Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama

Beckett's early writing is structured upon very sharply defined gender polarities. Objects of alarm, lust, derision, or indifference - women incarnate the "other". Beckett's shift from fiction to stage and media drama - giving a voice to women - unsettles this adversarial structure. From then on, the otherness of women is gradually eroded. In the later prose and drama, gender qualifies Beckett's people for neither fear nor favour. This study, drawing on the insights of such French writers as Deleuze and Guattari and Helene Cixous, traces how gender dualisms are undermined over the course of Samuel Beckett's writing career. It not only embraces his poetry and prose, but a number of unpublished and draft manuscripts from Reading University's Beckett Archive. Mary Bryden examines the status of sexual indeterminacy in Beckett's work, and concludes with a case study of the mother figure, whose profile alters from dread to tenderness. It also includes a discussion of the recently published "Dream of Fair to Middling Women". Bryden is also the co-editor (with John Pilling) of "The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives".