Female Betrayal in Bastard Out of Carolina

     In Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison tells the story of Ruth Ann Boatwright, nicknamed Bone, from her poverty-stricken birth through the aftermath of being raped by her stepfather at the age of twelve. While the physical trauma escalates throughout the novel, the ultimate betrayal in this novel is emotional: Bone’s mother Anney chooses her rapist husband Glenn over her daughter, an act that would seem inconceivable to most. In this paper, I explore the cultural and gender influences which lead Anney to make her choices, and Bone’s reaction to this betrayal.

     The Boatwright family is looked down upon by other people in Greenville County, South Carolina. “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground” (Allison 3). Being on the lowest rung of the social ladder weighs heavily on Anney Boatwright, who at the age of fifteen gives birth to Bone out of wedlock and is given a birth certificate with the word illegitimate stamped across the bottom third of it. “As a member of the disgraced and discredited Boatwright family and the mother of an illegitimate child, Anney is marked as a socially undesirable and tainted woman—as someone suffering from a spoiled identity” (Bouson 105). It’s disheartening for the Boatwright family to be labeled as trash, but as a woman, Anney has even less status. Rather than ignoring what others think of her and her family or living with the embarrassment or stigma, Anney goes back to the courthouse multiple times over the years trying to obtain a birth certificate for Bone that does not have the illegitimate label. Having an illegitimate child is what is expected of “poor, white trash” such as her; the fact that she doesn’t want to be makes her the butt of jokes. She internalizes the judgment of people in town who have a higher socio-economic status and look down upon her. She may carry the shame of being “poor, white trash,” but she doesn’t want her baby to have the label for the rest of her life. This same judgment does not extend to the man who is the father of an illegitimate child. This sends a clear message: to lift her status a woman must be attached to a man.

     The novel doesn’t tell how seventeen-year-old Anney meets her first husband, Lyle Parsons, only that it distracts her from her annual visit to the courthouse over Bone’s birth certificate. Lyle seems to care about Anney and Bone, he wants to provide for them, and he has a sweet disposition (Allison 5). They have a child, Reese, but then two years later, Lyle is killed when his truck goes off the road in the rain, and Anney has to go back to work to provide for her children. Anney is limited in the jobs she might choose, since she needs her sisters’ help with her two daughters, and ends up working at the White Horse Cafe (Allison 7-8).

     Bone describes her mother in the early pages of the novel and says “under that biscuit-crust exterior, more than anything in the world, she wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls” (Allison 10). Lyle died when Anney was nineteen, and she “dated Glen Waddell for two years” (Allison 34) before she married him when she was “just past twenty-one” (Allison 309). The novel suggests that Anney didn’t want to jump into another marriage after Lyle, but the truth is that Anney didn’t go long without a man in her life. Her first impression of Glen is that “he’d make a good daddy, she imagined, a steady man” (Allison 13). When she meets him, the only thing that Anney knows about Glen is that he comes from a family with a much higher social-standing than her own. She is looking for a way to provide for her children both economically and socially. She may have held off marrying Glen for two years, but she had to have started dating him about a year after Lyle’s death, and the novel doesn’t indicate that she dated anyone else. Anney’s self-worth is wrapped up in having a man in her life.

     Upon meeting Anney, Glen decides “he would marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers” (Allison 34). He doesn’t know Anney at all; he’s looking for a way to thumb his nose at his family. Neither of them seems to be entering the relationship for the right reasons.

     Bone loves her mother. She wants Anney to be happy. While she is dating Glen, Anney asks Bone repeatedly whether she and Reese like him. Bone says yes every time Anney asks (Allison 32). Bone knows this is the answer Anney wants to hear, and she wants Anney to be happy.

     When Glen and Anney decide to marry two years later, there is resistance from some members of Anney’s family. Aunt Alma quiets their resistance by saying that Anney “needs [Glen] like a starving woman needs meat between her teeth” (Allison 40). Similarly, “in Glen, Anney gets her wish for a man who loves her desperately— even though this desperate love is acquired at the expense of her eldest child” (Carter 8). This is not an equal relationship based on mutual love and respect. It foreshadows their codependent marriage and sets the stage for Anney’s ultimate betrayal of Bone.

