The Letter Never Written: Narrating the ‘Self’ in Arnold ... · The Letter Never Written: Narrating the ‘Self’ in Arnold Wesker’s Letters to a Daughter Mamata Sengupta Research

The Letter Never Written: Narrating the ‘Self’ in Arnold Wesker’s Letters to a Daughter

Mamata Sengupta

Research Scholar Department of English

University of Gour Banga Malda, West Bengal

India

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.” -Paul Auster

Though a wage is often drawn between the dramatic and the lyrical in so far as the former ventures to pan out while the latter seeks to delve deep within, the futility of this bifurcation comes to the fore when we discuss the work of a first rate playwright like Arnold Wesker. In fact, what many of Wesker’s plays show us is that the characters engage in serious and revealing interactions not only with others but with their own selves. The present paper seeks to re-read such a representative interaction with the ‘self’ that constitutes the crux of one of Wesker’s most controversial one woman plays, Letters to a Daughter. Efforts will also be made to see and show how such an interaction imposes on the ‘self’ the dual responsibility of a teller and an audience, and how all such attempts on the part of the female protagonist at voicing her hitherto silenced existence are finally thwarted by the failure of the same ‘self’ to assume the role and the responsibility of a powerful interpretative community that can not only listen to but empathize with and participate in the process of tale making that can alone liberate the teller-sufferer from the burden of her own private history.

Of course, before we hazard an empirical analysis of Wesker’s text, we should clarify the conceptual implications of the word ‘self’. Ever since the days of Freud and Jung, the concept of ‘self’ has come to occupy a central position in any discussion of human psychology. Philosophers like J. A. Beane and Richard P. Lipka have theorized the self as the composite of a person’s self-conception (what the person thinks he/she is) and self-evaluation (the assessment of his/her attributes, abilities and achievements) (Beane and Lipka: 1980, 17). However, social psychologists like W. Damon and D. Hart have viewed it in terms of a binary — at once an active agent (self-as-subject) and an observed entity (self-as-object) (Damon and Hart: 1982, 8). A third group of theorists, including Hazel Markus and Ziva Kunda, have argued that, far from being a mere amalgamation of perspectives and ideas, the self is a product of certain situational and contextual variants: […] in the empirical self-concept literature the self has been regarded as a stable and enduring structure that protects itself against change [….] although the self-concept is in some respects quite stable, this stability can mask significant local variations that arise when the individual responds systematically to events in the social environment (Markus and Kunda: 1986, 858-859).

That the self, as a concept, is itself variable points up its mediated nature. In fact, the self as ‘creative agency’ for logos and telos generates itself as a meaning-making entity that, according to Mark Freeman, aims at negotiating between individual experiences and expectations (Freeman in Brinthaupt and Lipka: 1992, 15-16). The self is as much at the core of human identity as it is behind the reflective consciousness through which the world is perceived and dealt with. It is both a prototype and a schema that provides the individual with a blueprint for his/her own psychological development, and helps organize a multidimensional cognitive and affective representation of the world that can be easily reviewed and at times

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revised with the help of newer insights acquired from various fields of experience. The self operates on the basis of identification, perception and rationalization of the outer world, defines the data gathered from these processes, relates them to internalized concepts, and finally gets constructed in terms of what P. Young-Eisendrath and J. A. Hall term ‘a narrative sequence’ that can both contain and control experiences (Young-Eisendrath and Hall in Young-Eisendrath and Hall: 1987, 2).

That the self is constructed as a narrative sequence lays bare the dual significance of both the ‘narrative’ of the ‘self’ (the untold story) and the ‘narration’ of the ‘self’ (a purgative act). The narrative of the self releases the entire body of worries and wishes that remains subliminal till that point of time. Similarly, the act of narrating (narration) the self relieves the individual during and after that cathartic release. It also leads the individual to move from the position of a mere teller to that of an audience and makes him/her ponder over the tale he/she is generating. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca call such an act of addressing the self as audience ‘self-deliberating’, and find that the teller ‘is in a better position than anyone else to test the value of his [or her] own arguments’ (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca: 1969, 40). Extending the scope of this argument, we may call this self-directed. The self as audience may, therefore, constitute an alternative ‘interpretative community’ that according to William G. Tierney acts as a tool for self-help on the part of the teller-audience and as a means of knowing the unknown on the part of the listener-audience (Tierney in Tierney and Lincoln: 1997, 47).

