The Construction And Deconstruction Of The Patriarchal Discourse In Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine

In the male-dominated British theatre, Caryl Churchill as a female playwright is one of the most outstanding and influential figure. Her first internationally renowned work Cloud Nine received a worldwide notice at once after it was firstly published and performed in1979. Some scholars abroad and in China have studied this play through theatrical, gender, Feminist and post-colonial approaches, pointing out many brilliant and inspiring ideas, but no one has ever thoroughly analyzed the structure of the patriarchal system, and how it is deconstructed in this play. To better understand how the oppressions have happened, a deep study of the patriarchal discourse is needed; otherwise the accusation to the patriarchal power is not convincing enough. However, the study of patriarchal structure is just the first step; the next task is to explore how the deconstruction of patriarchal discourse happened, and the possible results of such deconstruction leads to. Therefore, the two key questions that this thesis will discuss are how patriarchal discourse is constructed, and how it is deconstructed.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is an introduction, mainly introducing the playwright and the play Cloud Nine, and briefly generalizing the literature reviews by scholars abroad and in China. Chapter One is the theoretical support. This thesis is greatly inspired by the French philosopher Michael Foucault’s theory on discourse and power. Foucault points out that a certain discourse is often strictly constrained by many restricting procedures out of the fear for the discourse’s power. These restricting procedures including the prohibition, exclusion, division, provision and so on, greatly influence and constrain the individual speaking subjects. They endow privileged rights to some certain speaking subjects, and fix or restrict some other speaking subjects’positions and behaviors. In Chapter Two, the thesis discusses how the patriarchal discourse is constructed. It points out the patriarchal discourse is the implementation of British imperial colonialism. This ideology constrains the discourse and thus develops a patriarchal system that serves for it. The constraining procedures to speaking subjects mainly manifest in the hierarchy relationships of binary oppositions between men and women, parents and children, the colonizers and the colonized, and heterosexuality and homosexuality. Chapter Three begins to analyze the question of how the patriarchal discourse is deconstructed in Cloud Nine. It is believed that the deconstruction of patriarchal discourse starts from the dissolving of the four binary oppositions. Along with the binary oppositions dissolved, the central ideology of imperial colonialism can no longer control the whole patriarchal system. Instead of the old center, the play in Act Two marks for its postmodernism, which are diversity, freedom and tolerance. The last part is the conclusion, generalizing the previous analysis.Foucault’s theory on discourse helps to appreciate this play in a different perspective from previous studies. The patriarchal discourse has a vast power and extremely detailed constraining principles to restrict the individual’s positions and behaviors. Churchill with her splendid description vividly shows us how this constraint happens to every individual in the play. The binary oppositions are so strict that no one in it can escape the discrimination and inequality. However, in Act Two, the play demonstrates another possible feature of postmodernism. The binary oppositions are dissolved, and individuals have more freedom living in a diverse and tolerant society. It doesn’t matter if their life is confusing, for Churchill wants to present for us a chaos where everything is upside down. This is the spirit of postmodernism, in which an ultimately unified center is gone, and then all left for us is difference.