What the Constitution Means to Me and Women’s Generational Trauma
I have written about What the Constitution Means to Me here before, and I’m doing it again. This play continues to have a hold on me because I think it is an excellent reminder that we still need feminism, and not the individualistic feminism that saturates popular media today that has been adopted as a way for brands to market products to women under the guise of “self-empowerment.”
Male violence is an omnipresent threat. Our access to reproductive health care is insecure. These are not obsolete concerns of previous generations. The gendered trauma our mothers experienced is ours today.
What follows is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for a performance seminar last semester about intergenerational trauma, the audience, and the penumbra in What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck.
In the introduction to Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth expands on Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Torquato Tasso’s romantic epic, Jerusalem Delivered, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. While Freud is primarily interested in how the trauma of the story’s hero, Tancred, repeats itself, Caruth observes how Tasso represents the way Tancred’s trauma is entangled with the trauma of his lover, Clorinda. In Tasso’s poem, Tancred mistakenly murders Clorinda because she is wearing an enemy knight’s armor. Unbeknownst to Tancred, after her death, Clorinda’s soul is trapped inside of a tree within a magic forest, so when Tancred impales a tree with his sword, Clorinda laments that she has been wounded by him a second time. Caruth concludes that this parable “represents traumatic experience not only as the enigma of a human agent’s repeated and unknowing acts but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound, a voice that witnesses a truth that Tancred himself cannot fully know.”[1] Tancred’s trauma is implicated in Clorinda’s and her presence complicates Tancred’s understanding of their shared traumatic experiences. Caruth claims that Freud resorts to literature to understand trauma because “literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing.”[2] While literature is a useful means through which to explore the intricacies of trauma, performance may be a more useful paradigm because of its iterative quality that resembles the “repeat” of trauma. Caruth describes trauma as “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or a truth that is not otherwise available.”[3] In other words, trauma demands witness and, unlike literature, performance involves a shared temporal present between a performer, whose voice “cries out,” and an audience, who witnesses.[4] Heidi Schreck’s play What the Constitution Means to Me demonstrates the unique capacity of performance to enact a “plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard, […] by which the other commands us to awaken.”[5] By sharing the story of her trauma and the traumatic experiences of the women in her family, Schreck creates an occasion for her wound to be witnessed. In relating these personal traumas to global trends of violence against women, Schreck also raises the consciousness of the audience to their own entanglement with gendered trauma.
What the Constitution Means to Me is a play in which Schreck restages Constitutional debates that she participated in as a teenager to fund her college tuition. One component of the competition is that the contestant must explain a personal connection they have to the Constitution, and it is this premise that sets up Schreck to weave an exploration of the Constitution’s silence on women into her account of the trauma experienced by her female family members. Schreck produces a compelling argument that women shoulder a legacy of trauma compounded by centuries of male violence sanctioned by law.
At one point in the show, Schreck tells the audience that her great-great-grandfather purchased her great-great-grandmother Theresa for seventy-five dollars when he ordered her from The Matrimonial Times. Schreck learned that Theresa officially died from melancholia at age thirty-six at the Western State Mental Hospital and she grew up believing that all the women on her mother’s side of the family inherited chemical depression from Theresa. Schreck also claims that they all cry in the same way, which she calls “Greek tragedy crying.” It is interesting that Schreck links this “Greek tragedy crying” to the depression her female family members inherited from Theresa because, as Caruth points out in her examination of Jerusalem Delivered, the original definition of trauma comes from “the Greek trauma, or ‘wound.’”[6] This is the first implicit suggestion Schreck makes that not just her chemical depression, but also Theresa’s trauma was transmitted to subsequent generations of her family. The trauma may have originated with Theresa, but it did not end with her—it continues to implicate her family several generations later.
