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Woman's Theatrical Space. By Hanna Scolnicov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; pp. 177. $49.95 cloth.
Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics. Edited by Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995; pp. 319. $45.00 cloth.
These two books exploring women and theatre could not be more different. Woman's Theatrical Space examines the gradual dissociation of woman and home in major plays from the Greeks to the present day and the parallel shift in attitudes towards the woman's familial role. Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics, on the other hand, offers a collection of essays "focusing on theatre as a forum for feminist redefinitions of the aesthetic" (17). Yet this unlikely pairing of works together offers an interesting dialogue on the position of women in today's cultural landscape and on feminist scholarship in the academy.
In a comparative study of a sampling of plays from Aeschylus to Pinter, Beckett, and Handke, Hanna Scolnicov sets out to establish that "the ideological positions of the society and of the playwright shape the contours of the theatrical space. . . . [And that] the analysis of theatrical space directly reveals the changing conceptions of woman's position in the family and in society" (8). In order to do so, she distinguishes between "theatrical space within" (spaces visible to the audience) and "theatrical space without" (off-stage or invisible spaces). Scolnicov admits that the division of within and without is most easily recognizable in the opposition of indoors and outdoors, and she, somewhat conveniently, chooses to limit her discussion almost exclusively to plays in which this dichotomy represents such a pairing. She justifies this choice by asserting that
structural division of space into the interior and the exterior of the house carries with it social and cultural implications. Gender roles are spatially defined in relation to the inside and the outside of the house. Traditionally, it is the woman who makes the house into a home, her home, while the world of commerce, war, travel, the world outside, is a man's world. . . . From the spatial point of view, the world of the man and the world of the woman meet on the threshold.
The...