Female Characters in Beckett's Later Drama

One can clearly see Beckett's developing attitude towards women via the evolution and eventual abandonment of the placement of female characters in Dantean environments in his dramatic works. To fully comprehend the end status of the female cast in Beckett's later drama such as Not I, images of women in earlier examples as in Happy Days and All That Fall must be explored. Ultimately. Beckett places his female characters in a status of blabbering expulsion, as a result of the Inferno-like punishments they endured in previous works. The feminine consciousness is explored through the female protagonists as a Jungian collective whole, remembering on an unconscious level the survival from torments, only to arrive at denial and lunacy.

Beckett's treatment of his female characters coincides with his maturing theories of the universe. As a young and impressionable writer, the theories and poetics of Dante, as well as the new psychiatry of Carl Jung influenced Beckett. All That Fall, Beckett's first attempt at the composition of a radio play, embodies his ideals whilst embryonic. There are two very clear references to the Inferno in All That Fall, the first noting back to some of Beckett's earliest writings. Mr. Rooney states to his wife and female protagonist of the play, Mrs. Rooney, after posing the hypothetical question, "Did you ever wish to kill a child?" (191), that they are "The perfect pair. Like Dante's damned, with their faces arsy-versy. Our tears will water our bottoms" (191). This might seem like a reference to Canto 5 where the reader is introduced to the fate of the lustful, (who are buffeted by a storm hopelessly stuck together) however, it is more so in relation to Canto 20. Here, in the eighth circle, astrologers and magicians have their heads turned backward, "so awry that tears, down from the eyes/bathed the buttocks, running down the cleft" (INF 20: 23-4). The foreshadowing of the death of the child on the train now places Mr. Rooney in a more perverse context-for his implication of looking backwards while implying the future plays with his damned fortune-teller's role. "In Dante's poem, the Pilgrim himself weeps at the sight of [the astrologers], and is informed by Virgil: 'In this place piety lives when pity is dead' (INF 20:28). The line in the original Italian is: 'Qui vive la pieta quand'e ben morta', thereby obtaining a pun, since 'la pieta' in Italian means both 'pity' and 'piety'" (Bryden, Philosophy, 152). This is obviously a crucial passage for Beckett, being that it has been referred to in both Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks. Mrs. Rooney is an early example of this questionably pitiable person. She is neither completely saintly nor beastly, but moreover, it is questionable whether she is already damned, or in purgatory. When examining another occurrence of a Dantean reference, the protagonist's situation gains clarity.

Another instance of a Dantean reference in All That Fall involves Mrs. Rooney unequivocally. It is this inertia that all of the characters-both male and female-possess that seems to be the issue for chastisement in Dantean fashion. "The play…remains unflinchingly focused on omnipresent death, which becomes all the more palpable through an abundance of counterpoised references to fertility and élan vital that provide the play with its tense equilibrium. All That Fall…is marked by vigor mortis" (Oppenheim, 296). The key to understanding motivation in All That Fall may be found in Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno, the space devoted to the Ante-Inferno. It was at this stage that Dante introduced the shades of those who were both praiseless and blameless in life, who now mingled with the neutral angels. These shades are described as, "Questi sciaurati, che mai non fur vivi,/Erano ignudi e stimolati molto/da mosconi e da vespe ch'eran ivi" (INF 3: 63-65). Allen Mandelbaum translates this to, "These wretched ones, who never were alive/went naked and were stung again, and again/by horseflies and by wasps that circled them." However, the word 'stimolati' may be more literally translated as 'stimulated.' With this insight, one may naturally see the Dante-Beckett connection via the character of Mrs. Rooney in All That Fall. Mrs. Rooney, who is normally paralyzed with, to borrow the phrase, vigor mortis throughout the play, is spurred into action by a wasp, in pure Dantean style. Interestingly enough, there are no buzzing sound effects for the insect that Mrs. Rooney encounters-where there is a plethora of other animal sounds throughout the play. Furthermore, no other character complains of wasps. This seems to indicate that Beckett is trying to place the instance of the wasp on a highly metaphorical level, and the entire occurrence might even be within Mrs. Rooney's mind. After slapping her cheek and crying out, "Ah these wasps!" she finally accepts the assistance of a vehicle to achieve her goal of reaching the train station-an opportunity of transport she had previously denied. Transportation failure is a common ground for all characters in All That Fall-the hinny stalls, the bicycle wheel is flat, the car does not start immediately, and the train is late. The missing link for actual action for Mrs. Rooney was the wasp, the outside Dantean force that Beckett adopted to create an atmosphere of permanent suffering of living.

