CHAPTER 5:

THE WALKING SHADOW: THE INTERFACE OF COGNITION AND

IDENTITY IN THE PLAYS OF CARYL CHURCHILL

Any living organism exists and operates in this world by responding to as

well as interacting with its environment. Needless to say, for man, the social

animal, responses and interactions go a long way beyond instinct or reflex. In

fact, the rationality of man helps him/her devise and develop a system of

cognition that in turn has set him up at the head of the eco-system. At a further

remove, it is this system of cognition that goes a long way in fashioning his/her

personality. In the case of the civilized man, the system of cognition is perceived

to operate as much through knowledge as through belief. Plato has used the terms

‘episteme’ and ‘doxa’ to refer to and differentiate between knowledge and

understanding and belief and opinion respectively (www.blackwellreference

.com).

The word ‘knowledge’ derives from an Old English compound based on

the Germanic cnāwan earlier gecnāwan meaning ‘recognize’ or ‘identify’ from

an Indo-European root shared by Latin (g)noscere, Greek gignōskein, and

Sanskrit jna meaning ‘to know’. The term ‘belief’, on the other hand, is derived

from the Old English geleafa meaning ‘faith’ via the West Germanic ga-

laubon i.e. ‘to hold dear, esteem, trust’ ultimately from galaub meaning ‘dear’ or

‘esteemed’ from a combination of the intensive prefix ga and leubh i.e. ‘to care,

desire, like or love’. Therefore, etymologically knowledge, as a part of intellect

and higher cognition, is associated with perception, awareness and hypostatic

understanding of a particular person or thing generating from cognitive processes

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like sensory experiences, acquired skills, verified learning and the resulting

causal thought processes. On the other end, belief, as a part of thought and lower

cognition, depends on the ‘esteemed’ and then therefore estimated value of a

person or a thing which is based on propositional attitudes, presumptive

speculations, accepted hypotheses, perspectival judgments and the resulting

subjective conviction. Belief, therefore, may or may not provide a basis for

knowledge whereas knowledge can be seen to always form and inform our

system of beliefs.

Beliefs can roughly be translated as psychological stances that get

generated through intuitive awareness of and adherence to socio-culturally

accepted notions and influences. Unlike the process of rational interrogation that

forms the basis of knowledge, belief relies on compulsive involuntary conviction

about its own reality without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (i.e.

veracity and justifiability). Belief, therefore, refers to notions about phenomena,

generated by propositional attitudes to, psychological influences on, and

instinctive expectations of persons, events or things that can be either true or

false. When a belief is only perceived to be true but stands unverified or

unverifiable, it, along with the propositions or prospects on which such belief is

based, is deemed to be false. On the other extreme, when a belief is justified as

true it is immediately subsumed under the domain of knowledge. It is for this

reason that David Hume describes belief as ‘nothing but a more vivid, lively,

forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is

ever able to attain’ (Hume: 2008, 125). Nevertheless, the degree and amount of

influence that beliefs, whether true or false, exert on human actions remains

unchanged; for beliefs operate as much through their content as through their

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ability to inculcate attitudes whereby interrelated structures of norms are

provided to the subject for its understanding of a sign. This understanding of a

particular sign through a predetermined system results in the subject getting

further enmeshed in the web of beliefs which can equally be true or false.

It is this basic difference that led Plato to comment on knowledge as

verifiable belief or Kant to aver that when the holding of a thing to be true is

sufficient both subjectively and objectively, it is knowledge. These views are

later on developed into the ‘Tripartite Definition of Knowledge’ otherwise known

as what Edmund Gettier calls JTB i.e. ‘justified true belief’ whereby knowledge

gets splintered into three basic components viz. justification, truth, and belief

(Turri in Kaldis: 2013, 265). This JTB analysis purports to offer certain sufficient

preconditions for knowledge which vindicates a particular thought as rational and

thereby promotes it to the stature of knowledge. According to this framework,

knowledge is based on beliefs which need to be both true and justifiable. If a

belief is proved to be true i.e. brings about the right kind of deductions but the

processes of arriving at such deduction is not justifiable i.e. reasonable and

defensible it may be attributed to chance or coincidence, but may not be accepted

as knowledge. Epistemologists differentiate between three processes through

which knowledge can be generated: knowledge by acquaintance, practical

knowledge and propositional knowledge. Knowledge by acquaintance refers to

the practical experience of the attributes of a particular person or thing. Practical

knowledge, otherwise referred to as knowledge-how or know-how, is gained

through acquisition of skills or abilities that provide an awareness of how to do a

particular thing. Propositional knowledge, also known as knowledge-that, is an

offshoot of scientific learning of hypostases. As Von Glasersfeld asseverates:

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 Knowledge is not a picture or representation of reality; it is much
more a map of those actions that reality permits. It is a repertoire
of concepts, semantic relationships and actions or operations that
have proven to be viable for the attainment of our goals. (Von
Glasersfeld quoted in and translated by Meyer and Sugiyama:
2007, 18)

Since identity of the human subject encompasses both being and becoming,

knowledge and belief as stages of cognition are perceived to influence that

identity; for what we are may only be understood through ‘what we know’ and

‘what we believe’. In fact, identity refers to a set of characteristics which a person

perceives to be his/her own. In its physical, psychological and social

manifestations, identity encompasses characteristics which are as much innate as

acquired. It is on the acquired aspects of identity that knowledge and belief

impinge, because ‘cognition’ at once manufactures and maintains volition, and in

so doing influences the development as much of both the private self as of the

public one. In this chapter, I propose to re-read five of Caryl Churchill’s plays

namely, Vinegar Tom, The Skriker, Identical Twins, A Number, and Lives of

Great Poisoners with a view to highlighting the interface of cognition and

identity.

Vinegar Tom was first staged on October 12, 1976, at the Humberside

Theatre, Hull, under the direction of Pam Brighton. The play, as Churchill notes,

is the first of her collaborative projects:

Early in 1976 I met some of the Monstrous Regiment, who were

thinking they would like to do a play about witches [...] Soon I
met the whole company to talk about working with them. [...] I left
the meeting exhilarated. My previous work had been completely
solitary — I never discussed my ideas while I was writing or
showed anyone anything earlier than a final polished draft. (P1.
129)

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Vinegar Tom, therefore, is a product as much of Churchill’s creative imagination

as of Monstrous Regiment critical instinct. If Churchill’s reading of Witches,

Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and

Deirdre English provided the play with its theoretical/thematic background, then

the decidedly feminist stance of the Monstrous Regiment guided Churchill’s

treatment of the theme. Set in a small 17th century English village, the play takes

up for analysis the eternal struggle between truth and superstition surrounding

matters like women, witchcraft, magic and black magic, and thereby attempts to

portray how these versions of knowledge and belief have been manipulated by

patriarchy from time immemorial to fulfil its sexual, social and religious needs

and aspirations. As Catherien Itzin comments:

(Churchill’s Vinegar Tom) may be set in the world of seventeenth-

century witchcraft, but it speaks, through it striking images and its
plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century’s still deep-
rooted anti-feminism and women’s oppression. (Itzin: 1976, 8)

‘Witch Burning’, notes Mary Daly, is one among the most prominent of

‘Western and Christian manifestation[s] of the androcentric state of atrocity’

against women (Daly: 1990, 179). Right from the Classical Antiquity to the

present days, each and every female attempt at recording their personal and

collective story somewhere within or against the meganarrative of patriarchal

history has been met with social, cultural as well as religious prohibitions.

Starting from the mythical figures of Lilith and Medusa or the historical figure of

Joan of Arc and continuing with the literary figures of the Mother (in Angela

Carter’s The Passion of New Eve), the examples of female persecution

(metaphorical as well as literal) on grounds of exceptionality and defiance have

been numerous. In fact, it is this historical proscription on female voice that

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prompted the late 1960 American socialist feminist group Women's International

Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell define itself as ‘witch’ i.e. Women Inspired to

Tell their Collective History (Rodnitzky: 1999, 27). Interesting to quote what

Willie Tyson highlights in her famous song ‘The Witching Hour’:

A woman’s place is set like a tightly woven net

She’s chained like a dog to her position.
But if by chance or fate she should happen to escape
She’s a menace to the keepers of tradition.
So if you have the gift to heal but forget which way to kneel
Get ready for a manmade Inquisition.
(Tyson quoted in Daly: 1990, 179)

In fact, it is the menace of encountering an equal or a potentially better

alternative to the male self that has led patriarchy to simultaneously otherize and

marginalize women who are deemed to be different or deviant. Besides, the

biological association of women with pro-life processes and activities like

procreation, nourishment and healing are traditionally perceived to endow them

with some extra-natural if not supernatural and hence dangerous abilities.

Moreover, women represent that self-defining and self-possessed individual who,

unlike a normal human being, derives her power not from any external resources

but is self-fulfilling power unto herself. This divine and then therefore

superhuman image of the female not only makes the male self feel inordinately

inferior to her but also awakes him to the possibility of how such a power can

topsy-turvy the gender-power-hierarchy that society thrives on. This male

paranoia results in the patriarchal misogyny that expresses itself through what

Daly calls ‘sado-rituals’ for massacring women by identifying, dismembering and

destroying those ‘strong women’ who embody the ‘Goddess’ or represent the

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‘devil’ and by purifying ‘society of the existence and of the potential existence of

such women’ (Daly: 1990, 183).