     During the time in which this novel takes place, the unequal treatment of women is commonplace. Whether on purpose or not, Allison drives home this fact in the nickname she chooses for Bone. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the first woman was made from taking a rib from the first man. “Bone’s name, then, is a family name in the largest sense, making clear that in the Judeo-Christian tradition women are, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, the possession of men” (King 127). When Glen proposes to Anney, he says “You’re mine, all of you, mine” (Allison 35). He views Anney and the girls as his possessions, not as equals or independent entities; he is a patriarchal narcissist.

     Once married, Glen changes how he treats Anney and her daughters. “From the beginning [of their marriage] Glen desperately tries to isolate Anne from her sisters. The further away from her sisters, the less powerful she becomes” (Megan 77). It begins when Anney loses the baby and Glen moves them “over by the JC Penney mill near the railroad tracks” (Allison 49) without even consulting Anney. As the story progresses, Glen becomes more controlling and isolates Anney and the girls from the rest of their relatives as much as he can. He makes all of the decisions in the family and only rarely does Anney protest or disagree. This is the model of male-female relationships that Anney has grown up with. Men are the head of the family and women suffer through it. However, that doesn’t mean that Anney has no power in the relationship.

     In her book Mothers of Incest Survivors : Another Side Of The Story, Janis Tyler Johnson writes, “All the mothers in this book described their husbands as men who asserted themselves as authoritarian heads of the household, and themselves as wives who were subject to that authority. But this did not mean they perceived themselves as fragile and powerless within all areas of their lives” (Johnson 35). This matches the portrayal of Glen and Anney’s marriage in Bastard Out of Carolina. While Anney defers to Glen moving them into houses he has chosen, and he functions as the primary breadwinner in the family, when he goes fishing with her brothers instead of finding a job, Anney lashes out at him in anger, dresses up, and goes out for the evening; she returns with groceries, having ostensibly prostituted herself to get them. Glen doesn’t say a word.

     Anney has been raised in a family where the men are allowed to misbehave, drink, carouse, and end up in jail; the women “would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home” (Allison 22). Women are long-suffering, take care of children and put up with a lot from their husbands. This is the model Anney knows and it is the model that Bone learns from her. Bone is raised to believe that “men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding” (Allison 22). Anney is looking for the best provider she can find in a husband because she’s grown up believing that she will endure whatever he does, because that is what Boatwright women do.

     The double-standard over the roles of men and women is reinforced again in the novel when Aunt Alma’s baby dies. Alma snaps over her husband’s verbally abusive response to her wanting another baby. While Anney is comforting her, the Boatwright men joke about it; in this world, men are supposed to break up furniture and threaten violence, but not women. When women do it, they are considered crazy.

     It isn’t simply gender roles; there is a preference for men over women that is apparent in the novel. When Anney tells Bone that her grandmother “loved her boy children more” (Allison 18), it doesn’t appear to come as a surprise. This belief in the Boatwright family matches the belief in the culture at large. Even as a small child, Bone has internalized this message, as her mother must have done the same growing up. Bone hears it in Glen’s voice the day of the picnic celebrating Anney and Glen’s engagement. She overhears her aunt talking with Anney about being pregnant and wonders if Glen knows yet. When his tone has a “loud impatient note [she] had never heard before” talking to Bone and her sister, she is convinced that he does know. Then afterwards, he keeps referring to the baby as his son. Bone says that Glen “never entertained the notion Mama might deliver a girl” (Allison 43). It was a boy that Glen wanted, and that Anney wanted to give him, because boys have more value.

     The night that Anney goes into labor, Glen molests Bone for the first time. He narcissistically views her as his possession to do with as he pleases; he uses the six-year-old girl as an object to console his anxiety and fears.  Bone doesn’t tell anyone what he has done. She isn’t certain why she keeps the secret, but she has a lot of fear. Glen never threatens her to keep her quiet, but he doesn’t have to. Bone isn’t going to tell, even when directly asked if Glen has molested her (Allison 124). She may fear the unknown, she may fear what this will do to the mother she loves so much.