The trauma in Schreck’s family, unfortunately, does not end with the involuntary marriage that likely provoked Theresa’s death from melancholia. Schreck says that in her family the standard for a “good man” is that “he didn’t beat up his wife and kids.” Her grandfather was one such man, but after his death her Grandma Betty remarried a violent man who beat up her and her children. He raped Schreck’s aunt who was sent away to have the child he impregnated her with, and when she returned, he raped her again and she went away again. Schreck’s aunt and Schreck’s mother finally told the police about their stepfather because Grandma Betty was too scared to do it herself. When their stepfather found out they had been in contact with the police, he “got his Constitutionally protected gun, and he threatened to kill his whole family.” In the face of this threat, Grandma Betty finally summoned the courage to gather her six children and flee. Schreck’s mother and Schreck’s aunt testified and their stepfather was sentenced to thirty years in prison but only served two.
Despite the fact that Schreck only learned this part of her family history when she was fifteen-years-old, she seemed to adopt a survival response that resonates with the experiences of older generations of her female family members. For example, Schreck recounts a situation from her first year in college when a guy drove her home and surprised her by initiating unwanted sex. Even though Schreck did not want to participate in the sexual encounter and the man probably would have stopped if she asked, she just let it happen. Schreck explains, “I remember how dark it was outside. I remember looking around. There was nobody on the street. My dorm was way, way out on the edge of campus. And I remember having this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and then this fleeting thought, so quick, I almost can’t put it into language. But if I had to say it out loud, it would sound like: ‘Stay alive.’” This reverberation of her family members’ trauma demonstrates how she is “inextricably bound” to them “through the story of a trauma.”[7] That story is not just the violence inflicted on Grandma Betty and her children by her stepfather; it is a broader narrative which encompasses both the historical subjugation of women in her matrilineal line and women everywhere that continues in the present day.
In addition to this harrowing experience, Schreck describes a physical pain that manifests in her body when she thinks about what the women in her family wanted to do with their lives. She says that she has had a pain in her back for a year and that her “throat gets really tight” so that she “can’t get her voice out.” Her great-grandma Breckyn had sixteen children. Grandma Betty wanted to be a painter, but she had six children and only ended up painting Picasso reproductions. Her mom wanted to be an actor and a writer and move to New York City, but she got pregnant with Schreck the year before birth control became legal for single women. Schreck in some ways broke this pattern when she chose to have an abortion at twenty-one just after graduating college. This decision kept her from being tied down and enabled her to do what her mom dreamed of for herself—move to New York City to pursue writing and acting. Perhaps it is precisely because her mother told the story of her trauma to Schreck that prompted her to avoid the same fate. In doing so Schreck’s mother “passes” her “awakening on to” her daughter; that awakening, or coming into consciousness, gave Schreck the power to change the trend.[8] As Judith Alpert contends in her own account of trauma inherited from her mother, in order to stop the spread of trauma, one’s “stories must be told,” which is precisely what Schreck does in writing and performing What the Constitution Means to Me.[9] Schreck tells her own trauma so others will have the courage to reckon with and share their own.
At one point in the show, Schreck theorizes about the source of her tears that followed her recovery of a sentimentally valuable stuffed animal: “I don’t know if I was crying for my Grandma Betty, or because of chemical depression, or because he [the stuffed animal] is such a cute little monkey, or maybe because of centuries and centuries of fucking inherited trauma, or maybe, maybe it’s just the appropriate response to everything right now!” Schreck’s heightened emotional response may have been of “a voice that precedes her,” a voice that “is not” hers “but whose only opening is through” her “wounds.”[10] Schreck’s trauma experience is what Alpert would call “accumulated trauma,” which is “like compounded interest. The trauma is added to the existing principal so that, from that trauma moment on, the trauma that had been added also earns more trauma.”[11] Caruth and Alpert would suggest that the burden Schreck carries is intensified by that of the generation that preceded it.
