Ophelia's Complaint

To continue my discussion with Catherine Filloux’s collection of plays that I have proof-read, I am taking up her play Mary and Myra. It is different from the three previous plays discussed because it is not about genocide. But the common thread of oppression links it to the others. Nineteenth century USA, 1870s to be more precise is the backdrop of the play. Mary is Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln and Myra is Myra Bradwell, the first female lawyer of America. In 1875 Mary had been institutionalized by her only living son on the grounds of insanity. Myra, a good friend tries to get her released from there. The play is based on the few visits that Myra pays to Mary in the asylum where they discuss and argue about myriad issues–from a mother’s hopes and disappointments around her offspring, the position of a woman in that society, to the constant obstacles faced by a woman trying to practise law which was seen as an exclusively male profession. The dialogue between these two very sharp and intelligent middle-aged women is absorbing.

Mary has a peculiar problem. She is not mad but has to pretend to be so to keep the doctors appeased who diagnosed her so-called madness, and almost anything she says is construed as a further evidence of her mental instability, so that she is coached and reduced to repeating parrot-like just one reply–‘I think this fair and right’. Imagine repeating this calmly over and over again as one injustice after another is hurled upon you! It requires a lot of patience and self control, attributes incompatible with the notion of madness. So I thought—what is after all insanity? Sanity and insanity are concepts coined by men in a patriarchal society where a woman is labelled insane if she goes against the role defined for her. Is it a tag to cover up non conformity? For quite clearly, Mary is not mad. She is rather a woman with a personality who is eccentric and quirky at times. In the nineteenth century such women were considered wild and unruly and put into asylums by husbands and sons who could not control them. This was also only incidentally the easiest way to usurp their properties, as in the case of Mary. What Filloux has done is to question the presumptions on which sanity and insanity are based. Insanity here is not determined by the state of mental health but by the whims of the dominant male voice. Therefore it becomes a fluid concept based on perspective. Through her intelligent and perceptive protagonist Mary, she is showing us that it is actually Mary who is sane and the society outside the asylum who are suffering from a peculiar kind of madness in their desperate, insecure need to suppress in women all freedom of expression. The technique that Filloux uses to drive home her point reminds me of Shaw. Shaw at the turn of the twentieth century used the technique of reversal in his social plays. He would begin his play with a dominant, prevailing and accepted idea and then through logical discourse between his characters would slowly dismantle and invert that idea and replace it with his socially revolutionary idea. Take for instance Shaw’s Arms and the Man where Raina and Sergius are cured of their romantic notions by Bluntschli, or Candida where Morell’s assumption of being the master of the house is shattered by his perceptive wife Candida, the real master of the house. Similarly in Mary and Myra Mary turns upside down the conventional notion of madness by her logical arguments. Thus Filloux has taken up two historical female characters to raise a number of pertinent social issues which are sadly still relevant in our times— be it professional prejudices faced by women or the unequal struggle to control property and inheritance. I feel that the appeal of the play lies in how we can identify and sympathize with the plight of the protagonists while being separated by centuries.

I had wanted to discuss the last remaining play The Beauty Inside in this blog as well, but did not realize that I would have so much to say about Mary and Myra. Well, I will take it up later.