Wandering Identities: of Bags and Plays by Wilde, Pinter, and McGuinness
Bags onstage are a meaningful presence: being empty shells at times or full-fledged containing devices at others, they may work as the characters’ itinerant root of identity or, on the contrary, symbolise the remains of a memory wasteland. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), Pinter’s The...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2019
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | Bags onstage are a meaningful presence: being empty shells at times or full-fledged containing devices at others, they may work as the characters’ itinerant root of identity or, on the contrary, symbolise the remains of a memory wasteland. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960), and McGuinness’ Baglady (1988), explore the intricate ties between wandering, identity and memory. Although the plays are set in different territories, times, and contexts, they concur on the roles bags play to question memory and identity. Wandering is either what a character’s identity is paradoxically grounded on, or the process at work in the slow but ineluctable loss of it. Bag-characters are then split between their bodily presence and the physical incarnation of their minds / bags onstage. This paper aims to show how bags help question memory and identity and participate in the reification of characters. |
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