Gender on the frontline : a comparative study of the female voice in selected plays of Athol Fugard and Zakes Mda.
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Date
2002
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Abstract
It can be argued that critical scholarship has not satisfactorily commented on the portrayal of
women in South African theatre by male playwrights. This dissertation will examine the
presentation of the female voice in the selected plays of two playwrights, namely Athol Fugard and
Zakes Mda, coming from different socio-historical and cultural backgrounds. This comparative
study will re-interrogate the selected representative texts from a feminist perspective, and will
compare Fugard's subversive distrust of the female voice juxtaposed against Mda's refreshing
celebration of the female presence in the selected plays.
Fugard and Mda's female characters are generally seen by their readers, audiences and critics such
as Andrew Hom, Marcia Blumberg and Dennis Walder as fundamentally vital, irrepressible and
certainly more admirable than their male counterparts, as it is ultimately their quest for symbiosis
and affirmation of the self which precludes any passive spectatorship on the part of the audience.
However, paradoxically and ironically, it is Fugard, writing from a relatively privileged white male
position, who consistently places his female characters in positions where their distinct inner
strength is continually undermined. Despite their cognitive ability to engage with their situation,
they are seldom permitted to triumph over the bleakness of their lives, but in fact are rendered
emotionally impotent in the face of insurmountable existential isolation. Always situated within
an interdependent relationship absent of hope and love, Fugard's women characters are never
allowed to forget the role they are expected to assume in a patriarchal society rife with political and
racial overtones. This very impasse in which they are placed by Fugard generally resonates
strongly with the audience, who can identify or empathise with the women, but who are not
afforded an imaginative escape by Fugard.
Mda's female characters are created and portrayed within a similar political and universal system
which perpetuates their exclusion from power and keeps them in servitude. However, unlike the
ultimately silenced women in Fugard' splays, Mda, writing partly from a historically marginalised
position himself, empowers his female characters with the freedom to confront and articulate their
emotions and perceptions. His female characters are inscribed in a multiplicity of social positions,
within which they most often find a solution to their problems and demand an outcome which is
not only determined by outsiders, but by their own inner strength. Although they are less fettered
by class and ideological constraints, they are however more naively drawn than Fugard's female
characters. Whilst Fugard' s female characters in the selected plays are, without exception, left on
the periphery of the play as the ultimate victims of their inescapable circumstances, the female
characters created by Mda more often than not dominate the stage by virtue of their indomitable
resilience, rather than resignation.
This dissertation will also examine Fugard and Mda's presentation of their female characters as
wholly a male's construct, set in a political context which subtextually interrogates race and
gender. The implied assumption concerning the authority of the male writer over women's
narratives will also therefore be questioned. Reference to Fugard and Mda's own personal
histories as well as their other non-fictional writing will be seen as relevant in this regard.
In conclusion, this dissertation will focus on the artificially imposed passivity of Fugard' s confined
and limited female characters, and will compare this to Mda's empowerment of his female
characters through critical awareness. The provocative issues of voice and violence as agency in
both Fugard and Mda's discourse will be viewed, in particular, from within an apartheid system
of governance.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Durban-Westville, 2002.
Keywords
Women in literature., Feminism in literature., Feminist literary criticism., Gender., Mda, Zakes--Criticism and Interpretation., Fugard, Athol--Criticism and interpretation., Theses--English.