| This project explores the repeating instance of women's suicide as a theatrical device from the Greek plays to the present. It attempts to recontextualize the suicide of the female character, moving beyond the stereotype of the "hysteric" and exploring the agency of suicide. The project also explores the presence of the dead female body on stage, both as it affects the other characters on stage and the audience. Women who commit suicide in the plays examined use their bodies as an instrument of resistance. Perhaps the only way to reclaim their bodies from patriarchal control, the women under examination commit suicide as a referendum on the boundaries of gender. As a result, the remaining body plunges the other characters and the audience into a liminal space, where all notions of male and female are called into question, attempting to create a new form of the "sacred."... |
