"Incest is Best (When It's Kept in the Family)":
Staging a Re-conceptualization of the Oedipal Family Matrix in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive

by Matthew Rebhorn

The fascination and obsession with staging the modern American family so prevalent in twentieth-century American playwrights finds itself again realized in the postmodern American writer Paula Vogel and her 1997 Pulitzer-prize winning play, How I Learned to Drive. Like her predecessors, Vogel crafts an enterprising investigation of the modern American family, excising and then penetrating the various components that define the entity known as the family matrix. Even a cursory glance at the play suggests certain parallels between this work and the modern American realist canon. Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, notes that the "play is told from the perspective of the unfortunately nicknamed Li’l Bit..., a lyrical, ambivalent narrator of her own memory in the tradition of Tom in ‘The Glass Menagerie.’" ¹ Another reviewer comments with a cynical aside, "We see [Li’l Bit] squirming in the driver’s seat as a teen-ager, cringing at home in high school, crumbling when she escapes the dysfunctional roost and picks up the family drinking habits at college (If Eugene O’Neill had written this, it would be called ‘How I Learned to Drink’)."² Reminiscent of Mourning Becomes Electra, The Glass Menagerie, and All My Sons, How I Learned to Drive stages a highly dysfunctional nuclear family, a family that ostracizes its daughter and ironically casts an uncle with whom she has an incestuous relationship as her only "nurturing" parent.

What I would like to suggest, however, is that Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is far from simply another version of the same stage family so characteristic of the modern American theater. In a radical re-conception of the themes underlying this as yet unexplored text, we shall develop the ways Vogel constructs Li’l Bit as a lesbian heroine, a protagonist whose long-standing relationship with her uncle, Peck, presents a conceptually distinct notion of the American family. We shall understand how the heroine’s lesbian identity construction—what we shall see is her distinctly "absent presence" and reterritorialization of the phallus—is mapped onto the palimpsest of the secret of incest thus demonstrating a double and simultaneous geography of secrecy. By reading Li’l Bit’s "secret" lesbian desire through the lens of the more obvious "secret" incestuous pleasure between her and her uncle, and focusing this stereoscopic line of sight onto Vogel’s construction of a cybernetic protagonist, we can see how Vogel’s staging of the "cyborg" maps the secret homosexual coordinates onto a non-oedipal and surrogate family paradigm. In short, by using Haraway’s concept of the cyborg this way, Vogel’s play stages an antidote to the pathologized American stage family by making lesbian desire and incestuous pleasure both normative and necessary to a postmodern idea of family.

In the past hundred years, American stage realism has been dominated by issues relating to the family. Indeed, the primacy of the family has become the privileged space to work through dramatic tension. As Douglas Anderson has argued, this primacy of the family in fact became the founding trope of this country—"the guiding analogy, or model, of American life...was to be the family."³ Yet, the American family on stage in the last hundred years has been a violently fractured and "abusive" entity. Looking at some of the most representative families of the American realist canon, we cannot help but notice their pathology: O’Neill’s Mannons, Williams’ Wingfields, Miller’s Lomans and Kellers, as well as Albee’s George and Martha and Shepard’s family in Buried Child, all of these families are dysfunctional as they strive for answers "after the fall."

It then comes as no surprise that Paula Vogel’s American play should also echo this dysfunctional family so prevalent on the American stage in the last half century. If we integrate the disembodied voice of the driving instructor, the family is equated to "idling in the neutral gear,"⁴ a powerful image of the stagnant, unresponsive limits of the American stage family. Furthermore, the curiously absent father makes space for a degenerate patriarch, the grandfather. When Li’l Bit declares her intention to go to college, Grandpa replies: "What does she need a college degree for? She got all the credentials she’ll need on her chest" (14). Consistently reducing women to synedochic "tits and ass," Grandpa later chortles, "How is Shakespeare going to help her lie on her back in the dark?" (14).

Putting more pressure on Grandpa’s language and allusions demonstrates the ruptured and violently repressive vision of the traditional realist family in this play. When Li’l Bit’s grandmother is giving her granddaughter advice about boys, her grandfather is chastised for disturbing them. Endemic of the play as a whole, Grandpa’s ideological response as he gropes for a cookie is simply: "Oh, now we’re off on Grandma and the Rape of the Sa-bean Women!" (26). The allusion to the Rape of the Sabine Women resonates strongly with the play; the founding of Rome, and its establishment of its culture in particular, hinged on the Romans’ raping the Sabine Women. In other words, the establishment of a cultural empire—a phallogocentric society—was contingent and predicated on a metaphoric violence to women.

It is this same violence to women that informs Grandpa’s speech when he admits to Li’l Bit, "I picked your grandmother out of that herd of sisters just like a lion chooses the gazelle—the plump, slow, flaky gazelle dawdling at the edge of the herd" (26). All of the masculine figures in the play display this same "bestial" quality realized through animal imagery. Li’l Bit’s grandmother declares that "Men are bulls! Big bulls!" (27), and we hear how Jerome at the high school dance "sniffs" at our protagonist’s chest and gropes her, to which Li’l Bit’s response is: "You Creep! Cretin! Cro-magnon!" (35). Even her uncle echoes this animal imagery when referring to his own sex—"There’s nothing particularly manly in wolfing down food and then sitting around in a stupor while the women clean up" (45: my emphasis). The image of men as ravenous beasts, imperial rapists, or absent patriarchs rounds out a picture of this American stage family as defunct and dysfunctional as any family seen on the American stage.