This role of the self as an alternative ‘interpretative community’ not only helps the individual maintain continuity and flow within the private cognitive frame but also liberates it from any frustrating adherence to and dependence on the other selves like the audience. Hearing a tale of which he/she happens to be the originator liberates the teller, albeit momentarily, both from the burden of tale-making and dependence on the audience to participate actively in the processes of speech generation, speech reception and speech perception. As the teller, the self is now free to engage in all activities of tale-making; as an audience, he/she can confront all that has come to be the tale; and in the dual capacity as the teller and the audience the individual in question can now intently meditate on the act of telling as an agency to convey the intended message and the resultant speech product as the conveyed message.

The self-deliberating and the self-directed nature of this process, however, puts so much pressure on the potentially double self that often times ‘the self as audience’ falls apart, leaving ‘the self as teller’ lacking the pleasure, possession as well as assurance of a receiving self. The present paper seeks to discuss a similar process of dissipation that takes place in Wesker’s Letters to a Daughter.

Coming back to our play in focus, Letter to a Daughter was first performed on 20th March 1992 by the Sanwoolim Theatre Company, Seoul, Korea, with Young-Woong Lim as the director. The UK premier, however, took place six years later on 8th August, 1998, in the Observer Assembly Rooms during the Edinburgh Festival under the direction of the playwright himself.

According to Read W. Dornan, Letter to a Daughter reveals ‘a touching insight into a mother’s feelings about her daughter’ (Dornan: 1994, 115). In fact, the play seeks to voice the story of Melanie, an established composer-singer and a single mother, through her numerous attempts at writing a letter to her absent daughter. Although Melanie’s initial desire is to make the letter an extended advice-list intended for the innocent and ignorant child in her daughter whose body is on the verge of attaining puberty, it ultimately takes the form of an autobiography punctuated by, as it is, six songs about the problems of a woman’s life and a series of recorded calls from her lover-seducer who happens to be Marike’s father as well. While the letter allows Melanie to recreate, review and retell her own past, it also enables her





to take stock of her present. That the greater part of the letter is ultimately composed not literally on a paper but verbally through Melanie’s act of telling implies that the intended audience is not so much the daughter as it is Melanie herself. This is what transforms the ‘letter to the daughter’ into a letter to the anomic mother in Melanie who had none to provide her with guidance.

Letter to a Daughter opens with the voice of the 35 year old Melanie singing a song and conversing with herself as an audience: Melanie: No one can take From our time No one can shake The halcyon memories When nothing was beyond *** *** *** Not bad. Not good but not bad. Perhaps good but not great. Writes corrections on her score. (LD in P2, 144) That Melanie is both a composer and a singer is significant, because this dual identity establishes her access to the agency of both a language and a performing arts and allows her the medium of an empathetic audience (‘telling’ being the intended object). In fact, this is what enables Melanie to generate her narrative through Orality, action and performance. That Melanie is not only singing a song but also listening to her own voice, revising her composition, and making necessary corrections to the notes mean that she intends to present herself as both the originator of the media text (teller) and the receiver of the same (audience). Melanie’s song recounts ‘days’ which no one can take away from her — days of ‘halcyon memories’ and ‘hopeful energies’ when ‘nothing was beyond’. That Melanie speaks of such days with the past indicative ‘was’ implies both the pastness of those carefree days and her wistful longing to get back to them.

Although Melanie is working hard to improve her composition, soon she is overcome with a sense of futility — the fear that she will not be able to match up to the expectations of her audience, that she may fail to attract or hold their attention to her song and that she may therefore be unable to relate to them her inner crises. It is this fear of the performing self that connects Melanie with Connie, the ‘apprentice comedienne’ in When God Wanted a Son (WGWS in WSP, 269); for their dependence on the audience makes them doubly vulnerable to their (audience’s) judgement and acceptance. In Melanie’s case, it is the same fear of failure that reminds her of another failure — the failure to communicate to her daughter in an effective or meaningful way:

Melanie: [...] Ah, Melanie, Melanie! If you can’t work it out for yourself how can you work it out for your daughter. She moves to her desk to look at a sheet on which she has been writing. ‘My dear daughter, there comes a time in a young woman’s life —’ Shit! That’s a dreadful start.

