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Destructive Family Relationships, the Usurping Relative, and the Subjective Viewpoint Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind (1985) focuses relentlessly on the issue of a woman ntrapped in relationships which progressively overwhelm and destroy her. One of the bleakest plays yet written by Ayckbourn, it chronicles the mental disintegration of its female protagonist into madness, as a result of disastrous and futile family relationships from which she cannot extricate herself. Woman in Mind is, even for Ayckbourn, formally experimental. Stylistically, if not thematically, feminist, the play features a female protagonist who not only propels the dramatic narrative, but also provides the exclusive viewpoint from which the audience experiences all the play’s incidents. I. Theme: Destructive Family Relationships and the Usurping Relative In Alan Ayckbourn’s plays, the home environments and family relationships within it are more likely to destroy than to nurture the psyche, especially the female psyche, and the home of Susan in Woman in Mind is among the most psychologically destructive environments he has yet devised. Within this environment an insensitive husband, interfering relatives, lack of communication among family 19 members, and cessation of sexual relations all contribute to the mental destruction of the principle female character. Susan is a woman at least resigned to being eclipsed by the stronger personality of her husband. The author describes her as “[an unassuming woman in her forties, used to and happy to play second fiddle to more determinedly motivated personalities than her own].” But during the play she becomes aware of her own growing discontent and begins to feel keenly the failure of her relationships. Susan tells her husband, Gerald, of her new restlessness: “I don’t any longer know what I’m supposed to be doing. I used to be a wife. I used to be a mother. And I loved it.…But now…the thrill has gone.” Her youth and her only child both now departed, Susan has only recently begun to face the reality of a dull and loveless marriage. Her inability to revitalize or abandon this marriage will lead to her mental collapse and loss of identity. Unlike Susan, the men in this play suffer from what Bill Hornby has variously called “lack of imagination” and “lack of recognition,” qualities which he correctly attributes to many of the male characters in the Ayckbourn canon. Susan’s husband and son, Gerald and Rick, are unaware of, or unbelieving in Susan’s crisis. Gerald, for example, claims not even to have noticed the transition from caring to indifference which has taken place in his marriage. When Susan asserts in Act One of Woman in Mind that she and Gerald are no longer in love, he protests: “I do [love you]. At least, I’m not aware that my feelings towards you have altered that much.” Susan then enumerates the many ways in which their relationship has deteriorated, concluding the observation that “It’s nobody's fault. It just happened, over the years”; but Gerald will have none of it. When his interfering sister Muriel enters, interrupting the marital conversation, Gerald, happy for the intrusion, whispers to her, “She’s in a little tiny bit of a mood, Muriel. Don’t worry.” In Gerald’s view, Susan has inaccurately analyzed their relationship; she has merely been experiencing typically female dyspepsia. It is his response whenever she brings up unpleasant subjects, particularly ones in which he may come in for criticism. Cold, distant Gerald woefully lacks understanding of his wife’s needs, and tends to retreat from the company of his wife into his stultifyingly dull book on the six-hundred-year history of his parish rather than try to improve relations with her. He does not consciously attempt to harm his wife: Gerald just never recognizes the deterioration of his marriage and marriage partner as his spouse does, and this is the essential difference between Gerald and Susan in the play. Susan, on the other hand, has made a significant emotional investment in her marriage and family. She reminds Gerald, “I run this house. I do all the cooking, the bulk of the washing up, all the laundry…I cope with the sheer boring slog of tidying up after both of you, day after day.…” Sacrificing for her family has not resulted in happiness; but because she devoted so much of her time and energy to these relationships, when they deteriorate, she has no reserves of happiness independent of them on which to draw. For Susan, the collapse of family relationships is a prelude to mental collapse: she retreats increasingly into a fantasy world which eventually swallows up her sanity and what remains of her identity. 20 The lack of sexual relations also contributes to the unhappiness in Susan’s marriage. She and Gerald now sleep in separate beds, the physical side of their marriage apparently over. Gerald does not seem to miss their physical intimacy and is surprised that his wife does. But to Susan sex is an integral component, without which the marriage does not function. When the “sexual side” is lost, no other side can remain intact, and the joy and purpose of marriage is gone. Sex is, in fact, a specialized form of marital communication to Susan, and she prizes it primarily for that aspect. Its loss is the prelude to losing all other manners of sharing. In Gerald’s compartmentalized conception, by contrast, sex is a part of marriage no longer essential to the kind of relationship he now desires. He does not prize sex as an opportunity for sharing or communicating because these are no longer activities in which he wishes to engage with Susan–nor possibly with anyone else.
Approximate Word count = 3640
Approximate Pages = 14.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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