Cross-gendering Molly?

Patrons of Bloomsday in Melbourne who have long memories will remember Gillian Hardy's 'Multiple Mollies' (2002): they were young and old, and male and female, and all shades of betwixt and between gender identities.  Ten years later, and much more Joyce under the collective belt and braces,  Yes, Yes, Yes! in 2012 is quite different in conception and execution.

When in 2010, we indulged Bloom's fantasy of becoming a 'new womanly man' in our theatrical adaptation of Circe, it seemed to the (male) actor involved (bless you, Jase Cavanagh!), a step very far, but being a courageous actor, he went there as Bella/Bello, resplendent in corset and camp-knickers, and so did Drew Tingwell as a snag Bloom. To want to be a mother, and even to produce ten metal children (which patrons will remember were tossed in all directions), doesn't seem so very odd to those of us who are mothers, but making that physical on a stage is still a potent source of comedy for an audience. I wonder would it be in a truly equal world? Joyce, we keep discovering, is often way out in front of contemporary thinking.

If a womanly man is a bit odd, the inverse is unexpected: a manly woman is almost commonplace. What a woman has to gain by acting in stereotypic male ways has always been known (blue stockings parading London in disguise in Shakespeare's day come to mind), and in the period when Joyce was writing, and about which he was writing, there were coming to light narratives of women effectively masquerading as men, and indeed not yielding their secret until after death (Johanna Jorgenson is a local Victorian example, and one thinks of other 'drovers' boys'), and there are even more spectacular examples to hand - like Isabelle Eberhardt who took shocking risks to pass as an Islamic man, as Si Mahmoud Essadi. Making Molly take initiatives in wooing is a simple example of her manliness; that it communicates as a rank form of manipulation might amount to critique of social values on Joyce's part, or suggest that under the skirts he puts on for Molly, there's some blokey pants. You'll need to decide for yourself.

Gender debates in the 1920s and 1930s were obsessed by the notion of androgyny, not just as a rare physical condition, but also as a social and identity orientation. You'll remember Virginia Woolf, Joyce's contemporary, in A Room of One's Own, finding it necessary to transcend gender, and espousing the view that great writers were essentially androgynous, able to draw both male and female experience. Some subsequent feminist theorists found the notion of androgyny worse than useless (more  'andro' than 'gyny'), though at least one of the 'holy trinity' of French feminists, Kristeva (a theorist who cut her critical teeth on Joyce), adopted a position that owed something to these earlier debates about the uses of androgyny for rethinking gender difference.

Drew Tingwell, a thought-provoking Molly.

The cat is accidentally out of the bag about one of Bloomsday's 2012 Mollies being a man. Why do it? What effect does it have on the ensemble of Mollies? The idea was our director's, Brenda Addie, and in part arose from wanting to create a continuity with the Circe episode in which Drew Tingwell played a soulful Bloom. Drew was a late addition to the lineup (joining the cast in April when another cast member had to retire from the production), and his very presence changed the dynamic quite significantly and in ways we find really energising. Molly is given to rants and slighting comments about men. Give these to a man playing a woman ... and a special frisson is created. It's not unlike what happens in Shakespeare's comedies when females masquerade as men, especially when we know that until women played female roles (well into c18), it was men who masqueraded as women playing men. It also has a remarkable effect in concentrating the mind on the pathologies of gender stereotyping (for both men and women), and the very real emancipation of stepping out of these constricting roles. It's a bit like unloosening one's stays and flinging them under the bed, something Molly loves to do, and something in which Bloom enjoys participating. When he gives himself a holiday from being a man, he comically enjoys feeling the 'crinkly! scrapy!' fine fabrics of Molly's underwear.

Let the transgendering proceed, in a spirit of enquiry and good humour. Joyce gives us plenty to enjoy and think about.