Happy Days Archetype
Samuel Beckett wrote Happy Days in 1961, following his crusade of dramatic sublimity within the framework of a post-modern aesthetic deceit. The central character Winnie, like most Beckettian characters in Beckett’s corpus, refuses to struggle in the face of constraining circumstances. Having “descended all alone” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works 163), and sinking perpetually in the bottomless mound of the earth, Winnie is a picture of incoherence inherent in the worldview of nature in relation to that of the theatre. Confined, both within the mound as well as on the stage, caught within the inconsistencies of the desperate playing out of herself and the virtually inconsequential perking up of the one-way chatter, Winnie is the archetype of
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a life stranded within the extreme ends of an atrocious bell that periodically brings forth the realization of the passage of days and (non)events, and in her head, “It hurts like a knife” (162). There is the sun, the “black night without end” (166) that bestow upon her the “great mercies” (140), as she calls it, while on the other hand, there is that “strange feeling” (155) of being looked at day on day, eye on eye by an audience that may change their faces with each day but retains their gazes.
David Pattie in his book Samuel Beckett has pointed out how, with the fleeting moments, Winnie is continually seen as struggling with retrieval of as well as attributing authenticity onto the images and memories of her past. While in his esteemed opinion, this serves to shake off the sense of her self (a very intriguing proposition indeed), I would wish to contend how repetition and re-organization of the buried, the leftover, in the good old Freudian sense, serve to resurface, rather rake up the repressions of the past (notwithstanding, of course, the phantasmic methods employed for the same).
Also, this paper will delve on the idea of narcissism that I perceive as closely implicit in the character of Winnie, the middle-aged woman struggling against the forces of light (the fierce sunlight) and darkness in the pitiably decrepit condition that the audience sees her in. Moreover, while in Act 1, there is solace of her seductive bare shoulders to pardon the audacity of the author, Act 2 seems to be a further negation of any part of her sexuality being transferred to the audience, except, possibly, for her own consumption and self-satisfaction in her limited circumstances. So, narcissism, when enacted on the stage, takes on a whole new meaning and significance, and this paper seeks to explore this aspect.
Winnie, throughout the play, gives away the element of an almost surreal tapestry of glamour, erotica and garrulity. Armed with an unenviable array of possessions, consolidated in the endurance and visibility of her flesh, and salvaged by the companionship of a majorly dumb Willie, she may easily come across to many apologists of marital harmony as a woe that is woman, in a quasi-Miltonic sense. In that case, I argue that the entire plane becomes a gendered lake symbolically (and then, there is the whole clinching solace of mirages in her deserted landscapes!). I further argue that it is on this very landscape that Winnie physically detaches herself from Willie, realigns with the earth; becomes, on the one hand, dependent on him for giving her prattlings a ear (“…it’s a comfort to know you’re there, but I’m tired of you”- 157) and yet displaces her gender from his “crawlers” (158), as it were, on to her looking glass and this symbolic lake that we just spoke about. Her narcissism, then, is a far bloated and idiosyncratic affair. She discovers through her mirrors not only her face but even her claws. Her Other is neither gender neutral nor a masculine voice, as is the case with Milton’s Eve and rightly pointed out by Julia Walker (Walker, From Eve: The First Reflection.520); instead each image or reflection that unfolds on the stage becomes a monopoly of the wo(e)man.
Winnie has her eyes intact on both the ‘mirrors’ as well as the sun- eyes wide open with alacrity and expecting nothing save (self) attention. Everything ‘non-woman’ is extraneous to her field of sight, and also, admittedly so, the scopic expanse of the audience. For the audience is inundated with the images of the infinitely seductive and the painfully now-contracting, now-expanding Winnie. Sample the following sentences, “…flesh melts at so many degrees” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works 144) and “The earth is very tight today” (149).
In her brilliant book This Sex Which Is Not One Luce Irigaray has discussed how “surveying” is a premonitory gesture for an attempt at uncovering the hidden, the dark, including a possible manifestation of desire.
In Freudian understanding, it comprises one of human libidinal quests for power over the one being watched. The weapon, the eyes, in the course of time, become the surveyors of not just this side of the looking glass but also of the other side. “Eyes that recognize the right side, the wrong side and the other side: the blur of deformation; the black or white of a loss of identity” (Irigaray, The Looking Glass, from the Other Side 10).
Thus, to return back to Walker, we can safely analogize how a narcissist Winnie, like Milton’s heroine, rips out her body and her element off the male sexual and discursive economy (note how “Eve cease(s) to be a part of Adam, becoming not his rib but her self”- 519) and seeks self-knowledge, not through prescribed lords but through proscribed nature- the earth, the sky, the wilderness.
