CHAPTER: 1

INTRODUCTION

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial

ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.
— Erving Goffman (Goffman: 1959, 75)

Shakespeare would have us believed that ‘All the world’s a stage / And all

the men and women merely players’ (Shakespeare: 2012, 140). To shift the focus

of the words from sad mortality to the socio-cultural normativity that the modern

man is heir to, we can safely add that man has to follow the basic rules of

performance to conform and to belong to this stage-world. In fact, to prepare

oneself according to the standards of expectation and acceptability, to fulfill the

obligations arising out of those standards, and to produce results that are desired

as per their subjects positions — these constitute the discourse of the

performative. This discourse, in its turn, wields the power to shape the narrative

of the performer’s life. Since the efficacy of a performance is always measured

by the target audience’s response to it, a performer’s skill lies in his/her ability to

fit in with a viable identity either someone else’s or his/her own. While

performing the identity of one’s own self i.e. what an individual perceives his/her

self to be, is essentially empowering resulting in both identity consolidation and

identity achievement, performing as the ‘other’ may be both futile and fruitful.

While it may smother that quintessential ‘whatness’ (quidditas) of a performer’s

being which constitutes his/her individuality, it may also provide the deviant and

the different with a chance of easy social acceptability and accommodation. Thus,

performance of an other’s identity may become both a strategy and a mask that

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can save the performer from falling prey to social categorization as well as offer a

means to preserve the potent fragments of the self in and through the identities

performed as and for the others.

To take our cue from Shakespeare, the stage that life peoples, drama

entails and theatre reveals is the sight of performance. As such, the link between

life and drama on the one hand and drama and theatre on the other precludes any

study of the myriad performances of identity in isolation. Since the present study

proposes to re-read the plays of Caryl Churchill to point up the dramatist’s

presentation of the performances of identity by the characters of her plays, I

should first situate her in the world of the post Second World War British

Theatre; for as Eleanor Catton has observed:

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified

version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour
that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything
that is ordinary about me and you (Catton: 2010, 127).

The first woman playwright to become the Resident Dramatist of the

Royal Court Theatre, Caryl Churchill started her dramatic career in her mid 20s.

Her interest in the world of theatre and performance was actually an offshoot of

her Oxford days, and much before she obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in

Literature, she established herself as a well known BBC Radio-Dramatist.

Churchill came to the theatre scene when the English stage was being dominated

by the Theatre of the Absurd and the Angry Young Men. Her first play

Downstairs which got aired in 1958, within five years of Samuel Beckett’s

Waiting for Godot and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, was almost

2
universally overlooked by critics and reviewers. But the consistent presence of

her plays on the British Radio soon brought her to the limelight.

An acute observer of the ways of a judging, punishing, categorizing

world, Churchill presents in her plays characters who seldom hazard a head on

collision with the social order. Instead they try to force their way through it by

means of neutralizing its constrictions through a performance of vulnerability

and/or obedience. This not only enables them to be mistaken by the social

panopticon as harmless individuals but also provides them with an agency to

settle their scores with society on their own terms. At a further remove, this

façade of performance proffers them the ability to subvert social dictates as

regards ‘accommodation’ or ‘adulation’ within the social space.

As one of the foremost British female playwrights of the 60s and 70s,

Churchill’s concerns extend beyond any gender specific or socio-economically

restricted realms to embrace the many pangs and pressures that the modern man

needs to brave in a world that can accept neither deviance nor defiance. In her

plays, therefore, the struggles of identity performance and identity retention

become key issues. To portray this struggle, she adopts a style which is at once

radical and nonconformist. Any cursory glance, however, at the body of critical

materials available on Churchill reveals that as a playwright Churchill has almost

always been straitjacketed as a feminist or a socialist. Much ink has been spilt

over the playwright’s portrayal of the gender issues, political turmoil and other

socio-economic pressures, but seldom has any study focused comprehensively on

the issues of identity performance and self-narrativization in Churchill’s plays.

The present dissertation seeks to fill in this lacuna in Caryl Churchill criticism.

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 The present chapter is divided into two sections. The first section aims at

discussing and defining important critical terms that will inform and interpret the

study. In the second section of the chapter, Churchill’s 1986 play A Mouthful of

Birds will be examined to see and show how the tags of Feminist and/or Socialist

Playwright constricts an artist who has always dealt with the thousand kinds of

oppressions heaped on the entire humanity in the name of society, civility and/or

culture. Efforts will also be made to highlight how the protagonists of Churchill

resist and neutralize those oppressions and assert a kind of self-reliant entity of

his/her own.

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 1. DEFINITION OF TERMS

A study of the narratives that the characters of Churchill’s plays weave in

and thorough their performance of different identities must be preceded with the

explication of certain relevant critical terms and concepts so as to fix its scope

and perspectives. Since the dissertation seeks to show a host of characters

engaged in a performance of identities, terms such as ‘identity’, ‘self’,

‘performance’, ‘Performance Studies’, ‘performer’, ‘audience’ and ‘narrative’

should be defined at the very outset.

The word ‘identity’ derives from the Middle French identité from the Late

Latin identitatem of which the nominative is identitas meaning ‘sameness’ from

ident combining form of Latin idem meaning ‘same’ from ultimately Id meaning

‘that’ (www.etymonline.com). According to Joseph Butler, identity is the sum

total of those intrinsic features of an individual, which he/she may or may not

share with others (Butler in Blackburn: 1994, 185). In fact, identity can be

defined as a set of personally modified attributes and characteristics that

constitutes the uniqueness or individuality of a person and differentiates him/her

from those who are the others to his/her self.

The American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson is one of those

earliest critics who took an explicit interest in theorizing the issue of identity. In

his 1959 book Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers, Erikson defines the

process of identity formation as a series of stages in which identity gets formed

and framed in response to a number of socio-culturally defined increasingly

sophisticated challenges (Erikson: 1959, 23). For him, the social institutions

visualize the process of forming ‘a viable sense of identity’ as ‘an adolescent

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task’, and those who fail in resynthesizing childhood memories into his/her

mature identifications are seen as being in a state of ‘identity diffusion’ whereas

those who can successfully merge their past and present chain of remembered

selfhood by continually shaping and reshaping their knowledge of the world

belong to group of Identity Achievers.

