Women Issues in “The Heidi Chronicles”
In Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, she gives us views of so many women who lead completely different lives, which they come together for the same main reason of Womanhood. This play really shows aspects of women’s lives that continue to be controversial in our modern society, and depicts the part of women’s lives that are usually kept secret as “skeletons in the closet”. This play also illustrates gender differences, how the men demand all the power, and how the women take the more passive road. In today’s society, I witness the same passiveness in our young women as in the play, and that needs to change.
Wasserstein wants her audience to hear feminism issues such as: Dominant ideas of woman, relationships, learning gender, sexuality, women in politics, women fighting for equal rights and understanding and valuing difference. She wants us to see in the characters, real life instances where the choices we make in life directly affect the way we live and portray ourselves. She personally picked these characters from her real life while she was in college, and shaped them in a way that the real life person can’t deny the personalization of themselves. The characters continuously challenge on another in the aspects of motherhood and class, they all are successful in their own way. The women in the play represent the modern independent woman striving for equality amongst men.
The main character Heidi is shy, very observant, and is a pushover to her two male friends, Peter and Scoop throughout the play. The two domineering men in her life add a huge part to her success as an independent woman, as an Art Historian, and a friend to them both. Heidi is in love with the two men she can’t have, and she knows that feelings directly counteract the choices she makes. Because she receives two male points of views for everything she does, I’ve come to the conclusion that male’s views outweigh a female’s