Parks and the "Anxiety of Authorship"

A prime example for the analysis of Gilbert and Gubar’s theories in contemporary society is the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Her work shows two levels of the “anxiety of authorship” that Gilbert and Gubar talk about. Not only is Parks a woman, but also she is black. As a result, she must struggle doubly against the historical representations of blacks and of women. The tangle of untold stories of blacks and women, led Parks to write plays that dealt with “the great hole of history.” By opening up history and fictionalizing it, she makes a dramatic space for an audience to understand the depth of what we do not know about history.

She has multiple periods of plays. Critics have categorized her early work under the heading of “the historical plays” (since they focus on reframing history) and the work following that time “the literature plays” (because they talk about the experience African American women using classical form).

Gilbert and Gubar say, “Just as the male artist’s struggle against his precursor takes the form of what Bloom calls revisionary swerves, flights, misreadings, so the female writer’s battle for self-creation involves her in a revisionary process. Her battle, however, is not against her (male) precursor’s reading of the world but against his reading of her” (1929). This struggle for Parks is primarily against the white reading of “black work.” It seems that today, while women’s issues are definitely still relevant, race is a far stronger holding cell, creating a deeper “anxiety of authorship” for Parks. In an essay for the forum on black theatre, she says, “A black play is told that it is about race and a black play knows it’s really about other shit” and “A black play knows that when audiences read it primarily through the rubric of ‘race relations,’ that those audiences are suffering from an acute attack of white narcissism. (If you have a need to see yourself reflected in things that are not directly about you, then you are one of the afflicted.)”

The situation is more complex than that, however. I would argue that she still overthrows her precursors. Her art and style is different, thus altering contemporary notions of what good theatre looks like. In fact, she has challenged even the most basic of theatrical conventions. In her project 365 Days / 365 Plays, she wrote a play every day and included even the worst of them following her concept of “radical inclusion.” She organized simultaneous premieres of the plays to happen once a week over the course of a year at over 600 different venues, with all types of locations, budgets and levels of acting. This very directly follows in the Oedipal pattern proposed by Bloom that Gilbert and Gubar claim does not apply to women. Perhaps the “anxiety of authorship” is overcome on an individual basis. Once one is established in the literary world it becomes the “anxiety of influence.”

Honestly, I don’t think it is even that simple. From the beginning of her career, Parks’ style was unconventional and she knew it and not just because it was feminine. People also tell her that her play Topdog/Underdog had to have been written by someone with a penis. It is about men who talk about their penises. It is an intimate picture of the relations between two brothers who objectify women. For this reason, I believe that literature can transcend the categories of male-written and female-written, although there is a great deal of insight in Gilbert and Gubar’s theory.