Women's Voice behind Men's Words in Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's Fanny and Belle
著者（英） Masami Usui
journal or
publication title
Doshisha studies in English
number 78
page range 27‑55
year 2005‑03‑31
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000004730
Women’s Voice behind Men’s Words in Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Fanny and Belle
Masami Usui
I. Introduction
In Fanny and Belle, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s play which was first produced in March, 2004, women’s lives that are usually shadowed and misjudged at the sacrifice of men’s lives in the nineteenth century are examined, revealed, and even recreated in this global contemporary era.1 Robert Louis Stevenson, an eminent nineteenth-century author, is employed solely as a frame within which his wife, Fanny Van de Grift (formerly, Vandegrift, and once Osbourne) Stevenson and her daughter of her first marriage, Belle Osbourne (later Isobel Field), are portrayed and revived.
In order to recreate women’s lives in a form of drama, Kneubuhl ventured into doing an extended research on historical and biographical backgrounds of the Stevensons, especially of Fanny.2 The Stevensons’ lives in the South Pacific Islands including Samoa and Hawaii have been always the inevitable topics and interests in Hawaiian history and even in literature of Hawaiian theme. In an interview, Kneubuhl herself insists on her and Hawaii’s people’s long-term familiarity with Robert Louis Stevenson; “One of the first books that was read to me was (Stevenson’s) ‘The Child’s Garden of Verses’” and also “we’ve all come into contact with ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped.’
I’ve known Robert Louis Stevenson my whole life” (Tsai). Among contemporary Pacific islanders, however, there is an anti-colonial perspective
that determines and judges those early settlers from Europe and America. In a postcolonial and transnational era, furthermore, there also arises another issue of discovering the borderless experiences of women during that period.3 Both Fanny and Belle represent women beyond borders as Kneubuhl remarks that “Fanny foreshadowed the contemporary (woman)” and also “had a sense of herself that she couldn’t sublimate to the 19th-century normality”(Tsai).
To trace their life-long voyage does not simply mean to trace the historical and ideological implication in a context of political correctness but also represents their private and even psychological search for their identity in a universally-oriented sphere.
By dramatizing outstanding women’s lives in a transnational sphere, moreover, the space is intriguingly explored and surrealistically extended from Europe to America and also to the South Pacific on a stage. This extended space illustrates not only the dynamics of physical movement but also the enlargement of possibilities and psychological depth. It is biographers who attempt to trace, discover, and retell the others’ lives and as for Fanny, three biographies have been published to date. The first and official biography written by Fanny’s sister, Nillie Van de Grift Sanchez, was published by Scribner’s in 1922. Margaret Mackay’s The Violent Friend: the Story of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson published by Doubleday in 1968, during the
first wave of feminist movement, focuses on an unusual woman’s life. It was in 1993 that Alexandra LaPierre’s Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny was published first in France, and then in 1995 in the States. LaPierre’s work to recreate Fanny in a new form of biography is largely supported by her research and also her confidence in Fanny’s real life and self beyond Fanny’s wrongly-interpreted image as a sort of legendary figure.4 LaPierre states that if Fanny’s “intimacy with Robert Louis Stevenson gives her a
rightful place in his legend, her story goes beyond the frame of a marriage to a celebrated man” (4). One time, Fanny is criticized as a wrong wife for the gifted Stevenson, and another time, she is over-praised as she played perfectly such roles as a nurse, mother, secretary, and editor for the invalid and dependent Stevenson. No matter how appealing her personality may be, Fanny’s own search for self and psychological conflict that eventually led to her depressive illness has to be examined more carefully and thoroughly.
Kneubuhl’s play, like LaPirre’s fiction, is considered a newly-recreated work of art to encode the unveiled and misinterpreted life of distinguished women by doing research and rereading the recorded and reserved materials.
After being absorbed in such raw materials, Kneubuhl, as a playwright, revives Fanny and Belle by giving them their own voice on stage whose time scheme is from 1860 to 1915. Directed by John Wat, it was performed on the multileveled and cubistic performance area with a spacious central stage and three elevated satellite stages (Berger “Play”). Wat remarks that there were three challenges in producing Fanny and Belle: first, to present historical and biographical facts correctly; second, to make it possible for the audience to imagine beyond the facts; and third, to have the audience see it as the film worlds (npn). Within the minimized yet concentrated space of the stage, Kneubuhl enlarges and deepens the neglected aspects and unrecorded voices of women out of conventional bounds at the turning point of the women’s history.