In Vinegar Tom, Churchill takes issue with this tradition of witchhunt

which Daly alternatively terms as the female holocaust. The play is divided into

twenty-one scenes that tell the tale of some five women — Alice, Joan, Susan,

Ellen and Betty — who are accused of practicing witchcraft. The first female

character to appear on stage is Alice, a village girl of about 20 years old, whose

headstrong nature, uninhibited sexuality and constant questioning of the social

givens pose a serious threat to the patriarchal categorization of women both as

bloody whore and as pious virgin. As such she rejects both categories and

demands a place in society irrespective/independent of her sexuality. The play

opens with her post-coital conversation with an anonymous man regarding the

‘sin’-fulness of the sexual intimacy they shared just a while earlier (P1. 135).

While the man, as a representative of the patriarchal double standard, has no

qualms to use Alice for gratifying his sexual desires but refuses to take her to

London, Alice has no such problems in acknowledging both her sexual needs and

the absence of paternal affiliation to her first child:

ALICE: I’ll do what gives us pleasure. (P1. 136)

And again,

ALICE: I’ve a child, mind, I’ll not leave the child.

MAN: Has it a father?
ALICE: No, never had. (P1. 135)

According to Adrienne Rich, ‘Motherhood is ‘sacred’ so long as its offspring are

‘legitimate’ - that is, as long as the child bears the name of a father who legally

controls the mother’ (Rich: 1995, 42). Alice’s proud proclamation of the pleasure

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principle along with the absolute absence of the father figure of her child

punctures this ‘sacredness’ with which motherhood has traditionally been

interpreted by patriarchy. To add to this, her assertions like ‘If it [sex] was [sin] I

don’t care’ and ‘Any time I’m happy someone says it’s a sin’ betrays her stern

rejection of the patriarchal codes (P1. 136). This rejection instead of symbolizing

her inability to ascertain the paternity of her child, indicates her resistance to an

utterly irrelevant and deficient symbolic order that judges the worth of a person

through marital or paternal affiliations. On a further remove, it also symbolizes

her ability to become the signifier through which her child can perceive itself and

the world without being tethered to the name of the father.

Interestingly, the man asks Alice to ‘kiss’ his ‘arse’ like a ‘witch’ is made

to do to the ‘devil’ (P1. 136). Needless to say, this brings out the man’s

perversion and symbolizes his desire to control and thereby coerce the female to

yield to his will without any regard for her own wishes or desires. It is for this

reason that Luce Irigaray sees the ‘characteristics of feminine sexuality’ to derive

from ‘a passive acceptance of men’s [sexual] activity’ without ‘getting pleasure

herself’; for ‘neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any

right to her own pleasure’ (Irigaray: 1985, 186-187). What follows is a heated

argument about a witch burning that the man witnessed in Scotland. However,

the enthusiastic description of the spectacle that the man blurts out is

continuously counterpointed by Alice’s repeated queries regarding the veracity of

such beliefs, ‘Was she a real one? [...] Did you see her flying? [...] What did she

say?’ (P1. 136-137). That the man is unable to answer a single of her queries in

unequivocal affirmatives and instead resorts to hypothesized approximations like

‘I think so’ or ‘I may have done’ clearly points up how mindless have been such

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prosecutions of women. The man, as a representative of patriarchy, however, can

hardly accept this and instead equates Alice to the witch on scores of their

deviant nature. In fact, what frustrates the man is the absence of paternal control

on both Alice and the witch.

If the witch has transgressed the permissible limits of femininity by

practicing magic/black magic in order to control the world and people around her,

then by denying submitting to paternal control, Alice has situated herself and her

child outside the patriarchal machine. Separate as they are by time and space,

both of these subversive acts at once puncture the patriarchal imagination of

women as weak and submissive and thereby present examples for female

resistance. The witch’s persecution is indicative of both her ‘crime’ against

society and the ‘terror’ that such crimes strike at the heart of those who control

the society. Moreover, we can hardly forget that the witch’s narrative also

prepares ground for Alice’s questions vis-à-vis which the man finds it difficult to

categorize Alice as either wife or whore, ‘What are you then? What name would

you put to yourself? You’re not a wife or a widow. You’re not a virgin. Tell me a

name for what you are’ (P1. 137). That Alice or women like her cannot be

coerced into becoming or remaining a virgin, a wife or a whore means that these

three are the only identities that a woman is allowed to have by patriarchy.

Anyone daring to go beyond these parameters or falling short of attaining them is

forever fated to become what Maxine Hong Kingston would have called ‘No

Name Women’ — women who are forbidden and hence forgotten (Kingston:

1976).

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 The next female character is the 16 years old Betty whose repeatedly

failed attempts to escape from her parental house, just like Alice’s wish to visit

London, is indicative of her strong desire to disentangle herself from the clutches

of an overpowering patriarchal family (P1. 149). Similarly, her denial to marry is

symptomatic of her resistance to give in to a relationship that thrives on the

erasure of the female identity by merging it completely to that of its physical

owner i.e. the husband. However, Betty’s doctor and her family interprets her

growing sense of dissatisfaction with her surroundings as a mere instance of

female hysteria caused by excesses of blood and hence curable by purging it — a

process that will ultimately render her marriageable once again:

DOCTOR: Hysteria is a woman’s weakness. Hysteron, Greek, the

womb. Excessive blood causes an imbalance in the
humours. The noxious gases that form inwardly every
month rise to the brain and cause behaviour quite
contrary to the patient’s real feelings. After bleeding
you must be purged. Tonight you shall be blistered.
You will soon be well enough to be married. (P1. 149)

According to Rachel P. Maines, ‘Hysteria as a disease paradigm has been

variously constructed over time by physicians and their patients, but at all times

and places it has retained its focus on the intrinsic pathology of the feminine’

(Maines: 2001, 21). While this feminization of hysteria is fuelled by the term’s

etymological association with the Greek hystera meaning ‘that which proceeds

from the uterus’, the sufferer’s lack off self-control and need for constant

monitoring have been identified pejoratively as peculiar of the nature and the

demands of femininity. Needless to say, such an identification has provided

patriarchy with a much needed tool to erase naturalness from all acts of female

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subversion and brand them as expressions of ‘abnormal’ and then therefore

‘diseased’ states of being.

This patriarchal paranoia regarding the female tendency towards deviance

has resulted in the growth of a highly prejudiced body of beliefs as much

regarding the causes of hysteria as regarding and its treatments. The causes of

hysteria were variously diagnosed as sexual deprivation resulting in retention of

so-called female semen, sexual indulgence resulting in over-excretion of it, lack

of proper socialization or feminization, heretic beliefs, menstrual problems, etc.

Resultantly, the most common treatment of hysteria focused more on getting rid

of the excesses in the personality of the female patient by gruesome physical

means like cutting, bleeding, blistering, etc. than on identifying the real causes of

her psychological turmoil, if any. Needless to say, the doctor’s prescribed

bleeding and blistering will render Betty, at least for the time being, too weak to

attempt any further subversion of her family’s wish to get her married.

The next female protagonist of the play is Susan, a married friend of Alice

in her early twenties. The inarticulate fears that haunt Betty and the unfulfilled

desires that torture Alice find their full expression in Susan’s disrupted body. The

wife to an unfeeling man, Susan in her married life has been turned into a

procreation machine. The two children that she bore and the three miscarriages

that she endured make her impervious to the demands of yet another uncalled for

pregnancy that has been thrust on her by her husband’s fancy of having another

‘fine child’ (P1. 145). However, Susan’s training in the Christian doctrines of

original sin and female lasciviousness makes her too scared to attempt any

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positive change in her life until a similarly suffering Alice makes her aware of

her own rights on her body and being:

SUSAN: They do say the pain is what’s sent to a woman for her
sins. I complained last time after churching, and he said
I must think on Eve who brought the sin into the world
that got me pregnant. I must think on how woman
tempts man, and how she pays God with her pain
having the baby. So if we try to get round the pain,
we’re going against God.

ALICE: Blood every month, and no way out of that but to be sick
and swell up, and no way out of that but pain. No way
out of all that till we’re old and that’s worse. (P1. 146)

That society and religion impinges upon the feminine consciousness a collective

guilt and an overbearing sense of shame by linking each and every female

experience with Eve’s disobedience is a ploy to control the apparently

uncontrollable fluid body of the female through generating in them a fear

psychosis. Therefore, menstrual or labour pain becomes didactic expressions of

divine justice losing in the process their medical and/or pathological gravity. It is

this awareness that makes Kate Millet aver ‘Patriarchy has God on its side’

(Millett: 2016, 51).

Coming back to play we can see that though Susan’s words give vent to

her acceptance of her gendered lot, it is but apparent; for her next reference to her

‘complains’ ‘last time after churching’ highlights how she is convinced by what

‘they’ (society and/or religion) ‘think’ (profess) or ‘say’ (preach). Alice’s

breathless recounting of the stages of feminine existence here provides Susan

with a much needed afidamento whereby she becomes able to assess her real

condition and ultimately becomes ready to consider other alternatives means to

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end her sufferings irrespective of the fact that it may really mean ‘going against

God’ and by extension against them who profess to represent him on earth.