Furthermore, one can see the Dante-Jung parallel that Beckett linked in All That Fall through the Ante-Inferno images of neutrality and inertia. (Inertia being used here in this sense that despite in these early stages of Beckett's writing where the female protagonists such as Mrs. Rooney have bodies to carry themselves about, they are locked into routines that render them inactive.) The shades now tormented by the wasps are accredited as those who 'never were alive.' This does not seem to be lacking in propinquity from the Jungian reference of 'never being born.'

Beckett was much interested in a lecture that he attended in 1935, given by Carl Jung. The psychiatrist spoke of a young girl who had never been properly born and the thought worried Beckett for years. Jung does not appear to have explained what he meant by 'never been properly born', but he must have meant either that the trauma of birth had somehow been bypassed, leaving a gap in the emotional history of the patient-Beckett almost certainly connected the state of mind of Lucia Joyce, whose unrequited love for himself as a young Irishman in Paris, was blamed, at least by himself, for a life-long mental illness, with Jung's patient-or that the person concerned did not really exist in terms of having a full consciousness. The incident is related in All That Fall by Mrs. Rooney, who tells us that the girl eventually died. There is obviously an identification with Mrs. Rooney's own daughter, who never grew up, and the radio play ends with the news that the reason for the train being late is that another little girl had fallen under the wheels.
Calder, 96

The Jungian theory creeps into the play by tying together the two major instances of Dante in All That Fall, by linking the punishments of the Rooney's with their psyche fixations. The death of the child on the train (which Calder identifies as female, but that is not necessarily the case) has been foreseen, foretold, or foreshadowed by Mr. Rooney in relation to his wife. He is pretending to make a prediction despite the fact that he is looking "backwards" (191). This will thus coexist neatly with his blindness (for all 'psychics' or fortune-tellers in classical literature must be rendered sightless in the physical world for irony's sake) and the connection he made of himself as being similar to those in the eighth circle of the Inferno.

The stasis of the rest of the town seems clear. Beckett has determined insofar to remain consistent with Dante's method of punishment in the Inferno, as to follow the law of contrapasso-that is, the punishment is commensurate with the fault. Therefore, the speedy race of the banner and the goading by insects for those so ungoadable in life constitutes just retribution. This proves to be consistent with the fact that this is one of Beckett's more Irish plays; making references to the 'big house' literary tradition as well as other contemporary Irish issues where idleness and neutrality prove to render one impotent. Indeed, the setting and time in All That Fall is fairly definite on both a permanent and a metaphorical level. It is certainly Ireland, in the time shortly after the invention of the automobile. The alternative stage is the Ante-Inferno; where Mrs. Rooney lives within the confines of a psychological landscape (and it does appear to be dictated by her, being that the rest of the characters seem to be in synch with her vigor mortis in lieu of Mr. Rooney's mindset) the wasps torment only her to serve her husband. However, the further one progresses into Beckett's literary career, and the more ambiguous the setting becomes-such as an indefinite future, [a] time beyond the grave in hell or purgatory" (Mercier, 56) the law of contrapasso becomes more tenuous. "In The Divine Comedy universe, the mental and the physical are wedded together, with every punishment tailored to the nature of the sin, so that a physical assault has 'meaning' within the psyche of the recipient. In the Beckettian universe, on the other hand, kicks and caresses are for the most part arbitrary and perplexedly apprehended" (Bryden, Philosophy, 157). As the links to the world of Dante fade, the more obscure psychological means begin their reign, as already witnessed through the treatment of the female protagonist, Mrs. Rooney.

