What is a feminist drama? At first glance, this question suggests a binary split: a play is or is not feminist, depending on its rhetorical or didactic intention or, in other words, on its politics. But just as the feminist movement itself has, in this century, repeatedly emerged as a political movement and then seemingly disappeared, diffusing into the mainstream of American thought, so has feminism in American drama. Playwriting, performance, and dramatic theory today offer a feminist political critique through the act of dramatic speech, of costume and visual image, of performance itself. Just as feminists of the sixties and seventies discovered that “the personal is political,” so in the nineties, the political nature of all performance has emerged as a major theme.

In the twentieth century, drama that is feminist in intention has exhibited a commitment to telling the stories of silenced and marginalized women, celebrating women’s community and sense of connection through group protagonists, and expressing the moral concerns and societal criticisms that arise from women’s experience. The eighties and nineties have built on this tradition and added a broadened spectrum of political concerns, a questioning of language and of visual images and icons, and a specific concern with performance itself as an expression of gender and racial identity.

From Mary Carr Clarke’s early play The Benevolent Lawyers; or Villainy Detected (1823), to the many successful novel adaptations by the prolific Louisa Medina, to Pauline Hopkins’ Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad (1880), to the widely varied work of Francis Hodgson Burnett, whose stage adaptations of her own novels span several decades, American women have been writing melodrama. These women, and others like them, played an important role in the development and success of the mode of drama that had the greatest impact on the American theatre in the nineteenth century.

The study of nineteenth-century melodrama has traditionally been on the fringes of scholarly work. This is due in large part to the concerted efforts of early twentieth-century theatre practitioners to create new forms completely divorced from melodrama, which by that time had held the stage for nearly a century. The writers and producers of the new styles of realism, naturalism, and symbolism had to slay the giant of melodrama in order to gain control of the theatre of the twentieth century. Writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov, and Susan Glaspell began writing plays that demanded new acting and production styles. These writers, as well as designers, theorists, and producers, were passionate in their defense of a new aesthetic for the theatre and their arguments against melodrama gained in strength and validity as the old mode of communication failed to respond to the new age. Eventually scholars and practitioners began to speak with scorn of anything thought to be melodramatic, as they simultaneously spoke glowingly of all efforts to create a sense of realism.

InThe Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman — who has authored a book that sounds suspiciously like Portnoy’s Complaint — receives a letter from the editors of his old college newspaper. They “wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon.” Because Zuckerman is in the hospital suffering undiagnosed pain, the editors have sent a list of written questions: “1. Why do you continue to write? 2. What purpose does your work serve? 3. Do you feel yourself part of a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition?”

These are not questions of the sort to cheer an ailing writer, but they do summarize the elitist view of post-1960s fiction. From this standpoint, Zuckerman’s humor and ethnicity and his lack of esoteric technique and political commitment demote his work to a “rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition. ” Roth locates this attitude in the self-important undergraduate editors of The Anatomy Lesson (1983), but it is still pervasive in intellectual circles. The metaphor of the rearguard (and its correlate, the avant-garde) and the assignment of the “postmodernist era” to John Barth and Thomas Pynchon are symptomatic of a conception of literary history that itself should be labeled “a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition,” for the student editors are speaking the language of modernism, the aesthetic ideology of the early twentieth century.

The cello and its repertory have undergone radical transformations over the last seventy-five years. Whereas in former times musical styles and compositional conventions generally developed into an integral language over a period of some years, the proliferation of individual approaches to composition nowadays constantly challenges performers and their audiences to understand and assimilate new languages in rapid succession. Never before have instrumentalists been confronted with such difficulties as deciphering new notation for each different composer, mastering new technical requirements for each new piece, and transmitting often unnotatable sound-worlds convincingly to their audiences.

The left hand became liberated from its customary position-sense and the traditional diatonic framework, thanks to increased chromaticism, whole-tone, microtone and other scale patterns, glissandi and unusual non-consonant double- and multiple-stopping. Extreme applications of vibrato have been prescribed, including the ornamental vibrato-glissando, and traditional usages have been reversed, with demand for an intense, fast vibrato in soft passages, a wide, slow vibrato in loud passages, or even the use of senza vibrato for contrast or special effect. A wide variety of pizzicato effects has been developed, composers prescribing various pizzicato locations, specific plucking agents and other such instructions, and harmonics and scordatura have been exploited for their colouristic potential. Bowing technique developed in the twentieth century as a result of composers' demands on players to master awkward string-crossings, rapid changes and specific prescription of contact-point, speed and pressure, sudden or gradual changes in dynamic, often to extreme levels, and irregular slurrings and bow patterns.