Rachel Yehuda, Amy Lehrner, and Linda M. Bierer state that the term “‘intergenerational trauma’ is misleading because it is meant to refer to the intergenerational manifestation of the effects of parental trauma,” but there is evidence to suggest that not just the chemical depression of Schreck’s great-great-grandmother Theresa, but also her trauma, or rather the effects of her trauma, could have been “inherited,” in Schreck’s words, through epigenetic transmission.[12] According to Amy Lehrner and Rachel Yehuda, “epigenetics is the study of mechanisms that modify gene expression, thus shaping phenotypic outcome, but do not alter the underlying DNA sequence” and epigenetics “has been described as the means by which the environment ‘gets under the skin,’ facilitating or suppressing the expression of genes, which are themselves fixed and immutable.”[13] In other words, trauma does not have the ability to rewrite a person’s DNA, but it can create epigenetic marks; it is not the trauma that is inherited but its effects on gene expression. However, in an effort to dissuade people of biological determinism, Lehrner and Yehuda clarify that depending on whether or not the “environmental contexts” which generations of a genetic line experience changes, the transmission of these markers may become less reliable or the phenotypes of the genes may become less drastic. If Schreck continues the pattern of a stable domestic home life and her children and their offspring do the same, the effects of Theresa’s trauma on her genetic offspring may become less severe.
Schreck, however, obliquely alludes to the possibility of generational trauma in all women because of the long history of female oppression. This is not contradicted by Lehrner and Yehuda’s claims because they state that “The experience and transmission of trauma effects are embedded within a larger cultural context that includes narratives, beliefs, and practices. The effects of trauma are also felt and transmitted within a sociostructural context that includes access to resources, relative safety of the neighborhood, and the larger political environment.”[14] Considering the facts Schreck introduces about violence against women throughout the play, gendered trauma may actually be reified, as Alpert contends, because of the persistent danger of violence women have experienced over the course of centuries. Schreck rightfully describes this violence against women as an epidemic:
Four women are murdered every day in this country by a male partner. It was actually three women when I started performing a year ago. It’s gone up. One in three American women are sexually assaulted during their lifetime. […] One in five American women are raped during their lifetime. A study came out recently that said the United States was one of the ten most dangerous countries in the world for women. That’s physical and sexual violence, sex trafficking, lack of access to health care, lack of access to reproductive care, death in childbirth, especially for black women, gun violence. […] Ten million American women live in violent households.
These statistics both as a narrative and as a real-life threat to women’s safety can only exacerbate the transmission of trauma effects between generations. In addition to these statistics about the prevalence of danger to women’s bodies in the United States, the evolution of laws surrounding domestic violence across the globe suggests this inheritance of trauma is not unique to American women. The debate moderator recites:
The first law pertaining to domestic violence comes from Hammurabi in 1800 BC. It decreed that a husband could inflict punishment on any member of his household for any reason. The Roman code of pater familias said a man could kill his wife for adultery or for walking outside without her face covered. In Renaissance France, when it became clear that too many women and children were being beaten to death and it was hurting the economy, men were restricted to blows that did not leave marks. In eighteenth-century England, the law said that a man could only hit his wife with a whip or stick no thicker than his thumb. […] In 1910 the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that a wife could not press assault charges against a husband because it would open the doors of the courts to accusations of all sorts of one spouse against the other. In 1977, the California Penal Code stated that wives charging husbands with criminal assault must suffer more injuries than commonly needed for charges of battery. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that Jessica Lenahan could not sue the Castle Rock Police Department for not showing up to protect her and her children. In 2014, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that the United States violated the human rights of Jessica Lenahan and her daughters.
These are examples of state sanctioned domestic violence and indifference to threats to women’s lives. Caruth claims that “the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ cannot be extricated from each other,” which seems to apply here.[15] How can women not observe this concrete evidence of pervasive violence against women and governmental indifference of their plight and not conclude how little society values their lives?