It was in 1966 that James Marcia came up with his path breaking study

“Development and Validation of Ego Identity Status” with which emerged the

“Neo-Eriksonian” identity status paradigm. According to Marcia, an individual’s

sense of identity is neither biologically innate nor sociologically predetermined. It

is rather a byproduct of the explorations and commitments that the person makes

regarding certain personal and social incidents or ideas (Marcia: 1966, 556).

Crises in identity, he finds, occur as outcomes of particular life events or socio-

cultural incidents which may bring disequilibrium in the person’s sense of

selfhood. While such disequilibrium can devastate a person, it can also re-

construct the selfhood of the same person whereby he/she may either regress to

an earlier identity status or progress towards a newly achieved one.

The French Philosopher, Paul Ricœur in his seminal work Oneself as

Another (1992) introduced the concept of Narrative Identity in a completely new

light. Ricoeur holds that personal identity is composed of two distinct parts — an

idem-identity and an ipse-identity. If ‘Idem Identity’ refers to the ‘sameness’ that

makes it possible to identify the self as ‘self’ despite positive or negative

changes, ‘Ipse Identity’ can be defined as the constituent ingredients of that

‘sameness’ that mark us out as what we really are. According to Ricoeur, it is

impossible to think of personal identity without a narrative one. For, narratives

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engage an avid listener in the development of their storylines and thereby pave

way for introducing characters who parallel the listener in both joys and

sufferings. Thus, as Ricœur puts it, ‘the narrative constructs the identity of the

character’, and this identity which makes him/her another character in the theatre

of life is the narrative identity (Ricœur: 1992, 147–48).

Since, identity of a person is a sum total of the attributes that he/she

perceives to be intrinsically associated with his/her selfhood, we should now get

the concept of ‘Self’ defined. The word ‘self’ derives from the Old English sylf

meaning ‘one’s own person’ from Proto-Germanic selbaz i.e. ‘the self’, from

Proto-Indo-European selbʰ i.e. ‘one’s own’ ultimately from Proto-Indo-

European s(w)e meaning ‘separate, apart from others’ (www.etymonline.com).

‘Self’ can roughly be translated into a person’s essential being that at once

constitutes his/her uniqueness to and difference from others. In fact, the self

happens to be an offshoot of two diagonally opposite forces. If on the one hand,

the self is an autonomous entity constructed as it is by a person’s attitudes and

preferences, then on the other hand, it is also constricted by socio-cultural

conditions or what G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley calls ‘interactions’ with ‘the

others’ to that self (Mead and Cooley: 1975, 511). This realization that the self is

by and large conditioned by the social forces wrecks havoc on the self to such an

extent that it gets scattered into myriad kaleidoscopic fragments.

Although selfhood constitutes the subject position of an individual and

anchors him/her to the fixity of what he/she is, this anchoring is never static. Just

like identity, selfhood of an individual is always in an eternal process of

evolution — what Chris Barker had once pointed out about ‘identity’ — selfhood

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too is ‘a moving towards rather than an arrival’ (Barker: 2004, 96). Selfhood,

therefore, is never merely a static entity but something akin to a matter of choices

and compromises. It is constituted by a person’s perception and understanding of

the spatio-temporal particularities he/she happens to inhabit. Thus, with the

change of that particular space and its demands, the nature and projection of that

selfhood too changes. As Barker has further pointed out, ‘self-identity is

constituted by the [individual’s] ability to sustain a narrative about the self’

within ‘the socio-cultural domain the individual must live in accordance with’ —

to answer the crucial cultural questions like ‘What to do? How to act? Who to

be?’ (Barker: 2004, 96).

In a world beset with shifting binaries and several subjectivities there is a

constant negotiation between the public self and the private self. As such, taking

cognizance of both ‘perceiving’ and ‘performing’ identities becomes quite

essential; for, in its wake it brings the myriad narratives of the self to cope with,

contest or control the socio-intellectual space. Needless to say, negotiating with

the world one finds one’s self in entails performance of one’s identity. So, we

must now zero in on the concept of performance in some detail. The word

‘Performance’ which is a combination of the word ‘perform’ and the noun suffix

‘ance’ derives from the old French parfornir meaning ‘to do, carry out, finish, or

accomplish’ from ultimately par i.e. ‘completely’ +fonir i.e. ‘to provide’ and

from the Latin -antia and -entia meaning ‘of the state or quality’

(www.etymonline.com). Primarily, the word ‘performance’ refers to the act of

doing something both with a purpose and with a result that is verifiable. At a

further remove, the concept of performance may connote an event wherein an

individual, a group, an organization, a system or a component attempts to

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communicate to a target group of audience a particular message in and through

the medium of verbal, non-verbal or physical performatives that often lead to

performance acceptance and performance measurement whereby the target

audience receives, rethinks, and thereby becomes able to report information

contained in that piece of performance.

Performance Studies was first attributed the title of a separate discipline in

the year 1980 when New York University renamed their Graduate Drama

Program as the Graduate Department of Performance Studies. In fact,

Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary field of studies and research that

highlights the significance of performance as one of the major constituent factors

of man’s socio-cultural existence. The early roots of Performance Studies can be

traced back to a triumvirate of mid 20th century thinkers Kenneth Burke, the

linguist, Victor Turner, the anthropologist, and Erving Goffman, the sociologist.

Kenneth Burke sought to develop a ‘dramatist model’ to account for all/every

intellectual ‘language-actions’ be it normal day-to-day human communication or

some philosophical debate (Burke: 1969). Victor Turner put forward his theory of

‘social drama’ to understand and explain the workings of the various ritual-

practices in avoiding and/or resolving serious internal conflicts in a number of

agrarian communities of Africa (Turner: 1972). Erving Goffman, the third

theoretician in the list, put forward a dramatic approach to study how all human

interactions are basically well planned and well executed pieces of socio-cultural

performance (Goffman: 1959).

The allied fields of performance and performativity studies received the

next impetus in the 1960s when the experimental theatre directors Jerzi

9
Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, and Peter Brook sought to explore the overlapping

boundaries between life, art, theatrical practices and ritualistic behaviours.

Needless to say, these directors were highly influenced by the writings of

Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht. What appealed to these theatre directors is

Artaud’s stress on social causation as a trigger for human actions as revealed in

his Theatre of Cruelty as much as Brecht’s reliance on the Estrangement Effect as

a direct valorisation of performance in informing the aesthetic effect of theatre.