Susan’s search for alternative ways brings the next of the female

characters on stage. Ellen is both a shaman and a healer in her mid thirties who

offers relief to the tortured souls through her amoral knowledge of herbs and

unchallenged mastery over matters. It is this knowledge that makes Ellen

different from the other female characters of Vinegar Tom. Whereas all of them

suffer helplessly under patriarchal injunctions, it is only Ellen who has the power,

skill and resource to bring changes in their lives and to heal their wounds. In her

avatar as the potent healer, Ellen personifies the God on earth but in a feminine

body and soul who is able to understand and alleviate human worries. When she

offers to share her knowledge with Alice it is this empathic understanding of the

female’s lot in patriarchal society that inspires the woman in Ellen to this act of

solidarity. The potion that she gives Susan to drink terminates her pregnancy and

thereby allows her regain control on her own body that had been snatched away

from her by the husband figure. However, it is this very act of terminating the

pregnancy that brings both Ellen and Susan under patriarch surveillance; for in

daring to decide the fate of the child they transgressed the boundaries of

femininity and has thereby proved themselves fit subjects for social monitoring.

As Lisa Merrill puts it, ‘women’s autonomous desires are seen as punishable

offences because they are committed without official sanctions’ (Merrill: 1988,

82).

The fifth of the female protagonists of the play leads a marginal existence

on both metaphorical and literal plains. Joan is Alice’s mother who, in spite of

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her supremely important role in the narrative of Vinegar Tom, gets a stage time

commensurate with the time and space that our youth-oriented and productivity

driven society allows a middle aged poor and ugly woman to have. Joan,

therefore, can only exist as an irritating old hag or a despicable tomcat, forced to

live on people’s mercy. In the play, it is she who happens to be the first one to be

accused of practicing witchcraft.

Having thus situated the female characters against their personal and

collective histories, Churchill now focuses on the witch hunters Harry Packer and

Goody who stand for religio-patriarchal hegemony. The utter illogic with which

they identify Alice, Joan and Susan as witches by searching their bodies, pricking

them in public and identifying the blood or the absence of it as symptomatic of

their expertise in black magic give vent to the patriarchal double standard hell

bent on punishing each and every feminine attempt at self-assertion (P1. 166-

167). Moreover, the way Packer and Goody conduct their search for the witch

seems to gratify their sexual perversion more than serving any religious purpose:

Devil hides his marks all kinds of places. The more secret the
better he likes it .… And a woman last week with a big lump in
her breast like another whole teat where she sucked her imps.…
And when I squeezed it first white stuff came out like milk and
then blood, for she fed those horrid creatures on milk and blood
and they sucked her secret parts in the night too. Now let’s see
your secret parts and see what the devil does there. (P1. 172)

When these men have satisfied themselves with voyeuristic and tactile pleasures,

Packer’s announcement ‘Though a mark is a sure sign of a witch’s guilt having

no mark is no sign of innocence for the devil can take marks off’ leaves no option

for the woman to escape the witch hunters (P1. 172).

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 However, Joan still tries to escape persecution by faking pregnancy and

Susan does so through blame game. However, when society frustrates all their

attempts, Joan goes silent and Susan performs the repentant self, accepts her

corruption by the devil and prays for divine mercy but only to somehow escape

social persecution:

Oh God, I know now I’m loathsome and a sinner and Mr. Packer
has shown me how bad I am and I repent I never knew that but
now I know and please forgive me and don’t make me go to hell
and be burnt forever’ (P1. 174-175).

Alice, however, performs her deviance and holds her stand firmly to express her

subversive intent:

I’m not a witch. But I wish I was. If I could live I’d be a witch
now after what they’ve done. […] I shouldn’t have been
frightened of Ellen, I should have learnt. Oh, if I could meet with
the devil now I’d give him anything if he’d give me power.
There’s no way for us except by the devil. If I only did have
magic, I’d make them feel it. (P1. 175)

That Alice is now desperate to ‘learn’ things even if from the devil indicates her

readiness to avenge herself and her ilk. While Susan repents for her putative

cooption by the devil, Alice repents for not having listened to Ellen’s words and

tries to rectify it at any cost.

Vinegar Tom ends with a brief lecture from Heinrich Kramer and Jacob

Sprenger, authors of the famous 1487 treatise Malleus Maleficarum or The

Hammer of Witches that deals with procedures of finding and persecuting

witches. Played by two female actors, Kramer and Sprenger lecture about the

traditional belief in women’s inherent susceptibility to sin and demonic

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temptations as resulting from the many weaknesses that their biological status of

being a female confer on them:

SPRENGER: Women are feebler in both body and mind so it’s not
surprising
KRAMER: In intellect they seem to be of a different nature from
men—
SPRENGER: like children. (P1. 177)

According to Sally L. Kitch, from the very beginning of human civilization ‘Male

commentators [have] typically considered themselves the human model and

solipsistically regarded women as unfortunate imitations of, appendages to, or

even curses upon the male norm’ (Kitch: 2009, 18). While part of this belief has

derived from the smaller physical frame and strength of the female as compared

to the male, the other part has obviously been bolstered by the male need to

establish and justify itself as the one and the only potent representative of

humanity.

In fact, patriarchy always attempts to dislocate and/or substitute the

feminine for a hegemonic set of fantasies and beliefs that confines the female

within a compulsory inferiority while conferring to the male a psychosomatic

superiority. Therefore, when Kramer and Sprenger talk about women’s

intellectual and physical inferiority, they only seem to repeat what Euripides had

stated centuries ago, ‘women are a huge natural calamity, / against which men

must take / strenuous measures’ (Euripides: 1973, 47). Their further observations

on the female ‘carnal desires’, ‘defect of intelligence’, ‘inordinate passion’,

‘weak memories’, ‘vengeance’, ‘insatiable malice’, and ‘unfaithfulness’ give vent

to similar patriarchal stereotypes.

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 Interesting to note that apart from the Brechtian episodic structure,

Churchill makes use of a series of songs in the play which she clarifies are ‘not

part of the action and not sung by the characters’ but help express the prevalent

themes of mindless torture and suffering (P1. 133). The first of the songs

‘Nobody Sings’ is strategically placed at end of the third scene just after Alice

and her mother Joan are seen grappling with disturbing questions regarding

women’s identity, sexuality, age and socio-economic status:

I woke up in the morning,

Blood was on the sheet,
I looked at all the women
When I passed them in the street.
Nobody sings about it
But it happens all the time. (P1. 141)

The poem is a fine expression of the thousand muted cries that a woman has to

live with in her life on counts of her ‘difference’ from and alleged inferiority to

the socio-culturally adulated male existence. The blood which could have

attracted familial and medical care and socio-cultural adulation for a male

symbolizes for the female the shameful vulnerabilities of her body which needs

to be kept secret. This necessitates a woman to maintain a studied silence

regarding both menstrual and other sorts of physical troubles which, in its turn,

robs her of the opportunity of finding help from a solidarity group. This is what

makes the songs an example of what ‘nobody sings’ of i.e. things that ‘happen all

the time’.

Churchill points up in her note to the production of the play that the song

not only tells of the shock of getting the ‘first period’ but also of a similarly

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shocking experience of getting ‘old’ (P1. 133). The next stanzas of the song talk

about old age and the sufferings it entails:

I met an old woman

Who made my blood run cold.
You don’t stop wanting sex, she said,
Just because you’re old.
*** *** ***
Do you want your skin to wrinkle
And your cunt get sore and dry?
And they say its just your hormones
If you cry and cry and cry.
*** *** ***
Nobody ever saw me
She whispered in a rage.
They were blinded by my beauty, now
They’re blinded by my age. (P1. 141-142)

According to Robert L. Neblett, ‘Nobody Sings’ gives voice to ‘the internalized

desperation of the women… who are ensnared by the patriarchal customs of

judging a woman’s worth by her physical beauty and reproductive capacity”

(Neblett: 2003, 114). The claim that the society which was once ‘blinded by’ the

female’s ‘beauty’ is now ‘blinded by’ her ‘age’ bolsters the point. That the needs

for love and for the warmth of relationship have nothing to do with age or beauty

is a fact grossly overlooked by our youth oriented culture. This results in the

marginalization of old people both within the family and in the society. The

situation worsens for a woman like Joan on counts of her economic instability.

The song ends with the sad recounting of a compulsory silence that culture

teaches every woman to maintain about the condition of herself and her ilk,

‘Nobody sings about it / But it happens all the time’ (P1. 142).

The second song ‘Oh Doctor’ is divided into two parts the first of which

is placed at the end of the fifth scene where Susan instinctively decides to seek

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help from Ellen to terminate her pregnancy while the second one is placed just

after the sixth scene wherein the doctor diagnoses Betty to be hysteric and

decides to bleed her in order to cure her of the disease:

Oh, doctor, tell

me, make me well.
What’s wrong with me
the way I am?
I know I’m sad.
I may be sick.
I may be bad.
Please cure me quick,
Oh, doctor. (P1. 149)

Interestingly, both the parts of the song consist of a single repeated query ‘What’s

wrong with me’ followed by a recurrent wish to be ‘cured’ voicing thereby both

Susan and Betty’s troubled souls. However, while Susan is able to find out the

right ‘cure’ for her unwanted pregnancy through a female solidarity group,

Betty’s search is answered by a male doctor who as a representative of the

hegemonic patriarchy drags her further into confusion and suffering.