More than merely defunct or dysfunctional, however, the modern American stage family has also characterized this pathology through the tropes, actions, and metaphors of "aberrant" sexuality—adultery, homosexuality, and incest—any sexual orientation or experience that threatens the integrity of the nuclear, oedipal family unit. In Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we witness Willy Loman’s adultery as the key dramatic tension of the entire play. Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof raises the spectre of homosexuality in Brick and makes that phantasm the turning point of the whole play. Finally, in a host of plays in the late twentieth-century American canon, we encounter the "secret" threat of incest. O’Neill’s Mannons, Shepard’s Buried Child family, and to a certain extent George and Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? demonstrate that incestuous pleasure must be avoided at all costs, that it is fundamentally dangerous to the integrity of the American oedipal family. In each case, familial incest is pathologized, a "sickness" or "contagion" that in the language of Shepard, for instance, must remained "buried."

Likewise, Vogel’s dysfunctional American family also echoes that element of the American pathologized family unit—incest—that occupies the privileged space of dramatic tension. In fact, as with the pathologized incestuous couplings in other plays, How I Learned to Drive codes this incestuous pleasure as secretive and uses this secrecy to drive the drama. The very first line of the play, in fact, lets us know that the narrative will encapsulate a secret; Li’l Bit relates, "Sometimes to tell a secret, you must first teach a lesson" (9). Indeed, the title of the entire work, a lesson in learning to drive, becomes equated with the geography of a secret. As the ground is covered and the lesson plan followed, the secret becomes less obscure. Nonetheless, seeping out from this "lesson" is the air of secrecy, a fog covering the activities of the characters. Li’l Bit continues: "There’s a moon over Maryland tonight, that spills into the car where I sit beside a man old enough to be—did I mention how still the night is?" (9). Here, we see a noticeable omission on the protagonist’s part; Li’l Bit playfully changes subject to avoid having to complete the phrase "a man old enough to be" with "my father." Here, the incestuous relationship between uncle/father and niece/daughter is hidden behind an obscuring and concealing rhetoric. We see the same concealing rhetoric when Peck and Li’l Bit are flirting in the beginning. Peck asks what shampoo Li’l Bit uses, to which the protagonist states "Herbal Essence." Peck continues: "Herbal Essence. I’m gonna buy me some. Herbal Essence. And when I’m all alone in the house, I’m going to get into the bathtub, and uncap the bottle and—"

The "secret" perversions of Uncle Peck are left unknown, invisible, but obviously sexual—"something...nasty." In fact, the names of the family members, those code names that mask their real identities, also become synonymous with sexual desire; we can’t read "Big Papa," "Uncle Peck," "Titless Wonder," or "BB" as anything other than characters reduced to their coded sexuality.

Uncle Peck’s character is decidedly secretive, a secrecy that cannot help but gesture towards sexual desire. Not only do we hear his niece tell us that she can feel Peck "fighting the trouble—whatever has buried deeper than the scar tissue—and we don’t talk about" (44), but with Peck’s relations with other people, we continually encounter this same "deep" and "secretive" nature. He tells Bobby, "I can keep secrets" (24) and then, "I tell you what—I think I can still remember—there’s a really neat tree house where I used to stay for days—I think it’s still here—it was the last time I looked. But it’s a secret place—you can’t tell anybody we’ve gone there—least of all your mom or sisters—this is something special just between you and me?" (25). In this example, we see the intimation of sexual desire in Peck’s motivation to show his nephew his "secret" tree house. Like a predecessor to Li’l Bit’s sexual liaison with her uncle, Bobby’s incestuous relationship to Peck is hinted at in the hesitant style and absolute nature of the secret, the fact that "you can’t tell anybody we’ve gone there." The secret, therefore, becomes coded as sexual. More importantly, though, this example begins to gesture towards another area of secrecy underlying this play, not only incestuous pleasure but queer desire between a man and his nephew.

In other words, while numerous critics have argued that feminism and realism do not mesh,⁵ Vogel uses this other area of secrecy, namely queer desire, to counter the pathologized nature of American realist familial dramas. As we shall see, Vogel manipulates the tropes of this realist drama to create two simultaneous areas of secrecy, the more obvious incestuous pleasure and the more obscure lesbian desire. In this way, we shall witness not the parallels between this play and the American realist canon, but how this play’s construction of queer desire works to disrupt and put pressure on the "natural" and "monolithic" supports of American realism. What we should keep in mind, however, is that while queer can have merely metaphoric power as an opposition to "straight" linear thinking, what we shall be exploring is the way Vogel’s secret queer desire acts as an antidote to the oedipal breakdown in the play by subverting heterosexual normalcy with a distinct and incarnated form of manifest lesbian desire. ⁶

Sedgwick suggests that in "such texts as Billy Budd and Dorian Gray and through their influence, the subject—the thematics—of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and imitation, of secrecy and disclosure, become not contingently but integrally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic" (Sedgwick Epistemology 74). What Sedgwick suggests is of the utmost importance to a reading of Vogel’s work, for this critic maps works onto coordinates dominated by the issue of homosexuality and its revelation or suppression, a reterritorializing that resonates with How I Learned to Drive. As Sedgwick notes, "Among the striking aspects of considering closetness in this framework....is that [it] is a series of silences!"⁷ Much of homosexual identity rests on continuous repression and submission of this identity, on the secrecy of its presence, on its invisibility. As Sedgwick and others have shown, successful sexual passing hinges on the participant’s ability to pass unseen even if there are codes that reveal the participant’s choice and experience of passing. "One of the most pervasive themes in lesbian criticism is that women-identified writers, silenced by a homophobic and misogynistic society, have been forced to adopt coded and obscure language and internal censorship."⁸

By teasing out the sexual orientation of Li’l Bit and her coded, obscure, and ostensibly playful rhetoric, we shall discover, as Sedgwick maps out, that these secret codes and invisible phenomenon belie a distinct queer desire. In her lesson on driving, Li’l Bit asks quite naturally why the car must be a "she," to which Peck responds: "Good question. It doesn’t have to be a ‘she’—but when you close your eyes and think of someone who responds to your touch—someone who performs just for you and gives you what you ask for—I guess I always see a ‘she.’ You can call her what you like" (34). Li’l Bit closes her eyes, she relates, "and decided not to change the gender" (34). While seemingly a playful, amusing rhetorical quip, the humor here masks Li’l Bit’s sexual desire: when she closes her eyes and imagines "someone who responds to her touch," she sees women, not men, and thus hints at a secret lesbian desire.