During the 1977 Burg Wartenstein Symposium, for the first time

‘performance’ was accepted as a ‘cultural practice’, abolishing thereby the thin

line of difference between life and art. With this, the point made by the 1960s

experimental directors was also accepted. John J. MacAloon summarizes the

1977 Burg Wartenstein Symposium definition of ‘cultural performance’ as:

occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and

define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history,
present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some
ways while remaining the same in others (MacAloon quoted in
Jon McKenzie: 2001, 31).

According to Jon McKenzie, the three major points about performance as a

cultural practice proposed in the Burg Wartenstein Symposium definition are (1)

‘the social and self-reflective’ aspect of performance, (2) the access to

‘alternative’ courses of actions through performance’, and (3) the ability of

performance to ‘conserve’ and/or ‘transform’ both individuals and societies

(McKenzie: 2001, 31). Needless to say, the 1960s and 1970s the student rights

movements, civil rights protests, antiwar demonstrations and women’s liberation

marches all highlight the transformative aspect of cultural performances.

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 The two later day thinkers who contributed profoundly to the making of

performance studies are obviously Richard Schechner and Judith Butler. Highly

influenced by the writings of Victor Turner, Schechner tried to explore

performance as a ‘twice-behaved behavior’ and argued for the need to study

performance in a ‘broad spectrum’ which may interpret performance not merely

as a cultural practice but also as a social, political and even economic behaviour

(Schechner: 1985). Judith Butler, on the other hand, sought to connect Turner’s

theory of ritual performance with J. L. Austin’s concept of speech acts, especially

the performative ones, to answer queries regarding gender and sexuality. Butler

offered two important concepts namely ‘Drag Performance’ and ‘Gender

Performativity’ (Butler: 2010). While her conceptualization of ‘Drag

Performance’ highlights the socio-culturally constructed nature of gender, the

idea of ‘Gender Performativity’ speaks of both the normative and the subversive

response of the human beings as gendered entities. Though Butler is not the first

theoretician to talk of the relationship between gender and performance, she is

undoubtedly the first one to indicate performance as a double edged sword that

may equally make and mar an individual’s march towards self-actualization.

Since the entire discipline of Performance Studies revolves round and

turns upon the concept of ‘Performance’, we may do well to get this concept

defined. According to Erving Goffman, ‘performance may be defined as all the

activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in

any way any of the other participants’ (Goffman: 1959, 15). In fact, performance

is anything that can be is consciously formed, framed, presented, communicated,

highlighted, and then thereby displayed and analyzed as an object worthy of

attention. That performance is not an involuntary act but a conscious effort

11
highlights its importance as a medium through which information can be passed

on to the audience, and then therefore, can come into being. During a

performance, a performer not only presents ‘what is’ but also ‘what is to be

highlighted’. This raises his stature from a passive idea-bearer to that of an active

agent who can communicate as also correlate elements of personal and collective

history.

For a performer, performance, therefore, is never a simple tool of orality,

action and expression. It is rather a potent trope that can play a key part in the

process of sense making of his/her target audience. It is an essentially

empowering agency that allows the performer to take upon himself/herself an

assumed identity that can at once be a mask to hide his self-reality (what he really

is) and a strategy to protect his self-image (what others think he is). Performance

for the performer thus becomes a means of self-actualization or what Erving

Goffman better calls a tool of ‘impression management’ that can not only

suppress the unacceptable in the performer’s individuality and supplant it with

what is expected or accepted but also control, effect and influence impressions of

others about him/her. For, as Goffman himself points up, ‘All the world is not, of

course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify’

(Goffman: 1959, 75).

Since the presence of performance always presupposes that of the

performer(s), we may do well to get this term defined now. The word ‘Performer’

is a combination of the word ‘perform’ and the noun suffix ‘er’. It derives from

the same root as ‘performance’ but is semantically linked to the concept of the

‘entertainer’ coming from the middle French entretenir meaning ‘to keep up or

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maintain’ (www.etymonline.com). A performer is a person who ‘performs’ i.e.

carries out and thereby executes an action. In the context of Performance Studies,

performer designates person who plays a part or carries out a task, executing

thereby a ‘performance’ before an audience in a proper, customary and then

therefore established manner. That performance primarily denotes a purposeful

and skilled accomplishment of a well planned action makes it far from being

anything like an intrinsic or involuntary response that may provide the audience

with a hint to the inner theatres of the performer’s self. The performer operates

primarily as an entertainer who produces a preferred and valuable result through

a proper integration of previously acquired skills and knowledge. Instead of being

a self-actualizing entity, the performer is a person who has allowed an

institutional memory to substitute his/her personal memory and has thereby let

himself/herself to be transformed into a mere medium for carrying pre-conceived

notions to a target audience. Performance thus becomes some sort of a self-

annihilating practice that robs the performer of the uniqueness of his/her own self

and forces him/her to assume an alien identity.

Nevertheless, performance is a double-edged sword that can both be a

limiting exercise and an empowering agency for the performer. In fact, in an

essentially hierarchized society that we live in, performing identities becomes

something of a pre-requisite to accommodate oneself to the socio-cultural norms.

According to Marvin Carlson:

The recognition that our lives are structured according to repeated

and socially sanctioned modes of behavior raises the possibility
that all human activity could potentially be considered as
“performance,” or at least all activity carried out with a
consciousness of itself. (Carlson: 2013, 4)

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Within the social space any accepted human activity is some sort of a

performance of a standard code of conduct. As such it is only through a perfect

performance of acceptable behavior that a person can hope to get assimilated into

a particular culture. Interestingly, what the performer brings to the society for its

review and rating is not his/her own naked self but an assumed and pre-rehearsed

identity, and it is this performed and then therefore counterfeit identity that

guarantees the performer’s successful merger into the social circle. Performance

thus becomes a mask that the performer can wear at his/her will to camouflage

difference or deviance. Thus, the word ‘performer’ becomes an important term

that connects a performance not only to the identity that is being performed but

also to the audience whom the performance is offered to.

Since no performance can hope to survive or succeed without the

presence and participation of an audience, we may do well to clarify the concept

of ‘Audience’ now. The word ‘audience’ derives from the Old French audience

via the Latin audientia i.e. ‘a hearing’ or ‘listening’, from audientum which is the

nominative of audiens, the present participle of audire i.e. ‘to hear’. ‘Audire’ in

its turn comes from the proto-Indo-European compound au-dh meaning ‘to

perceive physically’ or ‘grasp’, and ultimately from the base au i.e. ‘to perceive’

— a term related to the Sanskrit avih meaning ‘openly’, the Avestan avish

meaning ‘evidently’, the Greek aisthanesthai meaning ‘to feel’, and the Old

Church Slavonic javiti i.e. ‘to reveal’ (http://www. etymonline.com). ‘Audience’,

therefore, not only refers to a gathering of spectators or listeners at some public

performance but also signifies an agency that allows the performers to reveal

themselves in public, express what cannot be divulged otherwise, and, last but not

least, let their untold stories be heard, felt and perceived.