      When Bone is ten, the family moves because Glenn has started yet another job. This time, they move far away from family and it is no longer practical to have the aunts or Granny care for the girls, so Anney leaves them home alone while she is at work. One day the girls run through the house, not knowing that Glen is at home because he’s been laid off. He catches them, carries Bone off to the bathroom and beats her for the first time, saying he’s “waited a long time to do this, too long” (Allison 105). Anney arrives home during the beating. When Glen finally unlocks the bathroom door, Anney slaps Glen for beating Bone, but then asks Bone what she has done to cause it (106). Later, Bone overhears Glen lying to Anney. She doesn’t challenge the lies. He’s an adult and a man. Anney takes his word for the truth without insisting that she hear Bone’s side of what happened. The message is clear: somehow Bone is to blame for this. Over time, Glen reinforces Bone’s feelings of worthlessness, shame, and guilt. He never takes responsibility for what he has done, and for the most part, no one else holds him accountable.

     When doctors recognize the physical abuse suffered by Bone, Anney leaves Glen for a brief period of time. Two weeks later, she returns to him. He is sneakier, but the abuse continues. On the day of Ruth’s funeral, Glen beats Bone again and leaves marks all down the back of her thighs. Her aunt Raylene discovers them and tells her brothers, who beat up Glen. Anney moves the girls into an apartment while Glen is in the hospital for a day. Her mother’s demeanor has changed. “Mama was ashen and silent and wouldn’t look at me. It was my fault, all my fault. I had ruined everything” (Allison 249). When they finally speak, months later, Anney is torn. She doesn’t want to be hated by Bone, but she is thinking about Glen. Bone knows that Anney will go back to him and tells her so. Anney says that she won’t go back until she knows that Bone will be safe. Bone says that she will never go back to live with Glen (Allison 275-276). Something has changed in Bone. She will not let herself be abused again.

     Bone goes to stay with her Aunt Alma. Reese tells Bone that Anney has started talking to Glen again. One day Glen shows up at Alma’s house and tells Bone that she must convince Anney that all of them will live together again. Bone refuses and he attacks her. Anney walks in while he is in the act of raping Bone. Anney calls him a monster and tells Bone that they need to go to the hospital. Yet when they are at the car, Glen begins banging his head against the door and Anney stops to comfort him. Bone has suffered so much at the hands of Glen, but this is the ultimate betrayal.

     Although Bone remembers Anney taking her to the hospital, she doesn’t remember the ride in from Aunt Alma’s, or what has happened to Glen. When Bone wakes up, her mother is gone. “Anney once again leaves Bone for Glen…despite the ‘realization’ of Bone’s spectacular fantasy of revelation. And Bone remains behind, remanded to her thoughts, and speaks no more than ten words aloud in the remaining two chapters of the novel” (Harkins 134). Raylene steps in as a surrogate parent. She insists that the sheriff quit asking Bone questions and stays up all night at Bone’s bedside. The next day she takes Bone home to live with her.

     Raylene tells Bone that Anney loves her. When Anney says that she doesn’t want to go back to Glen until she knows Bone is safe, Anney is telling the truth. She loves her daughters; she always has. “Unfortunately, however, all of that love does not equate into Anney knowing how to protect or provide for them” (Carter 3). In the end, Anney knows that she cannot be without Glen. She hasn’t been able to be without a man for more than about a year since she was fifteen years old. Anney’s need to identify herself through a man wins out. The messages she received her entire life are too powerful to escape.

     Bone says “My mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered” (Allison 302). In her mind, this betrayal is far worse than being beaten and raped by Glen. Bone was used to Anney going back to Glen, but held out hope that if faced with the incontrovertible truth, Anney would not go back to Glen. When she finds out that isn’t the case, Bone has to face the fact that no matter what happened, Anney would always choose Glen over her.

     Raylene tries to help Bone make sense of her feelings, tells her that her mother loves her, and asks her to give it some time. Bone is angry and devastated, but despite everything, her mother still remains a model for Bone. She recognizes her mother as “strong…hungry for love…desperate, determined, and ashamed” (Allison 308) and in the last paragraph of the novel Bone is sitting with Raylene and says “I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman” (309). Bone no longer looks at her mother as a child, but as a separate person, and she recognizes in herself all of the things that she sees in her mother and her mother’s sisters.

Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 2012. Kindle.

Bouson, J. Brooks. “’You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal 34.1 (2001): 101-123. Project Muse. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Carter, Natalie. "“A Southern Expendable”: Cultural Patriarchy, Maternal Abandonment, and Narrativization in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina." Women's Studies 42.8 (2013): 886-903. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2013.830540. Available from: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/378. Web. 17 Jan 2015.

