Off With Her Head! An Analysis of Female Awakening Through Social Deviance in Lynn Nottage’s Las Meninas

Abstract

The Victorian Era brought the evolution of a distinctly feminine writing trope: the development of female characters’ personal awakenings through acts of social deviance. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is a prime example of this phenomenon, wherein main character Edna Pontellier, disinterested in the expectations of upper-class French-Creole life, participates in an emotional affair to actualize her own autonomy. This essay seeks to determine the significance of this literary trope in contemporary playwright Lynn Nottage’s Las Meninas. The play follows the woes of French Queen Marie-Thérèse as she becomes dissatisfied with her position on the margins of French Courtly society and has an affair with another excluded person, Nabo, an African with dwarfism. Nottage’s parallel to the writings of Victorian female authors, like Chopin herself, emphasizes a desire to advocate for the advancement of women through the lens of Early Modern society. Additionally, the parallel reveals the continuity of the tradition of representing women’s recognition of their autonomy through deviant actions from nineteenth-century through twenty-first-century literature. The presence of this tradition in twenty-first century literature demonstrates that women are seeking similar social advancement in the present day.