Bodies Violating Boundaries

Abstract

This chapter explores a group of plays from Paula Vogel’s canon. Written more recently than the aforementioned Williams and Albee plays, Vogel’s work offers a slightly different take on the idea of ravenous women and fat behavior informed by her subjectivity as a lesbian feminist playwright. Although her characters are not necessarily described as fat or animalized the way Albee’s and Williams’s women are, they have their own version of fat behavior that frequently precipitates violence toward them. Many of her characters exceed physical or behavioral boundaries of what is culturally acceptable for women, and this creates or adds to the conflict within these plays. However, just as Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig works against the fat stereotypes depicted in the earlier plays, the characters in Vogel’s plays also in some ways refute the fat identity invoked by Williams and Albee. Some of the characters exhibit the fat behaviors I have discussed, but more significantly, all are treated as fat (in terms of negative responses) by the other characters. Vogel seems to object to the complicity Albee and Williams assume with the audience when they use fat to create antagonistic characters who victimize those around them with their fat behavior. Vogel inverts that established paradigm and creates protagonists who eat too much, are outspoken, or exceed their physical boundaries, and are themselves victimized by the other characters in the play. In other words, audiences recognize the fat behavior of Serafina, Maxine, Leona, and Martha as negative. On the contrary, Vogel’s feminist take establishes her hungry women as sympathetic protagonists.