Female Grotesque In Cleansed, Phaedra, And Blasted

3.1. Introduction

As it was stated earlier, one of the key terms in the present thesis is female grotesque. The researcher tends to see how the plays, Cleansed, Phaedra and Blasted, can be read in this respect. The point is that the narratives within these plays try to penetrate gender and sexual identities through the violence. This violence is not related to any gendered or sexual identity, whether male or female, it seems that Kane wants to put an end to these norms. This dissertation includes a group of women, fictional or real, these women symbolize the female grotesque. Some of them carnivalized by their societies and others bring about the inversion, comedy, and tragedy of their play worlds. Some of these women have the capacity

Male way of thinking becomes socially acceptable so the male sex turns into a central force in society based on notions of gender. Gender, as a social formation, deals with femininity as a form of suppression. Feminist of the era felt that they need to modify the conventional image of the female form in art. Mary Russo, author of Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory, writes,

The grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the

When Graham repeatedly asks for heroin in the opening scene of the play:” More…. It is not enough….more “(Kane, 107-8), it seems that he knows how far he can go without risking death:”I know my limits, please” (Kane,107). And Robin intended to commit suicide “ voices told me to kill myself”(Kane, 115) but further he declares ” safe now, nobody kills themselves here… nobody wants to die…I don’t want to die, do you want to die?”(Kane, 115). And finally like other carnivalize characters, Robin does not determine the moment of his