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Giving voice to women: Teaching feminist approaches to the mystery plays
College Literature, Spring 2001 by Normington, Katie
Coletti points to a number of teaching strategies that can be used to examine the cycles from a feminist perspective. In order to breakdown the positive/negative approach to the study of women, she suggests that classroom activity should begin by focusing upon the presentation of unruly women within cycles.These are the women who traverse the boundaries that are set for them by the patriarchal and hierarchical powers of the play-world. Within Cawley's selection of pageants there are four sets of unruly women in evidence. These include Mrs Noah and Mak's wife Gyll, who both do battle and plot against male authority. Other unruly women are to be found in the N-Town A Woman Taken in Adultery and the Mothers of the Innocents in the Towneley Herod the Great. The presence of so many unruly women within the plays makes for a fruitful feminist study, for these are the women who retaliate and who challenge the traditional roles assigned to women; the "women on top" as Natalie Zemon Davies would call them.
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The students were introduced to the notion of rebellious women through other forms of medieval literature, in particular the Wife of Bath's prologue in which she describes her position as a woman on top:" I had them eating from my hand" and "I governed them so well and held the rein" (Chaucer 1952, 288).22 Within classes students presented extracts from a selection of pageants and investigated the possibility of the functions of the unruly women. Disappointingly the playing of Gyll in the Towneley Second Shepherds' Pageant did not succeed in locating her beyond a comic topos. It might have been more beneficial to see a cross-dressed male actor attempt to play her, rather than a female student. However, it was notable that the desire to entertain the audience and to play the humour of the stereotypical character dominated the performance.The potential to utilise Gyll's unruliness as a form of revolt was not realised.
Some of the other presentations managed to explore the portrayal of the unruly women with more success. The presentation of Mrs Noah's character, like that of Gyll's, is susceptible to being read as repeating Eve's sin. For example, Rosemary Woolf sees in Gyll's derisive plotting in the Towneley Second Shepherds' Pageant that she "to some extent casts herself as the second Eve" (1972, 191). Richard Beadle's interpretation of Mrs Noah extends the dichotomous reading of women: "Noah's recalcitrant wife on the one hand repeated the disobedience of Eve, but on the other was looked on as a type of virgin in her eventual submission to God's will" (1983, 51). Students highlighted these critical opinions in the short seminar presentations that accompanied the performances. In class performances of the figures of Mrs Noah and the Mothers of the Innocents were able to surpass this limitation of interpretation through evoking sympathy within the audience. For example, Mrs Noah in the Chester Noah's Flood pageant is presented with the dilemma of leaving her friends to drown while she boards the ark:
