Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)
Studies - Lenke Németh: David Mamet's Women Characters: Conceptions and Misconceptions
heroines" (qtd. in Mufson 11); Donny in The Cryptogram (1994) is labeled as "narcissistic" (Lahr 73). Apparent even from the brief selection of comments cited above, Mamet's female protagonists have baffled male characters and critics alike. Whereas a large bulk of Mamet criticism has predominantly focused on the most obvious aspects and themes in Mamet's drama (the decline of American myths, the decay of American idealism, the prevalence of corruption and venality in business, the degradation of business ethic into deception and betrayal, the loss of American Dream and frontier spirit), the few critical inquiries- devoting scant attention to his female characters have produced one-dimensional and somewhat distorted images of women. I contend that these reductive explanations stem from what has been unduly overlooked so far: Mamet's heroines defy usual character typologies. The conventional clichés, archetypical paradigms or other patterns of classification that allocate women the roles of mother-wife-lover, Magna Mater-VirginSeducer-Bitch, the virgin and the whore, lose their validity in Mamet's world. Essentially, the female protagonists in Mamet's plays undermine and debunk the stereotypical roles sanctioned to them by patriarchy. Disrupting and subverting male dominance and superiority, the women carnivalize the male-dominated world, whereby they expose its prejudices and corrupt practices, as well as oppose the patriarchal modes of the objectification of women and the negation of their subjectivity. In an attempt to dispel some of the misconceptions about Mamet's women characters, in the present paper, I will highlight how Mamet is mapping the displacement of women's socially and culturally prescribed roles. I argue that M. M. Bakhtin's concept of "parodying doubles" (Problems 127)—a literary device whereby a leading hero has several doubles who parody him in various ways —can serve as an appropriate analytical tool to illuminate certain aspects of the representation of women in Mamet's plays Accordingly, the female characters assume the role of "parodying doubles" in the sense that they parody their male counterparts by emulating male role models and discourse, thus, the women characters expose the tenuous grounds that male phallocentric power is based on, and also lay bare corrupt patriarchal practices. In light of this assumption, it is precisely through 38