Sits at her desk to start again. (LD in P2, 144) That Melanie is actually trying to write a letter to her absent daughter but is not being able to figure out what to say or rather how to say it effectively points up the typical problem of telling that is so endemic to Wesker Women as tellers. The very abrupt beginning of her letter and then the even more abrupt rejection of that ‘beginning’ hints at her hesitation as a teller; for it is not a fairytale or a fable that the mother in Melanie is going to relate to her daughter but the potentially disturbing disruptive narration of one ‘young woman’s life’, and then therefore any/every young woman’s likely fate.

However, Melanie’s decision to sit immediately ‘at her desk’ to ‘start’ again and this time complete the letter highlights the urgency and unavoidability of telling the story to the





adolescent daughter; for innocent and unwarned as she is, a girl of her age should be protected from all the harms that had once befallen her mother:

Melanie: (Writing) ‘Daughter mine. Some things are difficult to talk about and so I’ve decided to try and write you a letter instead ...’

Stares at the sheet a long time. (LD in P2, 145) That Melanie feels it difficult to ‘tell’ verbally and instead prefers to convert her telling into ‘writing a letter’ is not only because the generation gap between herself and her daughter unnerves her but also because she is unable to gather up the fragments of her life to form and frame a tale out of it. Her long stare at the sheet she is scribbling her letter on reminds her of her own life that has violently been scribbled upon and then discarded without any love or compassion.

It is this realization of the ‘difficulty’ to put into language her own inscribed and insinuated history that reminds Melanie of the real nature of the ‘problem’ that causes a mother like her to ‘try and write’ a letter to the daughter:

Melanie: ‘Dear Marike, the problem is — young women have problems!’ *** **** **** ‘Dear Marike — your tits are growing!’ That arrests her. Makes her smile. Perhaps that’s the way to begin. *** **** **** ‘Dear Marike — your tits are growing. You told me so. “Don’t touch me, Mother,” you said, “I feel very tender here”.’ From here on she has no need to keep ‘writing’. The letter will be constructed in her head. ‘Well, I won’t touch you there but take it from me — the tenderness will go. You’ll get used to them. [...]’ (LD in P2, 146-147) Melanie’s consideration of the ‘problems’ of ‘young women’ as a ‘problem’ shows the socially constructed nature of these problems — that are simultaneously ‘difficulties’, ‘sources of difficulties’ and ‘questions raised’ for and by a gender hierarchy.

That the real ‘problem’ of a woman’s life is nothing but growth is significant; for far from being indicative of psychological ‘maturity’ (development, evolution and fulfilment) it is merely a bodily ‘growth’ (an increase in size or an extra gathering of mass) that can only attract prying eyes and not wholehearted praise. Moreover, it is that growth which marks the female’s passage from the relatively secure gender-neutral childhood to the vulnerable gender-specific adulthood, from the freedom of a fluid being to the prison of a biologically innate and socially imposed body, and from the ignorance of innocence to the knowledge and experience of gender victimization.

That the fact of her daughter’s growth ‘arrests’ Melanie and ‘makes her smile’ is because it re-presents before her own eyes a particular period from her remembered past. Significantly, Melanie finds this discussion about ‘growth’ to be the ideal ‘way to begin’ her letter. This finding is as much due to the fact that it is growth that begins (initiates) a child into womanhood as it is caused by the awareness that it is the ‘beginning’ (first) thing that may cause unwanted attraction to her body. The fact that from this point onwards Melanie’s letter will remain written within her consciousness (the place of its birth) is doubly instructive. It at once reveals that henceforth the teller in her will no longer talk to her daughter but will address herself directly. As a result, her letter will never come out in the form of a scriipt and therefore will ever remain confined within the self of the teller, yielding only a frustrating result.