The third song “Something to Burn” placed at the end of the seventh

scene is an expression of the mass hysteria regarding black magic and witch hunt

which engulfed the 17th century Europe. The song with its startling juxtaposition

of ‘witches’, ‘lunatics’, ‘women’, ‘blacks’ and ‘Jews’ highlights how these

categories have traditionally been perceived as akin, interconnected states of

being united by their shared lacks and flaws that at once form and inform their

marginal status. In fact, in the hierarchized social space, perceived or alleged

drawbacks of these individuals and/or groups on the basis of ‘religion’,

‘normality’, ‘gender’, ‘chromatism’ and ‘racism’ seem to justify their ostracism

and oppression:

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 Sometimes it’s witches, or what will you choose?
Sometimes it’s lunatics, shut them away.
It’s blacks and it’s women and often it’s jews.
We’d be quite happy if they’d go away.
Find something to burn. (P1. 154)

According to Randall, by ‘placing witch-burning in the context of holocaust and

genocide, Churchill forces her audience to confront the socio-economic basis of

fear and prejudice’ (Randall: 1988, 80). To put Randall’s comment into

perspective, this song actually highlights the basic similarity in different episodes

of human oppression pointing up thereby the vicious roles that the supremacist

ideologies like sexism, ageism, ethnocentrism, capitalism and religion play in

order to divide mankind among genders, races, religions and economic classes.

The fourth song of Vinegar Tom “If Everybody Worked as Hard as Me”,

sung at the end of the eleventh scene, actually enumerates the rules for women’s

successful integration into family and society, pointing up in the process possible

reason for their exclusion from social circle as well:

Nobody loves a scold,

nobody loves a slut,
nobody loves you when you’re old,
unless you’re someone’s gran.
Nobody loves you
unless you keep your mouth shut.
Nobody loves you
if you don’t support your man. (P1. 160)

That women’s acceptability in the family depends on her ability to perform the

roles of a wife, a mother or a grandmother indicates the normative existence that

patriarchy forces on the female. Similarly, age and speech can be considered as

negative attributes for a woman means it is either by her sexual appeal or by her

silence that she can be expect familial accommodation. The song also lays bare

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the need for such accommodation in vivid details, ‘So nobody comes knocking at

your door in the night / So the horrors that are done will not be done to you’ (P1.

161). It is for this protection of the family or by extension of the paterfamilias

that make Joan lament the absence of a male family member, ‘If we’d each got a

man we’d be better off…We’d have more to eat, that’s one thing’ (P1. 141). In a

similar context, however, Ellen’s repeated advices to the teenager Betty ‘You get

married, Betty, that’s safest […] Your best chance of being left alone is marry a

rich man, because it’s part of his honour to have a wife who does nothing’ in

spite of its claims in favour of marriage highlights a subversive strategy whereby

marriage becomes only a mask to protect the female against the patriarchal

dangers (P1. 169).

The fifth song “If You Float” is placed at the end of the sixteenth scene

immediately after Betty leaves Ellen with an apparent promise to get married:

If you float you’re a witch

If you scream you’re a witch
If you sink, then you’re dead anyway.
If you cure you’re a witch
Or impure you’re a witch
Whatever you do, you must pay.
Fingers are pointed, a knock at the door,
You may be a mother, a child or a whore.
If you complain you’re a witch
Or you’re lame you’re a witch
Any marks or deviation count for more.
Got big tits you’re a witch
Fall to bits you’re a witch. (P1. 170)

If the song “If Everybody Worked as Hard as Me” spells out the patriarchal

conditions for social/familial acceptance for the female, then the present song “If

You Float” punctures all such dreams with the reality of wholesale female

persecution by the application of an arbitrary male logic to identify female deeds

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or speech or the absence of them as symptomatic of their evil intentions. That

each and every female attempt at self-assertion or self-preservation is

foredoomed to be judged as black magic highlights the male paranoia that

visualizes women as deceptive, dangerous and loathsome entities residing

somewhere between the animal and the insane which can at best be civilized by

penetration and possession or at worst be eradicated altogether by force or

strategy.

The sixth song “Lament for the Witches” appears at the end of the

twentieth scene when Joan and Ellen have already been hanged and other witched

are awaiting persecution. The song thus becomes a call for the entire womankind

to come out of their complacent femininity to find traces of a similar silenced

history of injustice and suffering that these so-called witches attempted to

change:

Look in the mirror tonight

Would they have hanged you then?
Ask how they’re stopping you now.
Where have the witches gone?
Who are the witches now?
Ask how they’re stopping you now.
Here we are. (P1. 176)

That the witches have not died but still continue to be (‘Here we are’) is not due

to their supernatural powers but because of the persistence of patriarchal

oppression on women. And it is this persistence that, the witches feel, will

eventually result in another instance of female resistance whereby women like

Alice, Joan, Susan, Betty or Ellen will be avenged.

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 The concluding song of the play “Evil Women” herald the coming of

these witches who are hailed as ‘Satan’s lady, Satan’s pride / Satan’s baby,

Satan’s bride’:

Evil Women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
On the movie screen
Of your own wet dream
Evil women. (P1. 178)

Unlike the penultimate song which is addressed to the women audience both inter

and intra textual, “Evil Women” is addressed to the males of the society. That

male repulsion for evil women is as much fuelled by a deep seated attraction

towards them as by a recognition of and fear for their abilities to thwart the

megamyths of masculinity is what explains the mindless scapegoating and

demonizing of the female culminating in the intrinsically sexual nature of

punishment meted out to them. The song, therefore, becomes an expression of the

Freudian castration anxiety vis-à-vis female self-assertion.

If Vinegar Tom shows how belief in the infallibility of social institutions

visualize knowledge as corruption and in turn attempts to nullify the individual

identities of those who posses that knowledge, then The Skriker envisages a

revolt of the individual whose very existence defies both knowledge and belief.

The play presents an inverted fairy tale wherein common beliefs regarding the

inherent essential goodness of humanity and the assurance of a happy ending are

punctured with the pseudo-reality of an all pervading devilish intention of the

eponymous figure of the Skriker.

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 According to Jack Zipes, fairytales and folklores ‘exercise an

extraordinary hold over our real and imaginative lives from childhood to

adulthood’ (Zipes: 1975, 118). In fact, fairy tales operate as expressions of the

human desire for fortune and fulfilment which is often denied to man by his/her

real day to day existence. Fairy tales, therefore, substitute the real with the fictive

and offer a discoursal space wherein all the human philias and phobias are

brought up from the subliminal to the liminal plain to be eventually defeated by a

compulsory victory of the good over the evil, of the beautiful over the ugly, and

of the normal over the abnormal. Fairy tales can, therefore, be seen to constitute a

proscriptive discourse whereby the binary divisions between the good and the

bad, the beautiful and the ugly, and the normal and the abnormal are created,

defined and maintained. Churchill in The Skriker inverts this fairytale tradition by

anticipating the arrival of the bizarre and the uncanny through her protagonist and

thereby allows a free play to the thousand philias and phobias that lie hidden in

the human psyche. In her version of the fairy tale, therefore, the antagonist stands

victorious, the protagonist is damned forever and the traditional ending of the

heterosexual union is replaced with a re-enactment of the primordial fall that

‘brought death into to the world and all other woes’ (Milton: 2006, 5).

The Skriker was first staged on January 20, 1994, at the Cottesloe

Auditorum of the Royal National Theatre, London, under the direction of Les

Waters. Apparently, the play is a simple story of two mothers Josie and Lily who

come under the evil influence of a supernatural being identified as the Skriker.

Beneath the surface, however, what the play offers is an apparently inscrutable

maze of grotesque and absurdist voices and visions that instead of yielding

meaning drag the audience into a labyrinth of pseudo-real character-situations,

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linguistic rupture, logical obscurity and breakdown of sense. As Jean E. Howard

puts it:

(In The Skriker) speech repeatedly goes off the tracks, becomes
mutant. At one level recalling James Joyce’s puns and neologisms,
the speech of the three main characters constantly veers between
nonsense and new sense, its fractures allowing new ideas to form
and dissolve. (Howard in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 48)

However, it is the same obfuscated language and logic that makes The Skirker an

expressionistic portrayal of the inner crises of the female in a society that forbids

each and every expression of individuality. It is for this reason that Dimple

Godiwala comments:

In a method only faintly reminiscent of the dinner scene of Top

Girls which brought together, impossibly, several women from
different time periods in a contemporary British restaurant, with
this piece Churchill ventures into folklore and the darker parts of
our collective unconscious in hope of finding fresh metaphors for
that mad muddled place, England. (Godiwala: 2003, 78)

The Skriker, as Churchill herself notes, is ‘a shapeshifter and death

portent, ancient and damaged’ (P3. 243). She is a character form the British

folklore represented both as a vicious fairy and as an ominous great black dog

symbolizing vengeance and ruthlessness. True to this tradition, the Skriker in

Churchill’s play appears as an insidious being whose charms are too powerful to

overcome; for more than being an outside agent of destruction, she is an

extension and an intensification of the ahistorical human psyche ‘ancient and

damaged’ with its innumerable and often unrealized fears, desires and inhibitions.

The ‘damages’ that she bears, therefore, result from and reflect the clash between

these fears and desires which the Skriker as the timeless, hyper-real projection of

human mind is compelled to endure. Her unique capacity to diffuse the unity of

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herself and metamorphose it into various objects and beings coupled with the

voyeuristic pleasure that she takes in witnessing scenes of death and disaster lures

modern man to an unwitting visceral self-destruction. The Skriker’s role as a

‘death portent’ is highlighted thereby, and the age old fairytale gets transformed

into a thanatotic reality. It is for this reason that Geraldine Cousin asserts, ‘The

Skriker is, finally, not so much a fairy story as a warning against believing in

fairy stories – at least the kind where everyone lives happily ever after’ (Cousin:

1996, 186).

