• Play Title: An Ordinary Woman (monologue) 
• Author: Alan Bennett 
• First performed:  2020 
• Page count: 15 

Summary

In 1988, Alan Bennett wrote the first series of Talking Heads for BBC Television, which consisted of six monologues. A second series of Talking Heads was released in 1998. Ten of the monologues were re-recorded by the BBC in 2020 with new actors, and Bennett wrote two new monologues: An Ordinary Woman is one of the new additions.

Gwen Fedder is a married, middle-aged woman. She lives with her husband and has two children: Michael aged fifteen and his younger sister Maureen. Her husband is generally inattentive, her daughter is wearisome, but she dotes on her son. She teaches him to drive, washes his favourite clothes on demand, and appreciates his company. One day Michael comes to his mother for advice about an intimate problem. After this event, Gwen develops obsessive thoughts that she is unable to process in a healthy fashion.

Bennett tackles the theme of familial boundaries in this taboo monologue. The playwright considers the ordinariness from which unexpected problems arise, showing that being normal is no real protection.

Ways to access the text: watching /reading

The text of the monologue may be read on the website of The London Review of Books. The title of the piece is “An Ordinary Woman A Monologue by Alan Bennett.”

Alternatively, you may watch the piece being performed by English actress Sarah Lancashire. This is available on the Dailymotion website, entitled “Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – Se1 -Ep02 – An Ordinary Woman HD Watch.” The running time is 35 mins

If you like Bennett’s style of writing, then 6 other monologues from Talking Heads can be viewed on the Internet Archive website. Search under the title – “Talking Heads (2020 versions) by Alan Bennett.”

Why read/watch An Ordinary Woman?

Part of the strange fascination of Talking Heads is that Bennett presented these monologues to a nationwide audience (UK) via the BBC television series. Therefore, An Ordinary Woman was beamed into the living rooms of a cross-section of society, although it deals with a quite sensitive topic. Incidentally, these broadcasts occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is difficult to recommend this piece all the same, except for its core achievement of upsetting what we think of as ‘normal.’ In a similar fashion to one of Bennett’s older monologues entitled Playing Sandwiches, he presents a seemingly innocuous character at first. In the cases of both monologues, the revelations quickly shatter the facade but are these characters really such exceptions, or do ordinary people struggle all too often with these strange obsessions? If art is about getting people to reconceive something familiar, then Bennett succeeds. Gwen’s monologue will get deep under your skin.

Post-reading discussion/interpretation

_{Not Quite Respectable – just Normal}

After initially reading and then watching An Ordinary Woman, I became quite dubious as to whether the monologue should be taken literally. Surely Bennett is using the story as a metaphor to critique modern society. For example, one’s attention is drawn to a distinct lack of boundaries – boundaries to which Gwen has long been familiar, but they have now disappeared. The female vicar wears no distinctive collar, the therapist (psychiatrist) at the hospital doesn’t even wear a white coat – oh, and Gwen doesn’t recognise normal boundaries anymore either, especially at home. The highly structured, hierarchical society in which Gwen was born and raised is now gone, discarded as old hat. Modern parents are favourably described as their child’s best friends, a far cry from the old 1980s mantra of send them out to play when parents were busy, aloof, and unyielding authority figures. Isn’t the monologue highlighting the mess that has emerged amid wokeism and Generation Z in Britain; an era of precocious teenagers and Botoxed mothers whose lineless faces watch over their kids’ every move (helicopter parenting). This could be expected of a playwright who himself belongs to a bygone era and views modern life with an often cynical eye. However, my own knee-jerk reaction of looking for a metaphorical meaning is probably just a sign of discomfort with the subject material. Like Michael, who vomits on the back doorstep of the house upon hearing his mother’s confession, we too are unsettled by the topic. The escape route of finding a metaphorical meaning is simultaneously an attempt to find a less confronting message so that the slight churn of one’s stomach doesn’t become too upsetting.

A literal interpretation is actually essential. Bennett makes excellent use of the BBC forum to unsettle his audience like an aged provocateur extraordinaire. One needs to accept it at face value rather than as a metaphor, allegory, or tall tale. The monologue is, nonetheless, a ruse. Gwen doesn’t fit the profile of an incestuous mother. First, this specific type of crime is exceptionally rare. As late as 2005, Mark T. Erickson wrote “There are no studies that specifically examine the prevalence of mother-son incest in a general population” (166). Even in the case of convicted sex offenders – only “4 percent of a population of convicted sex offenders in a metropolitan treatment program were mothers who had sexually abused offspring” (166). Women who did engage in incest had experienced childhoods where “Physical and/or sexual abuse were extremely common (95 percent)” (167-168). Thus, abused girls turned into abusers in adulthood. Furthermore, the case of Gwen and 15-year-old Michael is unrepresentative since “In a study of mother-child incest, the mean age of victims at assessment was 6.4 years” (168). In summation, the child’s age is too old, Gwen’s background is all wrong, and it’s just not plausible. But that also misses the point because we are presented with Gwen’s thoughts, not actions. Her assorted irrational thoughts threaten to lead up to something. It’s the uncharted grey area of a family crisis in the making.