Kneubuhl’s play embraces the dynamics of women’s lives and their space/
spirit travel where the two women of different generations in a transitional period from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century are confronted with the unavoidable male-centered social values and norms. As far as the play needs to be located at various places such as Indiana, Panama, Reese
River, Oakland, Paris, Grez, Monterey, Honolulu, Sydney, and San Francisco, Kneubuhl sets the “Valimia Space” as a memory place used by Fanny and Belle and its Great Hall is used “in any imaginative way with moveable, flexible props to create the different scenes” (Playwright’s Note in Fanny and Belle). To make the play surreal, Kenubuhl employs an epic style and imposes Fanny upon Belle as a narrator. Fanny revives in Belle’s memory in the fragmented episodes where Belle is sometimes shadowed and other times lightened by Fanny (Tsai and Rozmiarek). The important topic of this play is, as Kneubuhl herself indicates, the unique mother-daughter relationship set in a historical context; it is the relationship “evolving through the years”
together and “through their shared experiences” in their unconventional lives and consisting of two opposite situations, “allies” and “competitors or rivals”
(Berger “Play”). Fanny and Belle, therefore, examines the transformation from women out of bounds to women in quest for and bound with independence and art, and ultimately to women in different generations, that is, mother and daughter, newly tied to each other by strong bonds in search for self.
II. Women out of Bounds
Within the sphere where Victorian values and norms prevailed and dominated, women were considered inferior to men, oppressed under the wrongly-idealized image and lightly-judged characteristics, and ultimately victimized by the male-centered collective values. Fanny and Belle undergo a similar path from their early marriage, to child-birth, to failed marriage life, to divorce, and finally to remarriage to younger men. Even though there is a conflict between Fanny and Belle regarding Fanny’s divorce and remarriage, both of them are entirely against the conventions and traditions
of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The conventions that bind women have dual aspects as they are women beyond the boundaries of the universally-transmitted nineteenth-century values and also as they are American women beyond the boundaries of Victorian upper-middle class values among the well-established Scottish family members.
The nineteenth-century values imposed upon women of the middle and upper-middle classes largely restricted women from being engaged in male- oriented activities and professions. Women were considered weaker vessels whose intellectual and artistic abilities were judged inferior to men’s.
Moreover, British ladies of leisure were primarily trained and educated by governesses at home or at girls’ boarding schools which provided them with basic language skills in English and French, dancing, music, and art. In spite of the imported Victorian gender ideologies and a national controversy, America was blessed with an expanded schooling for women in the early and mid-nineteenth century (Gordon 228). Fanny received a formal and regular school education at the Third Ward public school and the old high school on University Park (Furnas 128), while Belle had no formal educational opportunity in the mining camps in Nevada and was finally sent to Mr. Lunt’s Dancing Academy. Their primary educational background in American institutions formulates the boundary of women’s activities in the society.
Along with being denied educational opportunities in a higher and advanced level, women were mostly excluded from professions among respectable families in the nineteenth century.
The Victorian-based values among upper-middle-class Scots determines the life-styles and roles of women as well as men. The difference between an upper-middle Scottish family in Edinburgh and a middle-class immigrant family in the Midwest of the New World results in a conflict and resolution
that Fanny and Belle undergo during the rest of their lives. The environmental difference is definitely influential to build the residents’ lives. As the ancient capital of Scotland, Edinburgh consists of the old stone-built medieval castle and town, and also the new town as the established residential area expanded in the eighteenth century. The American Midwest in the nineteenth century blended the newly-established settlement with the wilderness. As Fanny expresses her early life in Indiana in her article entitled “A Backwoods Childhood,” on the other hand, everything that the townspeople “needed for comfort or health was within reach of” their hands (Sanchez 11).
The striking difference between a Victorian life-style in Britain and an immigrant life-style in America originates from the degree of independence, settlement, cultivation, and assimilation into the land and society. Among those differences, the degree of independence is especially estimated by the socioeconomic status and living conditions. The Stevensons are well- established professionals and even called “petty bourgeois” for generations in Scotland (Furnas 4); while the Vandegrifts are from early Swedish and Dutch settlers in Philadelphia and later head West after the first wave of frontier immigrants. Louis’s dependence upon his father and his principled and modest life in his young days is proven in the fact that until he became twenty three years old Louis’s allowance was kept to only ten shillings a week, that is, “ a sum that, even in 1870, did not permit large dissipations”
(Furnas 37). On the other hand, Fanny with a mining-devoted husband and two small children suffered poverty and had to be engaged in a dressmaking job in uncultivated Nevada (Mackay 13); and it was common that women in the rural West earned “significant amounts of money by engaging in household commodity production” (Weiner 153).
The distinction between women’s roles and labor in two different spheres
also depicts the socio/economic/cultural status. Housekeeping as a key to divide women into different social groups in nineteenth-century Victorian England is transformed into an embodiment of a gender-oriented woman’s role in the transitional and newly-established American society from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the Stevensons’ household, no housekeeping jobs such as cooking, sewing dresses, and growing vegetables were carried out by Mrs. Stevenson who always lived as a lady of leisure.
