SOURCE: Wolf, Stacy. “Re/Presenting Gender, Re/Presenting Violence: Feminism, Form and the Plays of Maria Irene Fornes.” Theatre Studies 37 (1992): 17-31.

In the following essay, Wolf argues that the form, as well as the content, of Fornes's plays make possible a feminist interpretation of the violence that pervades much of her work. Wolf asserts that Fornes's plays “re-present violence in order to point to its gendered construction.”

In a recent article in The Women's Review of Books, Marilyn French writes:

We cannot prove that actual violence toward women is affected by its depiction in film, television, advertisements, comic books, and literature. … But widespread fictional presentation of male violence toward women does legitimate it, reasserting through art a right held by law until the twentieth century—the right to beat, torture, and kill the women they ‘owned’—wives, daughters, slaves and concubines.¹

French's argument places itself on the cusp...