Stanley Spencer, one of England's most lauded post-war visual artists, is also among the most obscure outside of the context of his reception in England, which included his being Knighted near the end of his life.(Hauser, 2001) In a “Self-Portrait” from 1914 the artist paints himself in what can be deemed a faux-Renaissance style. (MacCarthy, 1997) The face is illuminated and fleshy, while the backdrop recedes behind the intense vision of self, as if to infinity. It is as if the dark looming presence of the Great War itself, which would for Spencer be a catalyst for transforming trauma into visionary ecstasy through a philosophy of love and sex, is captured in his audacious stare and the dense black background. His eyes are expressive of meaning, a combination of hunger, vision, sexual desire, egoism and fear. Painted before the war, it is as if the portrait corresponds to a line in Pam Gems 1996 play, “Stanley”. “Friends --- people you sleep next to in the trench turned into convolvulus – entrails hanging on the wire….How to get to a pure imagination…to beauty?” (Gems: 4-5) This paper will explore Gems' play, “Stanley” an episodic, almost Brechtian epic style play mixed with theatrical realism, the result a biographical study that deepens our understanding of issues of gender and points a way to queer aesthetics and critique. (Butler, 2004; Foucault, 1990; Mulvey, 2002, De Beauvoir, 1967)
[...] The mind-body split which is part of Western culture, demanded of masculinity, Godiwala contends, is ruptured in Spencer's imaginative vision of their reconnection through his art and through sex in all its permutations. (Godiwala: 95) However, as the play makes evident and as his biographers suggest, this recombination occurred only in his imagination; and that after Hilda died he realized it was most fully realizable with her, this sexual-artistic union, yet he rejected her, perhaps on the terms of having to be constant and monogamous intimate married partners. [...]
[...] As well, we are engaged, through Gems writing, with analysis of the framework through which normative society sets the boundaries for spiritual and sexual intimacy in marriage, an institution which to a radical feminist, or within queer theory, is highly problematic and limiting. (Butler, 2004; Foucault, 1990) To conclude the play presents us with historically active images and gender roles that maintain the social order and constrain personal growth and identity. Through his paintings Spencer was able to project forward, via his imagination, a more queer-oriented world of acceptance of diverse sexualities and alternative lifestyles. [...]
[...] As a feminist playwright usually concerned with contradictions in women, this play presents these contradictions, but how they revolve around an iconic male: the artist. That his images have a proto-queer sensibility trying to get out of a hetero-normative world is part of what makes this play audacious, confrontational and exciting to think about as a work of queer theatre. Bibliography Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, New York and London: Routledge Christiansen, Richard, “Simon, Sidney? Ah Stanley”, Chicago Tribune, April p 10. [...]
[...] Gem's play incorporates both of these Spencer's in her vision of the artist, setting up the actual playing areas of the stage to show the ease with which he ignored reality in favor of the one he wished to conceptualize. We see him moving back and forth from light and dark areas of the stage, as he moves between Hilda, his first wife and Patricia, his second wife. Both women are fantasy projections of his own overwhelming needs and hungers, which are not, as the play shows us, satisfied except in a Freudian sublimation: in the freedom of the polymorphous vision of the world and his ideal sense of self in paint and letters. [...]
[...] It is of value that Gems decided to place reproductions of the paintings on stage throughout the production so that the visual could be another layer through which the voice speaks. Thus, as a subject for a piece of theatre by a playwright who is fascinated and entranced with personality, glamour, media success, feminism and queer multiculturalism, as Gems is, Spencer's work and life conflicts seem an excellent place to explore the issues she has throughout her career. (Godiwala, 2006) It seems as if Gems is hoping or aiming to engage her audience in an analytical discourse on the problem and nature of intimate relationships, bohemianism, the nuclear family, the destructiveness of male- female relationships in patriarchy, using a Brechtian approach, where we think when we go to the theatre rather than get lost in emotion. [...]
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