In Happy Days the audience is brought into a world of indefinite time and space where the female psyche of Winnie proves to be the specified subject of crimination. "The original manuscript, called Willie-Winnie Notes, contains long scathing passages attacking the Catholic Church, its priests and religious observance in Ireland; denouncing the effect of church domination on the Irish people; and finally, describing the evils, both of omission and commission, for which British government in Ireland was responsible" (Bair, 517). With this information, some connections may be made throughout this play that makes it, like All That Fall, more Irish-based in theme than his later works. The female protagonists are not that dissimilar, being that they are both of approximately the same socio-economic background and religion. Furthermore, consistent with typical Irish themes, the issues of infertility arise. However, while Mrs. Rooney was capably of some basic mobility, Winnie is slowly being engulfed by what appears to be her own burial mound. "For as Winnie's trunk, and later her head alone, projects from the mound of earth, or as Willie's hand emerges from his hole by its side, one is reminded rather of the damned in Dante's Inferno, whose limbs protrude from the frozen lake or the livid stone" (Knowlson, 95). However, Willie and Winnie endure more of a psychological, "[post coitum triste] on a daily basis, for they, in company with most of Beckett's dramatic population, are situated in an essentially post-coital landscape" (Women, Bryden 94). Indeed, Winnie's genitals are not accessible, and Willie's impotence seems certain-at this stage they will not even have the privilege of regretting sex. Therefore, the audience is left somewhere between Dantean punishment and Jungian analysis. Beckett once more displays the flux between his evolving theories via his female protagonist.

To complicate the feminine psychological landscape further, more Freudian ideals come into play. In the case of Winnie it may be argued that she is both "looker and looked-at within a patriarchal Law which denies her independent access to the unconscious-as 'object of scrutiny'. Winnie does admittedly display a habituated accommodation to societal pressures upon women to please the eye, amongst other requirements. Yet, though attentive to her bodily appearance, she clearly privileges to a greater extent her mental faculties" (Women, Bryden 88). The issue of scopophillia is too great to be completely ignored. The audience is in fact enjoying looking at Winnie, and will surely suffer the absence of her breasts in the second act of Happy Days. Furthermore, Beckett adds more interesting twists to the scenario by adding the need of being heard, as well as being thought of for proper existence.

The audience is left to decide whether it is the female protagonist's own thoughts that are causing her to become immersed in the sand or if her reaffirmation can actually come via Willie's gaze. However, there is a kind of freedom that is developed with the loss of the body in the Beckettian world, the less flesh that clings to the head the more it is free to project the thoughts of the pure psyche. Therefore, it is consistent that Winnie does not loose her intellectualism or mental curiosity because she is bodiless. "These constrained bodies seem, by their very absence or rigidity, to set the mind free. Thus an escape of sorts is offered by dreams of other kinds of existence or of fantasy scenarios. For Winnie…the paradox of existence sine materia, almost completely realized on the stage, is entirely achieved in her dreams" (Women, Bryden 104). However, one is tormented with the credibility of the characters to relate their experiences with accuracy. Winnie's immobility causes her to wish and daydream-provoking questions to what is memory and what is fantasy. The lunacy of this with the current setting seems to be confirmed when the use of the future perfect is introduced. Winnie projects several times, "what a happy day for me…it will have been" (152). Any use of the future perfect blends dreams of future with present mind and past memory-which in Winnie's case is quite possibly fiction-the result is extreme complication. The situation is similar to That Time where the thoughts and voices of past, present and future become jumbled and memory and reality are confused. (However, this was a later experiment of Beckett's, written in 1974, where the limitation of the body and use of the voice medium becomes more pronounced) Indeed, Happy Days is like "a purgatory that is radically different from the 'conical purgatory' of Dante…although Winnie's predicament is physically far more serious at the end of the play than it was at the beginning, we have no assurance that it has yet reached any terminal point" (Knowlson, 96). Her visions may boarder on Paradisio, but she is still tormented by a past collective that will not release her. Like Mrs. Rooney, her limited mobility is still restricted to her routines of the day. Her phrases are repetitive, as are the daily actions.

With the basic layout and evolution of two of Beckett's earlier plays, one can examine the status of women characters in his later drama. The most striking example of the female role is presented in Not I, written in 1972. "The later drama introduces females who are only dubiously 'present' and yet who speak and move. Their being is simultaneously denied and affirmed by Beckett's theatrical practice" (Bryden, Women, 102). Once again, the location is Ireland, but the chronology appears more ambiguous. Inspiration for Not I arose from two sources; a Caravaggio painting and an Arab woman dressed in a jellaba intensely waiting for her child.

