At war with John Wayne: masculinity, violence, and the Vietnam war in Emily Mann's Still Life.

What, a man? Where's the model? (Matin 70)

The United States has gone through more than one war since the 1970s and is currently involved in a confused "postwar" in Iraq that will undoubtedly call forth its own discussion and literature. Yet, Vietnam seems to have left an everlasting and so far unequaled imprint on the memory of millions of North American citizens. At the time, it meant tens of thousands of deaths, numerous permanent physical injuries, many long-term psychological problems, and many shattered lives and broken homes. The Viemam conflict was perceived as an unjust cause by half of the population and as a shameful loss by the other half. Being such a relevant historical event, this war has found its place in art and engendered novels, films, poetry, autobiographies, essays, and of course, plays. Of the many plays that explore this subject, Emily Mann's Still Life, first produced in 1980, "gets it right by doing it wrong," according to Don Rignalda's analyses. It fails because it was written by a non-veteran, it does not happen "in country," and its focus is definitely not on the Vietnamese rice paddies. Throughout Still Life, Emily Mann reveals that behind the curtain of the armed conflict there was a kind of victim that was not included in the daily body count.

As a writer, Emily Mann developed her career mainly in Documentary Drama. Her plays have been called Theater of Testimony because they reproduce the words of people she interviewed, as well as using sources like recordings, trial transcripts, etc., in the line of work initiated by Erwin Piscator in 1929. (1) My essay centers on the playtext of Still Life, based on the author's encounters with a Vietnam veteran (Mark), his wife (Cheryl), and his friend and lover (Nadine). Mann met them in Minnesota in 1978, and their stories left a profound trace in her memory. When she realized that the way to overcome the pain--her own and the characters'--was to write about it, she devised this peculiar drama piece, structured in three acts and reflecting the protagonists' struggles with their most intimate traumas.

Mann contends the play is her "traumatic memory of hearing their stories during the interview sessions" (qtd. in Betsko & Koenig 281), and she organized the long hours of recorded material in a way that reminds some critics of a fugue. Still Life is basically a collection of juxtaposed monologues in which the characters speak their minds independently, hardly talking to one another, and yet their words are not unconnected. As in a three-voice fugue, there is a "subject," there is an "answer" to it, and there is a "counter-response" to both, which brings about a Brechtian breach of expectations. The spectator is introduced to a line of thought which then breaks into two more, very different voices, and, as it happens to the listener of a fugue, his/her ability to predict what will come next is debilitated (Di Liscia 2). In this kind of musical piece, as in Mann's play, the voices and points of view sometimes overlap. In the text, this is represented in the special layout in some of the editions:

NADINE:                       CHERYL:

I have so much to do          See, I got kids now.
Just to keep going.
                              I can't be looking into
Just to keep my kids going,   myself.
I don't sleep at all.         I've got to be looking
                              out. (53)

Scenes like this one give the audience-hearing the simultaneous voices--or the reader--seeing the typographical layout of the page--an insight into the contrasting versions of the same topic that the characters offer. With this apparent disconnection, and continuing with the line of Brechtian tendencies I have already pointed out, the play demands an active audience, one that will listen in full conscience and decide what the relevant links are within all the talking done on stage. In the play, Cheryl and Nadine describe a reality that has little to do with the image of the Vietnam War shown in mainstream movies or in literature written by male authors (especially by veterans).

In her personal memoir Lonely Girls with Burning Eyes, a veteran's wife, Marian Faye Novak, writes about the home front terror and how the Vietnam War provoked a domestic statistic of wounded individuals that has been ignored historically:

   Today, many bookstores and libraries have a section
   on Vietnam, with book after book detailing the
   vivid and powerful experiences of veterans of that
   war. But my story is not there.