Winnie becomes disconcerted with the way Willie, along with the eerily perusive audience, looks at her, “Don’t look at me like that! Have you gone off your head, Willie?” (167) and a “strange feeling that someone is looking at me” (155), instances when the dominant phallic politik threatens to invade into the feminine personality that she apparently wishes to sacredly …show more content…
safeguard.
Winnie’s narcissism is a voracious caprice at self-multiplication, the kind of agitated impulse that Irigaray has noted in relation to that repressed entity called the female imaginary, engaged in the process of diffusion of feminine energy (Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 28), that seeks to not particularly reconcile the multiple routes taken by the same personality in its passage to and fro in the mirror dynamics but rather reinscribe oneself many times over in the same frame of setup. It is an inflection from the beguiling visage of the Other that ignorantly stares back at the enchanted face, “Pleas’d…with answering looks/Of sympathy and love” (Milton, Paradise Lost 464-65). In Winnie’s case, the multitude of selves- ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘the other’, ‘the woman’, ‘the one’, ‘the eye’, ‘the earth’ overlap onto one another, furthering the inflationary energizing of the self over everything that cares to evade the basic minimality of the wo(e)man.
In his immensely referred to essay On Narcissism, a scholarship that marked development in the studies on self-obsession and self-fatalism, Freud viewed narcissism as an armed libidinal stance taken by the practitioner in the act of splitting the Id from the Ego in the psychopathological deviation from the norm, mostly when one (here, I would suggest that normally this ‘one’ is the subject although sometimes it may also be the ‘other’, the ‘object’ that appropriates the subjectivity that curiously scrutinizes it) herself/himself has undergone pain and torment. So, according to Freud, it is one’s neurotic state that disposes one towards narcissism (Peter Gay, The Freud Reader). Neurosis, for all conventional purposes, establishes the inability of the subject to give direction to her/his instincts.
In the more specific case of Beckett’s women characters, neurosis can be re-understood as a frantic activity in shoring up the forces of the unconscious and utilizing them as redeemers of liberating sense experiences.
Hence, it no longer remains the harbinger of death and doom that traditional literature and classical psychoanalysis would have us believe. It is (self) love sans death, a love less of a transcendental nature and more of an earthly kind. I further argue that, like Freudian narcissists, Winnie sure seems to have her ‘object libido’ directed towards her ego, nevertheless, the other end of the thread of their malady is always held strong by auto-eroticism, thereby holding up the Freudian argument on how narcissism is the intermediate state between auto-eroticism and
self-love.
Narcissism, then, for Winnie, is averting death that an encounter with the other may cause, notwithstanding the violent break-in of the phallus that has haunted feminists for decades now for the sheer brutal disruptivity it threatens to cause to the ego of the woman. Continuing further on these lines, one may argue that absence of narcissism is equivalent to a chaste retirement to the law of the Father and an identification of oneself only in relation to the masculine, the dominant symbol, the ultimate presence. And one can only imagine what a detrimental position this serves to be vis-à-vis womankind that is constantly harping on a sympathetic perusal of its body, its becoming, its place in the mirror. For Beckettian women like Winnie, self-love and self-appreciation are much more than being tied to an image; it is rather the Mode.
It is an inscription of desires and emotions onto a literal or hypothetical glass pane. This self-obsession is a defence mechanism, a fierce assertion of one’s constructed self through soothing signs and meanings. As Winnie would lament, “I am worse off with it up than with it down, and I cannot put it down” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works. 153), a phrase which, apart from being suggestive in terms of possibly lifting and dropping off a garb, also indicates what the excessive bombardment of images onto her is gradually conditioning her into. And even though Winnie, interestingly, would, for a moment, ask Willie to take her looking glass as it does not need her, the fact is she never gives it away since, in her heart of hearts, she is well aware that she needs it more and more with each passing day. She knows that her mirrors pressingly complement her deserts and her Id–bloated images, her mirages.
On a closer psychological analysis of Winnie, one can deduce a condition of not being loved and being unable to love, pointed out by Freud in his On Narcissism as a crucial trait of narcissism (Freud 553). Going further, he quotes Ferenczi to validate a narcissist’s shift inwards through the pathological streaming of repressions, “A person who is tormented by organic pain and discomfort gives up his interest in the things of the external world, in so far as they do not concern his suffering" (550). Beckett’s personae fit precisely in this category. They turn towards the ego or the I, facilitated by the intermediation of the Id or the libido, because the world outside is hostile and repressively linear.