Harkins, Gillian. "Surviving the Family Romance? Southern Realism and the Labor of Incest." Southern Literary Journal 40.1 (2007): 114-39. ProQuest. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Johnson, Janis Tyler. Mothers Of Incest Survivors : Another Side Of The Story. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

King, Vincent. “Hopeful Grief: The Prospect of a Postmodern Feminism in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.” Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 122-140. Project Muse. Web. 17 Jan. 2015.

Megan, Crolyn E. "Moving Toward Truth: An Interview with Dorothy Allison." The Kenyon Review Fall 1994: 71. ProQuest. Web. 17 Jan. 2015 .

Beginnings and Caesurae

I knew coming into the Advance Creative Writing workshop that I wanted to be a writer, and I leave that workshop realizing that I am a writer. The project I completed is very close to being ready to send out to publishers, but that’s not why I know that I’m a writer. I am a writer because I am writing and finishing what I start. I’m not sure why it took until the end of the class for me to realize that. I may have been too focused on the goal of completing my degree, but I look back over the past two years, and I have drafts of short stories, poems, plays, and the beginning of longer works that have been accumulating the entire time. I stand at the beginning of knowing I am a writer and at a caesura in my life, doing that reflection.

This was my third writing class at Southern New Hampshire University, so I came into the class knowing the only process that works for me: I needed to bang out a draft and then work from there. And then I didn’t do it. I allowed myself to be bogged down the first couple of drafts, worried that a first draft of a poem wasn’t good enough. Once I got back on track and returned to what works, “just finish it, and then fix it later,” I was able to get back into the groove. I like to write a draft, think about it, go back over it, and try new things. I also like to layer my drafts, looking at the world in one pass, looking at characters in another, sentence structure in yet another.

The project was a hybrid of fiction and poetry. One thing that I learned in the class about writing fiction is that I like fantastical elements, like the Denisovan grandmother speaking across the ages in my project. I always knew that I liked high fantasy, but this is the second short story I’ve written in as many years that was set in the present and had a fantasy element insert itself into the plot. I believe that magic happens, whether it is science we can’t explain yet, or something else, I don’t know. However, I won’t be surprised in the future when it shows up again in my writing, because I think it’s part of the “what if” I like to explore in my fiction.

I felt that eight weeks was not enough time to do the project complete justice. A hybrid project was ambitious, but I’m glad I chose to do one. I think I did what I could have done in eight weeks; I didn’t work on it every other week when a draft was due, I worked on it every day. Throughout, I wished I could write more quickly. I hope as I continue to write I’ll speed up.

I had fun playing with the fiction in this story. I didn’t know where it was going to go when I started. In fact, I didn’t think it would go anywhere in the direction it took me, especially fantasy.

I wonder if I sometimes over-think things, though. I don’t know if anyone reading the story in the workshop recognized the painting above Ari in the coffee house as a reproduction of Gaugin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” It supported a theme I was exploring in the piece, but it might have been esoteric.

Another thing I learned is that I have a hard time writing short stories. I had the same problem in the Fiction Workshop I took a couple of terms ago that I had in this workshop. My stories end up being the start of a novella or novel rather than fitting into a short story. It’s tempting to think it’s because I choose complicated topics that can’t be resolved in a short period of time, but some of it has to simply be practice. Flannery O’Connor explored what I think were complicated themes, and she wrote brilliant short stories. It’s simply another area for me to keep exploring until I get it figured out.

When it comes to poetry, I still feel like a novice. I gained more experience in the workshop and have started playing with various techniques. In my project I played around with a couple of forms, some traditional and some not. I included a haiku and then in a later draft, I took a page from poet Terrance Hayes. I wrote a “golden shovel” poem based on “Jamesian” by Thom Gunn, which didn’t work very well and only survived one draft of my project. I also took Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet “How Do I Love Thee” and created a sonnet based on the first word of each of the lines in her sonnet. The twist was that instead of the speaker loving a person, it was about the speaker loving her work. That’s one I will play with further because it amused me and I didn’t have time to get it where I really wanted it. In the immediate future I plan to spend time specifically exploring scansion and prosody.

In fact, I will keep working on all of the poems in this project. None of the poems I wrote in this project reflect me as the speaker; it was fun to play around with that.  I believe that I’ve grown more as a poet in this workshop than I have as a fiction writer, perhaps because I had so much farther to grow. I’ve read a lot more fiction than poetry over the years. 

