Narrative voice in feminist drama: a study of Adrienne Kennedy, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane

Abstract

Much as narratives are an essential part of human life, the scholarly research on narratives under the branch of narratology is quite recent. Particularly the Russian formalism and French structuralism played a vital role in the development of classical narratology within the theoretical framework. However, classical narratology studied narratives mainly in the novels and evaded including the genre of drama in its scope. Flourishing in the 1980s, postclassical narratology has been critical of this omission and paved the way for scholarly studies extending the scope of narratology to other media and genres. In the light of the theoretical works that postclassical narratology produced in relation to drama, this thesis intends to apply narratology to feminist drama. Feminist narratology, a recent branch of postclassical narratology, has restricted its scope primarily to novels and considerably neglected the narrative voice in feminist drama. Yet, drama can convey the narrator-narratee relationships among women characters through the dialogues in the storyworld. More importantly, a playscript does have an agent conveying the story with certain techniques even though this is not seen as overtly as in novels. In feminist plays, this (often invisible) agent may use various narrative techniques to attract attention to gender-related problems. Within this content, this thesis discusses the intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative techniques in the plays of Adrienne Kennedy, Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, which problematize the issue of gender and womanhood.