Almost "Better to Be Nobody": Feminist Subjectivity, the Thatcher Years, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse

Abstract

As a preface to The Grace of Mary Traverse, Timberlake Wertenbaker includes a quotation from George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle stating that although the "definition of culture in the age of the gas-oven, of the arctic camps, of napalm ... may belong solely to the past history of hope ... [w]e must keep in focus its hideous novelty or renovation," Written during Wertenbaker's 1985 stint as resident writer at London's Royal Court Theatre, The Grace of Mary Traverse focuses on culture through the young, well-bred Mary and her quest for knowledge and experience in late-eighteenth-century London. However, Wertenbaker cautions in an author's note that Mary Traverse is not a historical play and that the eighteenth-century setting is a metaphor for contemporary times. Of the contemporary issues Wertenbaker's work addresses, feminist themes often stand out. In fact, along with Mmy Traverse, plays such as Case to Answer (1980), New Anatomies (1981), Inside Out (1982), and The Love of the Nightingale (1988) feature female characters whose articulation of sexual desire, resistance to patriarchy, and/or transgression of conventional gender boundaries demonstrate this playwright's interest in staging feminist subjectivities. Wertenbaker's concern with the "definition of culture" in The Grace of Mary Traverse strongly links this play's feminist subjectivities to British culture and politics in 1985.

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