From realism to postmodernism : representing the woman.

The shift of drama from dramatic realism to postmodernism has taken place against the backdrop of the women’s movement. This coinciding of the rise of feminism and the women’s movement with the shift from dramatic realism to postmodernism begs the question, has the representation of women in drama changed? Can postmodern drama be expected to represent women more progressively than realist drama, especially when the concept of representation itself is dominated by binaries that privilege the male? This paper reads three plays, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, The Sandbox by Edward Albee and True West by Sam Shepard, through Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Representation. It investigates the demands made by A Doll’s House for the representation of the woman as an individual, and how the postmodern strategies of parody and Hutcheon’s “complicitous critique” employed in The Sandbox and True West respond to these demands. Albee and Shepard’s plays acknowledge but fail to meet the demands set out by Ibsen; while their strategies allow them to provide a critical standpoint, they simultaneously refuse to reposition the woman, thus exposing postmodern drama as a theatre that is ultimately unable to become a progressive platform for the representation of women.Bachelor of Art