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Abstract This thesis is divided into three chapters; chapter one is entitled, ”Autonomy” and the ”Moral Subject” in Kantian and Feminist Ethics. This chapter tackles two major concepts. First, ”Autonomy”, which is a key concept in moral philosophy, developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. ’Autonomy’ in Kant’s philosophy is often used as the basis for determining moral responsibility for one’s own actions (Groundwork,p.38). Second, the ”Moral Subject” a term coined by Karen Green, in her book The Woman of Reason. This term is Green’s feminist re-working of Kant’s concept of ”Moral Autonomy”. The difference between both terms is that Kant’s concept is purely intellectual based on his speculative philosophy and his universal approach, whereas feminist ethics, on the other hand, locates the female self within a specifically social-economic environment. In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant distinguishes two parts of moral philosophy: Ethics or moral philosophy may be divided on the basis of whether it is pure or empirical. Kant states that, ”Pure philosophy” deals ”only with a priori concepts or concepts that occur to us independent of any experience or sensual perception”(p.217). By contrast, ”empirical philosophy” ”deals with the objects we experience in the world around us”(p.217). Kant argues that if moral ideas were drawn from experience, then they could not be assured universal validity, for they may be universally valid only if they are based on the validity of a priori concepts”(p.315). Or in other words, ”our moral thinking is not based on an understanding of nature or disposition, but rather on universally applicable concepts that we can apply in all circumstances. In this sense, the ethics of Immanuel Kant is often contrasted with that of David Hume. Hume’s moral philosophy or Hume’s approach to ethics could be called empirical or experimental. In the second book of The Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seeks to displace a priori conceptions of human nature and morality with an approach according to which everything about us is open to empirical investigation and to explanation in naturalistic terms. Hume’s empirical moral philosophy is grounded in a posteriori principles, or ”principles inferred through observation or experience” (Treatise, p.217). On the other hand, Kant assured that morality’s commands are unconditional and autonomous in such a way that we could never discover a principle or a moral law that commands all rational beings with such absolute authority through a method of empirical moral philosophy. Therefore, In The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant defines ”autonomy” as ”an action which is determined by the subject’s own free will and the moral action is defined as being autonomous”(p.74), Kant says when ”we will autonomously we must abstract from all objects of the will to this extent: that they have no influence at all on the will”(p.77). This seems to imply that a person wills autonomously only when he/she completely detaches him/herself from the influence of his/her own desires and emotions, as well as from all social and even casual influences. In Kant’s philosophy, ―Morality works according to categorical imperative‖. Kant argued that ”a categorical imperative is an absolute, unconditional requirement where someone was obliged to act morally, out of duty”(p.90). In Kantian ethics,” duty‖ refers to ―self-constraint in opposition to inclinations that oppose reason‖ (p.89). Kant gives the name ”duty‖ to all actions we have moral reasons to do. But, of course, human agents also have subjective impulses, desires and inclinations that may contradict the dictates of reason. Such imperatives may be called hypothetical, or that is ”simply stem from laws of self-interest and feelings”(p.91). The moral subject in Kantian ethics is identified with and by moral freedom and the will and reason to enact it. In this sense, the moral subject acts according to a law, he himself dictates, not according to the dictates of passion or impulse or rules of action that have been legislated externally to it. Kant believes that ”freedom does not consist in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one’s own making”(Groundwork, p.97). A person with a free, autonomous will does not simply act but is able to reflect and decide whether to act in a given way. This act of deliberation distinguishes an ’autonomous will’ from a’ heteronomous will’, which is thus defines as ”such a will that is always submitting itself to some other end, or in other words, submitting itself to the commands of the hypothetical imperatives, while the autonomous will, on the other hand, is entirely free and selflegislating”(p.80). Feminist ethicists suggest that the pure rational autonomous moral subject of the Kantian tradition is an ethical nightmare in which ethics is divorced from the emotional and sexual realities of human existence. In this sense and as long as Kant was insufficiently sensitive to the great variety of individual experience, feminist ethics is born in women’s refusal to endure with grace the arrogance, indifference, hostility, and damage of oppressively sexist environments. Feminist ethicists view that - 245 - people men as well as women grow up with different cultures and different beliefs, and to them it seems that moral laws cannot be universal only because everybody’s culture and surroundings are not universal. The major objective of feminist ethics is to criticize Kant’s moral philosophy for being strictly speculative and ignoring the social and the psychological conditions which are responsible for woman’s oppression, thus making her unaware of her moral responsibility towards her own oppression. Kant had written in ”Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals” ”I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles”(p.29). And in his view, women’s philosophy is not to reason, but to sense. On the basis of this weakness, the woman legitimately asks for masculine protection. Because of their natural fear, women are also viewed as unsuited for scholarly work. Kant mockingly describes the scholarly women who ”use their books somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear the watch so it can be noticed that they have one, although it is usually broken or does not show the correct time” (Anthropology, p.221). Feminist ethics, by contrast, begins from the convictions that the subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience of women is as worthy of respect as that of men. ’Feminist Ethics’, is a branch of contemporary feminist philosophy based on the argument that classical philosophy, pioneered by Kant, tackles ethics from a strictly masculine perspective under the guise of a universal moral philosophy, thus, deliberately overlooking women’s own personal moral experience in a male dominated, oppressive culture worldwide. The idea that women have the capacity to offer a more thoroughly human, rational and ethical vision is crystallized in Karen Green’s book “The Woman of Reason”, in which she argues that; the assumptions about the individual as a formal entity, autonomous of social and historical relations are evident in Kantian philosophical traditional ethics, in which the moral subject must separate her or himself from all social and historical relations in order to achieve the rationality and objectivity necessary for a moral universal decision. On the other hand, she views that woman as a moral subject is not a completed, closed entity that may attain her full power only through speculation. Green believes that ―becoming a moral subject means recognizing that morality is a structure of socio-historical relations, not a detached calculus performed by autonomous individuals. By this recognition, women will no longer collude in their oppression and so that they can attempt to change conditions of life negation and alienation into conditions of affirmation and fulfillment‖. (p.250) Karen Green also further explained that Kant’s patriarchal morality is based on the desire for power over the other, beginning with sexual power over women and extending to political power over nations. She criticizes the idea that when women and morality are discussed together, the subject often becomes sexual morality, rather than the full range of human actions, struggles to create a good society, or human yearnings for justice and fulfilment. She accuses Kant who writes that ―woman is carnal and hence too closely associated with the evil impulses of the body; she is without that self-control necessary for disciplined moral action; she is too emotional and lacks the dispassionate rationality necessary for good moral judgment‖ (Groundwork, p.129). Also Kant thought that; women were generally incapable of deep thought and of sustained mental activity against obstacles… women were essentially incapable of acting otherwise than in accordance with their immediate inclinations and feelings. (p.120). Kant regards women as weaker than men not only physically but also intellectually and he thought it is appropriate that they should be ”in a permanent condition of civil guardianship represented in the public sphere by their fathers or husbands”(Groundwork, p.129). He also accepted the social and political subordination of women that prevailed in his time and in some of his writings on Anthropology, he expressed views that can be described only as racist. Therefore, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a wide variety of thinkers including Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Gerda Lerner, Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings addressed topics to ”women’s morality‖. All of them have objected to Kant’s characterization of the ethics. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill in their books A Vindication of the Rights of Women and The Subjection of Women argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. They extended their analysis of the corrupting influence of inequalities of power to explain the situation of women, suggesting that both men and women are corrupted by a situation in which women are slaves, brought up to have no means of supporting themselves except by entering into marriages with men, who consequently have a complete licence to tyrannize over them. Accordingly, Gerda Lerner also views in her book The Creation of Patriarchy that women were exchanged in marriage and men had certain rights in women, which women did not have in men. Women’s sexuality and reproductive potential became a commodity to be exchanged or acquired for the service of families; thus, women were thought of as a group with less autonomy than men. In this sense, the kind of character development which makes for a mind capable of seeing new connections and fashioning a new order of abstractions has been exactly the opposite - 247 - of that required of women, trained to accept their subordinate and service oriented position in society. Lerner states that; ―the way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, Kant have emphasized, must be based on the exclusion of feelings, while women’s knowledge is of feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments colouring abstractions‖(p.134). Women always live in a world in which they are devalued, and they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. Therefore, Lerner wonders; ―What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning?‖(p.135) Women’s interests, then, are located within the sphere of care, and men’s are located within the sphere of justice. Therefore, the ethic of care is much more devalued than the ethic of justice. Both Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, stressed that traditional western ethical theory is deficient to the degree that it ignores or demeans those traits of personality and virtues of character culturally associated with women. They discovered that women more often focus upon ”care” while men focus upon ”justice”. The ”care orientation” as Gilligan defines focuses upon ”emotional relationships of attachment and networks of concrete relationships, connections, loyalties, and circles of concern” whereas the ”justice orientation” focuses upon ”equality, impartiality, universality, rules and rights”(In a Different Voice, p.51). Both Gilligan and Noddings view that both orientations are crucial to correct moral reasoning and an adequate understanding of moral