Rites (Themes)

Themes

Feminism and Gender Stereotypes

At the heart of the play is the idea of gender stereotyping, in which the roles and attitudes of the sexes follow highly predictable patterns. Since it is men who set the rules and design them for their own advantage, this breeds frustration, resentment, and ultimately murderous rage in the women who congregate at the public lavatory. The negative picture presented of men is almost unrelenting, and includes the world of work, sex, relationships, and the home.

The office girls, for example, have dull, repetitive jobs in which they are at the beck and call of male bosses. But their minds are so impoverished, so crushed by the accepted notions of what women can do, that they have no ideas about what else they might aspire to. All they know is that the jobs they do have are better than the available alternatives, such as working on a factory production line. Being aware of one’s dissatisfaction but lacking the capacity to imagine anything better is a recipe for frustration and a stunted life.

Norma’s best solution, inspired by television advertising, is simply to take the day off and go to the beach. She and the other girls are lulled by the sentimental cliches fed to them by the male-dominated culture and also by the harmless diversions they are offered. Norma soaks up the soft pornography of romance novels that are aimed at women by the publishing industry, and the girls also lap up the conventional, moralistic advice about relationships with men that are offered to them by newspaper advice columns. The treachery of men is somehow enshrined and made harmless in little romantic rhymes that Norma learned at school. That is, until one of the office girls describes the reality of a man’s attitude to her as a young, single woman: “You’re all right till you’re stuck with a kid then they don’t want to know.”

Men are presented through the eyes of the women as nothing more than big babies who are obsessed with sex. Pornography and sexual perversions are the realm of men. “Only men, only men, only men do that,” chant the office girls in unison. And when the first office girl discovers the obscene graffiti on the cubicle walls, she assumes it must have been written by a man because no decent woman would write such things. The stereotypes conveyed are that men just want sex, whereas women want romance and family.

From the point of view of the females in this play, men are selfish when it comes to sex, and their performance also leaves much to be desired. “Eddy always falls dead asleep after,” says Norma, and Dot thinks of the male orgasm as “only like a sneeze, when all’s said and done.”

Men in their turn have a low opinion of women’s intelligence, at least according to Ada, who, as she studies the financial pages of the newspaper, says contemptuously, “They think we don’t read that far.” The “they” in question are the men who produce the newspapers. The underlying stereotype is that the realm of business and finance belongs to men; women are content with the “women’s pages” that discuss clothes, recipes, relationships, and the like.

The gender roles of the older generation, as represented by Nellie and Dot, are similarly fixed in stone. Men go to work; women wait all day for them to come home, occupying themselves, in the opinion of one of the office girls, sweeping and tidying and washing. The role of the wife is simply to make her husband comfortable, never to point out his faults or hurt his pride. Everything follows a predictable routine. Now widowed, Nellie and Dot seem in some respects to have more rewarding lives than they did when they were married. Although they do not have any directly unkind words to say about their dead husbands, they do let slip the fact that now there is no one to dock their housekeeping money after a bad week, or to ask where all the money has gone.

The younger generation of women feel the same pressure to conform to long-established roles. Women must defer to men. If a man steps on a woman’s feet as they dance, says one office girl, she is the one who apologizes. The man’s masculine pride must not be threatened.

Gender stereotypes emerge again when the girl with the slashed wrists is discovered. Nellie immediately says they must call a man because a man will be able to break the door down. Second Woman wants to get a policeman. The underlying stereotype is that in a crisis, you need a man. But Ada will not hear of this, and the women manage to solve the problem well enough on their own; brute strength is not always needed.

The gender stereotypes permeate society at all levels and are constantly reinforced. They can be found, for example, in the words of the nineteenthcentury nursery rhyme that the women quote: little girls are made of “Sugar and spice and all things nice,” whereas little boys are made of “Sni ps and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.”

Everything points to a rigid segregation of society along gender lines, and the relationship between the sexes is one of antagonism. This is learned in childhood, as the first office girl makes clear: “Like in the playground, boys against girls. Them onto us.”

The segregated public lavatories, in which the men’s lavatory is an unknown, mysterious place to the women, thus becomes a metaphor for the basic divisions in society. “It’s time he stuck to his own side of the fence,” says Meg of the toddler boy who has been brought by his mother to the lavatory.

Given the resentment that women in the play feel toward men — which is most exemplified in Ada — the outrage and madness that takes hold of them when they see what they think is a man emerging from one of the cubicles is not so surprising. The women’s lavatory is their domain; it is one of the few places where women can be in control. The invasion of their private space is likely to provoke a violent response.

But the play does not endorse the women’s violence. Since their victim turns out to be a woman, this suggests that mindlessly attacking men, or what men represent, will only hurt women, too. Duffy says as much in her introduction to the play:

In the very moment when the women have got their own back on men for their type-casting in an orgasm of violence they find they have destroyed themselves and in death there is certainly no difference.