One crucial point about Bennett’s scenario lies in the fact that “Incestuous families often present a facade of respectability and may be overtly conventional to a fault. With closer inspection, however, their apparent well-being is illusory” (Erickson 166). The Fedder family look conventional from the outside, but they harbour a fatal flaw. Erickson quotes a study where it was shown that in normal, non-incest families “there were clear boundaries between individuals, allowing for appropriate intimacy; these boundaries were far less distinct in incest families” (166: emphasis added). Yes, boundaries are the crux of the problem but not the societal ones that have evaporated over the past decades; it’s about personal and familial boundaries. Bennett depicts the breaching of several boundary lines before one gets to the core issue. First, when Gwen presents her monologue, she breaks the conventional boundary of the fourth wall by addressing the public directly in a rare moment of confessional intimacy. The topic that Bennett has chosen to address, namely incest, functions as an explosive device to shatter one’s idea of comfortable, middle-class normality by revealing the sordid goings-on of family life. Family secrecy is what normally blocks one from seeing beyond the conventional facade. A protective, external boundary falls away to expose the lack of internal family boundaries. The monologue was beamed into millions of British homes and its core message is that normality is a myth, quite literally.

The title of the monologue is salient too. To be ordinary is to be unexceptional, possibly even boring. The word is a consoling refuge for Gwen, and she repeats the phrase “I’m just an ordinary woman” to conceal her obscene difference. Yet, to be ordinary is clearly an insult too, and one that she must feel. Gwen finds herself in an extraordinary situation, and she savours this despite her protestations of normality.

“I don’t feel … I don’t feel I’m even entitled to this … well … passion. It’s lofty. Shakespearean. A man came to talk to us at the library once and he said love transformed, so that even the most ordinary people could become … epic, I think it was.”

(Bennett)

Her special love for her son, the fact that she’s in love with her son, lifts her above the humdrum of boring suburban life. Louisa, Gwen’s friend, expresses similar feelings about her own son Ricky – “I can’t look at him sometimes, I fancy him that much” (Bennett). Louisa is joking, but the topic is also risqué because Louisa recalls seeing her teenage son naked in the bath. For Gwen, such a discussion makes the whole idea seem quite “dirty.” To understand Gwen, one needs to consider why she considers it more appropriate to reference literature like Shakespeare’s and epic poems too. Shakespeare tackled the topic of incestuous thoughts and relationships in at least two of his plays: Pericles and Hamlet. Indeed, literature is full of tales of incest by renowned authors like Ovid, Sophocles, Walpole, Defoe, and Nabokov, to name but a few. They tell stories of this forbidden love. Peter L. Thorslev writes of how “The gods of ancient Greece … committed incest frequently or even regularly, but the fact is not always noticed that their license was never extended to the common man” (41). The fact that a “Zeus could commit incest with impunity was a virtual sign of his divinity … a sign that he was beyond mere mortal good and evil” (41). For Gwen to see herself in this light means that she is sublimating her base, libidinal urges into a fantasy romance of epic dimensions. For Thorslev, the symbolic implications of parent-child incest are that the past is a parasite upon the future; elderly parents are unwilling to let go of their youth; and these parents try to renew their youth by devouring their young or reproducing with them (47). Despite Gwen’s lofty aspirations couched in literary allusions, she is exposed as yet another vampiric figure.

This monologue about incest manages to fascinate and disgust us in equal measure. At the heart of the story is a flaw of nature. The monologue deals with one crucial boundary line and that is the normally foolproof instinct that debars parents from becoming sexually attracted to their children. What happens when this fails and why does it ever fail in the first place? When Gwen talks about the smell of Michael’s clothes, she is referencing the well-documented sensory bond that parents make with newborns through smell; but now, Gwen is using the smell of her son’s clothes to become sexually aroused. She almost gets caught by her daughter Maureen who asks, “Why are you all undone at the front?” (Bennett). Gwen crosses a line that was established soon after her son’s birth – “The evolutionary purpose of attachment is to elicit caretaking” (Wolf 20). Maternal caretaking threatens to transform into sexual predation. Gwen expresses her own subsequent confusion – “I thought there was something, genes or something, that gave you immunity” (Bennett). The vicar explains the problem to Gwen as follows:

“Living in close proximity together bestows a kind of protective coating on members of the family, so that in normal circumstances they don’t fall for each other, and somehow your protective coating has gone missing”

(Bennett)

The concept of a kind of sex-Teflon is not fiction. Erickson writes that “Incest avoidance is not hardwired, or present at birth, but rather depends on close association between kin from early life” (161). As far back as 1890, Edward Westermarck “argued that the deleterious consequences of inbreeding have selected for an innate tendency to develop an aversion to sexual relations with childhood associates” (Wolf 4). One could jokingly rephrase this as ‘familiarity breeds contempt in most families.’ On the other hand, Sigmund Freud “argued that humans are, by nature, incestuous. He proposed that repression of incestuous impulses created a universal neurosis, unique to our species [called the Oedipus complex]” (Erickson 162). If Westermarck was right, then parents should have nothing to fear, but if Freud was correct, then they have everything to fear. One way of resolving this issue is to refer to the incest taboo and the associated legal prohibitions. Sir James Frazier outlined the situation as follows:

“The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish.”  

(Wolf 5)

The unsavoury truth is that incest had to be made a taboo subject so that a normal inclination could be sufficiently stigmatised to keep occurrences rare. Gwen, like many, believed that something like this could never happen. Bennett cleverly exposes to his audience a succession of evaporating boundary lines and the ensuing anguish.

Gwen’s monologue opens up the dark, ugly secrets of an otherwise ordinary family. This dramatic piece allows us to peek behind a front door in suburbia. The actress Sarah Lancashire who plays the ageing, unemployed, frustrated housewife is excellent at communicating the madness of an illicit passion. There are moments when the camera zooms in on her face and you see the intense glint in her eyes as she speaks of her secret love. This unnoteworthy character who talks plainly in a regional, English accent is suddenly transformed. What she craves is quite normal when one uses simple labels like attention, lost youth, and re-ignited passion. It’s who she seeks them from that disturbs. The denouement of the monologue occurs soon after Gwen’s confession to Michael. She is first put on medication to normalise her thoughts. Marny, the therapist, advises that the drugs “start to put back your [Gwen’s] insulation, make you indifferent to one another the way families normally are” (Bennett). Nonetheless, it is ironic that a pharmaceutical solution is administered to this mother to return her to her natural state. Erickson notes that “clinicians are well aware that early association alone is not sufficient to establish incest avoidance. To the contrary, most incest occurs despite association” (163). The drugs should re-activate Gwen’s indifference towards her children – which is reminiscent of Victorian-era parenting. The psychologist also advises her to verbalise her thoughts and find closure. In fact, Gwen’s incestuous thoughts are primarily seen as a symptom of poor familial communication, especially between her and her husband. The taboo of incest is so emotive that diversionary tactics are used, even in a clinical setting.

The play reveals the ugliness of the id: the dark currents of desire, which are often followed by unrelenting shame. The sight of a teenage boy’s newly tumescent male member sends his mother into a paroxysm of strange desire. She breaks a hairdryer while pounding on her son’s bedroom door – driven insane by the sounds of his sexual exploits. Bennett utilises the shock appeal and sensationalism of the topic, but he ultimately makes a key point. Gwen is never presented as a gorgon; she’s only ever a normal woman. She describes herself as a “dirty mother” (Bennett),and her husband fears she may even commit suicide. Her abhorrent thoughts never go away, even when she’s highly medicated. Once the boundary has been erased, it is apparently unfixable. She is not equipped to handle it. Gwen remains a sympathetic figure, but maybe that’s because Bennett’s oeuvre is the voiced anguish of quite ordinary women. The lesson is that boundaries are like invisible safety nets that we instinctively rely upon to protect us. Gwen’s healthy love for her son changes in an instant into something obscene, and she has no power to reverse the error. This ordinary woman takes on a new hue and drugs won’t fix her. For an audience, ‘ordinary’ is less solid ground than the word formerly denoted. The monologue is not a critique of modern life per se, the playwright simply shows that ordinary is an illusion, and it often crumbles once the first boundary wall fails.

Works Cited

Bennett, Alan. “An Ordinary Woman: A Monologue by Alan Bennett.” London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/alan-bennett/an-ordinary-woman.

Erickson, Mark T. “Evolutionary Thought and the Current Clinical Understanding of Incest.” Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo, edited by Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham, Stanford University Press, 2005, pp.161-189. 

Thorslev, Peter L. “Incest as Romantic Symbol.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1965, pp. 41–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245694.

Wolf, Arthur P. “Introduction.” Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo, edited by Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham, Stanford University Press, 2005, pp.1-23.