Some Thoughts on Caryl Churchill´s 'Cloud 9' and Sexual Politics
In 1970, Kate Millet published Sexual Politics, which soon became a classic of feminism. Within its pages, Millet calls into question male dominance in Western art and literature. The book opens with an exploration of two traditional sex scenes, written by Henry Miller and Normal Mailer. Millet interprets these two scenes as archetypal illustrations of “sexual politics” – the domination of women by men – and contrasts them with the queer sex scenes of Jean Genet.
In her two-act play, Cloud 9, which resulted from a workshop by the Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1978, Caryl Churchill takes up the topic of Sexual Politics, contrasting the sexual morals of the Victorian era with those of 1970s London. In act one, the audience finds Clive, a British colonial administrator, and his family in 19th century Africa, a location Churchill uses to parody Victorian Society, calling traditional notions of gender and race into question. Parody is achieved through various means, such as the choice to have Betty, Clive´s wife, played by a male actor and Joshua, Clive´s black servant, by a white actor. As Churchill writes in her foreword to Cloud 9, these decisions are designed to reveal that “Betty wants to be what men want her to be, and, in the same way, Joshua … wants to be what whites want him to be.” In act two, which is set in London in 1979, some characters (who have aged only by 25 years) reappear, yet Betty is now played a female actor, and Edward, Clive´s son, who was played by a woman in the first act, is now played by a male actor. In the time that has elapsed between the acts, Betty has left Clive, Edward is now openly gay, and Victoria, Clive´s daughter, has left her husband Martin for a polyamorous relationship. Churchill´s play premiered at the Darlington College of Arts in 1979, the year often associated with the beginning of a social backlash brought about by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime minister.
Elizabeth Russel from the University of Tarragona called attention to the fact that the term 'sexual politics' appears for the first time in the writings of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. In his view, the repressive social structures existing in the Victorian era were inextricably intertwined with the sexual repression of the patriarchal family. Therefore, they could only be unraveled through a sexual revolution. Accordingly, Churchill parallels the repressive structures of colonialism and the oppression of women within the patriarchal family in Cloud 9. Russel identifies this parallel not least in Clive, who is depicted as “the master of the house and as the head of the family.” In Russel´s understanding, Clive “is the stereotype of the paternalist imperialist … ruthless, aggressive and sadistic.” In the second act, the characters are portrayed as having liberated themselves from the moral restrictions of act one. Clive is largely absent during the second act, a fact which, more than anything else, reveals his loss of power.
Today, the questions raised in Cloud 9 seem more or less obsolete; the fact that the play´s title harks back to a story about a woman who experienced her first orgasm at the age of fifty-nine and, as a result, felt as if she was “on cloud nine”, seems hard to believe. Since the play’s composition, a fundamental cultural change has taken place, and what seemed revolutionary in the 1970s is now commonplace. However, Cloud 9 is certainly more than a mere historical document testifying to political controversies which accompanied the sexual revolution. Rather, the play is now considered to be a canonical work, a view it certainly deserves.
Source: Petticonifer, CC BY-SA 4.0