Instead, the Stevensons had several servants in their dignified residence in the New Town of Edinburgh. On the other hand, the Vandegrifts managed almost all the work for survival by themselves and it is said that girls from such independent settlers’ families as the Vandergrisfs “were likely to be good cooks” (Furnas127).
Fanny represents this transitional figure of a woman whose role will continue and become more definitely established in the post-industrial era when the doctrine of separate sexual spheres becomes strictly settled in the West. Fanny’s life style originates from a typical style of middle-class pioneers in the prairie where all the necessities are supplied and even created by the hands of the pioneers and their wives. At the start of their marriage, Louis was surprised at housekeeping or domestic skills mastered and practiced by Fanny and Belle as “the two American women” (Mackay 108). Fanny as a pioneer woman created in Kneubuhl’s cubist approach emphasizes her nature as a wild and strong woman with practical skills related with the life, the land, and Nature:
Woman 1: See Fanny
Woman 2: See Fanny Vandegrift Woman 3: See Fanny seed the gardens Woman 1: Plant the trees
Woman 2: Grow the flowers Woman 3: Bring in the sheep Woman 1: Milk the cows Woman 2: Tend the poultry Woman 3: Pick the berries Woman 1: Bake the pies Woman 2: Keep accounts
Woman 3: And sew the dresses with lace and ruffles and ribbons Woman 1: And see Fanny Vandegrift on the horseback,
Woman 2&3: Ride and ride and ride Woman 1: over Indiana fields
Woman 2&3: chasing the wind. (FB Act I: 1)
Fanny’s wide range of housekeeping capabilities makes a striking contrast with Louis’s mother’s life in Edinburgh. Fanny’s nature, blended with the fertile ground and her early life in Indiana, alike that is criticized by more conservative women, is illustrated as the core of her personality.
Women’s national and transnational journey and settlement, in which in most cases they are accompanied by men, also restricts women from male- occupied activities and determines women’s devotion to men’s success.
Fanny’s first trial to travel with infant Belle to join her husband in Nevada is described as the crucially dangerous scene in Kneubuhl’s play as Belle remembers ; “And on we went into the loneliness of Nevada and the desolate landscape of Reese River where everything looked bleak, rocky and sulphurous. After months of traveling, danger and worry, to come to this, you’d have thought – (she would have sat down and wept) (FB Act I: 14).
The American frontier myth excludes women from “heroism and space, the opportunity for rebellion and nonconformity,” and freedom and independence;
whereas “the very values that the male is escaping are assigned to the white females: constrictions, obligations, and capitulation” (Wherry 224). On the other hand, women learned how to protect the family and themselves and survive among outlaws in the wild surroundings. Kneubuhl emphasizes the hardships of women’s westward journey; Fanny’s journey from Indiana to Nevada consists of outlaws’ seductions and her journey from Reese River, Nevada to Virginia City, Nevada and to San Francisco is hastened in a series of quick scenes of Sam’s chasing his dream and women and Fanny’s firing guns (FB Act I:16-17). In such a condition, Fanny’s masculine and strong personality was strengthened as shown in her practice of rolling and smoking cigarettes and shooting a revolver, all of which she actually did (Mackay 12). The American frontier as the male-idealized movement ultimately transforms women into self-supporting and self-confident creatures who were beyond conventional boundaries.
The voyage to the South Pacific in the nineteenth century is also formed by the male-centered idealized action to plunge into adventures and discoveries as well as by the colonial consciousness and motivations. Even Louis, in spite of his life-long struggle with illness since his childhood, underwent physical training and at his family’s second house in North Berwick, he “learned to cope with sand and sea, and became an adept at
‘crusoeing’”(Daiches 18). Compared with Louis’s enthusiasm and recovery of health owing to the voyage, Fanny attempts to answer to expectations of
“the wife’s devotion” during her three-year voyage with Louis to the South Pacific and it is noted “how she cheerfully endured a thousand discomforts, hardships, and even dangers for the sake of the slight increase of health and happiness the life brought to the loved one,” that is, Louis (Sanchez 135-36).
These hardships on board and also on the landed and transplanted ground
embody Fanny’s suppressed self whose good will is always expected and unconsciously controlled by her writer husband who needs both health and adventures for his successful career.
Women out of bonds are born from the restricted, determined, yet challenging traditions during the transitional period and develop their consciousness as hidden pioneers. The higher the barriers are for women, the more rebellious and challenging women become. It is the beginning of the women’s transfiguration; suppressed lives and selves turn to the liberated ones in the process of encountering, improving, and assuring their long- neglected potentialities and uncovered selves.
III. Women Bond with Art
Women out of bounds are in search for what Virginia Woolf calls “a room of one’s own,” that is, self-confidence, independence, and self-expression.
The nineteenth-century values restricted women not only from the Victorian male-centered social activities but also from creative activities such as art and literature. There also appears the distinction between professional women artists and the “lady amateurs” whose traditional practice of art was considered as part of female education and culture (Prieto 3). Both Fanny and Belle are deeply involved in this rebellious action against male-centered restrictions on women and both women indulged in creative, and even professional, activities such as painting and writing as pioneer women artists.
Painting is the first step for both Fanny and Belle to liberate themselves from a selfish patriarchal husband and father, and ultimately the male-expected and male-oriented life and also from the culture of the American West. As Belle’s artistic talents were proven in her drawing of caricatures on the margins of her examination sheets in high school, she was sent three days a week to
the School of Design in San Francisco (Mackay 20). More surprisingly, Fanny herself determined to enroll as a student there and it was Fanny who received the first prize after completing some paintings in the mid-Victorian manner (Mackay 20).
The next step to independence for Fanny and Belle who determine to study art in Europe is regarded as the crucial turning point where they could be entirely free from family and daily matters and be absorbed only in art trainings. Furthermore, the sex-segregation with which most other American women artists in Europe were confronted drove them to develop themselves and to attain self-confidence in art and future careers (Sminth 40). It can be estimated that it cost about eight hundred to a thousand dollars to study art in Europe in those days, and most women had to depend on family and individual resources (Sminth 40). The newly-grounded opportunities for women to study art and newly-earned money and established life in America made it possible for women to travel to the Old World to study art at a more advanced and professional level.
There is, however, a tension between this new wave of American women artists and the traditional male-oriented institutions of art in Europe. When Fanny could not divorce, she made a further step to go to Europe to study art, and arrived first at Antwerp where they were eventually rejected by the Academy solely because they are women. It is said that both Fanny and Belle as respectable women needed to have a seemingly appropriate reason to study art, or to go abroad, in 1875 (Mackay 24). Though their intention is sometimes lightly judged, they belong to the emerging generation of American women artists in the nineteenth century. They were lucky enough to start art training in the newly-founded art and design schools throughout America.
However, their confrontation with the strict segregation of women at art
schools and salons in Europe was unavoidable yet challenging for ambitious American women who sought for professionalism in art.
In America, both men and women “constructed art schools in interaction, reaction, and conflict”; while in Paris, “a dis-aggregation occurred as women and men studied in separate locations” (Sminth 40). American art was rapidly developed after the Civil War and it became “a potent vehicle for defining social authority” for Gilded Age middle-class Americans as the result of
“the extension of art education to the public schools” (Sminth 2-3). In addition, as a result of women’s pursuit of professional opportunities, due to the effect of public school educations, middle-class white women became central figures at design and art schools; first they received decorative and industrial training at schools of design, first founded around 1848, and then traditional and academic art training by the early 1860’s (Sminth 3). After a flourishing establishment of art academies in the East, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Art Students League in New York, it was in 1874 when the School of Design was founded in San Francisco.5 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance, attended the newly-founded Rhode Island School of Design in 1878 and without graduating, she made a living as a commercial artist (Kimmel ix). Both industrial needs and aesthetic tastes spread among Americans; next, art schools gained wide popular attentions and interests due to the proliferation of articles about their programs in newspapers and journals (Sminth 15). Compared with the women in the East, however, Western women had more freedom because the West “was unhampered by tradition and social hierarchy” (Trenton x). Belle at sixteen and Fanny at thirty-four were among the earliest enrolled students from 1874 to 1875 just after the school was founded by Virgil Williams above the
California Market. It is noted that Virgil Williams is one of the intelligent, talented, and “agreeable” people whom Fanny encountered in a small friendly circle in East Oakland (Sanchez 36) when she was deeply devoted to photography and one of a few attendants at Fanny’s marriage to Louis. The School of Design in San Francisco that later became the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in 1893, and whose annual exhibition became the focal event for artists in California, is now considered the significant backbone of American women artists’ birth, establishment, and development (Landuer 10).6 It was Fanny who received the first prize, the silver medal, for her paintings in the mid-Victorian manner at The School of Design in San Francisto (Mackay 20; also see Appendix 1).
American women artists are pioneers not only in their home country but also in the Old World, especially in France. The Julian Academy in Paris where both Fanny and Belle finally could study painting in 1875 was often mentioned in biographies as the only academy which admitted women, especially women who had no money to study with a private teacher those days in Europe (See Appendix 2). The Julian Académy or the Académies Julian was one of the two best-known art studios where women could receive training in France. It was founded in 1868 by Rodolphe Julien for the purpose of preparing the students for the entrance examination to the Ecole des Beax- Arts. Among nine studios at the Academy, five were for men and four for women so that American women rushed to the Academy by the late 1870s after struggling to find the appropriate art school, and consequently they had no other way except taking private lessons in Paris; and the number of American women artists increased there between 1885 and 1889. Fanny and Belle were, with Elizabeth Gardner, among the first three women to enter Julian’s in the 1870’s.