Beckett combined the darkness and drama of the Caravaggio painting with the Arab woman's intensity of waiting and created a mouth, a vivid red gash, the only visible object at eth center of an altogether dark stage. Off to one side he placed a figure described as everything from 'a huge, silent Druidic figure,' to 'a grotesquely tall, monk-like figure.' The mouth belongs to the speaker, an Irish woman of about seventy years of age, who recalls a life of premature birth, mechanical survival, and the avoidance of herself.
Bair, 622

In Not I, just as in Happy Days, the audience is left to wonder about the narrator's credibility. Here, the speaker desperately clings to the third person pronoun as an avoidance of self. The Mouth spouts out logorrhea at a rapid pace, the entire performance intending to last only fifteen to seventeen minutes, so that the audience in a performance of Not I is more then likely left with a feeling of intense emotion rather then cerebral comprehension. However, one must wonder why Beckett chose to use a female character for this innovative role. "Refusal to acknowledge responsibility for one's actions or to accept one's identity does not seem to be a peculiarly feminine trait. Technical considerations may have had more to do with the choice of sex: women do speak faster than men and scream more readily…while only a heavily made -up (and therefore feminine) mouth would be visible in the faint lighting Beckett calls for" (Mercier, 224). The Mouth is most certainly intended to be female, which with the potent image in the center of the stage, the idea of the "vagina as birth-canal and the mouth as word-canal" (Bryden, Women, 117) springs forth. Furthermore, the sense of beginnings of another life with consciousness already inherent, such as Jung's philosophy may be able to endure. "Not I is…a play about the denial of identity and one that asserts, with typical Beckettian ambiguity, the very identity that it seeks to deny. Yet again in the case of Not I we must acquit Beckett on the charge of perversity, conceding that what seemed at first sight a 'gimmick' is in fact integral to the artistic and philosophic unity of the play" (Mercier, 185). The idea of a Dantean world seems abandoned for the psychological connection. There is no justifiable means for the punishment of a premature birth, and the torment of avoidance of self-therefore the law of contrapasso does not hold any weight in later Beckettian drama. The woman is left without any thought process but exists just as a stream of unfettered consciousness.

This leaves the issue of the Auditor in the female psyche, who is of an 'undeterminable gender.' However, a Jungian theory can easily be attached to this character as well. "Auditor is…envisaged as possibly representing the 'shadow' or alter ego of Mouth…Mouth's avoidance of the first person singular is the symptom of a disconnected psychological state in which consciousness of an individual self cannot be maintained" (Knowlson, 199). There are naturally other possible implications for this character; however, the Jungian proposal seems to remain the most consistent with the patterns that Beckett had displayed to date. Overall, none of the major female protagonists exerted major issues of feminism. In fact, Beckett originally planned Happy Days to star a male lead rather than the female Winnie. Furthermore, Mercier's approach to Not I as only needing to be performed by a woman for technical reasons appears justifiable. Beckett used female protagonists when he needed to add the flavor of certain sterility to the acts. However, as far as torment and psychology are concerned, Beckett has no gender bias.

To conclude, Beckett's philosophical evolution as a writer of drama can be witnessed through the female characters in his plays. An early theology of a Dantean universe where the law of contrapasso reigns is quickly subverted for a more chaotic cosmos where punishment and praise are not necessarily justified. An early fascination with the lectures of Carl Jung however, seem to persist in the mind of Beckett. "Beckett was bothered by Jung's contention that the characters an author creates are indicative of the state of his mind because Beckett himself likened the creative process to more than inspiration; it was tantamount to a seizure of his conscious faculties by an autonomous force which seemed to well up from someplace deep inside himself and to commit itself almost independently on paper" (Bair, 209). His female characters carry with them the memory of their omniscient creator. All that is left to discover is how much of his own pathways are due to his own conscious or subconscious efforts.

Works Cited
Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett. New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1990.
Bryden, Mary. Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.,
1998.
Bryden, Mary. Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama. London: Macmillan
Press Ltd., 1993.
Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, UK
Ltd., 2001.
Knowlson, James and John Pilling. Frescos of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of
Samuel Beckett. London: John Calder Publishers Ltd., 1979.
Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Oppenheim, Lois, Ed. Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print
Media. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999.

Prose, Poetry, and Dramatic Works
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and
Charles Ross, University of California Press: Vol. I Inferno (1980) Vol. II
Purgatorio (1981) Vol. III Paradisio (1982).
Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1990.
Samuel Beckett: Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder Ltd., 1983.