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 In his essay “Analyzing Audiences”, Douglas B. Park while discussing

the significance of theories relating to the concept of ‘Audience’ comments:

The centrality of audience in the rhetorical tradition and the detail

with which current writing texts provide advice on analyzing an
audience might suggest that the answers to such questions are well
established. (Park: 1986, 478)
Park is obviously justified in his opinion especially if we remember the late

twentieth century revival of critical and creative interest in theories of audience

and audience reception. According to John Hartley, ‘The term audience is used to

describe a large number of unidentifiable people, usually united by their

participation in media use’ (Hartley: 2002, 11). Thus, ‘audience’ refers to a group

of individuals who willingly surrender both the uniqueness and the exclusivity of

their identities and/or ideologies and merge with the collective anonymity of

group belonging to observe, understand, and evaluate media texts such as music,

movie, or play that are offered to them. The audience is ‘unidentifiable’ since it is

‘anonymous’, and it is this anonymity that allows an audience to operate as a

collective entity giving out a singular response. The same anonymity also makes

the audience a faceless representative of the masses that can provide the

performers with an opportunity to confess, yield and embrace the thousand

forbidden tales that were so long lying buried in their personal histories.

Significantly, the birth of the audience is something of a prerequisite

without which a media text can hardly exist or survive. As Hartley comments

once again, ‘audience’ is a sort of ‘imagined community that enables institutions

to operate’ (Hartley: 2002, 12). Often a written text is metamorphosed into some

kind of a media text in order to extend its reach beyond the author-creator. But

for it to survive, the media text must find an audience. The audience, in its turn,

15
prepares a production format for the text wherein the media text is analyzed as

per accepted notions and emotions of enjoyment, apprehension, sympathy,

antipathy and apathy gets generated. It is this power of audience that at once

motivates and sustains the textual production. According to Chaim Perelman and

Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, this type of audience is called ‘Theoretical or Imagined

Audience’ who, unlike the ‘Particular or Real Audience’, such as in a royal or

legal court, does not merely exist to participate in the textual production, but,

more importantly, enables the performer(s) to compose, comprehend or compare

his/her experiences into, what may be called, ‘media texts’ (Perelman and

Olbrechts-Tyteca: 1969, 20-22). And it is through the performance of a media

text that a performer brings to reality the various identities he is assigned to

perform.

Both on the social and the textual planes what the individual/performer

performs and what the society/audience receives is the narrative of the self. This

fact necessitates a discussion of the concept of ‘narrative’ as it will be used in the

present dissertation. The word ‘narrative’ derives from the Middle French

narratif from Late Latin narrativus meaning ‘suited to narration’ from Latin

narrat, stem of narrare i.e. ‘to tell, relate, recount, explain’ via gnarus meaning

‘knowing’ from ultimately gno i.e. ‘to know’ (www.etymonline.com). A

narrative can be defined as a sort of retelling of some factual or fictitious events

that immediately captures the attention of the audience, convinces, and motivates

them to further action, rumination or fancy, and provides both the teller and the

audience with an opportunity to share and assess. A narrative differs from a story;

for whereas a story consists in the tale, a narrative refers to the process of telling

that tale. As H. Potter Abbott puts it, a ‘tale’ or a ‘story’ differs from a narrative

16
discourse in the fact that a tale is ‘an event or sequence of events (the action)’

whereas ‘narrative discourse’ is ‘those events as represented’ (Abbott: 2002, 19).

Narratives have always been viewed as discoursal sites for recollection,

expression and communication. Narratives create a psycho-linguistic

environment in which personal knowledge and experiences are evoked,

evaluated, and then transmuted as a shared resource of the narrator and the

audience. Thus narratives have often been construed as sites memory in

operation. They record what Charlotte Linde calls ‘life stories’ (Linde: 1993, 3)

to produce what Donald Polkinghorn terms ‘life-scripts’ (Polkinghorne: 1988,

18). The art of narrativization, therefore, provides the narrator with an

opportunity to reconsider and review events and incidents, paving the way for

meditated retelling, multiple but simultaneous judgmental perspectives, and

newer and alternative ‘intertales’ – a term that, Tinsley A. Galyean III defines as

an ‘interactive narrative mean merging a narrative structure with an interactive

method’ (Galyean: 1995, 161).

During the act of narrativization, the narrator has an opportunity to

understand the tale from the perspective of an audience and thereby can identify

the possible drawbacks in both the product (the narrative) and in the process (the

narrativization). This sets off another session of narration of the once narrated

narrative in the mind of the narrator resulting in, as it does, multiple obsessive

narrations of the same narrative from divergent perspectives. While such a

retelling results in almost uncontrollable variants of a once-singular tale, it also

allows both the narrator an unrestricted access to the realms of his/her experience

and imagination, and thereby break the shackles of imposed silence and

17
suppression. As a result, narrativization is perceived to have the benefits of

selection and arrangements of material that memory proffers and self-interest

assesses.

It must be clarified at the fag end of this section that concepts such as

culture, ideology, cognition, and trauma need to be defined and contextualized in

so far as they impinge upon identity, both in its formation and in its performance.

However, these terms may be more profitably discussed in their turn in the

following chapters that deal with culture and identity, ideology and identity,

cognition and identity, and trauma and identity respectively.

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 NARRATIVES OF THE SELF

“When is a performance a performance? How long

does a strip of behavior have to be before it can be
said to be performable in the ritual or aesthetic
sense? When strips of behaviour are taken from one
context and played in another is it a different kind
of performance …?”
— Richard Schechner (Schechner in
Schechner and Appel : 1990, 43)

The construction of selfhood vis-à-vis the performance of an identity is a

key issue with Caryl Churchill. Interested in exploring human responses to

various external and internal stimuli such as cultural constrictions, ideological

pressures, cognitive processes and traumatic experiences, Churchill in her plays

creates a world where the ability to fit in, and perform roles become not only

prerequisites for socio-cultural acceptance but also possible strategies of resisting

and thwarting such socio-cultural attempts at appropriation and assimilation.