Like the art schools, the artists’ colonies are men’s spheres where they can be entirely engaged in the freedom of self-expression. Seeking a change of the air after Hervery’s death, Fanny and Belle ventured into living in a forest colony in Grez-sur-Loing near Barbizon, which was a home ground for the Impressionists and which became the place to visit for British artists.
Consequently, they became more profoundly and industriously involved in painting. It is said that before Fanny and Bell’s settlement, “women artists had been practically unknown in the colonies about Fontainebleau, and the men who haunted these places were disposed to resent the coming of any of the other sex” (Sanchez 46). Women artists’ new arrival or even invasion became the news that was transmitted all way to Edinburgh and consequently Louis was sent to rescue his cousin, Bob Stevenson, from those attractive women artists. This was, however, the most productive era for Fanny, who was able to liberate herself from all social and cultural bonds. Fanny’s paintings completed at the Julian Academy and at Grez, especially her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson at twenty-six and the bridge at Grez in 1875, represent her earnest will to move into free space and create her own world (See Appendix 3 and Appendix 4).
Fanny’s pursuit for paintings and design did not cease after her remarriage to Louis and her settlement in the South Pacific. After she arrived on the Casco, ending a journey which began in San Francisco in June, 1888, she
was attracted by the people and the natural beauty of the South Pacific and began to draw portraits of the people whom she met. Among them was the first portrait of Chief Ori a Ori, made “by throwing the shadow of his head on the wall with the help of a lamp, then drawing the outline and filling it in with India ink,” and the portrait so impressed Ori that he demanded other portraits, so that their house became “a veritable picture-gallery” (Sanchez
145). In 1889, after arriving at the port of Butaritari, in the Gilbert islands, Fanny’s flag design pleased the king so much that he adapted it as the new flag of Tembinoka. This new flag has vivid colors and a symbol as it consists of “three vertical stripes of green, red, and yellow, with a horizontal shark of black showing white teeth and a white eye” as “a neat reference to the king’s supposed descent” (Sanchez 153). In her diary, The Cruise of the “Janet Nichol,” Fanny records that during her voyage she was “trying to paint a
small portrait of Tin Jack, who is a beautiful creature, but during the reluctant moments he poses he sits with his back toward me, his eye fixed on the clock, counting the minutes until his release” (67). In another diary entry of July 5, 1893, in Vailima, Fanny writes that “Belle and I thought it would be a good plan to stay all day and make sketches (Belle’s sketches) of war preparations (Our Samoan Adventure 219).
Along with painting, writing became an important role for Fanny and Belle, especially after their unique experiences across the American Continent, across the Oceans, and even in the middle of the Pacific islands. Fanny’s decision to sell her articles and stories to magazines was firmly made because she needed to earn money for making a living. As a result, she could sell just one story entitled “Too Many Birthdays” to St. Nicholas, an American journal for children, in July, 1878 (Mackay 29). In her diary entry of 20 July, 1893, Fanny still laments her broken dream in her fifties: “I wish I were able to write a little tale that I might save some money of my own” (Our Samoan Adventure 243). In 1889, Fanny wrote a short story with a Hansen’s disease background, “The Half-White,” after Louis was allowed to visit the Hansen’s disease colony in Molokai and was deeply impressed by Father Damien’s contribution and devotion (Mackay 282). Fanny’s ambition to become a professional writer reflects the social and cultural background of America;
in addition, it shows how eagerly she wishes to be financially independent.
By mid-nineteenth century, America underwent “a transformation in literacy”
and the “shift from oratory to composition” is linked with an emerging professionalism and that of women writers, that is, with “women’s success in popular fiction writing and journalism,”; indeed, women wrote almost half the best-selling novels, and “by 1872 women were authors of nearly three-quarters of all novels published” for an increasing female readership (Hobbs 18).
Fanny’s good sense and judgment as the first reader of Louis’s stories prove her long hidden talents as a writer. The tension between Louis and Fanny regarding Louis’s writings is most distinctly illustrated in a famous episode of his masterpiece, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Fanny’s sharp criticism on this story in progress and her deep insight into human nature nourished by her own hardships transforms Louis’s manuscript into a masterpiece. The scene is rendered in Kneubuhl’s play:
Fanny: I think you’ve made a story and missed the point.
Louis: (really irritated) What did you say?
Fanny: I said I think you’ve missed the point.
Louis: I missed the point? I can’t believe you’d say a thing like that.
It’s a thoughtless remark.
Fanny: Still, I say it. I think you missed the point.
Louis: (raising his voice) The point! Just what point is it you think I missed?
Fanny: The allegory, you’ve missed it.
Louis: No, you’ve missed it. This is a crawler, madame!!
Fanny: Well, it should be something more than just a crawler!
Louis: You know nothing about writing.
Fanny: You’ve made Jekyll a bad man pretending to be good.