Regardless of the scientific merit in the argument for the epigenetic transmission of trauma effects, it is still possible for trauma to be passed down between generations through a parent’s behavior. Based on her own inheritance of her mother’s fear of sexual violence, Alpert concludes that “unconscious phantasies can evolve from events that were never experienced by the child. […] The child takes in what is ongoing in the present that truly belongs in the past. The child observes the mother’s triggers and its effects on the mother.”[16] While Alpert’s case was extreme—her mother had her hide every time an unknown man came to their door, whether he had a legitimate reason, like delivering a package, or not—more minute behaviors of parents can also be observed and internalized by their children. As Caruth writes, a “traumatic experience can never with certainty be reduced to, or framed within, the boundaries of an individual life.”[17] No matter what, a trauma will always have unintended reverberations beyond the life of the victim.
The relationship Schreck constructs between herself and the audience reflects Alice Rayner’s idea of audience as “an instance of intersubjective relations with specific reference to the act of listening.”[18] Schreck does this by creating multiple ways for the audience to engage in the performance, which forms a “dialogic relation between performer and audience.”[19] Schreck directly addresses the audience, gives the audience calls to action, creates moments of communal listening, involves the audience in determining the winner of the debate at the end of the show, and models the ways in which encounters with others can reveal the interrelated nature of trauma.
Schreck directly addresses the audience with gestures like waving and intentional eye contact, or even responding to a reaction the audience has to something she says, like when she replied, “Yeah, ew, right, thank you!” when certain audience members vocalized disgust when Schreck confided that her college boyfriend wanted to turn her road trip to an abortion facility into a vacation. Rayner describes this strategy of addressing the audience as a “means for the performer to be explicit about its own relation and to engage the audience in an interplay of relations, not unlike what [Hans-Georg] Gadamer in Truth and Method called the ‘to-and-fro’ that constitutes play.”[20] Schreck also engages in this play with the audience by giving them prompts, such as to become the audience of men who judged her debate competitions as a teenager, or by asking the audience to imagine being someplace else since the show didn’t have the budget for a set change. These interactions change the dynamic between performer and audience since the audience is also participating in the formation of the play’s constructed setting.
Another way in which Schreck collapses the distance between the performers and the audience is by briefly suspending the action on stage during the broadcasting of audio recordings of Supreme Court justices. Schreck plays two audio recordings from Supreme Court hearings (one during which the male justices repeatedly cough and clear their throats in embarrassment as they discuss access to birth control and another in which two justices argue over the meaning of the word “shall” in the Jessica Lenahan v. United States of America case) and the third audio recording is the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s statement that there will be enough women on the Supreme Court “when there are nine.” In all three instances, the lights dim on stage and the performers and audience members all listen in darkness. It creates a moment when both parties are shifted to the same position of spectator/listener.
This dynamic of play is heightened in the final portion of the show, which is a debate between Schreck and a fourteen-year-old who participates in debates in New York, like Schreck once did. (Rosdely Ciprian participates in the debate in the filmed production of What the Constitution Means on Amazon Prime, but during the show’s run on Broadway, she alternated performances with Thursday Williams, but one of Williams’s debates with Schreck is a bonus video on the performance’s page). The subject is whether or not the Constitution should remain law in the United States. Schreck argues to keep the Constitution and Ciprian argues to abolish the Constitution. The style of their debate is parliamentary, which requires that the audience play a part in choosing the winner; the audience applauds points with which they agree and boos points with which they disagree. This creates a very literal way in which the audience, in Jean-François Lyotard’s words from The Postmodern Condition, “‘legitimates’ the performance not through knowledge of fact and law but through the ability to donate to other performer both presence and judgment,” and the donation is not of an “ethics of […] power over.”[21] During the performance, ushers also distributed copies of pocket Constitutions so that the audience could follow along and make note of any errors the debaters made. In addition to this contribution to the debate, Schreck chooses a single audience member to decide whether or not the Constitution should be kept or abolished based on the debate. Singling out one member of the audience draws attention to the diverse competition of the multiple subject that is the audience.