In fact, the twilight zone that the Skriker inhabits and forces on the human

world is far from being a fairy woodland. It is rather a veritable wasteland that

comes alive with nightmarish apprehension of an impending apocalypse. During

the course of the play the eleven different forms that the Skriker takes (among

which six are of women of varying ages, two are of young men, one is of a small

child, another is a monster while the last one is of an inanimate invisible sofa)

represent a ‘damaged’, disrupted, amorphous and most importantly ‘sick’

subjectivity. If the middle aged postmenopausal woman in the ‘dowdy cardigan’

symbolizes the sickness, sterility and mortification that has engulfed the modern

society (P3. 251), then the ‘derelict’ woman ‘shouting in the street’ is a symbol

for the ineffectuality of protest against that very sickness (P3. 252).

The ‘slightly drunk’ woman personifies both the wish to forget and the

compulsion to remember the disillusionment with the present state of things (P3.

253), whereas the ‘invisible’ part of the sofa that the characters sit on works as a

reminder of and a caution against the undisclosed properties of the present (P3.

260). The small child that the Skriker appears as at once personifies the child that

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Josie killed and the child that Lily is pregnant with, symbolizing thereby the

thousand muted fears and desires that a woman stores for her child (P3. 263). The

Skriker as the monster who comes to keep a watch on Joie while scrubs the floor

stands for the inescapable misery that modern man is heir to (P3. 270). Next, the

Skriker appears as a ‘smart woman in mid thirties’ whose smartness is just facade

to hide the hideous realities of modern life (P3. 275). The two men of about 30

and 40 respectively represent the failure of a glorious capitalism (P3. 280, 287)

while the silent figure of Marie embodies the lure of familial/social attachment

(P3. 285). The final avatar that the Skriker takes is one of a ‘very ill old lady’

whose physical incapacitation is an emblem for the psycho-spiritual barrenness

that the human civilization has descended into (P3. 288). Needless to say, these

performances envisage what Ralf Erik Remshardt describes as the ‘realm of

dreams, fears, and desires’ (Remshardt: 1995, 122).

While reviewing The Skriker, Michael Billington found the play

‘strangely opaque’ (Billington: 1994). This opacity results from the way the

Skriker, as an atemporal presence, embodies the repressed in human history in

general and women’s history in particular. In fact, the Skriker seems to represent

the eternal terror that has always been perceived to characterize the female across

continents and cultures. As Gloria Anzaldua puts it:

Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal

impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the
alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us). Culture and
religion seek to protect us from these two forces. The female, by
virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she
bleeds every month but does not die), by virtue of being in tune
with nature’s cycles, is feared. Because, according to Christianity
and most other religions, woman is carnal, animal, closer to the

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 undivine … Woman is the stranger, the other. (Anzaldua: 1999,
39)

It is this ‘strangeness’ and otherity of the female that has traditionally been

interpreted by patriarchy as both attractive and repulsive. If the female has been

theorized as a site of rampant sexuality, then her unique ability to menstruate and

procreate along with her endurance has been visualized with both reverence and

dread resulting in her socio-cultural categorization as evil and hellish. Through

the character of the Skriker, Churchill attempts to present on stage this horror that

femininity has traditionally been defined with.

The split in the personality of the Skriker, therefore, can be seen as much

as an offshoot of the repressed in female psyche as one of her strategies to

express it. Quite in keeping with this, the first monologue of the Skriker with

which play actually opens reveals a deranged personality constantly challenged

by the burden of memory:

Heard her boast beast a roast beef eater, daughter could spin span
spick and spun the lowest form of wheat straw into gold, raw into
roar, golden lion and lyonesse under the sea, dungeonesse under
the castle for bad mad sad adders and takers away. (P3. 243)

This apparently fragmented language has variously been interpreted by critics as

‘fantastical’, ‘newsensical’, ‘bizarre’, ‘schizophrenic’ and ‘anti-oedipal’ but it is

hard to overlook its inherent inter-mythic strain. The version of the European

folklore of “Rumpelstiltskin” that the Skriker repeatedly alludes to during her

monologue hints at the problematic relationship of maternal instincts and worldly

commitments. This allusion analeptically recalls Josie’s infanticide and

proleptically foreshadows Lily’s cooption by the Skriker, puncturing thereby the

megamyths of maternal security and protection. The other potent mythical

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characters present onstage like the Kelpie, the Bogle, Johnnie Squarefoot, the

RawHeadAndBloodyBones, the Thrumpins and the Bluemen remain by and large

inactive partly due to the authorial intension of highlighting the operations of the

Skriker and partly to hint at the obscurity inherent in both human nature and

mythical structure.

Dimple Godiwala is one among those very few critics who have identified

the Skriker’s speech as ‘Joycean’ in its structure and operation (Godiwala: 2003,

78). One may, however, add that it also shows an Eliotesque fondness for inter-

mythical allusion. In performing the vicious, vindictive dark force that she is, the

Skriker, as Claudia Barnett argues, embodies the Jungian ‘maternal desire’ which

is ‘secret’, ‘abysmal’, ‘poisonous’, ‘terrifying’ and ‘inescapable like fate’

(Barnet: 2000, 48). It is through the character of the Skriker that Churchill brings

out the horrors of unfulfilled maternalism that her other mother figures such as

Lena (A Mouthful of Birds), Marlene (Top Girls), Roz (Abortive), and last but not

the least Josie and Lily (The Skriker) suffer from. The Skriker’s obsession to

possess Lily’s new born along with her avatar of a motherless child voices the

female desire to feel those maternal instincts which she has often been robbed of

by chance, choice or coincidence. Her anger with Josie and Lily and the children

they bear, therefore, becomes indicative of her frustration with her own

barrenness vis-à-vis those fortunate ones who have been endowed with such

boons. Similarly, her wish to take Josie and Lily and mothers like them to her

underworld is as much expressive of her vindictiveness as of her wish to build up

a female solidarity group.

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 The first of the Skriker’s victims, the schizophrenic Josie suffers from

puerperal psychosis. When the play opens we find her in a mental asylum after

killing her newborn. Needless to say, her absentmindedness and her obsessive

reference to her ten day old child are symptomatic of the guilt of infanticide,

‘You can’t be naughty, a ten day old baby, can you. You really don’t know

anything about [...] it. What can a ten day old baby do that’s naughty’ (P3. 248).

The other victim of the Skriker, Lily is a pregnant lady in her final trimester and

it is during her visit to Josie that she comes under the evil influences of the

Skriker. Though both of them initially resist all of the evil temptations, soon the

Skriker gains control not only on their minds but also on their bodily movements

and outputs. All their attempts at speaking out are nullified by the Skriker who

makes them vomit currency and toads whenever they open their mouths.

Similarly, the constant presence of the other mythological figures such as Yallery

Brown, Nellie Longarms, Jenny Greenteeth, Black Annis, the Black Dog, etc.

tries to coerce them into yielding to the wishes of the Skriker.

When the Skriker is ultimately able to gain control on their minds, she

transports both the friends Josie and Lily to her underworld. In a virtual re-

enactment of Laura’s seduction in Christian Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

(Rossetti: 2010), Josie drinks the red wine offered to her and thereby ignores the

repeated warning of the underworld girl who is perhaps another ill fated victim of

the Skriker:

Don’t eat. It’s glamour. It’s twigs and beetles and a dead body.
Don’t eat or you’ll never get back. [...] Don’t drink. It’s glamour.
It’s blood and dirty water. I was looking for my love and I got lost
in an orchard. Never take an apple, never pick a flower. I took one

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 bite and now I’m here forever. Everyone I love must be dead by
now. Don’t eat, don’t drink, or you’ll never get back. (P3. 270)

The story that the underworld girl narrates as her own offers a mosaic of

fairytales, legends and myths whereby she represents herself one after another as

S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel, lost in the woods in search of love, as the eternally

damned Eve, beguiled by Satan and punished by God and Man alike, as

Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot, eternally trapped in a false world of make-believes,

and finally as a female Tithonus cursed with eternal life as punishment. However,

when Josie drinks the fatal cup, the Skriker transforms her into some kind of a

heinous carnivorous animal devoid of all sensory perceptions other than an

overpowering sense of hunger that can only befit hell, ‘She [Josie] is happy now

and eats the food they pile in front of her, not noticing the difference between

cakes and twigs. The SPIRITS celebrate, congratulating the SKRIKER’ (P3. 270).

Needless to say, the celebration that Josie’s drinking and the resultant dazed state

prompt among the spirits, and the vigour with which they congratulate the

Skriker prove the suspicious warning of the underworld girl as true. And this is

again bolstered by the Skriker’s joyous comments, ‘We won wonderful / full up

at last / last man’s dead’ (P3. 271).

