“Nothing here but kitchen things”

Three Plays from Feminist Theatre

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“All the world’s a stage,” but entrances and exits often look different when women hold the quill. This guided discussion during the summer mini-session explores plays with countervailing views on literature, medicine, and law:

We look forward to reading with you!

Reading Plan

June 13: Too Many Daughters: A Jane Austen Parody

‘Too Many Daughters’ is a Jane Austen parody. Mostly a parody of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ I really wanted to write this play first of all because I love Jane Austen and second because when I was in high school, there were never enough parts for all the girls. So I wanted to write a play that had tons of parts for girls so that everyone could participate.

Claire Epstein

June 20: Portrait of Dora

I am what Dora would have been if women’s history had begun.

Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” in The Newly Born Woman

Hélène Cixous, in her manifesto, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ writes of écriture féminine, women’s writing, in which woman writes herself ‘into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement’ (Cixous, ‘Medusa’ 875). Écriture féminine was a movement pioneered by several French feminists in the 1970s, namely Cixous, Catherine Clément, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. These women used writing, as and for women, as a way to intervene in the phallocentric realm of producing language. They stressed ‘sexual difference’ between men and women in their writing (which has garnered them criticism for being too essentialist). Cixous says, in the opening paragraph of ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ that women ‘must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (Cixous, ‘Medusa’ 875).

Quoted by Melissa Lepp

June 27: Trifles

In writing … remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.

Susan Glaspell (1912) (“Lifted Masks and Other Works,” ed. Eric S. Rabkin, 1993: 55)

The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn’t done any new thinking in the past ten years.

Susan Glaspell (“Plays by Susan Glaspell,” C. W. E. Bigsby, 1987: 132)

Even though you’ve given up a past it hasn’t given you up. It comes uninvited — and sometimes half welcome.

Susan Glaspell, “The Morning is Near Us: A Novel” (1940)