Cloud 9 by Caryl ChurchillMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Because the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Miami is producing the play, I will be teaching Cloud Nine this semester to my Into to Theater students. Anticipating this, I reread it this morning. So here are some thoughts...
Act One transpires in Africa during Victorian times, and Act Two jumps to London in 1979, though the characters have only aged 25 years. The historical division between the two acts is almost as significant, if not more so, than the non-traditional casting in Act One (male characters are played by women and vice-versa.) As the author writes in the introduction, Act One is set in Victorian times because she wanted to highlight the repressive gender norms, stifled sexuality, nationalism, patriarchy, and imperialistic values (which, perceptibly, she presents as being interwoven and interdependent on one another.) It’s interesting that there is a doubling/overlap between Victorianism (“traditional” values) and the “savage” colonized African landscape in Act One. This seems intentional, as they are both representative of the past. Though the imperialists consider themselves to be “civilized,” by showcasing how the characters transform from Act One to Act Two, Churchill represents them as unevolved, or stunted, in terms of how they conceived of social progress, in the era before women's and gay liberation.
In Act One, patriarchal values reign supreme. The gay characters and the women fully accept the idea that they aren’t as valuable/good/noble as the heterosexual male father figure. Sexuality in Act One is hushed up and secretive, and exploitation of women, people of color, and homosexual men is considered to be the normal, appropriate way of doing things. These forms of repression/oppression are a priori: they are simply how the civilized world “is.”
All of this changes in Act Two, when the gay characters and the women start acquiring self-esteem and self-awareness. Betty's many lines about how she no longer defines herself through the eyes of her husband (she had previously thought it was her duty to lie still during sex, as if pleasure was something she had no right to expect, until she rediscovers the pleasures of masturbation almost accidentally) evidence her transformation. The characters’ personal growth here mirrors society’s evolution in terms of how women and gay men gain social status. By Act Two, it is possible for gays to pursue both love and sexual fulfillment uncloseted, and for women to earn a living on their own and exist relatively free of male influence. The lesbian character of Lin is the epitome of this, although she realizes by the play's end that men can also be useful, provided they cook and/or are willing to satisfy women sexually.
In terms of social theory, psychoanalysis, and theory of gender, it seems to me that this play prefigures thinkers like Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam (who have written from the 1990s to the present about the way that gender is a performance/social construct rather than something inherent or purely biological), Gayle Rubin (an anthropologist whose influential 1975 article “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” explains how marriages were originally social contracts between two or more men, rather than between one man and one women. Rubin explained that in the pre-Modern era, the bride had little agency, but rather functioned as an object of exchange, i.e. a gift from the father to the husband that ensured a reciprocity of social relations between these two males and their male-dominated kinship networks), Eve Kosofsky-Sedgewick [who, in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), wrote about the importance of “homosocial relationships” in Victorian British literature. Her argument is that heterosexual men valued their relationships with one another in that era more than their relationships with their wives. In the “homosocial world” Sedgwick describes, women were not seen as equals. In fact, they were considered less than human in some ways. In the play, Churchill presents this by contrasting how the character of Clive interacts with Harry as opposed to Betty, his wife], and also post-colonial theorists like Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) and Homi K. Bhahba (1990s-present), who both argue that the Western self-conception of superiority is dependent on a de-humanization of the colonized -- in other words, the West’s elevated conception of itself is intimately tied to its exploitation of others: its barbarism.
Frantz Fanon’s seminal psychoanalytic text Black Skin/White Mask (from 1952, in which Fanon describes how the black colonized subject internalizes the European patronizing, derogating view of him into his own psyche as a result of the dominating social forces of racism, imperialism, etc.) probably also influenced Churchill. Even if not, her dramatic writing echoes it inadvertently. (Considering the character of Joshua, a black African servant who is played by a white man in Act One, it is difficult to imagine that Churchill was completely unaware of Fanon's theories.)
It is interesting that these thinkers (other than Frantz Fanon and Gayle Rubin) actually wrote their work after Churchill wrote Cloud Nine. (Edward Said, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig were her contemporaries.) To me, it feels as though Churchill's playwriting (if it inherently embodies some of these ideas theatrically, and I think it does!) prefigures much of the intellectual discourse that was to come in the fields of cultural studies, critical theory (both postcolonialism and feminist theory), literary criticism, queer theory, etc. Obviously, like Butler and Halberstam, Churchill is probably also influenced by early feminist thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir (who wrote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” as early as 1949) and Luce Irigaray (whose ideas in the 1977 text This Sex Which is Not One were similar to Gayle Rubin’s.)
