The Role of Female Bonding on the Stage of Violence

Abstract

Patriarchy has traditionally promoted a very negative perspective of any type of solidarity between women, an attitude supported even by popular sayings such as “[w]omen are each other’s worst enemies.” Added to this, as Nina Auerbach concludes in Communities of Women, whereas men traditionally benefit from male bonding, sisterhood “looks often like a blank exclusion,” and communities of women “may suggest less the honor of fellowship than a society, an austere banishment from both social power and biological rewards” (3). Nevertheless, the silence that has also helped negative and misguided ideas about female bonding to grow is being broken by the recognition of the necessity to make society discover and recognize the real nature and importance of women’s solidarity. In fact, the relevance of bonding among women, a powerful instrument in the fight against gender violence, has been studied in depth at a theoretical and at a practical level, dealing, for example, with its portrayal in literature. However, in most of the studies dealing with this subject, the focus is set exclusively on the narrative genre: here I extend the field and look at how women dramatists treat female bonding in their plays.