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Lecture 21 from ENGL 210
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Lecture 21 from ENGL 210
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Topic 21: Private LivesMarch 20th – 22nd
Noel Coward: at the time that this play came out, was the most popular playwright in the
English-speaking world.
● Idea for the play came to him in a dream…?
● Play written in four days in Shanghai
● Comes to us from the glorious and luxurious world that the characters inhabit.
Described as being tenuous, brittle, and delightfully daring.
● Interesting question between dysfunctionality and compatibility.
● Doubling parallelism and exchange tightly structures ACT 1: two couples, two balconies,
two sets of people that will produce drama.
Sibyl is much more retrograde in terms of her views with sexuality – she wants to be pale and
meek and girly (as opposed to Amanda)
● Makes us think about these things on the register of fashion…
Judith Butler: gender is something that is enacted, but we should be wary of biological
essentialism.
● Amanda wants a straightforward guy (Victor) and Elyot wants an innocent girl (Sibyl) –
their non-normativeness pushes Amanda and Elyot together.
Marriage relationships and how they do/don’t accommodate gender deviance.
● Amanda is the one that gets the lines that speak most directly to that material – the actor
playing Amanda has to carry it a lot!
Intersection between public/private; escapism, temporary/permanent, etc.
● Thin boundaries separates you from your past marriage and past life.
● When Amanda and Elyot run away, they’re still married to the two people – but, it’s
somehow less outrageous because they used to be married.
Surface/Depth
Noel Coward: Plays consist of lots of “small talk” and things in-behind.
● How does the play use “small talk” to signal something more complicated?
● What do Amanda and Elyot talk about concerning flippancy? Sometimes flippancy can
disclose something else…
Worms popping out of the eye sockets as a direct reference and silent illusion to Barbell?
● Both engaging in a mutually informing fantasy that they don’t have mutually strong
feelings about things – facade? Disclosing or badly attempting to conceal something.
● Communicating in a kind of code?
● Ironic relationship between the intensity of the intimacy and the superficiality of the
actual relation?
● Depth represented by shallowness?
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