INTRODUCTION: MYTH AND COSMOLOGY

Greek philosophical cosmology did not originate completely out of the blue. The first philosophical cosmologists - usually referred to as Ionian or Milesian cosmologists because they worked in Miletus, in Ionia - could react against, or sometimes build upon, popular conceptions that had existed in the Greek world for a long time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (eighth century B.C.). In Homer the cosmos is conceived as a flat earth, surrounded by the Ocean (Okeanos), and overlooked by a hemispherical sky, with sun, moon, and stars. In the eighth century the annual course of the sun and the rising and setting of some constellations were integrated into a primitive seasonal calendar. Lunations were used for small-scale calendrical purposes (“the twenty-seventh of the month is best for opening a wine-jar” Hesiod Works and Days 814) and at some point - although there are no traces of this in Homer of Hesiod - some form of lunisolar calendar was established.

Even more than World War I, in which American participation had been brief and casualties relatively light, the Second World War was a watershed, a turning point, in the social history of the nation. In the second war there were five times as many American dead, over half a million in a period of almost four years. This was a total war effort that mobilized virtually every segment of American society. Men and boys from sleepy towns in the Midwest, segregated farms and hamlets in the Deep South, and large ethnic enclaves in the North were thrown together in a huge, highly organized fighting force and sent to the bloody beaches and killing fields of France, Italy, North Africa, and especially the Pacific islands. On V-J Day in August 1945, America had nearly twelve million men under arms; more than sixteen million had served in the course of the war.

Novels written about the war invariably emphasize the shock of a new kind of experience, the social and personal dislocation as well as the shock of blood and carnage. They show how recruits were forced to adjust to the army before they had to face the war itself. To many, the hierarchy and discipline of military life cut against the American grain. Individualism gave way to a harsh, demanding group experience. The men they encountered and the distant places they were sent catapulted them out of the life they knew and thrust them into a larger world.

At the end of the 1950s, the American theater seemed to have lost its direction. Miller, it appeared, had ceased to write. Tennessee Williams was on the verge of annihilating himself in what he was later justifiably to call his “stoned decade.” The initiative seemed to have shifted to the other side of the Atlantic. Where earlier, those in the British theater had been enthused and challenged by the remarkable flowering of American dramatic talent that had marked the decade from 1945 to 1955, now they generated their own talents, who brought a new energy and purpose to that theater. In America, the dominance of Broadway was undermined by its peremptory economics, a declining urban setting, and the increasing power of a dwindling number of newspaper reviewers. An audience that had once supposedly been homogeneous now showed signs of fragmenting. As is often the way, decay concealed new life, however. By 1959, Off-Broadway had become a significant force. For the first time, the Ford Foundation began to put money into the theater and a number of productions pointed the way forward into the 1960s and beyond. As political power began to move to a new generation, so also did theatrical power. In 1959, Arthur Miller was forty-four, Tennessee Williams was forty-eight, and Eugene O’Neill was six years dead (though Long Day’s Journey into Night had not been produced until 1956 and A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten until 1957, with productions of Hughie still lying ahead in 1964 and of More Stately Mansions in 1967).

In addition to the sonata and concerto, the cellist's concert repertory comprises four further principal areas: music for unaccompanied cello; short genre pieces for cello with orchestra or keyboard; variations; and transcriptions and fantasias. Many nineteenth-century solo works for the cello were composed by cellists, who were strongly influenced, particularly in the first half of the century, by the violin repertory. Travelling virtuosos such as Duport, Romberg, Servais, Franchomme, Piatti, Goltermann, Grüzmacher, Davidoff, Popper, Fitzenhagen, Klengel and Becker wrote for their own use and also to meet the rapidly growing demands of flourishing middle-class audiences; their aim was both to satisfy the public's taste, to entertain and to demonstrate their own technical prowess. Writing for solo cello was only a peripheral interest for most of the ‘front-line’ nineteenth-century composers, probably because of the perceived problems of balance between the cello, with its tenor range, and the expanding orchestra or developing piano.