In fact, the linearity and its accompanying singularity that comes to obstruct feminine subjectivity at a far greater level, serves to perk up the standards of the acceptable, the admissible, becoming exclusive of any radical deviation of the norm, the natural. It forbids the ‘self’, the ‘auto’, the ‘ego’, all that which runs riot with the ideals set up across the historical primacies accorded to the uni-mastered Word, the all-pervasive phallus. Beckett presents to his characters a world of circularity, a closed cage of despair as well as the pleasure where temporal and vocal delineaments are subject to the whims of the characters; where reality is not what the spectators or the onlookers perceive it as but what is comprehended and modulated accordingly by the subject.
a life stranded within the extreme ends of an atrocious bell that periodically brings forth the realization of the passage of days and (non)events, and in her head, “It hurts like a knife” (162). There is the sun, the “black night without end” (166) that bestow upon her the “great mercies” (140), as she calls it, while on the other hand, there is that “strange feeling” (155) of being looked at day on day, eye on eye by an audience that may change their faces with each day but retains their gazes.
David Pattie in his book Samuel Beckett has pointed out how, with the fleeting moments, Winnie is continually seen as struggling with retrieval of as well as attributing authenticity onto the images and memories of her past. While in his esteemed opinion, this serves to shake off the sense of her self (a very intriguing proposition indeed), I would wish to contend how repetition and re-organization of the buried, the leftover, in the good old Freudian sense, serve to resurface, rather rake up the repressions of the past (notwithstanding, of course, the phantasmic methods employed for the same).
Also, this paper will delve on the idea of narcissism that I perceive as closely implicit in the character of Winnie, the middle-aged woman struggling against the forces of light (the fierce sunlight) and darkness in the pitiably decrepit condition that the audience sees her in. Moreover, while in Act 1, there is solace of her seductive bare shoulders to pardon the audacity of the author, Act 2 seems to be a further negation of any part of her sexuality being transferred to the audience, except, possibly, for her own consumption and self-satisfaction in her limited circumstances. So, narcissism, when enacted on the stage, takes on a whole new meaning and significance, and this paper seeks to explore this aspect.
Winnie, throughout the play, gives away the element of an almost surreal tapestry of glamour, erotica and garrulity. Armed with an unenviable array of possessions, consolidated in the endurance and visibility of her flesh, and salvaged by the companionship of a majorly dumb Willie, she may easily come across to many apologists of marital harmony as a woe that is woman, in a quasi-Miltonic sense. In that case, I argue that the entire plane becomes a gendered lake symbolically (and then, there is the whole clinching solace of mirages in her deserted landscapes!). I further argue that it is on this very landscape that Winnie physically detaches herself from Willie, realigns with the earth; becomes, on the one hand, dependent on him for giving her prattlings a ear (“…it’s a comfort to know you’re there, but I’m tired of you”- 157) and yet displaces her gender from his “crawlers” (158), as it were, on to her looking glass and this symbolic lake that we just spoke about. Her narcissism, then, is a far bloated and idiosyncratic affair. She discovers through her mirrors not only her face but even her claws. Her Other is neither gender neutral nor a masculine voice, as is the case with Milton’s Eve and rightly pointed out by Julia Walker (Walker, From Eve: The First Reflection.520); instead each image or reflection that unfolds on the stage becomes a monopoly of the wo(e)man.
Winnie has her eyes intact on both the ‘mirrors’ as well as the sun- eyes wide open with alacrity and expecting nothing save (self) attention. Everything ‘non-woman’ is extraneous to her field of sight, and also, admittedly so, the scopic expanse of the audience. For the audience is inundated with the images of the infinitely seductive and the painfully now-contracting, now-expanding Winnie. Sample the following sentences, “…flesh melts at so many degrees” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works 144) and “The earth is very tight today” (149).
In her brilliant book This Sex Which Is Not One Luce Irigaray has discussed how “surveying” is a premonitory gesture for an attempt at uncovering the hidden, the dark, including a possible manifestation of desire.
In Freudian understanding, it comprises one of human libidinal quests for power over the one being watched. The weapon, the eyes, in the course of time, become the surveyors of not just this side of the looking glass but also of the other side. “Eyes that recognize the right side, the wrong side and the other side: the blur of deformation; the black or white of a loss of identity” (Irigaray, The Looking Glass, from the Other Side 10).
Thus, to return back to Walker, we can safely analogize how a narcissist Winnie, like Milton’s heroine, rips out her body and her element off the male sexual and discursive economy (note how “Eve cease(s) to be a part of Adam, becoming not his rib but her self”- 519) and seeks self-knowledge, not through prescribed lords but through proscribed nature- the earth, the sky, the wilderness.
Winnie becomes disconcerted with the way Willie, along with the eerily perusive audience, looks at her, “Don’t look at me like that! Have you gone off your head, Willie?” (167) and a “strange feeling that someone is looking at me” (155), instances when the dominant phallic politik threatens to invade into the feminine personality that she apparently wishes to sacredly …show more content…
safeguard.
