Fefu and her friends

- The men possess the outside world;

- Fefu’s husband Phillip, her brother John, the gardener Tom walk the grounds ‘in the fresh
air and the sun”, while the women gather in the house, ‘in the dark’
- Three characters that cross over into the men’s world (outside): Fefu, Emma and Julia.
- Fornes genders the interior, with its depth, penetrability, and comfort – its domestic spaces
figured as body parts and inners organs – female.
- House/ grounds;
- The stone is a metaphor for the crucial, characterological difference between men and
women.
- The house is the locus of human warmth and social affirmation, but also the site of human
and animal functions that should remain unseen, such as the broken upstairs toilet, or the
black cat’s explosion of diarrhea in the kitchen.
- Julia, paralyzed, she suffers from hallucinations, more real than life, or being beaten,
tortured, and condemned to humiliating recitations about the ‘stinking’ and ‘revolting’
parts of the female body.
- Fefu enjoys ‘being like a man’, fixes toilets, and shoots a gun, but is hypnotically pulled
toward Julia’s female abyss.
- “Women are inferior beings. Their inferiority is constitutionaland resides in their sex…
which is a wound that never heals.” Octavio Paz
- In part I, which takes places in the living room, the public portion of Fefu’s house, the
references to female bodies emerge for the most part in veiled allusion and literary device.
- The married woman “a bonded slave, who takes her master’s name, her master’s bread, her
master’s commands, and serves her master’s passion.” Voltairine de Cleyre .
- The culminating event of Part I is the description of Julia’s accident
- Cindy and Christina- the conventional women;
- Julia is ‘petit mal’, she can not walk, she was not struck by the hunter’s shot that left her
with a bleeding forehead -> the fearless host Fefu will fear herself “host” to Julia’s
mysterious female contamination.
- The iconography of the “deer” as a purifier of venom, poison, and sin – of the ‘loathsome’
in short – would seem to operate in Fornes’s play as well. -> the antidotal creature. – the
deer as an emblem of rebirth.
- With the announcement of the spectators that they will be devided into four groups,
circulating through four locations in Fefu’s house to witness the scenes of Part II, the
alternate, compentatins pattern of the play begins to emerge.
- The dramatic model in Fefu will not be linear and progessive, but circulatory and cyclical.
- The house has a depth and scale matched to our offstage bodies. Its rooms are tied to the
needs of the body – the kitchen, the stomach; the bedroom, sleep and sex;
- Part II: spectators are invited at the beginning to cross the mainstage living room set and
walk through an upstage door. = > the spectators were no longer separated by the actors;
 even more interesting is that fact that this repositioning makes aware of spectators’s own
bodies, in the theatre was the acquiring of new seating companions for each segment.
- Part II reveals the often literally organic concern with bodies and embodiment that is part
of Fefu’s design. – all follow the trajectory from dis- to re- memberment. Part II makes the
stage of dismemberment in this process, a centrifugal motion that fragments the audience,
cast, and setting, while stories of the individual characters’ shatterings are being revealed.
It is in this part of the play that Fornes breaks her group of eight women into twos and ones.
In the scenes that follow, the talk turns again and again to the dismembered female body.
- The eight women of the play fall into three groups, the more conventional heterosexuals,
the lesbians, and the three androgynous women, whom Fornes develops as figures with
mythic imaginations.
- Conventional women: Christina, Cindy and Sue; Sue, the treasurer of the group effort
rehearsed in Part III, stitches the world together with soup and tea, good cheer and
practicality. Of these three, she alone is apparently not uncomfortable in her body, and
makes no reference to its needs, longings, or vulnerability.
The women in the study
- Christina, a confessed ‘conventional’ is timid and imaginative.
- She concerns about Fefu’s outrageous shooting ‘game’ with Phillip, and about Fefu’s
keeping lethal weapons in the house. Fefu, she observes, may not be ‘careful with life’.
- Christina an Cindy now share a scene in the study; whish is the safest in the sense of the
least gender- or sex-encoded-of the four intimate spaces that provide the settings.
- Cindy reports a disturbing dream populated by male authority figures. At first
paternalistically Friendly, and then apparently indifferent, these figures become menacing
in a way that mixes seduction and physical threat. A policeman, Cindy relates, “grabbed
me and felt my throat from behind with his thumbs while he rubbed my nipples with his
pinkies. Then, he pushed me out the door. Then, the young doctor started cursing me”.
Cindy is unable to say what she wants to say, unable to react. The dream ends in unresolved
panic.
- Stacy Wolf suggests that the dominant force in the play is male violence – either fear of it,
enactment of it in the background story, or performance of it by Fefu and Cecilia in their
masculine aspects.
- Julia suffers hallucinations as real as life and actual physical symptoms, Fefu is visited by
daytime terrors of death and alarming portents of infirmity, but Cindy’s more complacent
imagination only dreams of malevolent doctor treating her for an indistinct health problem.
The women in kitchen
- The two lesbians seem not to share the fear and dependency that is particular to
heterosexuals in the play, but they also differ from each other.
- The frosty Cecilia and Paula who has shrunken emotional life and speaks in intellectual
abstractions;
- Paula identifies herself as a woman with a career.
- Cecilia makes aggressive, even cruel, sexual advances to the still wounded- Paula
 - Paula is the strongest, and most fully alive woman in the play; she is the only character
from a working-class background, and the only one capable of class analysis, glimpsing
her upper-class friends in political and economic dimenstions of which they themselves are
unaware; she expresses no fear of male;
- Paula echoes the structure of the play that sets up a correspondence between body and
domicile.