Louis: Just as he should be –
Fanny: No, he should have a good self and a bad self, just like all of us!!
Louis: That’s the most ignorant idea I’ve ever heard!! (FB Act I: 62- 63)7
It has been reported that their discussions over Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“were sometimes hot and protracted, for neither was disposed to yield without a struggle”; yet at the same time, the dilemma made Fanny “quite ill” (Sanchez 118-19). It was Fanny’s role to assist and proofread Louis’s writings since Louis largely relied on her reviews and criticisms. Charles Neider remarks in the introduction of Our Samoan Adventure that “Fanny was in the habit of keeping diaries – partly for her own use and pleasure, partly so they could be used when needed to refresh Louis’s memory of events and placed for the benefits of his various literary projects” (12-13). Even The Cruise of the
“Janet Nichol”, which is also written for Louis, is not highly regarded since the original manuscript was largely revised and rewritten (Neider 13). Often criticized as unadorned writing without the artistic merit or sophisticate of Louis’s work, however, Fanny’s writing should be recognized as one independent soul’s creation isolated from her writer husband.
Like Fanny’s, Belle’s talents and pursuit for professionalism in writing illustrates the neglect with which women’s writings have been treated. During her stay in Hawaii with her artist husband, Joe Strong, who ultimately had mental and financial difficulties, Belle had to earn money by opening dancing classes and submitting articles to the Honolulu Advertiser. In Sydney, again, Belle wrote articles on her experiences for the Sydney Bulletin. In 1902, Belle under the name of Isobel Strong with her writer brother, Lloyd Osbourne, published Memories of Vailima. In addition to this memoir, The
Girl from Home: A Story of Honolulu (1905) was also written by Belle. In
1911, moreover, Belle’s memoir of her stepfather, Robert Louis Stevenson, was published. Her last work under the name of Isobel Field, This Life I’ve Loved, was published in 1937 to embody her life-long project of art.
In Kneubuhl’s play, gardening is an important metaphor to embody Fanny’s personality, which is deeply connected with creative activities and also with intelligence.
Fanny: I plant a seed or a root, and I plant a bit of my heart. I see tender shoots rise toward the sun, and I don’t feel so far removed from God. In a way I am an artist. I’m creating this garden, this house, the land, things I’ve bound all together in good faith and love. But now he’s hacking at the strings and it feels like its all coming apart. (FB Act II: 18)8
Fanny’s devotion to planting vegetable seeds, wherever she lived, is based on her urgent and consistent need to be involved in “growing” activities, by herself. Transplantation involves a new trial: planting the seeds in an infertile soil of Nevada, or even in a fertile land in the South Pacific. Transplantation in her garden of Vailima, Samoa, is especially an essential practice for Fanny as explained by her sister:
The fertile soil and kingly climate of the island encouraged her to experiment, not only with the plants native to the place, but also with exotics brought from other lands. In importing these foreign plants she exercised the greatest care not to introduce any pest, . . . Before introducing any plant she consulted the heads of the botanical gardens at Kew and Colombo and the grass expert at Washington, D.C.
(Sanchez 192-93).
Women’s creative activities, which have been ignored and lightly judged,
should be evaluated as the driving force in the search for self. Fanny’s silver medal, which she treasured throughout her life, and still was discovered by Belle after Fanny’s death, is an emblem of her life-long pursuit of art.
IV. Women Bound to the Search for Self
The multilayered conflicts shared by Fanny and Belle as women of the nineteenth to early-twentieth century eventually leads to their strong tie as women in search for self in the women’s emancipation era. In 1898, Gilman’s Women and Economics, which discusses woman’s imprisonment and the
future liberation, was published with great success and widely read. Yet, still in 1903, Gilman laments over “the insularity of mind” in most homes (274). Both Fanny and Belle lived in a crucial era when women’s emancipation was a matter of public debate. Kneubuhl places Belle as a narrator to reconstruct Fanny’s voice so that their experiences are not only overlapped as mother and daughter, but are also interrelated as are the lives of all women.
The wrongly-input Victorian values, which prevailed in the previous generations, are corrected and newly interpreted by Fanny and Belle in the transitional era before as here. Their two separate consciousnesses are slightly overlapped, as if they formed the threshold to the shared one. Kneubuhl writes:
Fanny: Sam loves adventure.
Belle: We’re going to be with him!
Fanny: Well, we’ve spent our savings, my dowry.
Bell: My father isn’t afraid of anything, Fanny: Sold our house –
Bell: He is so handsome.
Fanny: Sam says some mines yield 100,000 a day.
Belle: And charming.
Fanny: And prospectors wear diamond buttons – Belle: My father knows everything.
Fanny: Have houses like marble sculptures – Belle: He tells me I’m pretty.
Fanny: And their women take baths in champagne.