life. Thus, the ethics of justice and the ethics of care are not in fact rivalling, alternative moral theories. Gilligan also argues that while women define themselves through relationships with others, or through a web of relationships of intimacy and care rather than through a hierarchy based on separation and selffulfilment, therefore, the Kantian conception of autonomy is obviously inadequate, because it is not in isolation, but in conjunction with others that woman’s autonomy as a moral agent first takes form. For Kant, ―women have weak ego boundaries, poor self-definition, problems with separation, autonomy, and a weaker sense of justice. He, thus, concluded that ―women were thereby deficient in moral reasoning‖. (Critique of Practical Reason, p.113). Gilligan responded that if women have a problem with separation, men have a problem with connection. She reported that women tended to find safety in intimacy and danger in isolation while men tended to find danger in intimacy and safety in independence.Then the researcher is going to proceed with the second major focal point in this thesis by associating the principles of Kantian moral philosophy with the beliefs of ’Feminist ethics’ in order to apply all what is previously illustrated to the plays of two writers who are the forerunners of feminist drama, Ann Jellicoe and Caryl Churchill. Both writers are devising new forms of unconventional techniques of writing; and this is highly apparent and manifested in portraying their autonomous women characters. The following two chapters of this thesis will cover the lives of their heroines, dedicating one chapter for the plays of each author. Women characters of different ages and circumstances will be discussed throughout these chapters, through their relationships to men as well as their societies, as their oppression, their lack of autonomy and their sense of inferiority do not occur in isolation. The conflict of these characters stems from their eager desire for autonomy and self-assertion as moral subjects within social, economic, political and even religious conditions that offer neither. Chapter Two of this thesis tackles the analysis of Ann Jellicoe’s most important plays in terms of the feminist ethics’ moral subject. This chapter is an intensive analysis of the plays of Ann Jellicoe in light of her own personal assimilation of the concepts of feminist ethics which are then transformed into dramatic and theatrical representations which have made of her theatre a model of the feminist experimental political theatre. The main element that makes Ann Jellicoe a forerunner of feminist writers is her treatment of the crucial problem of women’s sexuality when it is threatened by the repercussions of a male-dominated authoritative society, such as rape, domestic violence, and ultimately war through destructive militarism. Jellicoe also does not free women from the responsibility of their own subordination to men. In this sense, she is very aware of the distinction between sex and gender, or the biological specification of women as a species and their gender roles which are socially determined by the patriarchal society. It is in the latter that Jellicoe lays the blame on women, namely in their complicity with patriarchal authority by submitting to the inferior gender role imposed upon them, and their reluctance to rebel against it. For Jellicoe human relations in any society, revolve around the relationship between man and woman. According to Jellicoe, when this relationship becomes distorted ,or even blemished, as a result of ethical conditions, patterns of behavior arise which range from slight aggression, both mental and physical to the most destructive ones on the personal and social levels. Hence, when the innermost human relation between man and woman, or the safety valve of all human relations, goes astray, total - 249 - entropy is the logical conclusion. Jellicoe is frequently included in feminist studies, mentioned as an early feminist who, like others in her time, rebelled against constrictive domestic roles for women. Strong female characters abound in her plays, along with themes like female creativity and sexual prowess. The Third Chapter tackles the dramatic and theatrical transformations of Caryl Churchill’s feminist politics combined with the concepts of feminist ethics to create her socialist-feminist drama. Churchill also is known for her use of non- naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatization of the abuses of power and exploration of gender and sexuality. Her playwriting career and political outlook have consciously been shaped by a continuing commitment to feminism and to socialism. Churchill believes that socialism and feminism are not synonymous but as she explained in her writings that she feels strongly about both and wouldn’t be concerned in a form of one that did not include the other. Thus, her drama re-iterates how meaningful change is impossible while women continue to oppress one another and while economic and political structures perpetuate patriarchy. Caryl Churchill is a playwright preoccupied with the discussion of the traditional relations of power. She challenges social and dramatic conventions through her innovative exploration of the male gaze, the objectification of women, the performativity of gender, and women as objects of exchange within a masculine economy. She views that the blatant abuse of women in male dominated societies had resulted in a continuous struggle by them throughout history that lead women to fight for equal opportunities as they attempted to improve their positions in society they live in. In this regard, Churchill illustrates some subversive characters among these oppressed women that although cannot change the present situation, they defy the conventional norms and challenge for their rights. This chapter places its crucial lens on portraying these impressive autonomous female characters in Churchill’s most important plays. Then this thesis ends with the Conclusion which is an analysis of the conclusions reached in the previous three chapters with the end of formulating a synthesis between the concepts of feminist ethics and feminist drama, in general, and the plays of Ann Jellicoe and Caryl Churchill in particular. |