That Melanie promises her daughter not to ‘touch’ (disturb, violate or hurt) her where she feels ‘tender’ (fragile, crushed or bruised) is not only because she as a mother does not want to hurt her but also due to the fact that she does not want to deal with her in the same





way she has once been dealt with by someone or some. Her double assurance — that Marike will ‘get used to’ her ‘tenderness’ and that ‘the tenderness will go’ — implies both the facts that a woman must get used to the feeling of being ‘tender’ (vulnerable) at some or other parts of her body and that the tenderness will ‘go’ (discontinue or disappear) with the repetitive experiences of femininity inflicted on her body and being by the actants of patriarchy.

It is at this juncture that something/someone ‘else’ intrudes upon Melanie consciousness. Hesitantly, she switches on the tape recorder to hear the voice of her lover-seducer: But something else troubles her. She moves, as if drawn, to the tape recorder. Presses ‘on’.

Man’s Voice: Hi, Melanie — at least I hope it’s Melanie. I know, I know, you haven’t heard from me in a long time and here I am not even in person but on a sodding answer-machine... (LD in P2, 147) This act of Melanie acts as a trigger to initiate the retelling of her story. As she ponders over the growth of her daughter’s body, she remembers her own passage to womanhood:

Melaine: ‘[...] I can remember when I first saw mine growing [...] And then came the day I had to buy my first bra. I was so excited. A light blue check thing it was. Really pretty, I thought. Long before I understood lace. And I looked myself in the eye, very serious, very dramatic, as though God had given me the world to look after, and I said: you — are a woman.’ (LD in P2, 147-148) Melanie’s retelling of her life story recreates for both the intra-textual (her own self as audience) and the extra-textual audience (Wesker’s audience) the same excitement that characterizes a pre-adolescent mind’s expectation for growing up. Her thankful recalling of God for making her ‘woman’ and giving her ‘the world to look after’, however, sharply contrasts with her present experience of being a ‘woman’ (a gendered being) and looking after the world of her body (with an inscribed history).

Although her present telling is also punctuated by her ‘switching on’ of the tape-recorder (LD in P2, 148), soon she gathers up the tale of her life in the form of another of her songs:

Said woman Said child no more Said woman, said growing And winds blowing Away innocent confusions (LD in P2, 149)

That just like her mother, Marike too is going to become that ‘no longer child’ — a body that has been ‘said’ (instructed or declared) to form a fully grown woman being, if not a human being — keeps on haunting Melanie. It again brings back to her memory the sad facts of her life, as revealed by her repetitive switching on of the tape-recorder (LD in P2, 152). This is when Melanie, for the first time, realizes the self-directed nature of her telling — that she is not so much talking to her daughter as she is addressing her own self:

Melanie: Perhaps it’s not a letter to Marike aged fourteen but to Melanie aged thirty-five. Dear Melanie, you are thirty-five years old. Your life is a mess. How did this come about? (LD in P2, 152) No longer writing letter to an absent daughter, Melanie now decides to confront her own past through the agency of telling (explanation) ‘How did this come about’. The realization that her life has become a ‘mess’ now flags off the last of her tales.

Although this time too Melanie switches on the tape-recorder, she, for the first time, has the inclination and the courage to listen to the entire message:

Man’s Voice: Hi, Melanie — at least I hope it’s Melanie. I know, I know, you haven’t heard from me in a long time [...] Shit! What made me think it’d be easier on a sodding answer-machine...





Pretends she hears nothing — like ignoring someone who’s in the room [...]. (LD in P2, 153-154) That all the efforts of Melanie’s at ignoring her past are foredoomed to failure is clearly borne out by the facts that she is actually ‘pretending’ to ‘hear nothing’ and that her past resides with and within herself just ‘like [...] someone who’s in the room’. Although she tries to escape these memories by remembering the time when she fell in love and got pregnant, when in spite of the worst apprehension of the doctors Marike was born alive or when she lulled her new born baby to sleep (LD in P2, 155-156), the thought of her lover-seducer never leaves her alone. This time it does not take her to switch on the tape-recorder, but the voice of the man automatically reverberates through the room as if to diminish Melanie’s own existence into some kind of an ineffectual echo of the past (LD in P2, 155, 156, 157).

