| This study first examines Adrienne Kennedy's plays within the tradition of women writers, focusing on a comparison between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf's fictional character, Shakespeare's sister. It then provides a theoretical analysis of Kennedy's plays as expressions of failed pregnancies--pregnancies which result not in metaphysical unions, but in irrevocable splits. Kennedy's plays focus on pregnancies which end in miscarriage and madness. Due to ingrained racial and sexual oppression, her subjects remain fragmented. Her characters exist as bitterly opposed "selves," observing their own existence but unable to act, incapacitated by circumstances of birth. Scars of birth remain with Kennedy's characters throughout their lives, fixating their victims in an infant stage of development called the "paranoid-schizoid position" (in the terms of British object-relationist Melanie Klein). In this stage, the infant mentally splits objects between good and bad, and projects hopes onto the good objects and fears onto the bad: later on, the normal infant achieves a point of integration. Kennedy's characters, however, rarely reach integration. Their splitting processes become confused; they project both persecutory and ideal qualities onto each object (which are dramatized as alternative selves), which ultimately cause them to self-destruct. These plays not only represent pregnancy; they are themselves pregnant in form. Kennedy's theatre equalizes, rather than prioritizing, reality and the stage and produces images which are neither representative nor derivative, but which are self-sustaining. The first two chapters provide a theoretical analysis of Kennedy's plays in terms of Kristeva's definition of pregnancy, Derrida's idea of "original representation," and Klein's theories of object relations. Kennedy's plays are also compared to those of Samuel Beckett and the theatre of the absurd to demonstrate that Kennedy cannot write absurd plays because her work, unlike that of Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee, neither mocks nor mitigates the process (and the vehicle) of birth. Chapter Three provides a close reading of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in light of these theories, while Chapter Four focuses on The Alexander Plays as a multi-voiced monologue and a flctional autobiography. |