Likewise, at the end, she relates how she has never known what it’s like to jog or dance, anything that reminds her of her high school dance experience—in short, anything that makes her "jiggle." Instead, she likes "to watch people on the dance floor, or out on the running paths, just jiggling away" (57). Although not as strikingly obvious as her gendering of the car, Li’l Bit’s desire to watch women—those subjects who "jiggle" like she did on the dance floor of her high school—casts her as a lesbian voyeur, finding visual sexual pleasure in other women. Even when Uncle Peck asks whether she is seeing other men, she can only balk and obscure her answer behind the "absence" of her reply. She hesitantly replies, "I—no, that’s not the reason—I—well, yes, I am seeing other—listen, it’s not really anybody’s business!" (51). Here, heterosexual desire cannot speak its name, for as she is responding to Peck’s demand in the affirmative, the heterosexual confirmation is derailed; she can only spurt out "well, yes, I am seeing other—" without completing it with "men." This hesitancy is more than an attempt to mimic the inchoate nature of the utterance; this omission on Li’l Bit’s part masks a strong undercurrent of lesbian desire.

What is important to realize is that as with numerous other works, the dyad between secrecy and revelation, between taboo action and "natural" action, informs the tone and themes of this work, and thus hints at what Sedgwick defines as the "queer" undercurrent to a play like this (Tendencies 8). Bonnie Zimmerman sums up the idea of lesbian invisibility nicely: "Reality is organized by men on a stage on which they are the principal actors and women the stagehands and backdrop. To maintain the fiction of this reality, no one must attend to any other movement but those of the main actors, men.... But lesbians construct an alternative reality by attending to, or focusing on, that background."⁹ Vogel’s coded and secretive language—the pervasiveness of invisibility as a constituent element of the driving lesson—begins to hint at a backstage where the absent presence of Li’l Bit’s "love that dares not speak its name" could be fostered and developed.

Some critics have argued that queer drama, which focuses on performance, tends to privilege the visible to the detriment of the invisible, tends to push for lesbian desire to be foregrounded on the "main stage." "It is as if ‘what is gender?’ is still confined to ‘what is visibly gendered?’"¹⁰ Peggy Phelan has argued that "the binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility is falsifying. There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal."¹¹ There is a real, undeniable appeal to construct a more inclusive representational geography—not to mention the fact that underrepresented communities or traditionally repressed social groups can be empowered by enhanced visibility—but to do so without wrestling with the terms of this visibility can often enervate the potential power of these identities.

Developing this idea of the power of being invisible, or "unmarked," we can parse out the encrypted meaning of Peck’s metaphor about the inn to which he takes his niece. Peck gives us a history lesson: "When the British sailed up this very river in the dead of night...they were going to bombard the heck out of this town. But the town fathers were ready for them. They crept up all the trees with lanterns so that the British would think they saw the town lights and they aimed their cannons too high" (17). In this example, it is the illusion/secret of the town’s misrepresented location that allows the site to be spared. In certain ways, this deceitful secret was the agency for the town’s salvation from the powerful imperial push of the British. Similar to what Phelan would argue, the invisibility and repression of facts become a powerful mode of subverting the potent imperial forces of the hegemony.

Invisibility as a strategy to subvert the hegemony also gains a sexual valence in Vogel’s play, becoming a valuable tool for redefining the parameters of "hegemonic" sexual identity. We encounter this sexually subversive power of invisibility in the highly tense photoshoot scene. Here, we again encounter the language of secrecy or invisibility. Li’l Bit relates: "In every man’s house some small room, some zone in his home is set aside. It might be the attic, or the study, or a den. And there’s an invisible sign as if from the old tree house: Girls Keep Out.... Here he keeps his secrets" (39). This space first gets coded as distinctly masculine—the masculine secret—and subsequently, we see how the feminine body enters this space to be objectified by the camera’s gaze. Yet, in certain ways, this space is problematized because of the evaporation of masculine agency. Peck assures Li’l Bit that "I’m not here—just my voice" (40), which already questions the dominance of this patriarchal maneuver. Vogel then further complicates this masculine space by telling us that as the protagonist looks at her uncle and "begins to unbutton her blouse," the older Li’l Bit, our narrator, truncates the complete revelation of the female body by conjuring a notably "neutral," asexual voice talking about "implied consent" (43). Invisibility thus becomes a way of de-stabilizing this masculine, secret space: in other words, Li’l Bit’s manipulation and denial of the visual pleasure of the nude female body in one of the most essentially masculine-coded spaces allows Vogel’s heroine to enjoy political agency.

