Disguise in Love: Gender and Desire in House of Games and Speed-the-Plow

Abstract

They’d had this date from the beginning. David Mamet had been on a collision course with feminist criticism since 1970, when he wrote the all-male Lakeboat and began to develop the scatalogically colloquial dialogue for which he would become known. This, after all, was the piece in which a man describes women as “soft things with a hole in the middle,” a line that one critic thought sufficiently representative to use in the epigraph to a scathing essay on the playwright published in 1991 (Nelson 71). Nevertheless, it took a long time for such criticism to appear. As recently as 1989, a collection, Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, was published for which no articles on Mamet were even submitted (Schlueter 11–12). The situation changed only after the appearance of two works that presented a woman character as enigma within a predominantly masculine world: Margaret Ford, the psychoanalyst who alters her appearance and behavior at the end of House of Games (1987); and Karen, the Hollywood secretary whose motives remain uncertain in Speed-the-Plow (1988).