2.+Lenkiewicz

**//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 1 discussions ONLY.//**
Katherine Kelly (Texas A& M University)

=Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s //Her Naked Skin//= ==

Like most history plays from Shakespeare onwards, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s //Her Naked Skin// distances a contemporary issue--recent western feminism's loss of memory and vitality--by setting it in a place and time in the past, in this case, a period roughly 100 years earlier during the heyday of the British Woman Suffrage movement fractured by the onset of World War I. Lenkiewicz’s first big-stage play, she wrote it “because I felt the suffragettes had been forgotten. . . . I admired their comradeship, strength, and old-fashioned pluck. . . . Feminism has regressed. . . recently. On the news and television. . . there is so much woman as object” (qtd. in [|www.guardian.co.uk/stage /2008/jun/29/theatre.features] ).

//HNS// addresses the present by revising the suffrage past in two ways: fabricating, by way of Radclyffe Hall’s //Well of Loneliness,// an emotional and sexual backstory missing from most suffrage histories, and darkening the triumphalist narratives of the campaign that have surfaced since the late 1970s, beginning with David Rosen's //Rise Up, Women//, and continuing with Lisa Tickner's //Spectacle of Women//. In focusing the play's narrative on what official histories of the campaign have left out--the circulation of affection and sexual passion between movement activists, the challenges to class distinctions and to conventional heterosexual marriages--Lenkiewicz has translated and contemporized suffragists' motives from the quasi-religious zealotry appearing in their own accounts to an emotional-sexual engagement closer to contemporary infatuation. The play’s epigraph, “I freeze and yet am burned,” also refers to the (disguised} passion of a woman from the past, in this case, Elizabeth I describing from her prison cell her desire for an unnamed “monsieur.”

The play’s structure operates at two magnifications: the epic historical story of the fight for the franchise and the intimate love story between a jaded and confused aristocrat and a young working-class seamstress. The middle-aged aristocratic suffragist, Celia Cain, an unhappy wife and mother, begins a love affair with a young, working class suffragette, Eve Douglas, which dwindles as Celia loses interest in Eve. At the play’s end, as the militant suffragette strategy to support the war is revealed, Celia does the unexpected by refusing to return to her husband and home, choosing instead a future of uncertainty and doubt. Lenkiewicz implicitly puts Celia's new life in the hands of the spectators, who must decide the kind of future women will create for themselves in this "post-feminist" age. As the first woman playwright to have a work produced on the National Theatre's largest stage, the Olivier Theatre, Lenkiewicz has not only remade suffrage history but has put her mark on women's theatre history as well.

The two-part structure of the play caused critics great discomfort. Act 1 Scene 1 opens with a disturbing rendering of Emily Wilding Davison’s preparation to attend the Derby and concludes with newsreel footage of her body being trampled by the horses after she has thrown herself onto the track in a surprise act of suffrage suicide. The effect is large and weighty. Similarly, several of the play’s scenes take place with documentary specificity in Holloway Prison, complete with clanging gates, dark hallways, stark lighting, and culminating in an Act 2 Scene 10 detailed representation of a forced-feeding event, complete with the use of a metal bit for holding the prisoner’s mouth open and her retching when the feeding is over. These scenes carry the “authenticity” of historical accuracy and speak to the role of the female body in conducting the campaign for the vote. In between these scenes, a romance between aristocratic Celia and naïve Eve unfolds, the first lesbian romance for each of them. The intimate love affair allegorizes the personal, emotional dimension of the suffrage movement as the site of spontaneous female passion, friendship, and enjoyment of a cross-class romance, frowned upon by movement leaders as self-indulgent and frivolous rather than disciplined and political. Critics lamented the shift between epic frame and personal love story: “Did an intensely political story of women’s politics have to be centred around a messy lesbian love affair?” asked otherwise positive reviewer Natalie Bennett (mylondonyourlondon.com/?p=188), as if the affair had been tacked on as a faddish afterthought. Lenkiewicz worked in the lesbian cross-class affair mindful of another significant moment in women’s history falling very close to the suffrage movement: the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s //The Well of Loneliness//, the first British novel to account for a lesbian affair ([|www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/37491/bookshop-talk/rebecca-lenkiewicz-on-her-naked-skin] ).  The ethical dimension of the play is in part a function of this affair. In despair at being unable to participate fully—to empathize fully—with either the Suffragettes’ campaign or her marriage, Celia admits to her husband, “I can’t change” (85). But in fact she does change—she chooses not to return to her wealthy husband and home at the play’s end. Her future (like that of Ibsen’s Nora) will be difficult but it will also, in some way, be new. Her (women’s) future is neither fully determined nor decided by chance. It can be continued by members of the audience or readers of the play.

Lenkiewicz has written a history play to prod contemporary feminists with a carefully constructed re-memory of the legacy of “first-wave” feminism, here riddled with some of the class and sexual complexities of second- and third-wave feminism. The play invites the reader and spectator to live its sequel.