Beyond dolls and costumes: what power structures inform performative acts?

Like Robin Bernstein in “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature,” Heartbreak House is interested in the performance of texts. For Bernstein, children’s literature is “possible” because children actively participate in materializing that literature through play; they “revise rather than only reify narratives” (163). I’ve already mentioned that I find Bernstein’s claims artificially specific: no reader is merely a passive receptacle, and Bernstein’s argument that “representational play is performative in that it produces culture” is odd insofar as the article does not acknowledge any performative acts beyond those of children playing with dolls (163). Heartbreak House explores the same fundamental concept of culture-making through the materialization of texts that Bernstein’s article does. Its product of choice is the play, but the claims made are similar.

Of course, Heartbreak House is a play, and one in which the characters are often seen taking up and discarding various roles. The strands of Feydeau-like farce; the seeming lack of permanence or import in characters’ actions; the many mentions of costume (Hector’s robe is specifically donned in order to make him look like the exotic characters he pretends to be, for example, and Hesione’s tresses—of which Ellie says, “there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful black hair”—are gleefully revealed to be a wig); and the fact that the Captain behaves as though his house is a ship; all of these things call attention to the performative (106). The characters might be children romping about, playing at being adults at sea.

Heartbreak House is also explicitly concerned with the reception and performance of texts. Ellie begins the play reading Othello. She and Hesione then use this text as a vehicle for discussing Ellie’s desires. Ellie’s reading, it turns out, vehemently excludes what we might argue is the most crucial component of the play (“He was jealous, wasn’t he?” asks Hesione. “Oh, not that,” Eillie replies. “I think all the part about jealousy is horrible” (46)). What Ellie likes in Shakespeare’s play, it turns out, is the part of it that resembles her relationship with Hector. Hector pretends to be an adventurer (Othello) regaling his inexperienced lover (Desdemona) with exotic tales. He is playing out, in other words, Ellie’s fantasy of romance. Thus her materialization of the play is so active as to be founded upon just a few lines of the original text that she claims to admire. She is re-writing as she plays.

Race surfaces very oddly in all of this. Many times, the women (most especially Hesione and Ariadne) are referred to as “witches” and “demons” with mysterious powers. And this is the explanation offered: “Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny” (100). Despite this association with the exotic and demonic, however, the women seem to use the association only to their advantage. They perform the role suggested to them in order to bewitch the assembled company. Race haunts Heartbreak House, but only as a role that can be assumed and used by the potentially marginalized in order for them to achieve power. (It is also worth noting that the race relations of Othello are entirely ignored.) The space of the house in Shaw’s play describes the boundaries of the characters’ world. They are not, it seems, subject to or influenced by any larger structures of power beyond those which exist in the myths of their home. And those—because always materialized, always performed and thereby rewritten—can be used without apparent limitation.

Bernstein’s conclusion about the materialization of texts by children is that this constant enactment “forces us to look anew at nineteenth-century white children and see not racist culture’s reflectors but its coproducers” (167). She is aware that the texts and dolls are “cultural prompts” that the child takes up; children are not authors, but coauthors. What forcing this article into an artificial specificity does, however, is erase all of the other power relations within which a child moves. Bernstein’s article narrows the world of children to their books and their dolls. Similarly, Heartbreak House narrows the world of its characters to their books and their costumes. Both must seek to understand what other structures the individual inevitably references in order to begin to perform.