The "clearest" example of the power of invisibility and secrets within How I Learned to Drive, and the way this invisibility not only subverts the hegemony but subverts the hegemonic notion of (hetero)sexuality by inserting lesbian desire as a viable alternative logic, is in Li’l Bit’s confessions about her college career. She talks of "cruising and boozing" the backroads of Maryland, an act that most reviewers of the work see as nostalgic yearning. "Li’l Bit, like all of us in some way, is searching for a lost innocence. Why else does she cruise the backroads of Maryland, a place where she imagines the country ‘before the malls took over,’ before childhood was shattered?" (Hartigan). As most queer critics note, "cruising" has become an adopted code for sexual speculation.¹² Although one could read Li’l Bit’s admission that what she did most nights when she was in college "was cruise the Beltway and the back roads of Maryland" (16) as being perfectly innocent, we cannot also help but see that Vogel may be coding homosexual desire here. This suggestion gains potency later in the same speech when Li’l Bit coyly tells us: "There were a lot of rumors about why I got kicked out of that fancy school in 1970. Some say I got caught with a man in my room. Some say as a kid on scholarship I fooled around with a richman’s daughter. (Li’l Bit smiles innocently at us.) I’m not talking" (16). Here, we see the most obvious example of lesbian desire being consciously suppressed. Understanding the coded nature of "cruising" coupled with the smirking "I’m not talking" about the "richman’s daughter" both reveals the invisible and coded presence of lesbian desire, reminiscent of Li’l Bit’s cogitation on "jiggling" and the car’s gender, and underscores the subversive force of the "invisible presence" of this desire. The refusal to talk becomes a way of safeguarding the integrity of the lesbian desire and of speculating about the disruptive power of that silence, a power that disrupts the authority of "that fancy school." Thus, we come closer to understanding how Vogel, through coded examples, is beginning to construct lesbian subjectivity and its power.

Vogel continues in this vein by pursuing the psychoanalytically rich field of meaning surrounding Li’l Bit’s uncle’s driving lesson, from which the title arises. Most feminist critics have noted that in Freud’s models of behavior, desire is, as he himself admits, inherently masculine. "There is only male or rather masculine libido..., the notion of female desire is oxymoronic."¹³ Rita Felski provides one of the clearest discouragements to using psychoanalytic theory. She states:

This "master code" is indelibly driven by the primacy of the phallus, an element that informs all uses of psychoanalytic theory and criticism in both literary critique and cultural studies.¹⁵

This argument about the pejorative nature of feminist psychoanalytic theory has interesting resonances with Li’l Bit’s character, most notably her moniker. She states, "In my family, folks tend to get nicknamed for their genitalia," and then her mother narrates—"And of course, we were so excited to have a baby girl—that when the nurse brought you in and said, ‘It’s a girl! It’s a baby girl!’ I just had to see for myself. So we whipped your diapers down and parted your chubby little legs—and right between your legs there was," Peck and her mother chime in together, "Just a little bit" (12). Vogel ironizes Freudian psychoanalytic theory by reducing characters to genitalia, identity to sex, and while several critics have noticed Vogel’s protagonist’s idiosyncratic name, none of them have hazarded a guess as to its full implications beyond irony (Brantley 11).¹⁶

One way of exploring the full import of Li’l Bit’s name beyond the ironic rendition of Freud’s theory is by rehearsing and applying Judith Butler’s theories surrounding what she calls the "lesbian phallus." Butler’s powerful reading has a provocative and elucidating effect on deciphering the puzzle of the protagonist’s name, and thus demands a careful and precise deployment. Butler begins her argument by noticing that, in Lacanian theory, "the ego cannot be said to identify with an object itself; rather, it is through an identification with an imago, which is itself a relation, that the ‘outside’ of the ego is first ambiguously demarcated, indeed, that a spatial boundary that negotiates ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is established in and as imaginary."¹⁷ In other words, the difference between inside and outside is imaginary—an imago. Undoubtedly, for Lacan, some parts of the body become the tokens for controlling the bodily imago and become the organs that structure the interaction of one ego with another and the ego’s engagement with the world of objects. In this way, Butler suggests, "these organs become part of the imaginary elaboration of the ego’s bodily boundary, tokens and ‘proof’ of its integrity and control" (77) and at the moment in which these organ(s) become the privileged model by which all "Others" are known, this function becomes phallogocentric.

Butler notes of Lacan, however, that in his essay, "The Signification of the Phallus" (1958), the psychologist will "deny that the phallus is either an organ or an imaginary effect; it is instead a ‘privileged signifier’" (77). Butler uses this admission to suggest that Lacan conceptualizes the phallus not as a body part, but the entire corpus—not an imaginary effect, but the basis for all imaginary effects. Indeed, because of this idealization, "one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its materialized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization" (Bodies 86). Butler’s masterstroke here is to suggest that because the penis and the phallus are separable, according to Lacan himself, the re-appropriation of the transferable phantasm of the phallus can "call into question" the masculine morphology and its ipso facto dominance.

Butler is referring first and foremost to the idea of a "lesbian phallus." When the phallus is linked to lesbian pleasure, it both resembles and disintegrates the masculinist figure of power. It problematizes masculine power by splitting the signifier notably. Furthermore, by adopting the phallic function, the lesbian phallus "(re)produces the specter of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus" (Butler Bodies 89). At first glance, however, this is exactly what we don’t encounter in the parking lot of Beltsville Agricultural Farms in Vogel’s play: the "Initiation into a Boy’s First Love" (31). In this scene, we hear Peck talking about a car—"a V-8 with corvette option, 225 horsepower; went from 0-60 miles per hour in 8.9 seconds"—to which Li’l Bit interjects what this car signifies—"long after a mother’s tits, but before a woman’s breasts...the boy falls in love with the thing that bears his weight with speed" (31-32). Vogel here equates the woman’s body with that over-determined sign of phallic power, the car. When Peck later declares, "I want to teach you to drive like a man" (34), we can see how ostensibly Li’l Bit, like all good Lacanian women, becomes a substitute for the phallic imago.