Belle: (aside, but Fanny hears) My father likes women. (FB Act I: 6-7)9 Kneubuhl’s intriguing employment of the duplicated narration emphasizes the husband’s selfish dreams and infidelities as shared experiences between Fanny and Belle. Fanny’s marriage with Sam Osborne is similar to Belle’s marriage with the artist Joe Strong. When Sam blames Fanny, saying “God Almighty woman! You can’t forget anything,” Fanny responds that “You mean everything. No, I can’t forget everything” (FB Act I: 20).10 In a similar situation, Joe says to Belle, “You can’t forget. You just can’t forget anything can you?”; and Belle says, “Everything! I can’t forget everything!!”(FB Act I: 65).11 Husbands’ betrayals and their insensitive remarks traumatize their wives. Women’s statement against men’s selfishness is repeated through two generations so that their agony echoes throughout the play.
Along with a husband’s infidelities, the death of a child which frequently occurred to women in the nineteenth century, caused many women’s manic depressive illness. Hervey’s death at age five in Paris due to poverty and the worst living conditions without Sam’s financial support drives Fanny to a serious breakdown (Sanchez 45). Another Hervey, Belle’s second child named after her dead brother, Hervey, also died young in Hawaii.
The most intolerable experience shared by Fanny and Belle is the loss of their artistic activities; instead, Fanny is engaged in being the writer’s wife
and Belle the painter’s wife.
Belle: We walked, sat in cafes, talked and talked for hours about everything – Your painting, you are still –
Fanny: No, I don’t have time, Louis’ illness . . . Belle: Drawing?
Fanny: I can’t. There’s always so much to arrange for Louis – Belle: Your stories, are you still writing them?
Fanny: No. Louis is the writer, Belle. His writing is important. (FB Act I: 68)
Louis’s illness is overwhelming, his health repeatedly worsens, and he is recognized as the talented writer, while Fanny’s illness is given less attention, and is never seriously examined. Kneubuhl’s examination of Fanny’s inner struggle broadens the audience’ consciousness in our contemporary where depressive illness is more correctly diagnosed, examined, and also treated.
Moreover, Fanny’s illness is caused by all the strain, exhaustion, and anxiety brought on by the invalid, entirely dependent, and self-devoted Louis. It also results from her anger and agony as Louis’s recovery from illness and literary success “emphasized her own failure as a creative artist” during their stay in Samoa. She “collapsed after she found that she was no longer indispensable to Louis” (Mackay 398)
Fanny: Artist! Artist! Artist! Don’t talk to me about being an artist.
I gave up everything for you – for your art. It was built on my back! Your artistic idealism would crumble around you if it weren’t for me. And this is how you repay me, with these contemptible pronouncements? (FB Act II: 18).
In her diary of October 10, 1890, in Vailima, Fanny is depressed after an endless house building and gardening job and Louis’s naming her “not an
artist, but a born natural peasant” (Our Samoan Adventure 61). Fanny’s reference to her depression, which is suppressed in the original manuscript, expresses her agony as an eminent writer’s wife: “I am feeling very depressed, for my vanity, like a newly felled tree, lies prone and bleeding” (Our Samoan Adventure 61). Women’s depression was neither seriously recognized nor treated. For example, Gilman, who suffered a serious depression around 1887 after her marriage in 1884, received the medical advice to return to traditional gender norms (Kimmel xi). Fanny’s manic depressive illness was never properly treated and consequently continued till Louis’s sudden death in 1894, and it is viewed as the most crucial trial she ever endured. It is usually remarked that Fanny took all the advantages of being Louis’s wife and lived an energetic life after his death, yet Fanny’ s inner conflicts were not resolved during the rest of her life.
As if tracing the path of the mother’s search for self, Belle’s search includes the following political issue of the women’s suffrage movement. Again, as Kneubuhl writes:
Bell: Sixty years go, in 1848, the demands for the enfranchisement of women were formulated at Seneca Falls. What we demand now, we demanded then, for the same sensible reasons: that we are taxed as any citizen is taxed; that we are subject to and obey the laws of this land; that the burdens and responsibilities we have had in shaping this country are by no means small or lesser than those of men. And yet, still, we are deprived of one of the central rights of citizenship – the right to vote. Should California women still be denied this right?
(Loud cries of No! No! No!) There are no logical arguments against the ballot for women – only some portentous fossils whose historic prejudice has reached mastodon proportions. Please tell all senators:
VOTE YES FOR WOMEN! (FB Act II: 55-54)
Belle’s public speaking skills are emphasized as the new voice of women who are liberated yet separated from their mothers. Fanny’s anti-suffrage remark echoes as an irony in the play because she is herself one of the most unconventional and adventurous women. Independent of her strong and public-appealing mother, Belle “found a separate identity as a suffragette but still found herself feeling that she was in competition with her mother”
(Berger “Play”).
