Beyond brutality

Sarah Kane has been categorized within a group of young, predominantly male playwrights who have come to be known as the New Brutalists. While there are many similarities among the New Brutalists, the media outrage directed at Kane was much more vehement than what her male so-called peers received. Critics who attacked her early writing often invoked her gender. Critics found it difficult to address Kane's work precisely because it transgressed accepted norms of 'women's writing.' Sarah Kane committed suicide on February 20, 1999. Following Kane's death, many critics reassessed her work, often retracting their earlier opinions. Her suicide has contributed to the fetishization of Kane and the mythology of her persona. While the classification of Kane with the primarily all male New Brutalists is certainly of interest, this study examines Kane's plays from a larger cultural and historical perspective. This recontextualization examines Kane's plays from three new contextual paradigms: death, madness, and female authorship; feminist theatre practice; and the historical legacy of experimental female playwrights throughout the twentieth century. Kane's writing can be read as abject, defying fixed classification, which enables feminist scholarship to not only encounter Kane's work from a fresh perspective but to challenge traditional conceptions of feminist writing and its historical positioning. This project addresses the whole of Kane's oeuvre, its shifting critical reception, and the ways in which Kane and her female contemporaries may have potentially contributed to the shaping of third wave feminist discourses. Kane's work certainly caused an enormous stir in the theatre largely because she was perceived as transgressing acceptable norms for a woman playwright. Rather than reiterating that Kane was an aberration or something of a 'gender traitor,' this study will argue that she belongs to a tradition of women writers who have been problematically situated within predominantly male artistic movements. Whether these women are viewed as anomalies or tokens, their perceived deviancy has contributed to their historical marginalization.