   There must be thousands of women like me -wives
   who waited, who in some sense are still waiting.
   But we have been silent ... there is no time or
   energy left to tell the story. Worst of all, we have
   been quietly condemned to silence because of who
   and what we are: wives. (3, 4)

In her piece, Emily Mann, following the path opened by other feminist playwrights, recuperates the female view and saves the wives' voices from oblivion through the character of Cheryl, who is given a chance to speak her truth about a conflict that has been interpreted mostly from a male perspective. After all, war and violence have always been "boys' stuff' American youngsters went to Vietnam, among other things, to become men through (rough) training, (sexist) education, and (virile) exercising with their bodies and guns. That Marines, for example, would repeat the following chant during their basic training shows the female standpoint was neglected in everything around that war, even though there were some women (mainly journalists) in country: "This is my rifle [GI holds up M-16] / This is my gun [puts hand in crotch] / one is for killing / the other for fun" (Bergman 60).

In this essay, I focus on the question of constructing masculinity through sexism and violence, how Mann uses the stage to uncover myths and fallacies that moved men first, to go to war, and then, to bring that war home with them and, sometimes, to take it out on the women around them. In Still Life the audience is allowed to enter the home front scenario during and after the Vietnam conflict and to see and understand how the veterans' wives were turned into invisible victims. Domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental disorder left as deep an imprint on United States society as the Viet Cong's bullets, and Mann, as a woman and pacifist, uses her ability to dramatize life to compensate somehow for the absence of her peers' plight in history books. If all her plays have a personal component, this one does even more so: "In Still Life each of those people, and especially each of the women, was me. But especially the wife. I got into the wife totally" (Mann, qtd. in Buchanan 210).

Mann exerts her feminist viewpoint in the construction of the character of Mark, who in the play works his way towards a terrible final confession, progressively going through moments of self-criticism, justification, anger, and deep pain. However, after one hundred pages, we come to the conclusion that the whole piece was not only written to serve Mark's purposes of undergoing a sort of "talking cure" but also to create some historical balance and restore Cheryl and Nadine's value as warriors in their (home) front and as subjects of their own her-stories. As the real Mark told Emily Mann when he finished his interview with her, "my wife ... really is another casualty of the war" (qtd. in Savran 153). That phenomenon is what the playwright explores in the text: are battered wives like Cheryl mere collateral damage, or are they first-hand victims of the Vietnam War and the culture, politics, and myth-making practices that took the nation into it?

At the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War provided a rite of passage for a whole generation of American men. Some realized that peace was their only option and avoided the draft in different ways (fleeing to Canada, getting a study permit), but many (mainly draftees) found their path into adult manhood in Asia: "In one short year, Vietnam took the measure of a man and of the culture that put him there. War strips away the thin veneer applied slap-dash by the institutions of society and shows Man exactly for what he is" (Baker xiv). The pressure to grow up in a few weeks in order to be able to face fear, atrocity, and death during their thirteen-month tour of duty made the very young United States soldiers cling to impossible masculinity myths they were obviously unable to reproduce fully. In Vietnam, reality and popular culture references clashed, creating a sudden loss of innocence that left thousands of "veterans" in their twenties psychologically maimed, sometimes for life. Emily Mann's protagonist in Still Life is one of them. At the beginning of the play he analyzes: "My biggest question to myself all my life was / How I would act under combat? / That would be who I was as a man" (43).

Just as some forms of theater are based on mimesis, the Vietnam War soldiers' learning process was a bad imitation of a popular icon internalized by millions of North American youths. The drafted men were, in fact, only teenagers sent into a hell of violence after a short basic training that was designed to turn them into a herd of John Waynes. As writer and professor Robert Flynn explains, the Marine camps were flooded by images of this Hollywood persona:

   When I was in Marine boot camp they showed us
   John Wayne movies. In Marine boot camp you
   couldn't leave the base, you couldn't go to the PX,
   you couldn't buy soft drinks, ice cream or candy.
   You couldn't have cigarettes, beer, or women.
   Instead, we had John Wayne. Usually, he wore a
   Marine uniform and killed a lot of Japanese. (2) (1)

In his films, Wayne attacked every enemy with the same zeal, with no questions as to the fairness of the conflict or its moral implications. If there was something that the mythic Wayne was not, that was definitely a feminist. Flynn refers to his macho behavior explicitly when he writes:

   John Wayne didn't kill women. No need to. Some
   things were lower than Indians. John Wayne didn't
   marry them either. He wasn't afraid of bad women,
   although good women gave him a scare or two.
   Nothing scarier than a good woman when she was
   breathy and in heat. John Wayne put women in
   their place. A little higher than a prairie dog. A little
   lower than a dead horse. (2)

Wayne's public image was one of roughness, close to verbal inarticulateness, and lacking any consideration toward women or any other group that could be labeled as "other"; "he doesn't feel comfortable with women. He does like them sometimes--God knows he's not 'queer.' But at the right time and in the right place" (Bergman 63). During a war, with an overwhelming majority of men around, "the right time and place" for soldiers to have contact with women is mostly during raids into enemy villages. In this respect, Vietnam was not different from other armed conflicts, and rape was a normalized practice, alongside other forms of aggression. (3) In the play, Mark acknowledges the United States Army's abuse of women, and translates it into his personal homecoming experience. Having witnessed and tolerated gender violence overseas, he comes to accept it as a means of interaction with his wife, creating a battlefield in his own bedroom: "I saw women brutalized in the war. / I look at what I've done to my wife" (45).

The Vietnam frame provided thousands of men with a new environment in which being a "real man" was the only option available, and where everything or everybody alien took on female characteristics. From the first moment of their training, as has been noted in the "this is my rifle" chant above, masculinity was taken to imply female inferiority, and contempt for women was pervasive. The connection made between the penis and the weapon, and a whole range of sexually loaded imagery and language typical of military environments appeared: "Sexual imagery applied to weapons is shown graphically in advertisements that appear in military magazines, where weapons are described in terms of hardness, penetration, and thrust" (Ashford & Huet-Vaughn 194).

In Emily Mann's playtext, the link between violence and sexuality is one of Mark's clearest characteristics, condemned by his wife who comments upon his return: "Everything Mark does is sexually oriented somehow" (76). In a strategy that underlines the parallel between the structure of Still Life and a musical piece, Mann includes this line in the first scene of Act II, where Mark's monologue--the subject of the "fugue" answered by Cheryl--deals with the brutalization of Vietnamese women and its invisibility within the Marine Corps: "I never saw our guys rape women. I heard about it / ... But you never took prisoners, so you'd have to get / involved with them while they were dying / or you'd wait until they were dead" (76). In the same way, the mistreatment of the veterans' wives was kept hidden in the mainstream narratives and dramatizations of the Vietnam War. Mann's play is a breakthrough, since it offers a voice to the silenced battered women through the mouth of Cheryl: "Mark's hit me before ... He's hit me more than once" (63).

Emily Mann emerges as an example of a successful feminist playwright because in her dramatic pieces, themes traditionally taken to be domestic and private, such as violence against women, take center-stage in a militant fusion of the personal and the political. In Still Life, the typically male topic of war provides the public context for the denunciation of an inequality present in millions of real-life homes. Gender violence raises questions of power, i.e. a political issue, that Mann wishes to name and make visible for her audience:

   In the kind of theater that I make, there's a conversation
   going on between the actors and the audience.
   And hopefully it shakes you up enough, or
   stimulates or moves you enough, so that when you
   walk out you are continuing the conversation ... in
   order to have a public conversation that matters you
   have to have lived very intensely and have that private
   story to tell. Conversely, you must be able to
   glimpse that private world, to have a full understanding
   of what the public conversation is. Or isn't.
  (Mann, qtd. in A. Greeene 287)