What follows is an elaborate scene of Faustian bargain wherein Josie

expresses her complete dependence on and need for the Skriker even if in

exchange of parasitic nourishment that a leech or a vampire needs:

SKRIKER: What will you pay me say the bells the bells?
JOSIE: Sip my blood?
SKRIKER: Haven’t I sipped lipped lapped your pretty twist wrist
for years and fears? What’s happy new, what’s
special brew hoo? (P3. 272)

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However, before the bargain reaches any definitive conclusion of the stakes, Josie

is brought back to reality by the wild screams of Lily just in a manner similar to

“The Goblin Market” where Laura is brought back to the human world by the

timely intervention of her sister Lizzie. But unlike the parallel market that the

Goblins set every evening for the unwarned girls, the underworld that the Skriker

inhabits has no specific entrances or exists; for it is a mere projection of the

subliminal fears and desires that man carries within the self. Therefore, the more

a person will try to penetrate it, the more he/she will get ensnared by its

inescapability. The same happens with Lily. Though she enters the underworld

with a resolution to return soon, she gets more easily enmeshed in its web than

Josie did. While the Skriker tried to capture Josie’s mind by allowing her senses

to submerge completely and perpetually in the present, Lily’s determination not

to yield to evil temptations is shattered by making her visualize the future

generation as perennially trapped. The play closes with Lily accepting the

underworld food from an old woman quite oblivious of the dangerous effects of

such a forbidden consumption, ‘The OLD WOMAN holds out some food and

LILY puts her hand to take it’ (P3. 291). That the passer by stops its ritualistic

dance signals the achievement of the feat i.e. the victory of the Skriker (P3. 291).

Interestingly, the horrific present that the Skriker impinges upon the

consciousness of Josie along with the ghastly future that she makes Lily visualize

is actually a projection of the thousand psycho-spiritual torments that a woman

has to endure in performing the roles of a daughter, a wife and a mother. What

remains shut up behind the veneer of such performance is what the Skriker brings

to reality. As Elain Aston puts it, ‘Ultimately, I am inclined to argue the Skriker

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as a nemesis figure: an ancient, avenging figure unleashed on a world that

continues to neglect its mothers, its children, its future’ (Aston: 2003, 31).

If The Skriker takes its audience to an ancient world of disrupted

identities, then the two companion pieces Identical Twins and A Number envisage

a world where identities are threatened by alternative equivalent models.

Identical Twins is a radio play, first aired on BBC Radio 3 on November 21,

1968, under the direction of John Tydeman. A Number was written some 25 years

after Identical Twins and was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre,

London, on September 23, 2002, under the direction of Stephen Daldry. If in

Identical Twins, the central actions revolves round the twin brothers Teddy and

Clive who are too identical to assert their individuality, then in A Number, the

very basis of the parental and personal identity with which the protagonist

Bernard grew up is shattered by the discovery of his own status of being simply

‘one’ of the undisclosed number of clones of the real Bernard. Therefore, the

identities that Teddy, Clive or Bernard think of as belonging uniquely to

themselves and in turn constituting their uniqueness and differentia are actually

found to be a shared and even a contested attribute. It is this sense of shared,

incomplete and then therefore dependent existence that haunts the subjectivity of

both Teddy and Clive. For Bernard, however, the situation gets problematized as

questions of unauthorized and hence illegal cloning define his own existence as a

‘counterfeit’ and ‘forged’ one.

According to R. Darren Gobert, ‘The twentieth century’s most compelling

articulations of subjectivity show that the subject originates in, and is reinforced

by, its difference from others’ (Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 106). It is

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this tendency to assert one’s self through one’s difference from others is what

constitutes identity as an expression of both the subject’s uniqueness and

exclusivity. Needless to say, the presence of an identical other, sharing a common

origination, similar physical features, and even an exact genetic map

problematizes both the self-image and the self-reality of the twin subject. Medical

science differentiates between fraternal and identical twins on basis of their

dizygotic or monozygotic conception. Though both these categories sport similar

physical features and psychological abilities, the monozygotic origin of the

identical twins i.e. the fact of their development from a single fertilized womb

later on divided into two makes them share a singular genetic code. As Edwin

Fuller Torrey describes:

Two-thirds of all twins are fraternal (dizygotic) twins, which begin

when two eggs are fertilized by two sperm. Such individuals share
an average of 50% of their genes and, except for sharing a uterus
for nine months, are genetically not more alike than other brothers
and sisters. They may be either the same sex or different sexes.
The other one-third of twins are identical (monozygotic) twins,
which result when one egg is fertilized by a sperm but then divides
into two (or more) separate fetuses. These individuals are the same
sex, share 100% of their genes, and are therefore genetically
identical. (Torrey: 1994, 18)

Such an absolute genetic sharing, in its turn, develops the identical twins as

mirror images of one another. In the absence of any perceived difference between

the self and the other, the twins visualize themselves as interchangeable replicas

of one another. As N.J. Sipes and J.S. Sipes put it, ‘A twin’s search [for self-

identity] is more complicated by virtue of having a built-in mirror – someone

who reflects his or her life’ (Sipes and Sipes: 1999, 68). This existence of a

mirror-image self and the resultant absolute identification with the other violently

disrupts the personal and social identities of the self, which according to J.A.

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Boon, gets formed and framed as an outcome of ‘playing the vis-à-vis’ with the

other, resulting in the synthesis of the self’s realization of its negative relational

status in the world i.e. ‘he/she is what others in the world are not’ (Boon 1982:

26).

In the play Identical Twins, both Teddy and Clive are faced with a similar

difficulty. Since the play was meant to be aired on BBC 3 and not to be

performed on stage, Churchill tried to highlight the crisis of the twins by making

a single artist Kenneth Haigh play both the roles. The differences between the

voices of the two twins were indicated by intonational modifications and changes

in the vocal pitch. John Tydeman, the director of that BBC 3 production of

Identical Twins, notes in this context:

She [Churchill] didn’t know how difficult technically it was to do.

It is a fact that we had to record twin A and then sync twin B who
was played by the same actor. He had to wear head caps to keep in
sync with himself because two twins had different personalities.
[...] Kenneth Haigh sat down and said this is going to be easy but
sort of cracked up around the third sentence. (Tydeman quoted in
Fritzsimmons: 1989, 15)

Interestingly, the most difficult of hurdles that a twin has to encounter in society

is the ‘twin stereotype’ whereby two separate bodies are popularly perceived and

encouraged to be interpreted as a singular entity. As Sipes and Sipes clarify, ‘The

only person who does not treat me like a twin is my twin. […] Not calling me

‘twin’; not confusing me with her; no staring and pointing; I am just me’ (Sipes

and Sipes: 1999, 67). Needless to say, in the case of Teddy and Clive it is this

realization of the difference in their personalities and the compulsion to share a

singular socio-genetic identity is what alienates them both from the society and

from each other. Desperately they try to escape from each other without realizing

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the utter futility of such an effort; for, unified as they are biologically and

socially, they can never ‘be’ themselves without being together with the other, ‘at

seventeen I began to be myself ... The day I came nearest to feeling fond of him

was when I realised we were both separately planning to run away from each

other’ (ID quoted in Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 107). At this stage, it is

the complete absence of the family, and especially of the mother figure to whom

the child’s identity lies tethered, that intensifies this sense of ostracism.

The figure of the mother, however, is referred to twice in the play but on

both of these occasions the mother serves to heighten only the precarious

condition of her children. The first time the mother is referred to, her memory is

overshadowed with the tragic apprehension of her inability to distinguish

between the twins. This imagined failure of the mother which may or may not

have been based on past experiences of the twins robs them of the validating sign

through which they were expected to make sense of their existence and the world

at large. The second time when the mother appears in the text it is in context of

the twin’s recollection of a triple mirror that always threatened to encircle and

devour them:

TEDDY AND CLIVE: When I was very small I would stand with
him in Mummy’s triple mirror. If we stood very close
we could almost shut it round us. There were
hundreds of reflections, all the same. (Clive’s voice
gets fainter) Then I was terrified to move (Clive
silent now)
TEDDY: not knowing which reflections would move with me
(ID quoted in Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009,
106)

In fact, Identical Twins is composed like two parallel soliloquies which come in

close contact with each other only to fill gaps in memory and language of the two

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protagonists who exist more as underground surrogate selves of each other than

as potent individuals. It is this experience of playing the other’s surrogate self

that evokes in the mind of each of the twins the powerful analogy of the mirror.

Keeping apart the Lacanian concepts, a mirror not only reflects reality but also

refracts and inverts it. It is a looking glass through which the subject not only

looks at itself (the reality) but also looks at the self as projected (the inverted

reflection/refraction). Therefore, the mirrored image that a subject accepts as its

own is a simulacra that attempts to simulate the subject and its actions but only in

an inverted manner. But Teddy and Clive’s case is complicated by their own

status of being each other’s living mirror images. The twin status of each of them

gives him the capacity to reflect the other without any inversion which in turn

may help one distinguish the image from the man. The situation is further

exacerbated when they stand before the triple mirror and the multiple inverted

projections of their selves make it impossible to acknowledge their identities as

separate from each other. Needless to say, the twins feel ‘encircled’ i.e. trapped in

the mirror and are ‘terrified’ at ‘not knowing’ which of their reflection will ‘move

with’ whom or will ‘move’ at all.