Since in the following chapters the many narratives of the self that get generated

in and through the performance of identities by Churchill’s motley crowd have

been discussed separately from different points of views, we may now do well to

concentrate on Churchill’s A Mouthful of Birds; for, this play is a truly

representative one revealing the characters’ struggles against the various forces

like culture, ideology, knowledge, belief and trauma that often seek to thwart

human attempts at difference with a socially preferred docility.

A Mouthful of Birds was first performed on 2nd September 1986 at

Birmingham Repertory Theatre in association with the Joint Stock Theatre

Group. The play opened in Royal Court Theatre the same year on 27th November.

Though A Mouthful of Birds is a collaborative work with David Lan, even a

19
cursory glance is sure to reveal typical Churchillean characters fighting against

odds that are quite/almost beyond any hope. According to Helene Keyssar, A

Mouthful of Birds is ‘an elaborate theatrical representation of violence’ (Keyssar:

1988, 140). In fact, A Mouthful of Birds can profitably be read as a tour de force

into almost all the possible variants of the themes of disruption and transgression

not merely thematically but also structurally. As Amelia Howe Kritzer points out,

‘the form of the play frustrates audience expectations for a unified and coherent

narrative . . . the performance involves the audience in a disconnected sequence

of scenes and images associated with dream and madness’ (Kritzer in Redmond:

1993, 214). Thematically, the play is highly influenced by Euripides’s The

Bacchae, and traces the psychological journeys of some seven putatively

‘violent’ characters — Lena, a mother suffering from Puerperal psychosis,

Marcia, a voodoo practitioner, Derek, a young man possessed by the 19th century

male pseudohermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, Yvonne, an alcoholic lady, Paul, a

zoophilic man, Dan, an almost preternatural gender-altering serial killer and

Doreen, a deranged woman desperately trying to get the meaning of her life.

According to Raima Evan, A Mouthful of Birds marks an important shift

in Churchill scholarship in particular and in feminist theatre criticism in general:

Soon after Caryl Churchill and David Lan's collaborative work A

Mouthful of Birds (1986) was published, scholars of feminist
theatre recognized the play's significance most particularly for its
bold stagings [sic.] of transgressive, gender-bending bodies (Evan:
2002, 263).

Not only does the play project ‘bodies’ that are ‘transgressive’ but also what can

more profitably be called ‘subversive’. In fact, A Mouthful of Birds attempts to

subvert all precepts about structure and pattern. The play is divided into two acts

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both of which open and close with the dance of Dionysus. These acts are

composed of 32 sections which fall into three major parts that trace seven

different and dispersed narratives. These 32 sections of the play are connected to

each other through intervening episodes of dance and psychosomatic possession

of the characters by mythical, historical, cultural or psychological forces. The

first part of the play consisting of eight short scenes presents the audience with

what Laura Nutten calls ‘essentially “normal”’ and ‘non-subversive’ characters

occupying ‘fairly conventional social positions’ (Nutten: 2001. n.pag).

In the second part of A Mouthful of Birds, ten short scenes present how

these apparently ‘normal’ characters become unable to control their passions and

fears and gradually fall prey to several socio-cultural forces during what

Churchill herself calls ‘undefended days’ ‘in which there is nothing to protect

you from the forces inside and outside yourself’ (Churchill in Churchill and Lan:

1986, 5). In the final part consisting of some twelve vignettes, the play becomes

more and more nonlinear both in theme and in structure allowing violence and

anarchy to take over in place of form and precision. Throughout this section

Dionysus appears, disappears and reappears and it is only at the fag end that the

characters come onstage for an epilogue wherein they give voice to uncertainty

and indecision.

A Mouthful of Birds can be called a ‘manifesto play’ of Churchill wherein

the playwright makes her characters face all most all kinds of negative social

determinants and shows how performance of an identity whether imposed or

borrowed helps them win over these constrictive forces. In the play, characters

like Marcia, Yvonne and Paul are victims of a constrictive cultural setup that can

21
neither expect nor accept difference or deviance. However, as they are unique

individuals with distinct identities, they cannot fully conform to social dictates

about what they should be like. In short, it is this tension between what they are

perceived to be and what they are prescribed to be, on the one hand, and what

they really are, on the other, that necessitates their clinging to and performance of

sets of identities that help them to confirm as well as critique socio-cultural

impositions.

Marcia is a Trinidadian woman in her mid thirties. While working for a

British lingerie company as a telephone operator, she finds herself continuously

marginalized by the supremacist discourses like ethnocentrism, capitalism,

patriarchy and the ilk. If on the one hand, her ethnic identity, social inferiority

and economic subservience makes her marginal vis-à-vis the predominantly

white society that she lives in, then on the other hand, it is this marginality that

turns her into at once a detestable other (to be excluded and blotted out) and an

exotic object (to be scrutinized and controlled through ravishment, penetration

and possession). Thus for her White male boss Colin, who represents the White

capitalist society, Marcia is nothing but a mere plaything to be enjoyed and

discarded at will.

Bill Ashcroft et al. have pointed out that the ‘gradual establishment of an

empire depended upon a stable hierarchical relationship in which the colonized

existed as the other of the colonizing culture’ (Ashcroft et al.: 2000, 36). The tale

of Marcia in A Mouthful of Birds proves the persistence of the colonial hierarchy

in postcolonial times. It is this predetermined ‘stable’ and thus unquestionable

‘hierarchical relationship’ between Colin, the boss, as the superior self and

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Marcia, the telephone operator, as the inferior other that situates Colin at the

centre of power and authority while pushing Marcia to the margin not only of

‘culture’ and ‘power’ but also of ‘civilization’ (Ashcroft et al.: 2000, 36). In fact,

for Colin, Marcia denotes the ‘exterior’ of the culture he belongs to which makes

her existence at once insignificant and inconsequential. Thus, Colin has no

qualms to deny her right to exercise choice by imposing supervision and control

and proscribes all her expressions of individuality by ignoring, distorting and

mischaracterizing it as what Carole Boyce-Davies would have called ‘non-

speech’ (Boyce-Davies: 1994, 15).