However, at the end, when Li’l Bit is getting in the car, she sees Peck’s spirit in the backseat, in the rearview mirror, and then drives off (58). At this point in the play, Li’l Bit defines her agency by separating the phallus from its material signifier, the penis. Li’l Bit’s aggressive and metaphoric reterritorializing of the phallic function—becoming the driver rather than the pupil—demonstrates more than a traditional "rite of passage." This symbolic "mirror phase" of Li’l Bit’s ego formation, her realization of her own integrity localized in a phallic function, also casts light on her moniker: we see a "little bit" between her legs as Vogel’s indication of the metaphoric absent presence of the phallus. The transferable phantasm of the phallus becomes marked by the protagonist’s "little bit," and her agency becomes further coded as "lesbian agency" since, as Butler has theorized, this sexual agency is "localized within the...variation on the repetition" of the masculine, phallic construction.¹⁸ Butler has argued that the heterosexual origin is "utterly constructed" so that "gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy" (Gender 31), and in Li’l Bit’s name and her character progression, we see how Vogel is indeed varying the repetitive construction of masculine agency. Vogel consciously chooses to highlight the absent presence of Li’l Bit’s lesbian agency through a localized and material displacement of the phallus in both name and action: after all, Li’l Bit—that "little bit"—is the driver here. Vogel uses the invisibility of her protagonist’s lesbian subjectivity and agency to center the power of this image as well as to critique powerfully the "naturalized" psychoanalytic primacy of the penis as phallus, masculine as superior, heterosexual as normative.

In other words, the coded space of lesbian desire subverts the hegemony of a (pathologized) heterosexual space located in the family. After all, the oedipal dyad of incestuous desire—father and daughter—is fractured because the daughter-figure does not desire the phallus heterosexually. While the protagonist may desire the phallic function of the penis, her underlying disinterest in the penis itself heightens the separation of the phallic function from the actual body part, and by doing so, goes a long way to mitigating the tension of the incestuous pleasure as a taboo, and in certain ways, to re-articulating what it means to be a family sans Oedipus. In short, the fracturing of the oedipal dyad occurs along the lines of heterosexual normalcy so that by substituting lesbian desire into the equation, we witness both the constructed nature of an admittedly pathologized family paradigm and begin to be able to re-conceptualize the family matrix.

To understand the exact implications of this re-conceptualization of the oedipal family matrix, we must turn to the ways that Paula Vogel stages the cyborg described by Donna Haraway. By realizing Vogel’s staging of the cyborg, we can understand how the playwright both reads technology as a space that can be manipulated and grafted so as to deconstruct heterosexual normativity and uses this same hybrid conceptualization to map Li’l Bit’s secret homosexual desire onto a non-oedipal family paradigm based on surrogacy.

Vogel re-maps technology onto sexuality and through this hybridization, provides powerful critiques of heterosexuality and its "natural" construction. For instance, Li’l Bit tells another girl at a high school dance:

The idea of her breasts being alien parasites that scientifically graft themselves onto her anatomy evokes an Alien-esque science fiction story—the tools of technology and their effects put under the microscope.

Vogel makes the hybridization, or "grafting," of technology and sexuality even more pointed when she makes Li’l Bit’s anatomy cybernetic. In one scene, the stage directions tell us that "there is occasional rhythmic beeping, like a transmitter signaling. Li’l Bit is aware of it, but can’t figure out where it is coming from.... The Male Greek Chorus member wheezes, grabs his throat, and sniffs at Li’l Bit’s chest, which is beeping away" (35). Li’l Bit even seems to be thinking about her cybernetic breasts—"maybe someone’s implanted radio transmitters in my chest at a frequency I can’t hear, that girls can’t detect, but they’re sending out these signals to men" (38). Finally, later in the same scene, the truth is driven home: "over the music there’s a rhythmic, hypnotic beeping transmitted, that both Greg and Peck hear. Li’l Bit hears too, and in horror stares at her chest" (38). Vogel draws a blatant parallel between Li’l Bit’s sexuality, her womanly breasts, and a technology of radio transmission—a cybernetic grafting.

Haraway defines a cyborg as a "hybrid of machine and organism, a creative of social reality as well as a creature of fiction."¹⁹ When Haraway goes on to define the cyborg as "a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as woman’s experience in the late twentieth century" (149), we can begin to see the political effect of Vogel’s staging the cyborg.

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation" (Haraway 150). Haraway argues that the difference between natural and artificial has been compromised, an ambiguity whose distortion sends ripples of disruption through the entirety of hegemonic fixed order. The cyborg identity, on the other hand, "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of conscious solution, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the ‘woman’ of some streams of the white women’s movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix" (Haraway 156). In other words, the technology of cyborgs presents a new matrix of imagery that may allow a way out of the dualisms that have tried to account for bodies, machines, sexuality, and power.

If this definition of a cyborg seems naturally to drift towards non-traditional sexual orientations, it is because the cyborg imagination is a potent way to challenge the normativity of heterosexuality, among other institutions. In other words, the "strategy of making assemblages of bodies and technologies proposed by Haraway should have a special valence for lesbians, who as a group have a history of playing with body assemblages against which straight female’s masquerading pale in comparison."²⁰ Haraway’s notion of the cyborg, therefore, provides a powerful alternative strategy for constructing lesbian bodies and conceptualizing lesbian identity politics as a body of power. The technology of the cyborg, as embodied and staged by Li’l Bit, opens up possibilities for feminists because of the breakdown of clear boundaries between organisms and machines, and the similar distinctions that structure hegemonic identity. Vogel’s staging here of the cyborg manifesto in the figure of Li’l Bit allows lesbian agency a form of its own and a telos towards which to strive. Haraway describes this telos quite elegantly:

Having thus seen how Haraway’s cyborg staged by Vogel problematizes heterosexual normativity, we can put more pressure on Haraway’s theories about the cyborg. By doing this, we shall see how the subtext of Haraway’s argument all but posits "unnatural" sexual couplings as a mode of realizing a new "feminist science," and in this way, the exact parameters of Vogel’s non-oedipal family become apparent. Haraway states that "there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Women, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It passes through woman and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life" (177). If we then realize how Haraway suggests that a new "feminist science" can only be achieved through "potent and taboo fusions" (173), we are left with the idea that "taboo" sexual couplings will be the backbone to a new feminist infrastructure; we encounter the idea that "illegitimate offspring" are to be cherished and emulated for being "unfaithful to their origins" and making obsolete "their fathers" (151). Haraway indeed argues that "the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival" (150). Thus, Haraway’s cyborg manifesto hints at the affective power of masticating the unsettling idea of incest as a kind of normative sexual relation.

Yet, as critics like Judith Butler have argued, by simply proposing subversion without scripting the development of a new ideology, theorists like Derrida, and even Haraway to a certain extent, may be merely leaving hegemonic codes of procedure in place.²¹ To re-conceptualize the oedipal phenomenon, therefore, we must concentrate on how subversion may be substantiated and extended, conceiving of a network of productive alternatives that will significantly call into question oedipal norms and provide useful structures to facilitate a paradigm shift. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is a key text in attempting to conceive of alternative paradigms, although, as we shall see, Butler stops on the threshold of plunging into a well of support for incest. Taking Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Elementary Structures of Kinship as her point of departure, Butler recalls that for Lévi-Strauss, the bride in primitive cultures functions as an object passed between different men: "she does not have an identity.... She reflects masculine identity precisely through being the site of its absence" (39).²² Butler continues that the taboo against heterosexual incest, for Lévi-Strauss, becomes a universal fantasy or "truth" of all cultures.

Jacques Lacan’s adoption of Lévi-Strauss’ focus on the prohibition of incest pushes the model further. For Lacan, culture is understood first and foremost as a set of linguistic significations and structures. For Lacan, therefore, the "Law which forbids the incestuous union between boy and mother initiates the structures of kinship, a series of highly regulated libidinal displacements that take place through language.... Speech emerges only upon the condition of dissatisfaction, where dissatisfaction is instituted through incestuous prohibition" (Butler Gender 43). Butler suggests that the oedipal incest taboo becomes the fundamental element of identity construction; for Lacan, the subject can only come into being—that is, become a signifier within language—through the repression of the incestuous desire.

Butler concludes: "The incest taboo is the juridical law that is said both to prohibit incestuous desires and to construct certain gendered subjectivities through the mechanism of compulsory identification. But what is to guarantee the universality or necessity of that law?" (76). In this last statement, Butler sets the stage for a completely novel re-conceptualization of sexuality by questioning both the universality of the incest taboo and, more earth-shattering yet, the necessity of forbidding incest. She quietly asks, "What might an alternative logic of kinship look like? To what extent do indentitarian logical systems always require the construction of socially impossible identities to occupy an unnamed, excluded, but presuppositional relation subsequently concealed by the logic itself?" (39). As we can see, Butler does not actually posit the idea of incest as positive, but her questioning of the universality, necessity, and utility of the concept demands that "an alternative logic of kinship" be explored—one where incestuous desire may indeed be less than taboo.

Butler’s "alternative logic of kinship" syncopates quite nicely with Haraway’s idea that the "family of man is multiple, pregnant, and complex" (Haraway 160). Butler’s argument also jives with Benedict Anderson’s own conceptions of familial communities. In his watershed work, Anderson has argued that the formulation of nationhood can be conceptualized most potently as an "imagined community" not dependent on natural bonds but articulated through a shared system of signs, through "the non-arbitrariness of signs" within a given group.²³ Anderson's idea carves out a space for what an "alternative logic of kinship" might entail: not familial blood bonds between subjects, not consanguinity, but rather surrogate kinship, a mutual congruence between both subjects concerning the very idea of subjectivity and their interdependence.

Indeed, in Vogel’s work, one way of reading Uncle Peck within this genealogy and commensurate with the theories of Butler, Haraway, and Anderson is as a surrogate father, a paternal figure whose slightly skewed familial relation to Li’l Bit allows him the ability to be supportive without subscribing to a patriarchal rhetoric of female suppression. In short, his avuncular construction allows Vogel to build on the suggestions of these critics so as to problematize the nuclear family structure and propound a non-oedipal system of familial relations based on surrogacy. Indeed, because Anderson’s "imagined community" has problematized traditional notions of nationhood and kinship, and because Haraway has put so much pressure on the integrity of the oedipal family matrix, Vogel can now stage a family not based on a pathological model, but one situated in a dialogue about surrogacy, about being almost oedipal and nuclear but retaining qualities that allow the dangers of the hegemonic system to be circumvented. After all, if we concentrate for a moment on Peck’s name, we immediately see his allusive citation—Gregory Peck, the consummate father in the film To Kill A Mockingbird (1962).²⁴ Add to that the fact that other characters comment on how Uncle Peck held Li’l Bit in his "outstretched hand" (12) like a father, and how Peck is "so good to [children] when they get to be this age" (15), and we see Peck as a father-figure, indeed almost a father except for the direct genetic linkage.