Winnie’s narcissism is a voracious caprice at self-multiplication, the kind of agitated impulse that Irigaray has noted in relation to that repressed entity called the female imaginary, engaged in the process of diffusion of feminine energy (Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One 28), that seeks to not particularly reconcile the multiple routes taken by the same personality in its passage to and fro in the mirror dynamics but rather reinscribe oneself many times over in the same frame of setup. It is an inflection from the beguiling visage of the Other that ignorantly stares back at the enchanted face, “Pleas’d…with answering looks/Of sympathy and love” (Milton, Paradise Lost 464-65). In Winnie’s case, the multitude of selves- ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘the other’, ‘the woman’, ‘the one’, ‘the eye’, ‘the earth’ overlap onto one another, furthering the inflationary energizing of the self over everything that cares to evade the basic minimality of the wo(e)man.
In his immensely referred to essay On Narcissism, a scholarship that marked development in the studies on self-obsession and self-fatalism, Freud viewed narcissism as an armed libidinal stance taken by the practitioner in the act of splitting the Id from the Ego in the psychopathological deviation from the norm, mostly when one (here, I would suggest that normally this ‘one’ is the subject although sometimes it may also be the ‘other’, the ‘object’ that appropriates the subjectivity that curiously scrutinizes it) herself/himself has undergone pain and torment. So, according to Freud, it is one’s neurotic state that disposes one towards narcissism (Peter Gay, The Freud Reader). Neurosis, for all conventional purposes, establishes the inability of the subject to give direction to her/his instincts.
In the more specific case of Beckett’s women characters, neurosis can be re-understood as a frantic activity in shoring up the forces of the unconscious and utilizing them as redeemers of liberating sense experiences.
Hence, it no longer remains the harbinger of death and doom that traditional literature and classical psychoanalysis would have us believe. It is (self) love sans death, a love less of a transcendental nature and more of an earthly kind. I further argue that, like Freudian narcissists, Winnie sure seems to have her ‘object libido’ directed towards her ego, nevertheless, the other end of the thread of their malady is always held strong by auto-eroticism, thereby holding up the Freudian argument on how narcissism is the intermediate state between auto-eroticism and
self-love.
Narcissism, then, for Winnie, is averting death that an encounter with the other may cause, notwithstanding the violent break-in of the phallus that has haunted feminists for decades now for the sheer brutal disruptivity it threatens to cause to the ego of the woman. Continuing further on these lines, one may argue that absence of narcissism is equivalent to a chaste retirement to the law of the Father and an identification of oneself only in relation to the masculine, the dominant symbol, the ultimate presence. And one can only imagine what a detrimental position this serves to be vis-à-vis womankind that is constantly harping on a sympathetic perusal of its body, its becoming, its place in the mirror. For Beckettian women like Winnie, self-love and self-appreciation are much more than being tied to an image; it is rather the Mode.
It is an inscription of desires and emotions onto a literal or hypothetical glass pane. This self-obsession is a defence mechanism, a fierce assertion of one’s constructed self through soothing signs and meanings. As Winnie would lament, “I am worse off with it up than with it down, and I cannot put it down” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works. 153), a phrase which, apart from being suggestive in terms of possibly lifting and dropping off a garb, also indicates what the excessive bombardment of images onto her is gradually conditioning her into. And even though Winnie, interestingly, would, for a moment, ask Willie to take her looking glass as it does not need her, the fact is she never gives it away since, in her heart of hearts, she is well aware that she needs it more and more with each passing day. She knows that her mirrors pressingly complement her deserts and her Id–bloated images, her mirages.
On a closer psychological analysis of Winnie, one can deduce a condition of not being loved and being unable to love, pointed out by Freud in his On Narcissism as a crucial trait of narcissism (Freud 553). Going further, he quotes Ferenczi to validate a narcissist’s shift inwards through the pathological streaming of repressions, “A person who is tormented by organic pain and discomfort gives up his interest in the things of the external world, in so far as they do not concern his suffering" (550). Beckett’s personae fit precisely in this category. They turn towards the ego or the I, facilitated by the intermediation of the Id or the libido, because the world outside is hostile and repressively linear.
In fact, the linearity and its accompanying singularity that comes to obstruct feminine subjectivity at a far greater level, serves to perk up the standards of the acceptable, the admissible, becoming exclusive of any radical deviation of the norm, the natural. It forbids the ‘self’, the ‘auto’, the ‘ego’, all that which runs riot with the ideals set up across the historical primacies accorded to the uni-mastered Word, the all-pervasive phallus. Beckett presents to his characters a world of circularity, a closed cage of despair as well as the pleasure where temporal and vocal delineaments are subject to the whims of the characters; where reality is not what the spectators or the onlookers perceive it as but what is comprehended and modulated accordingly by the subject.