According to R. Darren Gobert, ‘the play gives the twins no space of

difference against which to define themselves’ (Gobert in Aston and Diamond:

2009, 106). This results in the gradual growth of animosity between the brothers

to such an extent that both of them grow up as strong enemies, ‘I leapt at him and

we fell on the pavement and rolled over and over into the road, I wanted to hurt

him’ (ID quoted in Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 106). The clash of

identities between the identical twins soon reaches a point of no return and both

of them are found contemplating suicide with a single bottle of sedatives on a

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table strategically placed between them. It is at this point, notes Gobert, ‘the two

finally find a twisted sort of individuation, marked materially on the page as the

text splits, for the first time, into parallel columns’ indicating their separation if

not in life then in death (Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 107). While Teddy

goes out for a walk, Clive starts swallowing one sleeping pill after another:

TEDDY:
Clive takes more pills. This is
one of those stupid things you
regret later. I go on watching.
Then I get up without a word
and go straight out for a walk,
the night is quite mild as the
day has been and I feel better
for some fresh air.
CLIVE:
I take more pills. This is one
of those stupid things you
regret later. I take some more
pills. And some more. Then I
lean over the table and hide
my face in my arms and hope
I’ll go to sleep quickly and
whether it works or not is out
of my hands now.

(ID quoted in Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 106)

However, Clive’s suicide instead of solving Teddy’s problems only intensifies

them. After Clive’s suicide followed by another suicide – that of Teddy’s

disillusioned wife Janet — Teddy accepts the responsibility of Clive’s family.

This decision, however, is not so much prompted by Teddy’s socio-sexual desire

to replace Clive but by his recognition of the inner void that the absence of his

spiritual other has created in him. But trying to fill in the void Teddy unwittingly

runs into a greater nonbelonging; for the family he now calls his own actually

belongs to Clive and Teddy’s own family of which Clive was an important part

has already ceased to be. Unable to tolerate the exclusive identity that as a twin

he had always hankered after, Teddy is heard caught up in another ‘to be or not to

be’ situation, ‘Sometimes I think I’ll make one effort, not to kill myself’ (ID

quoted in Gobert in Aston and Diamond: 2009, 108).

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 If in Identical Twins Teddy and Clive fight with biological realities, then

in A Number the male protagonist Bernard struggles against complexities created

by human knowledge. A Number is the tale of a thirty-five-year old Bernard who

comes to know himself as one among the unknown number of clones that were

manufactured without the consent of the original Bernard’s biological father. For

Bernard, the clone, this bit of information is of a manifold signification. Firstly, it

highlights Bernard’s existence not as the outcome of a natural process but as that

of a scientific experiment. Secondly, this scientific origin brands Bernard’s

existence as secondary and pseudo-human as compared to the primacy of the

‘natural’ human beings who surround him. Thirdly, this secondary existence hints

at the existence of a primary prototype of whom Bernard is only a replica.

Fourthly, that the name Bernard belongs originally to the prototype, who is five

years his senior, dilutes for Bernard, the clone, the efficacy of his ‘name’ to

which his identity lies tethered. Fifthly, that several other unauthorized clones of

the same prototype Bernard may have been produced makes Bernard, the clone,

confront a similar identity crisis that assailed Clive and Teddy in Identical Twins.

Sixthly, that the clone Bernard himself may be just one of those unauthorized

clones and not the one that Salter, the biological father of the prototype, wished

for, shatters both his selfhood and stigmatizes him as a counterfeit, an unwanted

and an illegal one. And finally, that the family which the clone Bernard has

known as his own actually belongs to the prototype Bernard deprives him of the

familial affiliation through which he has learned to make sense of himself and the

outside world. Needless to say, these revelations wreck havoc on the psyche of

Bernard.

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 The play opens when the clone Bernard has already come to know about

his origin and is confronting Salter, the person he has known as his father, with

numerous apprehensions and doubts regarding his identity and selfhood.

Interestingly, Salter also happens to the biological father of the prototype

Bernard, and hence proves to be the right choice to answer the queries of the

clone Bernard:

B2: A number
SALTER: you mean
B2: a number of them, of us, a considerable […] ten, twenty
(P4. 165)

That Bernard is now considering himself as just ‘a number’ signals his loss of

self-identity at the discovery of his shared counterfeit origin. Though Salter tries

his best to alleviate his worries first by proclaiming the prototype Bernard to be

dead, then by praising the clone Bernard as the ‘desired son’ in no equivocal

terms, and finally by clarifying the other clones as unauthorized and hence

illegal, it can hardly provide relief to the tortured psyche of B2 i.e. the clone

Bernard.

Interestingly, throughout their conversation, Salter tries to comfort

Bernard by providing him with a paternal sanction of the bloodline as indicated

by his emphatic self-assertion as Bernard’s father ‘I’m your father’ (P4. 166).

However, instead of helping Bernard it only emphasizes the similar paternal

affiliation to other of his clone equals and most importantly to his prototype, the

original Bernard who achieved it some five years earlier than him, ‘someone else

is the one, the first one, the real one and I’m […] not that’ (P4. 166). When the

prototype Bernard, who was thought to be dead, returns in the next scene, Salter

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faces a similar problem in assuring him of his fatherly affections, ‘I could have

had a different one, a new child altogether that’s what most people but I wanted

you again because I thought you were the best’ (P4. 182). He however fails to

understand that parental affiliation is too small a bargain in the struggle for

identity retention. The third scene therefore portray a near neurotic clone Bernard

continuously threatened by the existence of his prototype, ‘I’m afraid he’ll kill

me’ (P4. 194).

According to Kerry Lynn Macintosh, ever since the first cloned lamb

Dolly was born ‘society has fiercely debated the advantages and disadvantages of

human reproductive cloning’ (Macintosh: 2005, 7). The arguments against human

cloning that Macintosh includes in her study can be categorized under five broad

heads: the religious debate, the ethical debate, the identity debate, the scientific

debate and the medical debate. The objections leveled against cloning from the

religious point of view concentrate on cloning as an ‘expression of hubris’ — ‘an

offense’ against ‘God’ and against ‘nature’ (Macintosh: 2005, 10). The ethical

charge against cloning refers to assisted reproductive technologies as a

devaluation of the human dignity (Macintosh: 2005, 17). The identity debate

which Macintosh calls ‘identity fallacy’ issues largely from the popular

misconception regarding the compulsory predetermined psychosomatic similarity

between the prototype and the product, resulting in identity threat and identity

theft (Macintosh: 2005, 22). The fourth point raised against cloning which

Macintosh calls the ‘scientific hubris’ highlights the fear psychosis based on the

Frankenstein myth whereby all unnatural reproductive technologies are believed

to produce superhuman abnormalities (Macintosh: 2005, 35). The fifth and the

final argument which Macintosh terms as the ‘safety objection’ against cloning

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points up the medical uncertainty regarding the physical and psychological

fitness of the cloned person (Macintosh: 2005, 44).

According to Macintosh these are but symptomatic of the popular fallacy

that ‘reflect[s], reinforce[s], and inspire[s] unfair stereotypes about human clones’

(Macintosh: 2005, 7). However, when viewed from the perspective of the cloned

Bernard especially in the situations that he finds himself in one can hardly ignore

the dangers inherent in such scientific experiments. Since, the human subject

comes to know itself through knowing what others are not, the presence of his

alternative equal models may run counter to the normal functioning of his

identity. Needless to say, both Bernards, the prototype and the product, find

themselves enmeshed in this web of uncountable alternative counterfeit selves.

What the existence of these alternative selves does to both Bernards is robbing

them of their rights to remain themselves. Since the identity that they used to

sport exclusively is now perceived to be a stolen one (stoles away as much from

B1 as from B2), the very basis of their selfhood is disrupted. It is to reconstruct

this self that Bernard, the prototype, ultimately kills Bernard, the product, before

the fourth scene of the play opens (P4. 195). In fact, in killing the clone twin,

Bernard attempts a similar solution to his problems that Clive in Identical Twins

resorted to through committing suicide. But unlike the Clive-Teddy case, the

perceived presence of other clones of Bernard continues to haunt his existence.

The actual appearance of Michael, another of the clones, in the concluding fifth

scene of A Number proves the point, and once again Bernard is reduced to being

the prototype of yet another himself (P4. 199).

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 In fact, what differentiates Michael from both of the Bernards is his sense

of contentment with himself. A well known mathematician happily married to a

loving wife and a father of three children, Michael represents the self-established

man whose identity rests not on his past which he can hardly control but on his

ability to make the best of his present and future. Therefore, the information of

his being a mere clone of some Bernard only seem ‘fascinating’, ‘funny’ or

‘delightful’ to Michael which extremely surprises Salter (P4. 204). The selfhood

that both of the Bernards wanted to perform but failed to do, is achieved by

Michael. His final answer to Salter’s repeated queries about how happy or

content he is with his life especially after the knowledge of his scientific birth is,

therefore, in the affirmative (P4. 206); for, he is the one who has been able to

utilized knowledge and belief to serve his purpose and has thereby saved himself

from getting used and manipulated by their respective discourses.

The strong personality that Michael shows in A Number finds its parallel

in the three protagonists of Lives of the Great Poisoners. The play, along with

Identical Twins and A Number, happens to be one of the least discussed plays of

Caryl Churchill. Lives of the Great Poisoners is a collaborative project with the

Second Stride and was first performed on February 13, 1991, at the Arnolfini,

Bristol, under the direction of Ian Spink. Lives of the Great Poisoners

concentrates on the personal histories of three different personalities — Dr.

Hawley Harvey Crippen, the 19th century US homeopath who was convicted for

killing his wife, Medea, the mythological princess of Colchis, who murdered her

husband’s newlywed wife and her own children, and Madame de Brinvilliers, the

17th century French aristocrat also convicted of poisoned innocent people. It is

through the character of another great poisoner Thomas Midgely, who as

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Churchill notes, ‘put the lead in petrol and CFCs in fridges, two inventions that

seemed a good idea at the time but were inadvertently poisonous’ that these three

different tales get interconnected (P3. 185).

