, music (Rock’n’Roll) plays an important part, like the Greek Chorus, to portray characters’ inner minds and dramatic development.

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