32 pages 1 hour read

María Irene Fornés

Fefu and Her Friends

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990

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Themes

Theatricality and Performance in Women’s Relationships with One Another

Near the end of Part 1, Emma states, “Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre” (22). Although Emma lives her life more dramatically than the other women, this assertion does not simply pertain to her personal philosophy. First, it’s a meta-theatrical statement that refers to how the play itself works through questions about social expectations and unpacks the way gender roles harm and even kill women. The performances of womanhood and femininity continue to be oppressive, even when a woman is in her own home or among other women.

The play turns the domestic sphere, which is meant to be private, into a performance space, putting these women on display even in personal moments. This effect is emphasized in Part 2 when the audience is forced to travel from room to room and remember that they are taking part in a performance. They aren’t allowed to become engrossed as a passive observer. The women in the play also perform for each other, frequently expressing themselves through monologues rather than discussions. They put up fronts to perform propriety or mask their emotions and pain.

Additionally, the cause that the women are fundraising to support, while not expressly explained, seems to be related to supporting theatre education for children. In Emma’s speech, she describes how society constantly hammers people into conforming, but that theatre is a way to rediscover oneself and become more sensitive and responsive to the world. Theater is a method of discovering one’s uniqueness, and teaching theater to children leads them to be less constricted from a young age.

The Suppression of Women

The women in the play are pressured in various ways to conform to social gender roles, and they comply at different levels. Fefu attempts to reject her role as a woman, taking on traits and tasks that are traditionally masculine. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Christina is heavily invested in her own conformity as a woman, to the point that Fefu’s rebellion against gender roles makes her feel threatened and uncomfortable. As Fefu explains in Part 1, women are only given safety if they forfeit their spirit and identity. In Part 3, the women discuss how young women at their college were pathologized and forced into therapy for being outstanding or asserting their intelligence.

Julia was once a confident and unstoppable woman who asserted herself, but was pressed into conformity and passivity, which for her manifests as a physical disability. The stakes of conformity are high, but the women are punished both for failing to conform, as with the women in college, and for agreeing to conform, as with Julia who goes insane and hallucinates. The only way a woman can escape either psychosis or the accusation of psychosis is to truly believe that women should be limited and contained. As Julia describes, the judges have told her that the only way she can stop hallucinating is to forget that they exist—something that other women have managed to do.

In Part 2, Emma muses on the fact that everyone has genitals, and yet they continue with their lives without ever mentioning them, acting in public as if they do not have them. Although genitalia are private, they dictate how a person is gendered and how they are treated in public. The play takes place in Fefu’s home, a private, domestic space in which the feminine is relegated. And yet the act of performing a play makes the space public. The women continue to perform for themselves and each other.

The Role of Gender in Relationships

In the first line of the play, Fefu says that her husband is married to her because their marriage reminds him constantly how much he despises women. This sets up the play’s discussion of the contrary and combative dynamic in heterosexual relationships, despite Fefu’s claim that women are unsettled and uncomfortable with each other until a man arrives to act as a calming barrier between them. Fefu and her husband are unable to connect and understand each other, despite the fact that, as Fefu eventually admits, she desperately loves him and longs for his attention.

In Fefu’s marriage, the nature of male domination in their relationship manifests as a form of mutually assured destruction. She points her gun at him and shoots, always knowing that it is up to her husband whether or not the gun will have real bullets. Eventually, Fefu is aware that she will not be shooting blanks. She will pull the trigger and her husband will die, also destroying Fefu by turning her into a murderer. Despite this looming destruction, Fefu seems unable to stop or force herself to perform differently. She pretends to enjoy this quirk of their relationship, but the repeated action of shooting stems from his hatred of women and the fact that he finds her exhausting.

The play examines these gendered relationships in the absence of men as the male characters never appear onstage. But the women are still shaped by the expectations of a patriarchal society. Emma proposes that the way to gain admittance to heaven is to be a good lover rather than to perform good deeds in public. This idea suggests that there is a private way that people act in relationships that is somehow separate or purer than the way they treat each other when around others. Dividing private interactions from public interpersonal relationships thus highlights the performative aspects of gender and gendered relationships.

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By María Irene Fornés