While talking about the play, Churchill in her note highlights her

preoccupation with the theme of poison and poisoning while planning for

collaborating with the Second Stride, ‘I think it was Orlando who started us on

poison and we played around for some time with the idea of a toxic waste ship of

fools unable to put in to any port. That faded but poison stories remained’ (P3.

185). The assertion becomes important as the play unfolds and the characters

appear onstage to spell out their stories of poisoning people, acts which in their

own turn transform them into poisonous people. Lives of the Great Poisoners,

therefore, becomes a tale of those who not only poison others but also are poison

in themselves.

The first of the three eponymous poisoners of the play, Dr. Hawley

Harvey Crippen (1862-1910) was popular among his peers and patients for his

‘mild-mannered’ nature before he was convicted for murdering his wife Cora and

later on brutally dismembering her body before fleeing to America with his

mistress Ethel Le Neve (Hodgson: 2007, N. pag.). The 29th July, 2010, BBC

feature on Dr. Crippen which coincided with the century of his execution notes

how after a brief trial of five days and an even brief hearing of less than half an

hour the doctor was hanged till death on November 23, 1910, at Pentoville

Prison, London (http://www.bbc.com /news/magazine-10802059). Though a 21st

century DNA examination has raised serious doubts regarding the identity of the

corpse that was identified as belonging to Cora Crippen only on the basis of a

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scar on the torso, still now Dr. Crippen continues to be the most notorious of

British murderers (Hodgson: 2007, N. pag.).

Dr. Crippen appears onstage first during a surreal conversation with

Midgley, the industrial chemist and Lequeux, a famous thriller writer at the 39,

Hilldrop Cresent, the Crippen house. While Lequeux reads a murder scene from

the latest of his novels Dr. Crippen instinctively starts proposing several murder

strategies:

I got ideas for novels. But I don’t have a way with words, so if you
just wrote them up. There’s a man married to a termagant. He’s in
love with a beautiful and innocent girl who works as his secretary.
He poisons his wife in the tea [….] The poison is indetectable. No
suspicion falls on him. A perfect crime. He lives to an old age with
his beloved. Does this idea appeal? I have many others. He kills
his wife with poisoned gloves. He … (P3. 194)

The utter enthusiasm about murder plans, the need to make them flawless, the

almost pre-rehearsed precision of ideas and the breathless exasperation with

which Dr. Crippen speaks clearly highlight the impact that the Lequeux’s wife-

dominated hero has created on him. The reference to the ‘termagant’ wife and the

extramarital affair with the ‘beautiful and innocent’ secretary are obvious facts of

Dr. Crippen’s personal history which he wants to fictionalize through the act of

telling. Needless to say, this act of sharing the murder strategy with a writer who

specializes in perfecting murders is immensely helpful in identifying any possible

loopholes in the strategy. Therefore, it is not surprising that Dr. Crippen is soon

seen to prepare a lethal drink for his wife, ‘Drink up your coca, my love. […]

You’re meant to go to sleep. It’s not supposed to hurt. It’s painless. […] You’re

meant to die quietly, Cora, in your sleep’ (P3. 202).

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 The second of the three protagonists of Lives of the Great Poisoners is the

Colchian princess Medea who is infamous in mythology as a sorceress and a

murderer. According to the myth, Medea betrayed her family for Jason and stole

the Golden Fleece by killing her brother. However, when Jason married the

Corinthian princess Creusa, Medea sought revenge first by poisoning the bride’s

dress which burnt her alive along with her father, the King of Corinth, and then

by killing the two children she herself bore to Jason. This figure of the avenger

woman intrigues Churchill to such an extent that she actually makes Medea open

the play Lives of the Great Poisoners with a prologue which is divided into a

silent segment and a brief song-monologue. If the silent section details how

Medea restores Jason’s old father Aeson to youth by her knowledge of herbs,

then the song narrates her unique ability both to hurt and to heal:

Hurting you I heal you

Killing you I cure you
Secrets of death and new life
Poisons that heal
Fill your blood fill your breath
By my skill
I kill you and give you new life (P3. 191)

The next time when Medea appears onstage, we find her writhing in the

pain of betrayal. At this juncture, Jason’s shameless utilitarian view of marriage

coupled with the promise to buy her a house as a price for his infidelity only adds

to Medea’s sufferings:

Marriage doesn’t mean much here. Wives are a matter of career.

Passion is for a mistress. […] We’ve a chance to get in with the
royal family. I’m doing it for you. I’ll buy you a house’ (P3. 213).

That for Jason ‘wives’ are only matters of ‘career’ highlights his marriage to

Medea as a mere ploy to get hold of the golden fleece. Similarly, his claim that

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‘Passion is for a mistress’ meaning his ‘passion’ has been kept in reserve ‘for a

mistress’ is utterly unacceptable for Medea both as Jason’s partner and as a

woman; for it highlights the patriarchal assumption of the woman to exist merely

as an object of male concupiscence and comfort. In her last attempt to assert her

identity when Medea reminds Jason of her past sacrifices, Jason rejects to

acknowledge them altogether and instead announces her to be nonexistent

without a male-centered, male-dependent name/role, ‘You are nobody. […]

you’re only famous for helping me’ (P3. 213). Unable to tolerate Jason’s

infidelity any longer, Medea plots revenge and actually executes it by applying

her knowledge of healing peopled to hurt them, ‘My enemies are melted in fire /

Your palace on fire’ (P3. 216).

The third of the protagonists of Lives of the Great Poisoners, Madame de

Brinvilliers (1630-1676) appears to be haunted by the thousand unuttered cries

that lay buried under the strong vengeance that the mythical Medea sported. This

association is highlighted twice by Churchill; the first time in the stage directions

where a single actress is instructed to play both the roles (P3. 189) and then again

at the beginning of Madame Brinvilliers’s story where Medea is seen to become

the 17th century lady ‘MEDEA is now MME DE BRINVILLIERS’ (P3. 218).

The theme of possession is further bolstered by Madame de Brinvilliers’s

opening lines which are actually a verbatim quotation from Medea’s prologue,

‘Hurting you I heal you / Killing you I cure you’ (P3. 218).

Madame de Brinvilliers is not only possessed by Medea in the play, her

life story also resembles that of the mythical woman. Madame de Brinvilliers was

convicted of conspiring against and killing her father and two of the brothers with

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active assistance from her lover Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix. These deaths are

soon followed by that of Captain Sainte-Croix with the exception that this death

was caused by natural conditions. Soon after the Captain’s death charges against

Madame de Brinvilliers started being levelled when patients started dying

‘invariably’ and in ‘great agony’ in the hospitals she visited for giving food in

charity. She was convicted on the basis of letters of Captain Sainte-Croix and on

her confessions which are deemed to have been extracted by torture. Madame de

Brinvilliers was beheaded and her body was burnt at stake on July 17, 1676.

Lives of the Great Poisoners traces the life of Madame de Brinvilliers

when she is already bemused of Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix. The scene opens

in a manner similar to the opening of Dr. Crippen’s story. In the Sainte-Croix

house, Sainte-Croix welcomes Thomas Midgley and one Mr. Exili (P3. 219).

There is another stark similarly between the two guests. If Midgley, through his

scientific experiments with the refrigerator, is poisoning the world unwittingly,

then Exili is a professional poisoner working with full knowledge and

responsibility of his actions. The situation soon proceeds to show Madame de

Brinvilliers hunting down one after another of her victims, including Sainte-

Croix. In a scene highly reminiscent of Dr. Crippen’s murder plot narrated to the

thriller writer Lequeux, both of the lovers accept to poison one another. However,

it is their knowledge of each other and of the right antidotes that, as they

acknowledge, keeps them alive:

BRINVILLIERS: I’ve been giving you poison too. [...]

SAINTE-CROIX: Do you think I didn’t know? I am hard to
poison, I know the antidotes. And why do you
think you feel so ill and sad? Remorse? A little
drop of remorse in your coffee.

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 BRINVILLIERS: I know what you give me. I can save myself. I
know everything you know. (P3. 232)

Madame de Brinvilliers is next seen making a confession of her crimes, ‘I

accuse myself of having caused general scandal / I accuse myself of having

ruined myself’ (P3. 235). Her closing lines ‘I have forgotten [...] I know nothing

about it [...] I do not remember’ highlight her collapse under the tremendous

pressure of the prison authorities (P3. 235). The play ends with Midgley, Sevigne

and Desgrez discussing the spectacle of horror at Madame de Brinvilliers’s

execution (P3. 236). The scene turns surreal when Madame de Brinvilliers’s spirit

appears and obsessively starts recounting sins she as a modern Medea has

committed, ‘I set fire to a house. I poisoned my father, I poisoned my brothers, I

myself took poison. I do not remember. I do not know. [...] I do not know’ (P3.

237).

The plays discussed in this chapter clearly show how individuals are often

burdened with certain identities that necessitate important choices and their

consequences. What Caryl Churchill seems to show here is actually the

interdependence of knowledge and belief claimed and/or held by specific

individuals, on the one hand, and the society, on the other. In fact, how these

individuals are perceived and how they perceive themselves are dependent

entirely on the processes of cognition that are either in consonance with or at

variance to one another. Performance of identities, therefore, becomes at one and

the same time rewarding and/or restricting that makes the individuals ponder over

the questions of ‘preferences’ and ‘perils’.

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