Women in Edward Bond

Introduction

Women in Bond focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond’s writing. While different studies have examined the violence present in his plays or his dramatic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. Remarkably, the presence of women in Bond’s plays is dominant in contrast to his contemporary playwrights. Female protagonists and powerful secondary characters abound in Bond from the beginning of his career. And the author himself has often stated that he was interested in women’s problems. Yet, the metaphysical human condition Bond describes is not gender-specific. Bond’s human world is one that inscribes its figures in an apocalyptic aura, but it is a world in which the word ‘human’ subsumes both male and female voices without prevailing conditions.

This collection approaches femininity focusing on the importance of the historical and social context in which women grow as characters. This project has mainly concentrated on women in Bond’s plays, describing and studying their evolution; discussing the forces that influenced their depiction; and illustrating their significance in his writing, and more generally, their relation to the depiction of women in modern society. In the following chapters, Bond’s progress in the conception and delineation of female characters will be analyzed through a grouping of plays which mark distinctive stages of development.

In his early plays from Saved (1965) until The Woman (1978), we find oppressed women with the only possibility to show their presence in the world through violence. Bond himself assumed that men are the same as women for this effect: “I put women on an equal status with men: they have to accept responsibility for changing their society, not merely be its victims, acquiescing or otherwise” (Stuart, 1995: 201). We find powerful examples of female evil in Early Morning, Lear, Narrow Road to the Deep North or The Sea. The characterization of these figures aligns different traces to femininity such as religious obsession, sexual power or craving desire for extreme torture. The later female-focused plays can be interpreted as depictions of female responses to the same suffering and limit situations. From The Woman, Bond’s main domain is on political and social heroines in different historical contexts. Opposingly to the early women, these heroines (Restoration, Human Cannon, The War Plays, Summer) take action and change their society becoming the voice of the author and his political commitment.←9 | 10→

Harry Derbyshire analyses Restoration and Summer and their women as potential examples of progressive attitudes within patriarchal societies in specific historical settings. The author will also establish comparisons with canonical figures such as Lady Bracknell or Hedda Gabler and parallels with female playwrights of the twentieth century. Summer’s naturalistic approach is argued as anticipation and influence over the controversial Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Chapter six by David Tuaillon will describe how in The War Plays and after, Bond changes his main model of female characters as political heroin through an interest on ←10 | 11→motherhood as a metaphor of the alienation of society and experiment new ways of critical analysis and opens new dramatic perspectives. Beyond Brecht’s Mother Courage, Bond’s mothers voice examples of collectivity and humanity in violent and apocalyptic settings.

The reader will discover in Women in Bond female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness. Unfortunately, not all women characters are present in this book. There are other extraordinary figures like Dea (Dea, in Plays: 10, 2018) that will hopefully find an appropriate place to be explored in future projects. This book attempts to show a representation of Bond’s female universe in his conception of humanity. Women are not differently approached to men in Bond’s writings but undoubtedly, her visions offer an alternative perspective to his understanding of humankind and rationality. Emotions and ideas will be analyzed in these pages in a journey through Bond’s feminine universe closer to reality than to stage←11 | 12→←12 | 13→

My Female Characters

An interview with Edward Bond by Susana Nicolás Román

I think that from the beginning I knew it was not appropriate for me to write from the point of view of feminism. It was already absolutely clear to me that inequality between men and women was unjust and harmful to both. It corrupted culture. I wondered what particular attention a just society might give to women- how it would cater for the needs of living with pregnancy and early motherhood for months. A woman friend told me “not to go down that route.” I took her advice. The feminist movement could deal with it. So instead I dealt with what questions women in a fully emancipated society would face- the questions of war and of justice when the moral imperative was confronted by the practicalities of choice. But rather than trying to deal with that in an imagined emancipated society, I did it in our present sort of societies. This was because I wanted to show what humanness cost us already. That cost would also be part of women’s struggle for emancipation. But placing women in the situations occupied by men, and facing women with these questions, would also be creative for men. They would rediscover what the problems involved and what solving them cost, and how destructive it was to ideologize- or worse, glamorize, their male solutions. Traditionally men have not only often loaded the burden of work on women. They have also burdened them with their consciences. This is why I wrote plays such as The Woman, Human Cannon, Jackets and The War Plays.