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Phyllis Nagy's Fatal Women

Phyllis Nagy's fascination with The Scarlet Letter might at first seem odd. After all, the surrealist, political, displacedNew York playwright (whose work is produced mostly in London), known for staging an intense lesbian sex scene, could hardly be more contemporary. Yet her concerns with morality and feminism anachronistically align her with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne's novel, like Nagy's plays, explores female sexuality as criminality. Nagy's central characters are enigmas, transgressors who, like Hester Prynne. will not confess. "I think people would be surprised," says the playwright, "to find that what they think Hester Prynne is, is very different from what Hawthorne actually wrote. Hester is thought of as a victim, or some kind of standby-your-man sort of woman, loyalty at all costs, and that isn't what she is.'" Throughout her writing, which includes an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, Nagy challenges the preconception of woman as victim, complicating the stereotype with women characters who are more likely to kill than to be killed, to dominate than to yield, and to feel culpable than to feel blameless. Western drama's legacy of fatal women, from Medea and Clytemnestra to Lady Macbeth, has, in the twentieth century, been continued and adapted by women playwrights who focus on female murderers. Susan Glaspell's Trifles, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House, Sarah Daniels's Masterpieces, and Pearl Cleage's Flyin' West are examples that read as feminist cases for justifiable homicide: these plays typically exonerate their female murderers, portraying them not as brutal villainesses (even when they bludgeon their husbands or push strangers in front of trains), but as frail heroines who attempt, in the only way they know how, to free themselves from an oppressive patriarchy. Nagy challenges this tradition, exploring, in her drama, interdependent issues of crime, sexuality, and social responsibility. Lynda Hart traces an implied equation between sexuality and criminality in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. Lesbianism has