Men and Women Writing Women in Drama: An Exploration of the Male Gaze in Playwriting Through the Years
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Abstract
John Berger wrote in his analysis of the male gaze, a term coined by Laura Mulvey, “[M]en act and women appear.” The male gaze has been largely explored in film, but very scarcely in theatre. How has the male gaze affected playwriting? How has the male gaze and treatment of female characters in theatre changed through time, if it has at all? And finally, how may we recognize these biases and promote successful and apparent change as we continue to perform theatre? A total of six plays were analyzed. Three of these plays were written by men: August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s Grease: The Musical (1971), and Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters (2011). They were directly analyzed against the remaining three plays, written by women: Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves (2016). Mostly, I was looking to find discrepancies when female characters were written by men compared to when they were written by women. In the male-written plays, did the female characters behave realistically? Do their lives revolve around more than just men? Most importantly, are they people? expected in my results to find that the sexism was less blatant as the years went on – however, what I was surprised to find is that while the sexism was indeed less blatant, it was still arguably just as present, just in different ways. Where Miss Julie is sexist outright and portrays women as inferior beings to men, She Kills Monsters depicts teenage girls as sex objects and eroticises lesbianism. The aim of this research s obviously not to say that men should no longer be allowed to write plays. The focus is to avoid falling into traps like these previously discussed playwrights have fallen into. A male playwright should treat writing women the same way he would treat writing about something he doesn’t know much about at the beginning: research and understanding.