Yet, if we also see how Vogel goes out of her way to draw attention dramatically to Peck’s identity as almost a father, we begin to see how this playwright is re-conceptualizing the family. After a fight between her family and Li’l Bit, the protagonist runs outside to be alone. A few beats later, Peck attempts to approach her, saying, "I don’t suppose you’re talking to family. Does it help that I’m in-law?" (15). Li’l Bit responds, "Don’t you dare make fun of this," to which Peck strangely retorts: "I’m not. There’s nothing funny about this" (15). One way of reading this exchange is that Peck’s very identity as an "in-law" and not patrilineally primary is an alternative viewpoint that is indeed not "funny." Vogel’s dramatic highlighting here thus sheds light on Li’l Bit’s later playful chaffing of the idea of family; she smirks, "[F]amily is just another acquired taste, like French kissing" (15). While undoubtedly funny, Vogel here indicates one of the more legitimate and serious undercurrents in her work—"the (nuclear, oedipal) family is just another acquired taste," a taste that finds alternative and "monstrous" ingredients in the family matrix being staged by Vogel.²⁵

Repeatedly in How I Learned to Drive, we hear the simple, almost ironic tautology, "Family is family" (15, 45, 53). In fact, both Peck and Li’l Bit mention it to each other as if reinforcing the legitimacy of their bond as family, an incestuous bond between an uncle and his queer niece. Many reviewers have cited just this legitimation as a major problem with the piece: "There is something unintentionally creepy, too, about the writing, which suffers from that peculiarly American soft-centredness, that craven desire not to cause offense. If it is possible to imagine a ‘feel-good’ show about child abuse, then this is it."²⁶ In the Los Angles Times, another reviewer concurs that Vogel’s play posits an affirmative ending to an endlessly troubling situation. "Vogel’s urge toward forgiveness brings ‘How I Learned to Drive’ to its problematic coda—a frustrating cap to a fine, tricky play.... Without the woman’s conflicted emotions, we’re left on an unalloyed note of affirmation" (Phillips). However, what these reviewers find "creepy" or "problematic," I have been arguing is, in fact, affirmative to a great degree. Most critics have noted that Li’l Bit "holds onto the lessons that matter most, and finally, she is able to put the key in the ignition and drive—safely, indignantly, and with complete control" (Hartigan); what I am suggesting is that one of the "lessons" that Li’l Bit has learned and that we have learned by extension is the valuable re-conceptualization of the family not as nuclear, insulated, oedipal, and violently oppressive, but, with Sedgwick in mind, as extended, integrated, non-oedipal, and tenderly subversive.

It would be naively optimistic to suggest, however, that Vogel’s surrogate family matrix, with its "incestuous" kinship, does not, in Haraway’s words, distinguish another "logic of repression." After all, we need only recall the events that transpire at a Philadelphia hotel room in 1969 to gather exactly how painfully stagnant and destructively repressive the relationship between Peck and Li’l Bit has become: Li’l Bit is flunking out of school and, like all good O’Neill protagonists, turning to the bottle for solace, while Peck is desperately hanging on to memories of Li’l Bit and pathetically re-enacting them in hopes of recapturing a lost past. Yet, as the end of the play makes clear, Li’l Bit has come to cherish new ideas that never occurred to her in her youth, namely "family and forgiveness" (57). She has integrated her past into her present psychology, finding the strength and character to "forgive" Peck for his damaging effects on her own development and, more importantly, to understand and "believe in" the idea of "family" turned on its head to include Peck and herself. In other words, Li’l Bit’s belief in forgiveness and family creates a necessarily dual mode of reading Vogel’s play, as a work that simultaneously explores a new, intriguing idea of family that pushes at the edge of the Oedipal family matrix and understands that this "new" family imaginary contains flaws, errors, and missteps—both trivial and egregious—but is a worthy and ultimately healthy direction in which to go.

By thus developing simultaneous areas of secrecy—incest and homosexuality—within a genealogy of pathologized familial drama on the American stage, Vogel allows the absent presence of lesbian desire to depathologize the classic American stage family "suffering" from incest. By reading how Vogel also stages Haraway’s cyborg in the figure of the lesbian Li’l Bit, we can also see a re-conceptualization not only of heterosexual normative realism but of the American theatrical tradition that Vogel both locates her play within and deconstructs in its very character. By thus using Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Vogel both defies the normalcy of heterosexual realism and scripts a new ideology of surrogacy. Surrogacy thus becomes the hinge—or brisure—in defining a new, non-oedipal family matrix for the American stage even if its initial realization in this play still grapples with its own set of repressive tactics. As Paula Vogel has noted to me about the idea of family in her play, the "real alternative [to the Oedipal matrix] is an offstage space where Li’l Bit constructs a lesbian family,"²⁷ but this play, with all of its subtle re-workings of such dominant motifs and themes in American drama and in our lives, allows us to comprehend a more mortal, flawed, and realistic foundation to imagining new communities like the one Vogel sees waiting in the wings at the beginning of a new millennium.

Notes

1. Ben Brantley, "A Pedophile Even Mother Could Love." New York Times 17 March 1997: 11. (back)

2. Patti Hartigan, "The Route of One Evil: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Tells a Woman’s Story of Sexual Abuse, Survival." Boston Globe 26 May, 1998: E1. (back)

3. Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 1. (back)

4. Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997) 12. All further quotations from this play use this edition and its pagination. (back)

5. Jill Dolan, "‘Lesbian’ Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology" in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. by Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 42. See also Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theater (New York: Methuen, 1985) 124. In another work, Jill Dolan again blasts realism, labeling it "a conservative force that reproduces and reinforces dominant cultural relations" while its structure is "embedded in oppressive representational strategies" in The Feminist Critic as Spectator (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) 84. Also consult Rosemary Curb’s "Re/cognition, Re/presentation, Re/creation in Women-Conscious Drama: The Seer, the Seen, the Scene, the Obscene" Theatre Journal, 37 (1985) 33. (back)

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that "a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are...marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition." The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 72. (back)

7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 11. (back)