Marcia’s relationship with Sybil, the spirit of White Elite society, is even

more stifling; for Sybil is a spirit both in the literal and in the metaphorical

senses. If Colin, her employer, tries to exploit Marcia sexually, then Sybil does so

psychologically. Needless to say, Sybil’s antipathy towards Marcia encompasses

both preternatural and ethnocentric dimension. As such, Sybil is perceived to be

at loggerheads with another spirit i.e. Baron Sunday. By way of a schema, Sybil

the White spirit is juxtaposed with Baron Sunday, the Black spirit. However, the

juxtaposition is problematized further by the beneficence of the Black spirit as

opposed to and by the malignity of the White spirit.

During Marcia’s planchet sessions with her clients Sybil interferes with

the process, and forcefully interrupts Marcia’s communication with her guiding

spirit Baron Sunday. Since Baron Sunday is a representative of Trinidadian

culture and ethnicity, by cutting the psycho-linguistic ties between Marcia and

the Baron, Sybil at once deprives Marcia of the support of what can be called an

insurgent solidarity group and eliminates the possibilities of a resultant subaltern

23
resistance against the dominant culture. No doubt, Sybil succeeds in her mission

as indicated by the disappearance of Baron Sunday from the stage and by the

appropriation of Marcia’s self symbolized by her vanquished body lying

senseless in a chair. This, however, is a momentary phase.

Marcia is soon back to give voice to what Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak

would have called ‘constructive questions, corrective doubts’ (Spivak: 1987,

258). Though she still is the alienated other struggling with unrealized fears for

and deep-seated frustration generated by her endurance of a constrictive cultural

hegemony, her strong conviction about her needs and her wish to sail out clarify

that these are mere strategies to hoodwink the cultural panopticon and to go

unnoticed by it as ‘incapacitated’ and thus ‘harmless’ and ‘irrelevant’. In fact, it

is from the very beginning of her textual existence that Marcia has been fated to

perform one identity or another. If as a black female employee she had to oblige

her white male boss’s sexual advances by playing the submissive and the weak,

then during her planchet sessions she played the superior self able to give succour

and solace to her clients. Now at the fag end of her telling she assumes the role

and identity of a deranged sufferer to fulfil her objective of escaping from the

socio-cultural framework that has ever constricted her.

In A Mouthful of Birds there are two other narratives where cultural

constrictions are seen to wreck havoc on the psyche of the individuals concerned.

The first of these two characters is Yvonne who along with her old mother falls

prey to the patriarchal institution of the ‘family’. Yvonne is an attractive young

woman fighting alcoholism while her mother is an old and apparently

disinterested lady who has seen and suffered much. Yvonne’s near neurotic

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conversation with her mother reveals how women have traditionally been

marginalized by the hegemonic patriarchy that operates through cultural

typecasting of masculinity as potent and powerful and of femininity as weak and

submissive. In fact, it is family that localizes both female motivations and

frustrations; for not only does it provide the female with the security of kinship

but also thrusts the female to the wrong end of the power hierarchy, and

apportions for her abjection, aberrance and abuse. It is the family that introduces

its female members to the culturally mediated versions of gender, morality and

normality and thereby provides them with experiences of neuroses as well as

phobias. These neuroses and phobias, in their turn, rear the female as socially,

psychologically and sexually ‘well’ or ‘mal’-adjusted being.

To survive in that family one must either dwindle into the submissive

femininity as does Yvonne’s mother or be the deranged one as seems to be the lot

of Yvonne. Since the very beginning of her narrative if alcoholism offers Yvonne

a mask to protect herself from being coerced into a normative gendered existence,

then her final avatar of the socially detestable butcher signals her new found

ability to take on the world on her own terms. As a butcher the power Yvonne

wields on the animal bodies in killing and cutting them into proper pieces

parodies the power with which culture cuts through the very individuality of a

person not only to bring it down to size but also to produce acceptable pieces of

institutionalized behaviours and normalized thought streams. This change of

profession, in its turn, signifies Yvonne’s entry into the symbolic order of the

male through a semiotic infiltration of the patriarchal borderline as symbolized in

her newly established control and authority over the phallic symbol of her ‘knife’.

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 Though Yvonne is ultimately able to resist the constrictive familial forces,

Paul, another character in A Mouthful of Birds, suffers under the cultural concepts

of normalcy and the normal on counts of his putatively pervert ‘fondness’ for a

pig. According to Thomas Nagel, sexual perversion has traditionally meant action

that ‘reveal[s] itself in conduct that expresses the unnatural sexual preference’

(Nagel in Soble: 2002, 10). It includes any and every kind of sexual interest or

behaviour that may run contrary to or seem to counteract with what has

traditionally been accepted as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ sexual interest or behavior

notwithstanding the fact that there is a wide critical dissensus regarding the

philosophical anthropology of the ‘natural’ and the ‘normal’. Since sexual

perversion is deemed to be corruptive both on the moral and the non-moral

grounds, those who are designated as perverts have always been ostracized. If on

the one hand this ostracism has meant social alienation that cuts the individual off

from his moorings in the community then on the other hand it has also led to self

alienation causing an intra-personal breach between desire and delicacy. In A

Mouthful of Birds, Paul too has to endure such a psychological split. His desire

for the pig not only interferes with his family life but also with his business. No

matter how keenly he tries to perform as a husband, as a son-in-law, as a friend,

and as a businessman, he can hardly take his mind off from the pig dancing

‘tenderly’ (seeking attention) or ‘dangerously’ (seductively) before him (P3. 28).

Interestingly, Paul himself is quite aware of the ‘abnormality’ of his

desires. This is evident from the way he tries repeatedly to justify his passions as

mere fondness for the animal. However, his inability to concentrate on his

business meetings and his absentmindedness while talking to his wife gives vent

to the intensity of his psychological involvement with the pig. But being tied to

26
the chains of what culture deems as ‘normal’ intra-species sexual inclinations,

Paul can hardly dare to be himself. He, thus, performs the perfect loving husband

and agrees to go on a vacation with his wife until one evening the pig is taken to

a slaughterhouse. It is at this point that his failure to save the object of his love

from the slaughterhouse makes him painfully aware of his own double standard.

Unable to maintain the façade of normalcy for any more, Paul now breaks down.

And therefore, his final decision to leave his family and his business for ever after

his failure to save the pig from the butcher’s knife, is as much indicative of his

guilt as of his acceptance of his own difference. No longer wishing to play the

socially, sexually normal self, Paul is seen to embrace his alterity and it is during

the epilogue that we see him waiting for love — not the socially sanctioned

heterosexual human love, but that which is not limited by any such constrictive

boundaries.

