Female Parts: The Art and Politics of Female Playwrights

David E. Kemp is head of the Drama Department at Queen’s University.

In this splendid book, Hodkinson analyzes the work of six women
playwrights who are in the process of creating a new feminist vision in
drama based on the recurrent themes of wilderness, immigration, and
colonialism. From the feminist perspective, wilderness can be seen as a
metaphor for female inner consciousness; immigration—or, more
specifically, the immigrant— represents women’s sense of exclusion;
and colonialism symbolizes women’s powerlessness in the face of
patriarchal control. These themes (the search for inner consciousness,
the sense of exclusion, and powerlessness) are major motifs that recur
frequently in feminist literature and thought. Hodkinson’s greatest
achievement here may be her ability to relate these major themes to
specific plays written by major women playwrights.

In “Everloving” and “Islands”—both written by Margaret
Hollingsworth, who is in my view Canada’s finest woman playwright—we
see both woman’s sense of isolation and her struggle and need for
self-recognition. In “The Twisted Loaf,” by Aviva Ravel, we see
immigration through the eyes of an old Russian-Jewish woman who finally
achieves a meaningful connection with her past. In Betty Jane Wylie’s
“A Place on Earth,” an elderly rape victim struggles for survival in
an urban setting while undergoing a lonely, painful, and moving process
of self-discovery. In Antonine Maillet’s “La Sagouine,” a poor
Acadian washerwoman becomes an expression of dignity and pride in the
middle of a hardship and oppression made more poignant by her
subservient position in a predominantly English society. Finally, Cindy
Cowan’s, “A Woman from the Sea,” uses mythology and ritual to
connect the play’s protagonist, Almira, with women’s collective
creative past, while using imagery that portrays woman as the symbol of
the life process.

If, as Hodkinson suggests, the creative contribution of Canadian women
playwrights has gone unrecognized in the field of literary criticism,
this book will not only help rectify this omission but also suggest an
in-depth analysis of that contribution. In the way it looks both back to
the past and forward to the future, Female Parts is an important
addition to feminist literature. It further represents a large step
toward the recognition of the significance of women playwrights within
the mosaic of Canadian theatre.