On this occasion, the public dialogue takes place between the characters and an audience constructed as a jury who will listen and judge. Mann's play, contrary to some novels and other fictionalizations of the Vietnam War, eliminates the idea of glamor in the conflict, and deals with its subtext: "[The] battlefield is located between the war and the home front epistemology that started, maintained, and lost it ... The Vietnam plays bring the war back home where it started and is still being waged" (Rignalda 73). Explicit and implicit myths about masculinity appeared and applied subtly in American life, and Mark and his contemporaries unconsciously assimilated a concept of manhood directly related to the idea of blind loyalty to the group and unlimited duty toward their country. To be a man, in this line of thought, meant to always do as you were told: no questioning, no thinking, just acting. In this sense, the soldiers' bodies in Vietnam were perceived back home as destruction machines with no human identity attached, hence the recurrence of insults like "war-monger" and "baby-killer" applied to the returning veterans. Many of the soldiers recall the pain of being rejected as monsters by the same society they thought they were defending: "'My people' were angry. At me. It blew me away ... there is no forgetting the spitting. They aimed at my feet. They missed. I kept walking, to the tune of 'baby killer, baby killer'" (qtd. in B. Greene 25). This gesture of spitting at the veterans was not an isolated incident. Hundreds of men remember this as another traumatic rite of passage; the painful (un)welcome back into their homeland; the evidence that their new identities--their former, innocent ones destroyed by the war--did not fit among the "flower children" of America.

The construction of a Vietnam veteran's identity was based on a chain of paradoxes that too often led men into a no-way-out situation of anger and repressed violence. First, they underwent a harsh training during which their individuality had to be replaced by a group identity, "designed to replace the existing social ties with much more intense, if shallower, ties to the immediate group" (Cronin 203). At the same time, drafted men returned from their time in Vietnam alone; "each soldier arrived alone and left alone ... the shedding of the military identity was performed alone and without a meaningful ceremony. This lack of clear boundaries between one phase of life and another caused many incomplete transitions" (Cronin 204). This blurred passage from military into civilian life provoked confusion in the men, who had to adapt abruptly to the new social rules in America, a country that had experienced serious domestic changes in their absence. Emily Mann's male protagonist comments on the shock of being deprived of power and a certain type of freedom and thrown into a society at peace but with many internal injuries unhealed: "I wanted to live so much life, but I couldn't. / ... I don't know. / I was afraid. / I thought people were ... uh ... I mean / I was kind of paranoid" (93).

Another cultural construct that defined the soldiers' identity and performance during the Vietnam conflict was the concept of patriotic duty. In the 1960s, masculinity was identified with preparedness to die (Wheeler 141), and in 'Nam the alleged reason to die was one's country; everything seemed to be justified by the duty towards one's mother nation. The problem came when, back home, this idea was revealed as a fallacy, and the veterans were made to assume individual responsibility for the violence of the whole group. Most of them were not ready for this, and their guilt over wartime conduct, together with the survivor guilt caused by the death of their "buddies" in the field, brought about serious mental disturbances like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Emily Mann's view is made evident in her choice of the veteran's words when he tackles this issue in her play. Mark tries to rationalize his violence and sometimes looks for excuses, but on this point, he shows a resistant attitude toward the prevailing social code of accepting imposed duties at whatever price:

   I could have just said:
   I won't do it.
   Go back to the rear, just not go out,
   let them put me in jail. I could have said:
   "I got a toothache," gotten out of it.
   They couldn't have forced me.
   But it was a duty thing.
   It was like:
   You're under orders.
   You have your orders, you do your job,
   you've got to do it ...
   But I don't make excuses for it.
   I may even be trying to do that now.
   I could have got out.
   Everybody could've.
   If everybody had said no,
   it couldn't have happened. (69)

Within the dramatic polyphony that defines Still Life, we can see here a new voice appearing: to Mark's, Nadine's and Cheryl's, we can add Emily Mann's. She wrote the play as a pacifist response to her pro-war father, and that ideology is implicit in her selection of materials for the text. This making public of private beliefs obliges the audience to take a stance, activating their own ideologies to interpret the play, "because the audience is repeatedly and directly told that we are all implicated in the Vietnam War" (Rignalda 77).

Mann's feminism also becomes transparent in the fact that she presents domestic violence as a variant of the typical wartime forms of aggression, within a continuum marked by gender. My reading of the play concludes that she intended to implicate the audience in a dialogue about that continuum of violence that makes us all capable of aggression, but marks women as the most likely victims. In the atmosphere of a battle, every person or attitude perceived as alien ("other") is branded female. Following the traditional modes of masculinity at war, the enemy is feminized prior to complete dehumanization, a soldier who does not agree to kill blindly is labelled a coward and a homosexual ("sissy"), and the unknown territories are perceived as virgin lands to be raped and conquered. As it happens with men who batter, whose attitudes toward women are highly stereotyped, in Vietnam "men who carried out atrocities had highly prejudicial views about their victims" (Bourke 205).