If culture refers to the set accepted beliefs, norms and values of a

particular society, then it is through the promotion and propagation of certain

social, religious or political ideologies that such beliefs, norms and values are

inculcated into that society by the dominant social class. Since ideology is both

the tool and the manifestation of hegemonic and supremacist discourses like

patriarchy, classism, racism, zealotism, chromatism, ageism, etc., it is often seen

to prescribe and proscribe specific identity models. The individual is therefore

forced to adapt and perform useful roles and identities that may or may not reveal

their true selves.

In A Mouthful of Birds, it is the character of Dan that suffers most brutally

from the religious ideologies of sin and salvation. According to John Scott and

27
Gordon Marshall, the term ‘religion’ refers to the ‘set of beliefs, symbols, and

practices (for example rituals), which is based on the idea of the sacred, and

which unites believers into a socio-religious community’ (Scott and Marshall:

1994, 560). In fact, as one of the most influential systems of belief, religion

through its explicit assertions and implicit inspirational ambitions operates as a

justifying mechanism of social systems. Through its open propagation of the

existence, desirability and/or the dominance of a particular opinion, religion can

often delude one into doing something abnormal or extraordinary in the name of

morality and religiosity.

Dan’s religious training as a vicar too imparts such a kind of delusion to

his mind. Instead of ridding the sin through the nostrum of penance and faith, he

takes a shortcut of ridding the sinner. The strategy he adopts for accomplishing

these murders is one of death through ecstasy. Playing the twin roles of moral

judge and dutiful executioner, he performs a sort of danse macabre before his

victims following which they die peacefully. Dan’s decision to kill his victims is

a part of his religious indoctrination whereby he is always under the impression

of acting on God’s mandate. For Dan, to better the condition of the world is to

maintain its ‘sacredness’, and to maintain its sacredness, he believes, it is

necessary to exterminate whatever (whosoever) is ‘profane’ or ‘polluted’. In his

epilogue, he expresses this openly when claiming that the death which he is

giving is not mere killing but some kind of a mercy killing whereby the earth will

be saved from all impurities and the reign of God will once again be established.

The oasis he mentions repeatedly during his epilogue, thus, refers to the

unpolluted state that he seeks to restore on earth through his multiple murders.

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 If ideology refers to the set of doctrines that reflects the social, cultural,

economic, political or philosophical needs and aspirations of the dominant social

group, then it is through the processes of cognition — through the twin tools of

knowledge and belief — that the individual comes to understand the preferences

of that dominant group. Though both knowledge and belief lack any set standard

definition they are perceived to constitute or influence the human understanding

of and relationship with the self and the world. If knowledge refers to the

understanding of a particular object or issue gained through perception,

experience, experimentation or discovery that can be justified and proved to be

true by reasoning and exemplification, then belief can be defined as something

that has been accepted without any proper empirical evidences or proofs of its

factual certainty. Thus, knowledge, as Plato sees it, can be called ‘true beliefs’

(Chappell: 2013), whereas beliefs as Bertrand Russell puts it can refer to both

‘true’ and ‘false’ knowledge (Hasan and Fumerton: 2014). Thus scientific truths

and superstitions both constitute the corpus of human belief while understanding

of heresy and delusion may form the basis for knowledge. Different as they may

be in nature and orientation, the relationship of knowledge and belief with

identity is always similar. Knowledge as well as belief tries to influence identity

by presenting itself as the only truth as opposed to both the other and the identity

of the individual. Needless to say, it is this influencing of individual identity that

culture promotes and ideology propagates.

In A Mouthful of Birds, it is the character of Derek possessed by the spirit

of Herculine Barbin, a 19th hermaphrodite or a ‘pseudo-male-hermaphrodite’ as

the medical fraternity would term that class of individuals. Interestingly, both

Derek and Herculine are torn between what society ‘believes’ to be true and what

29
it ultimately comes to ‘know’ as true. Derek is man who has seen how society

determines a man’s value not by his inner worth or capacity but by his ability to

follow certain stereotypes and to achieve certain standards. In fact, the social

acceptability of a male depends on the way and the extent to which he performs

the culturally stipulated gendered identity. This culturally defined nature of

masculinity seems all the more threatening for Derek, because he can hardly

forget that his father’s failure to perform well as the bread earner of the family

caused his death and that in spite of his own proclamations of masculinity, he too

is jobless.

It is at this moment of his story that Derek comes in close contact with the

spirit of Herculine Barbin, and finds a stark similarity between their personalities.

Just as Derek’s identity is continually challenged by the traditional belief in the

veracity and unalterability of stereotypical views regarding masculinity,

Herculine Barbin’s unity of the self is threatened by the scientific knowledge of

what constitutes the difference between the male and the female and where these

boundaries overlap. Derek decides to counter society’s rejection of an

economically unstable man with his performance of a hegemonic masculinity.

Herculine Barbin, who considers herself to be female, seeks to dismantle her

social expulsion on counts of her sexual difference through her symbolic act of

writing her story to pit it against the culturally sanctioned and celebrated version

of patriarchal history.

As Derek starts identifying himself with Herculine Barbin, he seems to

get ‘possessed’ by the spirit of Barbin, something that belief can accept but

knowledge can hardly rationalize. However, this identification proves beneficial

30
for Derek since this possession provides him with both a mask and a strategy to

express his dissatisfaction with a constrictive socio-cultural framework. As Craig

S. Keener puts it, ‘possession trance has sometimes provided culturally

acceptable opportunities for expressing forbidden desires; sometimes, this may

include aggression, especially for those not otherwise permitted to express it’

(Keener: 2010, 232). Since during the possession, the possessed person’s identity

gets displaced or eclipsed by that of the spirit entering his body, therefore the

changes in the host’s identity, speech, act or thought cannot be attributed to him.

Derek’s epilogue as Herculine Barbin thus gives vent to this pent up anger and

raises a slew of disturbing questions regarding the society, gender and identity.

