Volume 61, Issue 4

Putting one character in bed with another, while either one or both are under the impression they are embracing someone else, is referred to as a ‘bed trick’ in drama studies. This article investigates four bed tricks in three early modern plays. Using the analysis of both Thomas Middleton/William Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling and the historical Essex/Somerset scandal as a backdrop, it compares the bed tricks and their embedded power relations of gender in Thomas Otway’s Restoration tragedy The Orphan with those in Aphra Behn’s Restoration comedy The Lucky Chance . My main interest is to demonstrate how the bed tricks in these plays function as projection screens for early modern cultural anxieties and fantasies, which circle specifically around the problematic semiotic representation of female virtue and the question of female agency. While The Orphan uses the bed trick to destroy its heroine before idealizing her as a martyr of patriarchy, The Lucky Chance employs its two cases of unauthorized intercourse to stage a female fantasy of control and independence.

The allure of American citizenship and the function of patriotism among naturalized foreigners bring into focus questions of American national identity and the contested belief in the “whole of America.” European immigrant perspectives on the promise of the Declaration of Independence, naturalization, and political activism in the cultural arena created unforeseen conflicts in the process of acculturation. Patriotic declarations of Americanness resemble a means of distinguishing oneself from other Americans who appear to be less enthusiastic about the moral responsibility of American citizenship or take it for granted. The difference has often been described in terms of a “thrill.” This emotional excitement results from the creation of a fantasy space. Instead of being American by birthright, immigrants repeatedly emphasized the challenge of having to earn citizenship and democratic rights. How does the immigrant definition of Americanness differ from that of American born citizens? In how far does the State Department shape, channel, and control the cultural imaginary connected with the moment of becoming an American? The following article analyzes the complex interplay between the cultural imaginary of intellectual immigrants and the processes of the naturalization ceremony. I will focus on the series of 69 radio broadcasts entitled “I am an American,” which were produced between 1940 and 1943 by the Department of Justice of the United States in cooperation with the National Broadcasting Company

An autobiography is commonly understood to be the record of an individual’s past, and readers untouched by literary theory believe an autobiographical text informs them about its author’s behaviour in the past. Yet, as autobiographical texts are written according to narrative conventions this simple view of autobiography will not do justice to texts written with some literary ambition: writers of autobiographies do not base their texts on the assumptions made by the common reader - that they are going to read an authentic life narrative or a piece containing historical truth. Taking some of Paul Theroux’s autobiographical texts as examples, a poetological reading of these writings shows how these assumptions are systematically demolished by the use of remembered events as metaphors for the writer’s present state of mind and by incongruities in the matching of narrators with protagonists which cannot be resolved by applying standards of plausibility and probability.

Critics of Louisa May Alcott’s fiction have tended to discuss performativity as an exclusive attribute of her female characters, mainly in terms of their ability or inability to negotiate between the domestic/public spheres. While readings of “Behind a Mask; Or, A Women’s Power” through the context of female performance in the nineteenth-century U.S. have shed ample light on the subversive qualities of the tale, these readings have yet to assess the full subversiveness of the story due to its neglect of the performative qualities of the male characters. It is by assessing its illustration of both female and male characters as having a performative selfhood that we are able to see a more complete view of the ways in which “Behind a Mask” engages critically with the cultural conventions of its time. By giving the female protagonist sole awareness of the innately fictional nature of subjectivity and the resulting agency to rewrite the selfhood of men who believe in the “realness” of their identity, Alcott presents a narrativized critique of the false hierarchy designating the male subject as real and authentic as opposed to that of women being transitory and derivative. At the same time, the story presents a singular theory of authorship that is neither romantic or postmodern in its proposal that the awareness of the fictional dimensions of the subject has the potential for securing a limited but nevertheless powerful measure of authorial agency.