Recreating The Icons: Women’s Myths In Pam Gems’s Queen Christina And Marlene

Contemporary British playwright Pam Gems uses revisionist plays to present the contradictions in the historical representation of female icons in biographies and films.Her revisionist style of biographical plays is both generative and deconstructive:it engages in the project of recreating the great historical women while debunking and transforming the myths in order to expose the limitations of gender dichotomy and to further seek a way out of the attendant real-life quandaries.The existing literature on the dramatic art of Pam Gems recognizes that her act of revision has resisted and exploded traditional gender roles.However,on one hand,critics fail to probe into the difference between her revision and the portraits of Christina and Marlene in biographical and filmic heritage.On the other hand,although highlighting the effect in unsettling the social and cultural structure which defines gender identity,they do not fully explain the endeavor of Gems’s revisionist plays to excavate and overcome the real dilemmas behind women’s myths.This thesis intends to address the above inadequacies with a special focus on Queen Christina and Marlene.The key word "myth" indicates fiction.Accordingly,women’s myths refer to the"lies" in different aspects created by patriarchal discourse and knowledge.Iconic women are encoded as the sign of myths,permeated with patriarchal consciousness,and have been deprived of the right to express the truth behind fabrication.In this case,the readers mistake illusoriness for naturalness.Drawing on Roland Barthes’s idea of myths,the first chapter examines the representation of Queen Christina and Marlene Dietrich in their respective biographical and filmic heritage,and argues that the way they have been portrayed fails to do justice to the nature and development of female subjects.Biographical heritage reinforces the myth that Christina is the romantic figure that exercises her will and power regardless of social conventions and constraints.In cinematic context,Marlene is inscribed as the scopophilic myth that denotes the source of voyeuristic pleasure.The second chapter argues that both her revisionist style and subjects are eventful.Combined with Derek Attridge’s idea of literary event,it is to argue that Gems’s revisionist style is eventful because she not only provides the reception of biographies but also engages in revision and recreation,which has brought into full play the singularity of text and facilitated the recycling of the event of literature.Gems’s revisionist historical women,as specific and individual subjects,are eventful because,under the scope of set theory in Being and Event by Alain Badiou,the female plights previously uncounted are newly presented.The portrayal of Christina’s fear and belated cherishment of motherhood reveals the matrophobia that leads to her oscillation between family and work.Meanwhile,Marlene’s self-reflexive contemplation upon stardom demonstrates her complicity with male dominance.She is a victimizer apart from a victim.However,any practice to define the real about women reflects a mode of thinking in which dominance surfaces.Gems’s plays show her awareness of gender fluidity,which overcomes the limits of the female position of debunking patriarchal ideologies behind women’s myths.Therefore,by recapitulating postmodern feminist theorists’ discussion over"subject",the third chapter zooms in on Gems’s dramatization of cross-dressing in Queen Christina and use of female-to-male voice impersonation in her staging of Marlene.It is proposed that through those two ways Gems destabilizes gender identity and transforms women’s myths.In order that any discourse about women not be transformed into myths,women need beware the imposition from men as well as refuse to put forth any standard to define what a woman should be.Instability of gender identity transcends the binary nature of man and woman,fiction and truth.Most importantly,it is performances that invoke an urgent call to immediate action and for resolutions to the social and cultural problems resulting from such a rigid gender dichotomy.