Gender Acts and Gender Lies in "I Am My Own Wife"

Among the resonant assertions of ''I Am My Own Wife'' is that lives themselves are narratives, and that the perspective, sympathy and reliability of the narrator are crucial to our understanding of them. In other words, to endure the world, people may lie about themselves or to themselves, and the lies are as important as the truth.
-Bruce Weber, THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along, Published: December 4, 2003

I find this comment from Bruce Weber’s 2004 New York Times review of Doug Wright’s “I am My Own Wife” particularly intriguing. As a biographical play about a transvestite, Wright’s one man show already calls to mind Judith Butler inspired ideas about the performativity of socially constructed gender identities. As a play deeply concerned with questions of credibility, authenticity, and lying as a means of survival, the play raises similar, although perhaps more materially grounded questions.


I have only begun to puzzle out the relationship between “the lies” that constitute gender, and “the lies” that allow Charlotte to survive in her (male) body, through both the Nazi and Communist regimes in East Berlin. What can be said of the connection between lives as narrative, as Weber puts it, and gender as narratives, as Butler gestures towards?


First, a refresher. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Butler’s hallmark piece of queer performance theory, she reminds us that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). This phrase, “stylized repetition of acts” seems especially important in the context of this play.

Jefferson Mays as Charlotte

Charlotte constructs her identity as a woman through repetition of such stylized acts and tokens, most notably her trademark pearls. Her charming and unruffled demeanor also suggest the easy grace of femininity, for example in her reply to Wright’s initial query of her, in which she merely replies: “Dear Mr. Wright, Yes. Perhaps it is possible for you to make a play. Maybe you will visit Berlin after Christmas. Sincerely, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf” (14). She is routinely described as charming and enchanting, suggesting her authentic relationship to femininity as a stable identity. As Butler puts it, the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production” (522). Charlotte is suitably credible, and thus acceptable, comfortable even.


Butler goes on to point out that gender acts only make sense in relation to other acts, it is infact the pattern that is most important for constructing a gender identity, that and historical maintenance. Gender after all, is an “historical situation rather than a natural fact” (520).


The question then becomes one of identifying those acts which break the pattern. Butler writes, “the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (520). The acts that seem to break Charlotte’s gender patterning of her body seem to overlap with those that break the pattern of her story as historical martyr, or hero, of representing what Wright perceives as a secret history of queer integrity and perseverance. Acts that would be associated with spying, or deception, seem to me gendered in the same way that wearing pearls, or penmanship “full of curlicues and frippery” are (Wright 37).


That her public villainization, her recasting from hero to traitor coincides with the breaking of her repetition of stylized gender acts strikes me as significant. Note, for example, Charlotte’s attempt to reestablish her gender patterning as Wright confronts her about Kirschner. Avoiding Wright’s questioning, she pulls out an artifact as she is wont to do, an old sweater with antique brass buttons. “These hands have laid mortar and brick; they have carved walnut. But for Alfred, they learned to knit. (Beat.) It is beautiful, yes?” (37-8). To Charlotte, the break from the pattern, the expression of agency and survival that allowed her to survive, but put her dear friend in jail, is a disturbing break in the pattern that must be forgotten. The only way to go on living is to reestablish her stylized repetition of gender acts.


Perhaps the public, in the world of the play and indeed in the audience of the playhouse, are willing to accept Charlotte as a woman so long as she acts like one, actively working to maintain the authenticity of her relationship to femininity. When there is a break in the act, rendering it less than credible, we are no longer comfortable. This ambivalent relationship to credibility, both in the narrative of Charlotte’s life, and in the narrative of her gender, continue to shape contemporary understandings of this individual, and indeed this play in important ways. And furthermore, if we accept Butler's claim that "gender performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions," than for each of us, to endure in the world in a gendered body is truly a matter of lying, or at the very least, acting (527).

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. ““Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology

          and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40. 4 (Dec, 1988): 519-531. Print.


Weber, Bruce. “THEATER REVIEW; Inventing Her Life As She Goes Along.” Review of I

         Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Dir. Moises Kaufman. New York Times 04

         December 2003: Web.


Wright, Doug. I Am My Own Wife. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc, 2005. Print.