8. Bonnie Zimmerman, "What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism" in Sexual Practice/ Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993) 40. (back)

9. Bonnie Zimmerman, "Perverse Reading: The Lesbian Appropriation of Literature" in Sexual Practice/ Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993) 137. (back)

10. Martha Vicinus, "Introduction" in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Reader, ed. by Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 7. (back)

11. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993) 6. See also Phelan’s chapter on Operation Rescue where she expounds on the insidious power of visibility in abortion rights (130-145). (back)

12. Alisa Soloman, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997) 168. (back)

13. Elisabeth Grosz, "Refiguring Lesbian Desire" in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 72. (back)

14. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 175. (back)

15. In a penetrating and intelligent article, Anne Fausto-Sterling observes just this primacy of the phallus. She notes that "male infants who receive extensive penile surgery often end up with badly scarred and thus physically insensitive members. While no surgeon considers this to be a desirable outcome, in assigning sex to an intersexual infant or to a boy with micropenis, sexual pleasure clearly takes a backseat to ensuring heterosexual conventions. Penetration in the absence of pleasure takes precedence over pleasure in the absence of penetration." "How to Build a Man" in Science and Homosexualities, ed. by Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997) 222. (back)

16. See also Michael Phillips’ "Navigating a Tricky Road: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Steers Clear of Easy Answers as It Probes Themes of Sexual Awakening, Adult Betrayal," Los Angeles Times 26 February, 1999: F1. (back)

17. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993) 74. See also Jane Gallop’s The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) and her Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) for concise readings of Lacan’s esoteric and confusing prose. (back)

18. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) 145. (back)

19. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 149. (back)

20. Cathy Griggers, "Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction" in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 127. (back)

21. Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 18. See also Janelle Reinelt’s "Staging the Invisible: The Crisis of Visibility in Theatrical Representation" Text and Performance Quarterly, 14 (1994). (back)

22. See also Luce Irigiray who argues that psychoanalysis articulated as the imposition of oedipalization is in fact a reproduction of a circuit of symbols where women equal objects. These women serve as linkage nexi between men at various points. This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. by Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). (back)

23. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 14. (back)

24. This may indeed be Vogel’s tongue-in-cheek commentary on the paternal in To Kill A Mockingbird: her equation of Gregory Peck as father incarnate and Uncle Peck as warped uncle both destabilizes this very potent incarnation of the paterfamilias and elevates the "warped" characterization of Uncle Peck to a more hegemonically valid figure of paternity. (back)

25. Sedgwick pursues just such a theme in her research on Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest. She isolates the figure of the uncle as being a keystone in supporting a new family paradigm–a non-oedipal family matrix similar to Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. Sedgwick begins by noting that the terms "uncle" and "aunt" have been coded since Wilde as being synonymous with queerness, noting that Proust’s essay called "The Men-Women of Sodom" was simply titled, "La Race des Tantes" (Tendencies 59). She suggests that having uncles and aunts–even non-incestuous ones–means perceiving the parental figures as siblings, "not, that is, as alternatively abject and omnipotent links in a chain of compulsion and replication that leads inevitably to you; but rather as elements in a varied, contingent, recalcitrant but re-forming sexuality, as people who demonstrably could have turned out very differently" (63). She sees uncles as being a key term in re-conceptualizing your own identity, as well as your own sexuality. In the end, Sedgwick advocates a more "elastic, inclusive definition of ‘family,’ beginning with a re-legitimation of the avunculate...in order to project into the future a vision of ‘family’ elastic enough to do justice to the depths and sometimes durability of nonmarital and/or nonproductive bonds" (71). (back)

26. Charles Spencer, "Compelling Drama Let Down by a Lamentably Soft Centre," The Daily Telegraph 26 June 1998: 25. (back)

27. Paula Vogel. Letter to the Author. 6 July 1999. (back)

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Anderson, Douglas. A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Brantley, Ben. "A Pedophile Even Mother Could Love," New York Times 17 March 1997.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

_______. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Case, Sue-Ellen. The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

_______. Feminism and Theater. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Curb, Rosemary. "Re/cognition, Re/presentation, Re/creation in Women-Conscious Drama: The Seer, the Seen, the Scene, the Obscene" Theatre Journal, 37 (1985).

D’Emilio, John. "Capitalism and Gay Identity" in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. by Ann, Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Critic as Spectator. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.

________. "‘Lesbian’ Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology" in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. by Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. "How to Build a Man" in Science and Homosexualities, ed. by Vernon A. Rosario. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Gallop, Jane. The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982

________. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Griggers, Cathy. "Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post)Mechanical Reproduction" in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Grosz, Elizabeth. "Refiguring Lesbian Desire" in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. by Laura Doan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Haraway, Donna J.. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hartigan, Patti. "The Route of One Evil: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Tells a Woman’s Story of Sexual Abuse, Survival." Boston Globe 26 May, 1998.

Irigiray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Phillips, Michael. "Navigating a Tricky Road: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Steers Clear of Easy Answers as It Probes Themes of Sexual Awakening, Adult Betrayal," Los Angeles Times 26 February, 1999.

Reinelt, Janelle. "Staging the Invisible: The Crisis of Visibility in Theatrical Representation" Text and Performance Quarterly, 14 (1994).

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

_________. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Solomon, Alisa. Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender. London: Routledge, 1997.

Spencer, Charles. "Compelling Drama Let Down by a Lamentably Soft Centre," The Daily Telegraph 26 June 1998.

Vicinus, Martha. "Introduction" in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Reader, ed. by Martha Vicinus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997.

__________. Letter to the Author. 6 July 1999.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. "Perverse Reading: The Lesbian Appropriation of Literature" in Sexual Practice/ Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

__________. "What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism" in Sexual Practice/ Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.