Music for unaccompanied cello

Among the first to compose for unaccompanied cello were the Italians Giovanni Degli Antoni, Domenico Gabrielli and Domenico Galli. Degli Antoni's Ricercate Op. 1 (Bologna, 1687) comprises twelve unaccompanied ricercari, pedagogical works for the instrument which might also be used as a bass for harpsichord improvisation – seven include figured bass with this option clearly in mind. Although perfectly playable on the conventional four-stringed cello, Kinney's recommended use of a six-stringed instrument tuned like the bass viol, with the alternate tuning for the lowest string depending on the key, C (or D)–G–c–e–a–d1, has its advocates.

Historian E. J. Hobsbawm has described the twentieth century as the age of extremes. In a strange way, no quarter of the century had to grapple with extremity, or its terrible aftermath, more than the seemingly tranquil decades after the Second World War, which some Americans still look back on as a golden age. Though the war had spared the North American continent, its effects were brought home as Americans emerged from their traditional isolation. Besides coming to terms with the general carnage on an unheard of scale, and moving rapidly toward the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, the postwar world had to assimilate the most shocking news of the war, perhaps of the century as a whole: the details of Holocaust and the effects of the atomic bomb. The Holocaust and the bomb do not often explicitly appear in the literature of the forties and fifties, perhaps because writers found them too large to encompass and too remote from their direct experience. Despite this eerie silence, they contributed to an undercurrent of anxiety that was freely reflected not only in poems and novels but in the popular culture, including horror films, science fiction, and the new vogue of ghoulish comic books that alarmed the moralists and psychologists of the period. Along with peace and prosperity came a heightening of anxiety and insecurity.

Ordinary Americans, insulated from immediate knowledge of the worst horrors of the war, recoiled after 1945 into an island of normalcy, a world of getting and spending, as they had done after the First World War. There was an emphasis on family and domesticity, on traditional gender roles, and on a new culture of consumption made possible by rapid economic growth. The war industries retooled to produce consumer goods, beginning with new homes and cars.

In the 1980s, a striking phenomenon occurred on the American stage. In an eight-year span, three women dramatists, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, approaching the total of five Pulitzers awarded to women for the previous sixty years. This same period saw the production of new plays by Tina Howe, Maria Irene Fornes, Emily Mann, Ntozake Shange, and Wendy Kesselman, among others, as well as the establishment of avant-garde, alternative women’s theatre companies, both in New York and around the country. In a 1992 New Republic article entitled “What Do Women Playwrights Want?” Robert Brustein refers to the “spate of plays by, for, and about women that have multiplied in the last decade,”saying that “in terms of numbers, if not in broadness of theme, American women playwrights now represent a significant movement that is surely unprecedented in history” (28). I would like to examine how three women playwrights, Henley, Norman, and Howe, drawing on realistic modes, use these traditional forms to dramatize feminist perspectives.

Naomi Nakane, the narrator of Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), looks at the box of journals, letters, and government documents that she has received from her Aunt Emily and thinks to herself, “Crimes of history … can stay in history. What we need is to concern ourselves with the injustices of today” Naomi calls her activist aunt “a world warrior” and “a crusader,” and the papers chronicle the shocking treatment of Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government during and after World War II. Aunt Emily is a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese North American (the term Nisei being a combination of the Japanese character sei meaning “generation” and a prefix signifying “second”), and she sees herself as a Canadian betrayed by Canada. But Emily is not the aunt — the obasan — to whom the novel’s title refers. Naomi’s obasan is her Aunt Aya, whose husband Isamu has just died, bringing about the reunion of the surviving members of Naomi’s extended family with which the novel will conclude.

Obasan is an Issei, a first-generation Japanese immigrant, and she has none of Emily’s brash outspokenness. “How different my two aunts are” Naomi thinks to herself: “One lives in sound, the other in stone.” Obasan’s stoicism keeps her from expressing, perhaps even from feeling, the outrage that engulfs Emily: “Obasan was not taking part in the conversation. When pressed, finally she said that she was grateful for life. ‘Arigatai. Gratitude only.’”

