She, Not I: Issues of Female Subjectivity in Beckett’s Not I A Study of the 1977 BBC Production of Not I

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Not I, written in English, premiered at the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York on 22 November 1972, performed as part of the Samuel Beckett Festival (Auster 508). The London premiere occurred 16 January 1973 at the Royal Court Theater (Worth 42).

2. The focus of Liz Conor’s text, The Spectacular Modern Woman, is the making of the “spectacle” of the modern woman. Her argument, focused on the commodity culture that arises in the early 20th century, alongside Modern art and film, suggests that the depiction of women in text, film, and static image created a spectacle, a sexually enticing visual commodity, of the modern woman. As she puts it, “[t]he Modern Woman was spectacularized. For women to identify themselves as modern, the performance of their gendered identity had to take place within the modern spectacularization of everyday life” (7).