When reading about the attitude of the most violent soldiers in Asia, one cannot help recalling the feminist literature about gender violence. Thus, for instance, Joanna Bourke explains how in 'Nam "such racism contained an element of fear ... These people [the Vietnamese] needed to be put in their place" (205). In a similar manner, gender-conscious analyses of domestic violence have proved that one of the reasons behind the atrocities committed on wives and girlfriends is the men's fear of female independence and power, which they perceive as a threat to their own masculinity. Furthermore, their favorite rationalization for their violent behaviour is that the women have gone astray and need to be corrected, which allows them, as men, to take the role of parent or trainer in what has been called the "teaching model" (Browne 60).

United States soldiers in Vietnam were fighting against a powerful but invisible enemy that could come out of nowhere, making them constantly aware of their vulnerability. Back home, those same men, a lot of them victims of PTSD, saw their women as "Others," unknown beings who shared their beds and their lives but could not share their pain (mostly because the men were, 21 la John Wayne, hopeless in trying to articulate it). Plus, contrary to their power of destruction, women had an overwhelming power to give life, to nurture, and to heal, as Mark affirms in Mann's play: "Cheryl is amazing. / Cheryl has always been like chief surgeon. / When the shrapnel came out of my head, / she would be the one to take it out./ ... Just like Danny. / She delivered Danny herself" (52).

The polarization of life into masculine (forcing, killing, invading) and feminine (caring, waiting, healing) drives provoked a clash in the homes of those veterans who could not overcome the trauma of being emasculated by giving back their guns, which provided them, as Mark acknowledges, with "the power of life and death" (59). This kind of power, as we have seen, is closely connected to sexuality. Mann's character compares killing to "the best dope you've ever had, / the best sex you've ever had" (59), which confirms the arguments of feminist analysts that describe the erotic act as "the occasion for the transgression of the boundaries between life and death" (Jeffords 110).

For Cheryl's husband, as for many shell-shocked veterans, the sexual act became a form of confirmation of their virile identity. Back to "the world," as they called America, with their lives disintegrated by trauma and pain and their emotions numbed, PTSD victims found in violent sex a way to re-member their bodies and their selves: "because the violating body remains intact while the violated experiences discontinuity, the act of transgression is simultaneously an act of confirmation that boundaries exist and can be maintained, if only through force and violence" (Jeffords 110). In Still Life, Mark violates Cheryl physically during his feats of anger and symbolically in his art. The veteran's artwork are "artifacts of war," strange jars and pictures that serve a fetishist purpose for him. In them, Cheryl perceives his brutal tendencies, which fuse blood and sex:

   He had a naked picture of me in there,
   cut out to the form,
   tied to a stake with a string.
   And there was all this broken glass,
   and I know Mark.
   Broken glass is a symbol of fire ...
   there was a razor blade in there
   and some old negatives of the blood stuff, I think.
   I mean, that was so violent.
   That jar to me, scared me.
   That jar to me said:
   Mark wants to kill me. (44, 43)

The ever-present fear that Mann presents as the defining feature of the character of Cheryl is another link between the atrocious violence wrought by the armed conflict and the gender violence in the home front. In the testimonies of battered women, fear is a constant and probably the most difficult factor to deal with in the problem of domestic violence. This terror, together with the psychological damage caused by habitual battering, brings about a kind of mental disorder that psychologist Lenore Walker has called the Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS). Since Walker devised the label, BWS has been classified by experts as a variant of PTSD and has been diagnosed in a significant majority of the victims of repeated domestic abuse. In this respect, as I have stated elsewhere, Mann goes with the times in drawing a parallel between Mark's PTSD and Cheryl's BWS, while looking for the reasons behind both and the way to overcome them without generating more violence. (4) For the playwright, it is more than clear that male soldiers were not the only victims of the Vietnam conflict. The loneliness, sorrow, and mental disturbance of many women who found themselves living with strangers after waiting for their husbands to return untouched was much more than collateral damage. Gender violence and its consequences in the 1960s and 70s America had a lot to do with the Vietnam War, an episode of patriotism, militarism, and a dangerous ritual of socialization into violent manhood. Men had to adjust to "the world" again, but so did women who became nothing but "soldiers' wives," invisible in history and for the American institutions. Marian Faye Novak laments this neglect: "I had forgotten who I was ... it takes restructuring of the psyche to really absorb a new identity" (82).

