“Who the Hell Are You?”

IF 0.4 0 LITERATURE Acta Neophilologica Pub Date : 2023-12-08 DOI:10.4312/an.56.1-2.53-65
Nilay Erdem Ayyıldız
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Abstract

Tom Stoppard is an outstanding playwright, embellishing his plays with scientific and philosophical approaches and presenting complicated, mysterious plots to the reader. He bases the plot of his postmodern play, Hapgood (1988), on quantum theory and draws an analogy between Werner Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminism, termed “The Uncertainty Principle”, and international espionage. Thus, he constructs the complicated relationship between the particle and the whole throughout the play to depict the relativistic and deceptive relationship between sex and gender. Focusing on the title character of the play, the present study proposes that the play represents the fluid and indeterminate nature of gender and identity within the context of espionage and indeterminism. Hapgood, who is a mother, a lover and a successful master agent in a man-dominated British secret service, navigates between “masculinity” and “femininity” during a day. Moreover, she metamorphoses into her twin, who is entirely different from her, except for their identical faces, to entrap the mole in the office. The study consults Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and fluidity to indicate the unpredictable and uncertain nature of ‘gender identity’, which formulates itself through performances in social relations and trespasses the heterosexual matrix. It juxtaposes the Butlerian approach with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory pertaining to the confusing relationship between gender, the body and identity. The Butlerian analysis of the play reveals that particularly the modern way of life makes women transgress the Cartesian dichotomies of sex/gender, masculine/feminine and man/woman through the fluidity of their roles even during a single day and makes it difficult to find out who is really who.
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"你到底是谁?"
汤姆·斯托帕德是一位杰出的剧作家,他用科学和哲学的手法点缀他的戏剧,为读者呈现复杂而神秘的情节。他的后现代戏剧《哈普古德》(Hapgood, 1988)的情节以量子理论为基础,并将维尔纳·海森堡的不确定性原理(称为“不确定性原理”)与国际间谍活动进行了类比。因此,他在全剧中构建了粒子与整体的复杂关系,描绘了性与性别之间的相对性和欺骗性关系。本研究以该剧的主角为中心,提出该剧在间谍和非决定论的背景下表现了性别和身份的流动性和不确定性。哈普古德既是一位母亲,又是一位情人,在一个男性主导的英国秘密机构中是一名成功的高级特工,她在一天中游走于“男性气质”和“女性气质”之间。此外,她还变成了她的双胞胎,除了一模一样的脸之外,她和她完全不同,以诱捕办公室的内鬼。该研究参考了朱迪思·巴特勒关于性别表现和流动性的理论,指出了“性别认同”不可预测和不确定的本质,它通过在社会关系中的表现来表达自己,并超越了异性恋矩阵。它将巴特勒的方法与量子理论中的不确定性原理并置,该原理涉及性别、身体和身份之间令人困惑的关系。巴特勒对该剧的分析表明,特别是现代生活方式使得女性甚至在一天内通过角色的流动性,超越了笛卡尔的性别/性别,男性/女性和男性/女性的二分法,并且很难找出谁是真正的谁。
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来源期刊
Acta Neophilologica
Acta Neophilologica LITERATURE-
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
0
审稿时长
16 weeks
期刊介绍: The scientific journal Acta Neophilologica is the review of Slovenian experts in English-speaking, German-speaking and French- and Italian-speaking literary historians that publishes scientific studies of international and domestic scientists in the field of Western-European, American and other literatures in English. The journal pays special attention to the problems from the history of cultural and especially literary and theatre contacts between Slovenia and Western-European literatures, as well as the problems of Slovenian emigrant literature. The articles are published in the world language (English, German, French, Italian) the literature of which the author analyzes, the abstracts are written in a foreign language and the summaries in the Slovenian language.
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