            In the end, this workshop taught me that I still love writing both genres, and I plan to continue working in both of them. I decided to finish my degree in Creative Writing and English because I completed the draft of a novel during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2011 and didn’t know what to do next. Now I do, and I’m anxious to apply what I’ve learned. I have one more class at Southern New Hampshire University before graduating, and then there’s no stopping me. I’m a writer. I will continue writing.

Patching the House, a cento from poems by twelve poets

Two people in a room, speaking harshly.

Now we will count to twelve

This house in one year fallen to decay

guarded in elegant blackness

won’t be forgotten

Hopes, left with those hangers-on

All doors from their lives are entrances

like a window in a building on fire. For Jesus

And silence is always coming,

but nothing lasts forever

There’s a bankruptcy that’s pure gain.

The heat of the night is giving us new things

and the house             after all            is half paid

Sources: [Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Robert Frost, Audre Lorde, Sappho, W.D. Snodgrass, Rainier Maria Rilke, Terrance Hayes, May Sarton, Nikki Giovanni, Jelaluddin Rumi, Mark Strand, Nikki Giovanni]

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “The Census-Taker.” Intro. Louis Untermeyer. New Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969. 179. Print.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Age” Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978. 45. Print.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Poem (for Ema)” Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978. 74. Print.

Hayes, Terrance. “Coffin for Head of State [Trouble Sleep].” Lighthead. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. Kindle file.

Lorde, Audre. “Timepiece.” Comp. Judy Grahn. Another Mother Tongue. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 101. Print.

Neruda, Pablo. “Keeping Quiet.” Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems of Pablo Nerudo. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. 155. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. “Novella.” Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton, 1975. 65. Print.

Rilke, Ranier Maria. “Girls.” Trans. J. B. Leishman. Possibility of Being: a selection of poems. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1977. 9. Print.

Rumi, Jelaluddin. “One Who Does What the Friend…” Trans. Coleman Barks. Soul of Rumi. New York: HarperOne, 2002. N.Pag. Rumi Poetry. Web. 27 August 2014. http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/Rumipoetry1.html#anchor_16450

Sappho. “100.” Trans. Mary Barnard. Sappho. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. n.p. Print.

Sarton, May. “Of the Seasons.” Ed. Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes. Selected Poems of May Sarton. New York: Norton, 1978. 121. Print.

Snodgrass, W.D. “Snow Songs.” Ed. A.R. Ammons. The Best American Poetry 1994. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 169. Print.

Strand, Mark. “The Mysterious Maps.” Ed. A.R. Ammons. The Best American Poetry 1994. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 175. Print.

Dialogue and The Dining Room

A.J. Gurney, Jr.'s "The Dining Room" is a series of french scenes that show the decline of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) through a day spent in a dining room that represents dining rooms across time in America. However, it's also a look at intimate relationships and how they have changed with the culture. One of the scenes early in the second act, is a scene between Jim, in his late sixties, and his daughter Meg, who is about thirty. After a series of messy relationships, Meg wants to move home with her three small children and her father doesn't want her to.

In this short scene, Gurney effectively uses "interpretation and misinterpretation.... to carry the essential freight of theme and characterization" (Downs and Russin 145). When Meg tells Jim that she's left her husband, her father interprets it to mean she's taken a vacation from her husband, because he doesn't want to hear what she is really saying (Gurney 339) and he doesn't want to have the conversation that he knows is coming. He tries to avoid the conversation he knows is coming by trying to not be alone with his daughter, and when that's impossible, tries to steel himself for it with alcohol.

Another technique Gurney uses in this conversation, is to weave the exposition into the conflict. When Jim reveals that he had an affair and that Meg's mother ran off the "other woman" it is exposition, but it's also part of the reasoning behind his argument: that Meg should toss the other woman out and try to make things work with her husband. Similarly, Meg explains that this won't work because she's not only had an affair of her own with a married man, but also with a woman.

Guerney uses dialogue to support the scene but also the overall theme of the play. When Meg says "I want to... do all those things you and Mother used to do with all of us. I want start start again, Dad," she is talking about her own life; she's also longing for the WASP culture that doesn't exist anymore. She says that she can't go back to the way it was in her married life and Jim says that he can't either. He means that he can't go back to the way things were in his marriage as well as to the way things were culturally when he was raising Meg and her siblings.