- Sue – the most emotionally complete of the women, competent and caring, who is also
briefly in this scene – is staged in Fefu’s kitchen, the sustaining core, or stomach, as it
were, of Fefu’s house.
The women on the lawn
- Involves Fefu, Emma and Julia; Fefu and Emma play croquet on the lawn – this is the only
represented scene that abandons the house for the sunlight and air Fefu associates with
men.
- They are doing somehow mannish things for 1930’s women: they are talking openly about
sex while swinging at croquet balls. (discussion about genitals)
- Emma describes the beginning of a kind of breakdown, evidencing itself – she speaks in
quasi-erotic terms;
- Fefu then tells the story of the mangled and diseased black cat;
- The relationship with the cat sounds suspiciously like Fefu’s relationship with Phillip, but
with the roles reversed. Fefu becomes the black cat, in effect her own familiar, haunting
herself and Phillip from hell.
- Emma is left alone on the lawn, reciting Shakespeare’s fourteenth sonnet -> it is the second
of three important moments in the play in which Fornes draws attention to the revelatory
force of the human gaze.
- The aspiration, which is really the aspiration to the highest form of human love, is stated
in two ways, in the ideal of equal, conscious sexual union, and in the ideal of the silent,
profound, speech of the eyes. Emma, in her riff on the ‘devine registry of sexual
performance’, and in her own performance of Shakespeare, is thus far the bearer of both
messages.
- The scene hints at a culture of feminine freedom, of women able to leave the house-world
that demands, entrapment as the price of protection.
- Emma, who is too charmingly blind; Paula, who hurts too much.
The women in the Bedroom
- Julia’s world if the hell to Emma’s heaven.
- Julia is as deep portrait of the feminine subterranean ‘where the cockroaches aare’ as exists
in modern dramatic literature.
- The spectators are not given seats, but stand surrounding the ‘patient’ who lies on her
mattress on the floor, wearing a medical gown.
- The experience of Julia’s hallucination melts and slips across boundaries, those between
spectator and actor, between character and invisible persecutors, and even between
 character and spectator. Can we be certain that it is not we, the surrounding audience, to
whom Julia is describing her journey througu hell?
- The bedroom scene is the only one that is not in the form of a dialogue between women.
- Putting Julia’s hallucination in the form of soliloquy without an authorized observer or
receiver is Fornes’s chief means of creating its surreal effect.
- This scene is also the only one to depart from realism in its setting;
- The dead leaveson the floor (in the bedroom) symbolizes contrast between the bright lawn
of the Emma-Fefu scene. The incursion of the woods into the space of the house ironically
recalls Julia’s last moment of idependence, when, in or near the forest, she was felled by
the hunter’s shot that killed the deer. Fefu and Emma are capable, whitin limits, of
appropriating the masculine preserves of fresh air and sunshine. Julia, once the most
independent of women, who moved as if unimpeded in the male world, is now captive in
the house-world of women, her former freedom reduced to a handful of dead leaves. These
leaves expressionistically portend her losing battle with death.
- The overlay of Fornes’s personal experience in the women’s movement on something akin
to a comic-strip playwriting experiment evolved unto the complexity of Julia, whose
mutilation is both socially imposed and regulated, but also strangely self-generated. Julia
both exemplifies and grasps this ambivalent condition of woman better than any other
character in the play that Fornes once identified her as ‘the mind of the play-the seer, the
visionary’.
- Though all four scenes develop the motif of female dismemberment, Julia’s goes far
beyond the others to an imaginative limit that approaches the literature of apocalypse.
- The narrative is not entirely clear. In her hallucinations Julia is speaking, and mostly
responding, to one or more male interrogators who have trained her in the recitation of a
prayer. She is explaining to them, once more in the language of dismemberment, what
another set of inquisitors did to her body. These were the implacable judges, who claimed
to love her, but threatened to cut her throat if she resisted.
- Part I is about gathering, part II abou dismemberment, part III about reintegration;
- The spectators are beginning to experience in their bodies the motions of dis- and re-
memberment that move the play and its characters.
- PIII – the musical movement is almost more appropriate a term – contains two group scenes
with all characters present that formalize in circular tableaux the circular shape of the play.
- These scenes represent yet one more vision of Fefu’s parable of the stone;
- The several scene fragments that comprise the joyous rondo of the water fight, as well as
the confrontation between Fefu and Julia that precedes the play’s mysterious, surreal end.
- Two sides of Fefu: playfully, even swaggeringly, performed the man, shooting Phillip,
fixing the toilet, and making macho pronouncements about women to scare the ‘girls’, or
she can collapse into fear and anxiety.
- Like the gun in the first act that goes off in the last, every vagrant reference in Fornes’s
seemingly nondirectional text assumes a precise place in a dense poetic structure.
- As Orpheus, Fefu seeks to break the law of the underworld and the grip of death.
- The ending of the play is a riddle.
- The game with the gun: Fefu takes the gun outside to clean it, fires and shots Julia in the
forehead. The play ends in a circular tableau.
- The rabbit dead, Julia ‘dead’;
- A rabbit; the rabbit has a homely association with reproduction. It may be a mark of Julia’s
decline and weakness that while she earlier fell as a deer, she has now succumbed as a
rabbit. The mystery of the rabbit is intensified by the formality and seeming solemnity of
the context in which it appears.
- ‘mourning women’
- We do not finnaly know what happens at the end of this play, not even whether Julia has
actually died, though many critics declare this as a certainty.