The baby’s not for burning: the abject in Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Helen Oyeyemi’s Juniper’s Whitening
Both Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Helen Oyeyemi’s Juniper’s Whitening have frightening instances of theatrical violence which include infanticide. These instances are more overt in Blasted and are alluded to in Juniper’s Whitening. This article interrogates the instances of infanticide within both pla...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM
2015
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8857/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8857/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/8857/1/8675-25685-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Both Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Helen Oyeyemi’s Juniper’s Whitening have frightening instances of theatrical
violence which include infanticide. These instances are more overt in Blasted and are alluded to in Juniper’s
Whitening. This article interrogates the instances of infanticide within both plays, connecting the violence to the
child abuse and farcical infanticide in The Punch and Judy Show. The figure of the child is examined from the
perspective of a symbol of civilisation corrupted from within and the murder of the child through the lens of
Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The staged infanticide and the rapes present in both texts reflect shifting cultural
norms in an increasingly multicultural Britain. The study of these two plays is both literary and dramaturgical;
the casual brutality in Kane’s play with the psychological and insidious motifs in Oyeyemi’s work are
compared with the motifs found in The Punch and Judy Show and then situated within the context of the In-yerface
theatre productions of the 1990s to the 2000s. In both plays, a sense of domesticity being a farce
underscoring brutality, torture and infanticide is present. |
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