There is no question that Parmenides' poem was a watershed in the history of early Greek philosophy. No serious thinker could ignore his work. And yet it seems to pose insuperable problems for cosmology and scientific inquiry. The first generation to follow Parmenides includes thinkers who wished to continue the tradition of Ionian speculation. But how would they confront Parmenides? What would they make of him and what effect would his arguments have on their work? The first neo-Ionians, as they have been called, were Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Despite some salient differences, the two philosophers have much in common in their approach. They are near contemporaries, and as we shall see, they make similar moves in their approach to scientific speculation. Let us first examine the systems of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and then discuss their responses to Parmenides.

EMPEDOCLES AND ANAXAGORAS

After warning us to seek a balance in our evaluation of sensory evidence (DK 31 B3), Empedocles goes on to identify the basic constituents of the universe and to develop a cosmology based on those constituents. There are four “roots,” (rizômata): earth, water, air, and fire (B6), which combine in whole-number ratios to form compounds.

In the 1960s, change was an imperative. Signaled politically by a generational shift, it was reflected socially in an economically empowered youth movement whose spending power began to shape popular culture. The civil rights movement, kick-started in the late 1950s, now became the principal domestic issue, while the Vietnam War provoked a resistance that politicized a generation. Authority was challenged; formal structures were questioned. Politics became street theater, a series of publicly enacted gestures. Individuals underlined the integrity of their beliefs by physical presence and dramatized their faith by offering to levitate the Pentagon or place their bodies in front of munition trains as a symbol of the body’s vulnerability to the military machine as well as a pragmatic strategy of resistance. The body, indeed, became an expressive force, sexually liberated by the birth control pill, publicly deployed as a provocation to a society presumed to be simultaneously puritanical, materialistic, and aggressively technological. This was life lived metaphorically, and, perhaps logically, the theater, which deploys the body as a primary instrument of signification and works through metaphor, became a focus and means of revolt.

For those committed to transformation – personal, social, political – where more natural to turn than to a form in which transformation was of the essence? In an age of performed gestures and specially staged events, the theater had a persuasive symbolic force. In a period in which the slave was shown transmuting into the rebel, the self being reborn, and history being restaged as paranoid vision, the theater seemed to offer itself as paradigm.

Soul, sensation, and thought: a separate chapter could be devoted to each of these items. But, beyond considerations of space, there is a rationale for broaching them together, for these three notions are in some sense correlated. It is on certain aspects of this correlation that I shall focus. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the soul, and its relationship to the two other terms. The second part specifically will be devoted to the relationship between thought and the senses. Since an important aspect of the latter question bears on epistemology, some overlap with J. Lesher's contribution to this volume (Chapter 11) is unavoidable. However, I have tried to draw attention to “physiological” rather than epistemological problems. As it turns out, this emphasis may not be too artificial because, as we shall see, there is a question as to whether the early Greek philosophers' interests in the relationship between thought and the senses was not primarily physiological rather than epistemological, in a sense of the term “physiological” that remains to be spelled out.

There is a huge diversity of bowed stringed instruments throughout the world. Their acoustical principles, however, are common. A bow is drawn across a taut string. Friction between the bow and the string excites the string into vibration. The string has particular vibrational properties which make it an ‘ideal’ musical signal source, but unfortunately its small size renders it practically inaudible. The string is therefore connected to some form of resonator, which is traditionally a wooden box (as in the case of the cello), a stretched animal skin or a gourd. The function of the resonator box is to vibrate in sympathy with the strings. The larger surface area of the box interacts readily with the surrounding air, creating sizeable pressure fluctuations which we hear as sounds.

This chapter aims to provide a brief introduction to cello acoustics and to add sufficient detail to the above simple model to explain various features of practical importance to players. The last thirty years have witnessed intense activity in the study of the acoustics of stringed musical instruments. In the case of bowed stringed instruments, work has concentrated almost exclusively on the violin, and readers interested in pursuing the subject further are directed to several standard works on the subject. In many respects, the differences between violins and cellos are simply a matter of scale, the acoustical principles being the same in both cases. However, the increased body size and heavier strings and structure bring particular problems associated with starting transients and wolf-notes, both of which will be discussed later.