Schreck explicitly involves the audience in this way so that they will come to think of themselves as part of the complex phenomenon of gendered trauma that women experience. Regardless of the spectator’s gender, their lives will inevitably be influenced by the patriarchal ideology that perpetuates the subjugation of women. Schreck also conveys this truth by yielding time on stage to her scene partner, Mike Iveson, who plays the part of the debate moderator (in both teenage Schreck’s Constitutional debate competitions and the debate between Schreck and Ciprian, but in the latter, he moderates the debate as himself). Iveson relates a story in which he entered a bar and was asked by an intimidating looking man, “Don’t you want to fuck her?” in reference to the waitress behind the bar. Iveson feared that the man may have been “testing” him to figure out if he was gay and wondered if the man was “capable of violence,” wondering if the waitress felt threatened like Schreck did when she consented to sex out of a survival instinct. The culture which validates men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies makes both Iveson and Schreck vulnerable to violence if they refuse to conform—whether, for them, that means in Iveson’s case, not desiring or wanting to dominate women, or in Schreck’s case, refusing to yield sex to men on demand.
Schreck also demonstrates the truth in Caruth’s observation that “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” and that “trauma may lead” to “the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.”[22] This potential for connection through mutual trauma is brought to light when Schreck discusses how when she began to perform this play in its earlier forms, the fact that she shared the story of her abortion led to both her friends and their mothers telling Schreck about their own abortions. Schreck’s bravery in speaking up about her own abortion produced the “surprise” of learning how common abortion was in her own social circle, and how pervasive the shame and secrecy about the procedure is.
Ultimately, Schreck may in fact have the best paradigm of all for thinking about the dialogue between performer and audience: the penumbra. This is how Schreck defines a penumbra in the context of her fifteen-year-old self’s explanation of justice William O. Douglas’s interpretation of the ninth amendment: “Here I am standing in the light and there you are, sitting in the darkness. And, this space between us, this space right here of partial illumination, this shadowy space right here, this is a penumbra. […] I mean here we are, stuck between what we can see and what we can’t. We are trapped in a penumbra.” It is in this in-between space, this penumbra, that the audience in its “dual position” echoes a performer’s “speech and gesture, a return that occurs in time as openness, not in a static image or closed meaning. […] It returns the voice to the speaker, the same but different.”[23] Schreck’s penumbra metaphor demonstrates the potential for performance in the intersubjectivity it creates between performer and audience to form an avenue through which one can express their trauma, their “wound,” that demands witness. This sharing between speaker and listener creates not only an opportunity for trauma to be more completely known in its telling, but also for raising the consciousness of the listener to the larger forces that enable or contributed to the trauma.
[1] Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Ibid. 2.
[5] Ibid., 9.
[6] Ibid., 3.
[7] Ibid., 102.
[8] Ibid., 107.
[9] Judith L. Alpert, “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge: On Rape and History,” in Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma, eds. Jill Salberg and Sue Grand (London: Routledge University Press, 2016), 160, doi:10.4324/9781315751061.
[10] Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 138.
[11] Alpert, “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge,” 155.
[12] Rachel Yehuda, Amy Lehrner, and Linda M. Bierer, “The Public Reception of Putatiive Epigenetic Mechanisms in the Transgenerational Effects of Trauma,” Environmental Epigenetics 4, no. 2 (2018): 5, Directory of Open Access Journals, doi:10.1093/eep/dvy018.
[13] Amy Lehrner and Rachel Yehuda, “Cultural Trauma and Epigenetic Inheritance,” Development and Psychopathology 30 (2018): 1764, Cambridge University Press Journals Complete, doi:10.1017/S0954579418001153.
[14] Ibid., 1769.
[15] Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 121.
[16] Alpert, “Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge,” 152.
[17] Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 121.
[18] Alice Rayner, “The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7, no. 2 (1993): 6.
[19] Ibid., 13.
[20] Ibid., 14.
[21] Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 133, quoted in Rayner, “The Audience,” 21.
[22] Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8.
[23] Rayner, “The Audience,” 21.