The following words of Melanie lay bare the spilt that has already been wrought on her memory by the voice of her male detractor. Her contradictory statements about singing lullabies to the child Marike highlight such a split (LD in P2, 159). Although she still tries to make tales out of her childhood, of her father’s love (LD in P2, 160), of her experience of being locked up in the attic (LD in P2, 160), of her inability to distinguish between fear and pleasure (LD in P2, 161) or of quitting school at seventeen (LD in P2, 161), she is neither able to formulate her tale nor forget the past that has given birth to her tale.

Melanie winds up her tale with her last and incomplete letter to her daughter: Melaine: ‘My dear Marike, I wish could see your future. Your teachers and friends tell me

how special you are but when I kissed you good night in bed I could feel — your neck was stiff. [...] in the middle of the night I can hear — your teeth grind with anxiety ...’ ‘My dear daughter, Marike, I have been meaning to write to you for some time ...’ (LD in P2, 186) The anxious mother’s wish to see or know about her daughter’s future is not only a mother’s affection but also a fellow woman’s apprehension. Her perception of the daughter’s ‘stiff’ neck and ‘grinding’ teeth gives Melanie, the single mother, an added cause for concern; for these are physical manifestations of a mental anxiety that seeks and lacks a father figure. Of course, Melanie’s expression of her repeated attempts at writing the letter shows not only the hesitation of a single mother but also the urgency of a concerned fellow woman. Melanie’s final song ‘It was our time’ is not only a lament for the by-gone era or her youthful past, it is also a playwright’s ploy of confusing or concatenating the temporalities of the song, the singer and the message (LD in P2, 187-189).

The attempts at finding the self as an audience give to the Wesker Woman both the shame and the chagrin of failure; for her tale has already diminished into echoes that are at once derivative and non-committal. The more Melanie engages herself into the act of writing the letter, the more is she able to understand the utter futility of such an attempt. But, tales, as they say, need to be told; for as Elizabeth Minchin has told us, ‘We tell stories for many reasons, but their primary roles are to help us impose a structure on our own experience, and to give us a format for sharing our experience with others’ (Minchin in Cooper: 2007, 3). And it is this ‘sharing’ of personal experiences that enables the teller-sufferer to move out of the burden/bondage of secrets to the freedom/empowerment of expression and sharing. Her letter, though unfinished and fragmentary, is something more than a mere cautionary tale for Marike and girls like her. It is a saga of a lifetime experience of a woman who dared to be herself. And it is this awareness of the need to tell and the actual act of telling what was hitherto suppressed that ultimately saves the female protagonist Melanie from utter ‘despair’ and keeps alive the hope for a successful ‘tale making’ and ‘content reception’ in the times to come.





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Adolescence”. Child Development. 53 (1982). 841-864. Dornan, Reade W. Arnold Wesker Revisited. London: Twayne, 1994. Freeman, Mark. “Self as Narrative: The Place of Life History in Studying the Life Span”. In

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Markus, Hazel, and Ziva Kunda. “Stability and Malleability of the Self-Concept”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 51.4 (1986). 858-866.

Minchin, Elizabeth. “The Language of Heroes and the Language of Heroines: Storytelling in Oral Traditional Epic”. In Politics of Orality: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. (Ed.) Craig Cooper. Vol. 6. Boston: Brill, 2007. 3-38.

Perelman, Chaim and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969.

Tierney, William G. “Lost in Translation: Time and Voice in Qualitative Research”. In Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the Narrative Voice. (Eds.) William G. Tierney and Yvonna S. Lincoln. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 23-56.

Young-Eisendrath, P. and J. A. Hall. “Introduction” In The Book of the Self: Person, Pretext, and Process. (Eds.) P. Young-Eisendrath and J. A. Hall. New York: New York University Press, 1987. 1-15.

Wesker, Arnold. Letter to a Daughter. (abbr. to LD) In Plays 2: One Woman Plays. (abbr. to P2) London: Methuen, 2001. 141-189.

----. When God Wanted a Son. (abbr. to WGWS) in Wesker’s Social Plays. (abbr. to WSP) London: Oberon Books, 2009. 265-330.





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The Letter Never Written: Narrating the ‘Self’ in Arnold ... · The Letter Never Written: Narrating the ‘Self’ in Arnold Wesker’s Letters to a Daughter Mamata Sengupta Research