If knowledge and belief provides cultural straitjacketing with a basis and a

tool, then trauma happens to be one of the most recurrent offshoots of such kinds

of cultural indoctrination/imposition. Trauma is the experience of some serious

physical, psychological or psychosomatic injury, shock or damage that gets

manifested in physical debility, distress, disruption and/or neurotic behaviour. It

is the extreme expression of one’s loss of physical and emotional security that

threatens man’s poise and peace. As Duncun Bell puts it, ‘Trauma implies a

breakdown of both meaning and trust – in a world that has been shattered,

overturned’ (Bell: 2006, 8). Lena in A Mouthful of Birds is a victim of trauma. A

wife of an almost unfeeling man and a mother of a new-born girl child, she tries

to perform a normal femininity until the sight of a shot dead rabbit with blood

oozing out of its wounds evokes in her mind a set of unwanted images from her

own past whereby she visualizes the rabbit as an emblem for herself sacrificed to

the male lust for power. Needless to say this identification with the dead rabbit

31
leads her to question those aspects of her own identity, and by extension, those of

others of her ilk, that are traumatized both retrospectively and prospectively.

But Lena still tries to play her normal self, but the experience of trauma

has ruptured her identity to such an extent that they can hardly be put together to

some identifiable shape. At this point, it is her identification with the rabbit that

evokes to Lena’s already tortured mind the insignificance and vulnerability of her

own self in particular and of the entire womankind in general. As Raima Evan

puts it, ‘the dead rabbit may be seen as an extreme expression of her [Lena’s]

own sense of death in life, an existence in which she is trapped in the endless

routines of housework, child care, and wifely “duties”’ (Evan: 2002, 271). It

blurs the very basis of her faith in the familial bonds around which her everyday

existence revolved.

Unable to tolerate the situation any longer but at the same time bound to it

by strings of memory and morality, Lena frantically revisits her traumatic past of

compulsory heterosexuality, unwanted pregnancy and unprepared for

motherhood, and tries to effect a change in her personal history. According to

Rena Moses-Hrushovski:

Traumatized people … relive the event as though it were

continually recurring in the present, not only in their dreams and
thoughts, but also in their actions. Often they re-enact the
traumatic moment … wishing thereby to change the traumatic
encounter retroactively, so that they can, as it were, overcome it
differently this time (Moses-Hrushovski: 2000, 25).

Since traumatic memory is by and large a non-declarative one, the victims of

trauma often try to express their uneasiness with their surroundings through

conditioned habits, neurotic responses and violent conduct. Lena’s absentminded

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replies to her husband and her inability to participate in normal household chores

like cooking or chopping are symptomatic of her psychological trauma. The

apparition seen by Lena too is a figment of her own heated fancy symbolizing her

inner fears and frustrations.

Roy, Lena’s husband, however, fails to notice the changes in Lena’s

personality, and it is at this point that the traumatized woman in Lena starts

seeing in her daughter’s future a projection of her own past. This identification in

its own turn warns her of a similar fate that may befall her daughter in particular

and the entire womankind in general. The more she starts seeing a reflection of

herself in her daughter, the more acutely she feels the need to put a putative stop

to female sufferings. Lena’s final decision to kill her daughter is therefore as

much a ritualistic killing of her own self as a fanciful subversion of gendered-

power hierarchy. Through this act of violence, Lena not only refuses to perform

the roles of a dutiful wife and a loving mother but also announces her resistance

against a normative femininity that patriarchy endorses, society supports, culture

propagates and ideology accomplishes.

Another character suffering from trauma in A Mouthful of Birds is

Doreen. In fact, it is Doreen’ tale that at once lays bare and sums up what the

other characters in the play are unable to express ‘All I wanted was peace and

quiet’ (P3. 8). In fact, it is this search for peace and quietude in her marital life

that led Lena kill her daughter, Paul to abandon his family and his job, Dan to kill

in the name of love of religion, Marcia to seek her island paradise as a lone

ranger, Derek to harmonize the body with the spirit of an alternative gendered

identity through the hermaphrodism of Herculine Barbin, and Yvonne to try one

33
after the other — alcohol to forget, acupuncture to mitigate and butchery to

terminate. Doreen’s story thus becomes a sort of metanarrative for all the other

narratives in the play. Doreen’s heated exchange with her husband Ed with which

her story begins is emblematic of all the quarrels as well as of all their causes. To

all intents and purposes, this conversation sums up what actually can and often

does go ‘wrong’ with an individual. While Ed tries to assuage Doreen through

verbal and attitudinal aggression and by reminding her of her past ‘crimes’ and

‘punishments’, Doreen’s obstinate repetition ‘All I wanted was peace and quiet’

along with the assertion ‘I found it’ expresses her strong denial not only to submit

but also to recant (P3. 8).

Interestingly, the pain that Doreen always complains of having is hard to

locate or alleviate; for, at best or at worst it is psychosomatic. This pain is

actually a result of the many wounds that an individual receives in the myriad

encounters with the supremacist discourses of heteropatriarchy, ethnocentrism,

classism and the ilk. While some of them survive the onslaught, others are

vanquished. The utter apathy with which such individuals are received by family

and society, only enhance this sense of pain. Thus, in the play while Doreen

writhes in pain, in an adjacent room, a young lady Lil starts reading the

newspaper aloud and in yet another room one Mrs. Blair turns on the radio.

Significantly, the news items Lil reads aloud are about brutal killings — murder

of three children by their mother, of a wife by her husband, of an innocent

pedestrian by an anonymous lady, of a young girl by her flatmate, of twelve

raped women by a serial killer, of a middle aged man by three friends, and of a

teenager by herself (P3. 45-46). Needless to say, these news items adversely

affect on Doreen’s psyche.

34
 Doreen’s epilogue, with which A Mouthful of Birds ends, give us a

harrowing picture of her mental torment:

I can find no rest. My head is filled with horrible images. I can’t

say I actually see them, it’s more that I feel them. It seems that my
mouth is full of birds which I crush between my teeth. Their
feathers, their broken bones are chocking me. I carry on my work
as a secretary. (P3. 53)

Doreen’s case may be profitably diagnosed as an instance of ‘vicarious trauma’

for want of a more suitable term; for her sensory illusion of having a mouthful of

birds, of crushing them to bits and of being chocked by their ‘feathers’ and

‘bones’ closely resembles the ‘disrupted spirituality’ of a trauma worker or

helper. Though Doreen is no trauma worker, she is at least a Whitmanesque

witness who is socially fated to ‘sit and look out’ upon ‘all the sorrows of the

world’ and upon ‘all oppression and shame’.

The foregoing analysis of Churchill’s representative play A Mouthful of

Birds, with its portrayal of characters engaged in performance of myriad identity

sets in the teeth of meta-individual forces and factors like culture, ideology,

cognition and trauma may facilitate more detailed discussion of their interplay in

the following chapters.

35