In spite of being a play about violence, Emily Mann's way of dramatizing atrocity in Still Life has little to do with gory films or detailed in-country narratives. Her characters have but their words, and that is what the audience receives. Mark has his testimony of failed adjustment supported by some slides, in which we can get glimpses of blown-up corpses and lost "buddies," but what he sajs (or not) is much more important than what he actually shows. The images place a second layer of narrative on top of the drama (Meyers 113), but a secondary one in a theater of words like Mann's. The real story of Still Life is to be found between the lines, in the tension between the said and the unsaid, in the silences between the monologues. There is no dramatic dialogue stricto sensu, but "an investigation of consonant and dissonant relationships" (Rignalda 77). The audience is required to interpret the polyphony and find the points of encounter and departure between the characters. Mark's final confession that he killed a whole family in Vietnam cannot surprise us much, since we have heard testimonies of pain and atrocity for ninety minutes; it is just the final step in the veteran's fall. As I see it, the author's intention in bearing witness to the war is finally fulfilled, not in Mark's description of his brutal murder of five people--scarcely new in a war situation, after all--but in the last line of the play, the stage direction that reads: "The women's eyes meet for the first time as lights go down" (132).

Still Life is the dramatization of a series of ruptures, dismemberings, and re-memberings. Mark's identity has been fragmented by his experience, and his guilt about killing and surviving is somehow healed in the process of giving testimony. Cheryl's life has also been blown apart by the conflict, which destroyed her family, her faith, and her self-esteem. In the path towards inward peace she needs to verbalize the anger against her husband-batterer, which will allow her, at least in the process of communication with Mann's audience, to claim the status of victim of the Vietnam War, because "she is a casualty too. / [but she] doesn't get benefits for combat duties" (63).

The character of Nadine, Mark's mature lover, acts as a kind of mediator, to balance the two main points of view and to remind us that women are also capable of violence. In the final gesture of looking at each other, Cheryl acknowledges her rage before the more articulate Nadine; Nadine recognizes herself as a victim in front of her peer Cheryl. Both women have made their demand for a space on stage and in history; thanks to Emily Mann's craft and political commitment, they have proved that women should also have their say about the most painful war so far for the United States. After all, they have bled and cried in their own front, too, just as the "John Waynes"/veterans have done in the movies and in real life. As Marian Faye Novak reminds us from her own experience, "for the wives, too, the war had its legacy" (266). Emily Mann passed this legacy on to the coming generations, with the hope that they, too, will "come to understand the violence in ... all of us" (126) and will be able to protect themselves from the myths, the fallacies, and the socializing pressures in order to "come out on the other side" (126). Mann hopes this will be the same side for women and men, so that Still Life can stop being a fragment of painful reality on stage and become simply an historical drama.

NOTES

(1.) I wrote about the origins, history and current trends of Documentary Theater in the U.S. in ENTEMU XIV (2002): 13-25.

(2.) Although Flynn actually trained for the Korean War, his experience is applicable to the Vietnam context, where Wayne was also placed in some of his films.

(3.) During the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first half of the 1990s, for instance, more than 20,000 women were raped as part of the genocidal policies of the Serbian army. In Iraq, reports of women (Iraqi civilians as well as female soldiers) being raped by the American and Allied armies are beginning to appear as this article is revised (see, among other sources, the following websites: <http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/012508.htm>, <http://www.vialls.com/myahudi/rape.html>, <http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140012005?open&ofENG-IRQ>.

(4.) A discussion about the gender variable in the psychological consequences of Vietnam can be found in my article "Emily Mann's Testimonies of Collateral Damage: Gender and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Still Life" (in press).

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