The Repulsive Other in Tim Crouch’s I, Malvolio (2010)

Sarah J. Ablett

doi:10.1515/jcde-2019-0004

Article

The Repulsive Other in Tim Crouch’s I, Malvolio (2010)

Sarah J. Ablett
holds a research position at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, working for the German-Israeli joint-research project “Hyphenated Cultures: Contemporary British-Jewish Theatre.” She has studied Literature, Philosophy, and Creative Writing at the Universities of Hamburg, Manchester, Heidelberg, and Hildesheim, and completed her doctoral dissertation on “Dramatic Disgust. Forms and Functions of Aesthetic Disgust from Sophocles to Sarah Kane” in 2017. Articles on the concept of abjection and the plays of Sarah Kane have been published in JCDE and Performance Research. The most recent publication is a chapter on the function of disgust in Beckett’s Molloy in Heike Hartung’s Embodied Narration. Illness, Death and Dying in Modern Culture (2018).

Published/Copyright: May 9, 2019

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

Donald Trump famously used Hillary Clinton’s ‘toilet business’ or Marco Rubio’s ‘sweating like a pig’ as talking points in his campaign for the U. S. presidency. He thereby managed to use disgust’s intrinsic link to fear as a catalyst to negatively influence people’s opinion of his opponents. It was a tactic he also successfully used to rally his supporters against groups of people like ‘lying’ journalists or ‘rapist’ Mexicans. The mechanism of dehumanising the Other via association with disgust can be regarded as a dangerous tool of political rhetoric. In times like ours, where political discourse is commonly drenched in emotional hyperbole, it is paramount that we come to understand our emotions and learn how easily they may be hijacked for political purposes; this is especially true for such a seemingly ‘intuitive’ emotion as disgust. In his play I, Malvolio dramatist Tim Crouch gives voice to a Shakespearean character who has become a victim of discrimination via disgust. Crouch turns the perspectives around and allows the audience to see the story from the deplored’s point of view. This paper uses Crouch’s play for an exemplary analysis of the underlying structures of repulsion, and its relation to fear, and investigates the aesthetic possibilities of redemption.

Keywords: disgust; fear; affect; Tim Crouch; the Other; Shakespeare; discrimination; social hierarchies

About the author

Sarah J. Ablett

holds a research position at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, working for the German-Israeli joint-research project “Hyphenated Cultures: Contemporary British-Jewish Theatre.” She has studied Literature, Philosophy, and Creative Writing at the Universities of Hamburg, Manchester, Heidelberg, and Hildesheim, and completed her doctoral dissertation on “Dramatic Disgust. Forms and Functions of Aesthetic Disgust from Sophocles to Sarah Kane” in 2017. Articles on the concept of abjection and the plays of Sarah Kane have been published in JCDE and Performance Research. The most recent publication is a chapter on the function of disgust in Beckett’s Molloy in Heike Hartung’s Embodied Narration. Illness, Death and Dying in Modern Culture (2018).

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Published Online: 2019-05-09

Published in Print: 2019-05-07

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https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2019-0004

Keywords for this article

disgust; fear; affect; Tim Crouch; the Other; Shakespeare; discrimination; social hierarchies