Differentiated from the biographies on Fanny, the last stage of conflict between mother and daughter is grounded upon the controversial political context in Kneubuhl’s play. The women’s movement already started at the beginning of the nineteenth century and there was the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848. We know that the West early embraced women’s activities, and in most states in the West women had voting privileges before 1915, or five years earlier than the Nineteenth Amendment (Trenton x). In 1914 when Fanny died at age 74, Belle had already been in pursuit of her own path in the new era for women. The play is over when Belle, who is possessed by Fanny’s spirit after her death, undergoes an internal revolution when she discovers the meaning of the silver medal that Fanny kept through her life, and the meaning of her seventy-four-year life with its shared experiences.
V. Conclusion
In Fanny and Belle, Knebuhl gives voices to outstanding yet shadowed women who actually lived in the transitional era from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The neglected or lost women’s stories have been discovered, examined, and revived in different fields and forms, from history, sociology,
economics, politics, and culture. Literature as a flexible field can embrace all those aspects and virtually reconstruct the lives of women. Compared with other literary forms, drama is a visible and audible form of creation in which the actions and the narrative can be magnified to convey hidden emotions and thoughts. Liberated from all the restrictions and limitations, Kneubuhl attempts to revive both once-spoken and once-suppressed voices of women out of bounds. Kneubuhl explained that the “parallels in their lives are startling, and in both of their individual struggles to shape their own lives, we might recognize the foreshadowing of what are now pervasive issues, particularly for women: infidelity, divorce, stepchildren, singleparenthood, and addiction” (“Notes”)
This paper is completed as part of my project on Hawaii’s local plays for the 2002-2005 Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (2) by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. I deeply appreciate Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl for her generous support, for answering my questions by e-mail, spending time with me in an interview, for her warm welcome to her house in Hawaii on March 21, 2003, for giving me a file of unpublished manuscripts of Fanny and Belle, and for sharing the production of Fanny and Belle with me and
my daughter at Kumu Kahua Theatre on March 21, 2004. I also thank Dr.
Dennis Carroll, Gene Shofner, John Wat, Harry Wong, and Allisa Akisuba for their assistance in my research at the University of Hawaii and Kumu Kahua Theatre. At Hamilton Library of the University of Hawaii, my research could not have been done without the assistance of Joan Hori and Dore Minatodani. My studies on Hawaii have been consistently supported by Joy Kobayashi-Cintron and Juliet S. Kono.
(Appendix 1: Trenton npn)
(Appendix 2: Lapierre npn)
(Appendix 3: Lapierre npn)
(Appendix 4: Daiches 38)
Notes
01 In an interview by Tsai, Kneubuhl says that she began her research officially in 1996 when she received a fellowship from the State Foundation for Culture and Arts though she had already read about Fanny and Belle, and completed the first draft in 1999. In the same year, the reading of the play was conducted at Kumu Kahua Theatre, and in 2000, she received an Honorable Mention at Bay Area Playwriting Festival for the play.
02 Kneubuhl finished her first draft of Fanny and Belle in 1999, and have revised it several times (Tsai). During that period, Kneubuhl had hard times when “she’s gotten burned out on topics or characters during the writing process, but there’s something about the lives of Fanny and Belle Osbourne that continues to fascinate her even years after the final rewrite (Berger, “Not Just Mrs. Tusitala”).
03 Kneubuhl has challenged the women’s lives and conflicts within her Hawaiian theme, especially of the nineteenth to twentieth century. Kneubuhl in 1987 coauthors Ka‘iulani, a biographical play about half-Scots and half-Hawaiian princess whose borderless yet tragic life still remains as a legend. According to another co-author, Dennis Carroll, that historical background “provided the foundation for stylistic dialectic,” and her story “was played out a spectatorial context that maximized the dominant motif of loss and dispossession that her life embodied” at the most
“unforgettable” production at Hana-Maui Hotel (137).
04 In book reviews, LaPierre’s intention to give the readers “the ‘real’ woman” is evaluated well (Rubin A12); and LaPierre’s obsession with or even identifying herself Fanny is revealed to show how deeply she was involved in research on Fanny’s life and strong personality (Riding C15).
05 After the establishment of three art schools in the East, the 1870’s became the era when new schools were established in major cities; in Chicago in 1867 and 1879, in San Francisco in 1874, in New York in 1875, in Boston in 1877, in Province in 1878, and in St. Louis in 1879 (Sminth 14).
06 The California School of Design in San Francisco is the West’s first art academy founded in 1874 and forty-six of the initial class of sixty were women; they were
“among the first students when classes in drawing and modeling from the live nude began in 1886, under the condition of sex segregation till the 1910’s (Launder 10).
07 Underlined by Kneubuhl.
08 Underlined by Kneubuhl.
09 Underlined by Kneubuhl.
10 Underlined by Kneubuhl.
11 Underlined by Kneubuhl.
0
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