A.R. Gurney, Jr. is a master at using dialogue to convey characterization and theme. "The Dining Room" gives examples of how to do this over and over in each of the scenes of the play. I'm hopeful that I can learn from him and employ similar technique in my playwriting.

Works Cited

Downs, William Missouri and Robin U. Russin. Naked Playwriting: The Art, The Craft, and the Life Laid Bare. 1st ed. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2004. Print.

Gurney, A.R., Jr. "The Dining Room." Plays From the Contemporary American Theater, ed. Brooks McNamara. New York: Signet Classic, 1988. 339-342. Print.

Larger Than Life: Sister Mary Ignatius

Note: This blog post contains spoilers (about a Chistopher Durang play that's over thirty years old, so if you haven't read it yet, what are you waiting for? It's a one-act, won't take you long at all. Hop to it and then come back here.)

The second play we're reading for the playwriting workshop I'm taking is another play I read when I was at St. Louis University, around 1980 or 1981: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You by Christopher Durang. I remembered the play being wickedly funny satire; I remembered St. Mary Ignatius being larger than life; and I didn't remember a thing about the plot except that Sister Mary Ignatius lectured about Catholicism. That speaks volumes to me about Durang's effectiveness in creating the eponymous character because, for better or worse, she outshines the other elements of the play.

Durang starts by using the stereotype of a conservative nun in traditional wimple and veil. This could only be used effectively in a satire such as this play, but Sister is more than simply a stereotype used for satirical purposes. I like that Durang creates a positive motivation for the things that Sister Mary Ignatius does in the play. When she shoots Gary it isn't because she hates homosexuals, it's for the best possible reason she could have. She believes he'll go to hell because he's an unrepentant homosexual; by killing him after having gone to confession, Sister is sending Gary to heaven. This isn't rationalization for the sake of justification: she believes it.

Durang also uses selectivity effectively in creating dialogue for Sister Mary Ignatius.  "The secret of good dialogue is selectivity—finding the conversation that most reveals the lives of the speakers, finding the expression that means more than itself, finding the word that the audience can instantly absorb and interpret" (Leib). The catechism that Sister discusses in the play is directly tied to the events of her childhood; the audience quickly understands that the convent must have been a refuge for Sister. Her desire to understand the terrible things that God could allow to happen in life conflicts with her desire to be a good Catholic. When Sister says "the only reason God has not destroyed these modern-day Sodoms is that Catholic nuns and priests live in these cities, and God does not wish to destroy them" (Durang 200), she is making the nonsensical fit within the realm of her Catholic beliefs. All of the dialogue Durang has written for Sister is tied to the specific action and themes of the play.

While the Catholic church has been the butt of jokes for at least decades, probably centuries, I am hard-pressed to think of nuns like Sister Mary Ignatius being lampooned until right around the time when Durang was writing this play. While he was working on this play in New York, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of mostly gay men who dress up as nuns to rebel against gender roles, increase AIDS awareness, and raise money for charities, were coming into existence in San Francisco. It was a time when there was a lot of religious oppression directed at the LGBT community. As a gay man, I think Durang channeled his anger into a very funny play full of dark, unexpected moments.

Still, I can't help but think there wasn't enough plot for this to be a full-length play, and perhaps because of that, I don't come away from reading this play believing that there is much of a character arc for Sister Mary Ignatius. There is conflict and rising action, first with the audience being lectured, and then with the former students admitting they have not come to present the pageant for altruistic reasons. We do see Sister move from verbal action to physical action, as the play progresses; however, I don't think she changes very much from start to finish. By the end of the play I want her to be a changed woman, to have some kind of epiphany, and instead she takes a nap. She's killed two people but she hasn't seemed to really change. While that supports a theme that explores the absurdity of an unbending, behind-the-times Catholic Church, it leaves me somewhat unfulfilled. Sister Mary Ignatius is a well-developed character and I think she deserved a better plot.

Works Cited

Durang, Christopher. "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You." Plays From the Contemporary American Theater, ed. Brooks McNamara. New York: Signet Classic, 1988. 193-225. Print.

Leib, Mark E. "Overview of Playwriting." Writing Commons. n.d. Web. 18 July 2014.