| This dissertation explores the falsely universalizing, always politicized constructions of maternity in twentieth-century American drama and performance as those texts articulate themselves from within and without historical variations and social hierarchies. Looking through the lens of materialist feminism as well as a "materialist semiotics of performance," my methodology reveals how meaning is generated by "texts" beyond the diageses of the play itself. This methodology allows me to read theatrical performance from a materialist feminist perspective akin to that of cultural studies; but I also rely on the work of theoreticians who examine the ways in which the construction of mothering as universally "women's work" obscures additional, often equally constructed subdivisions such as race and class. Chapter one addresses the "feminist mother" of the progressive era. Investigating several turn-of-the-century and "politically overt" plays of Rachel Crothers, I contend that the trope of the white, upper-middle-class, unmarried, artist-activist New Woman---via her frequent non-gynocentric expression of mothering labor---projects usefully alternative models of maternity vis-a-vis their gender-neutral understandings of reproduction. Chapter two explores single motherhood of the post-war era, looking at Tennessee Williams' 1955 play and film The Rose Tattoo (and its star, Anna Magnani) alongside the on and offstage single-mother subjectivity of Lana Turner, especially in the latter's capacity as a figurehead of Hollywood Melodrama and that genre's subversive gender ideologies. Chapter three examines the asexual, overtly nurturing subject-of-color who puts her/his own mothering on hold while caring for white employer---a subject also known as The Mammy. Alfred Uhry's 1987 Driving Miss Daisy , Cheryl West's 2002 Jar the Floor, and Tony Kushner's 2004 Caroline, or Change present caretakers of color who provide nurturance to white, southern, Jewish recipients, subjects who themselves surface in the texts as simultaneously marginalized and privileged. Chapter four looks at lesbian playwright/activist Cherrie Moraga's 1990 drama Shadow of a Man. While considering the archetypal figure of the "hysteric," I argue that this play presents a resistant and alternative construct of motherhood by representing the family patriarch as kind of queered maternal hysteric. |
