Desdemona, Juliet, and Constance Meet the Third Wave

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald has won the Governor-General’s and Chalmers Awards and has been produced over forty times across Canada and abroad since its premiere in 1988. The critical assessment of this immensely popular play has ranged through discussions of its postcolonial elements (Wilson), its treatment of Shakespeare’s female characters (Porter), and its use of a recognizably feminist mode of comedy (Hengen). In July of 2002 I attended a conference at the University of Exeter in England on the topic of Third Wave Feminisms. In March of 2003 I will be directing a student production of Goodnight Desdemona at the University of Lethbridge, one of three student productions taking place, coincidentally,  across Alberta this year. In my proposed paper, I will be bringing together these two experiences to discuss the relevancy of the play to what I will identify and define as Third Wave Feminism. I am interested in the appeal of MacDonald’s play to young women and I will consider the specifics of the play in performance in relation to notions predominant in Third Wave Feminist writing. In works by, for example, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future), and Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake,  (Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism), Third Wave Feminism is defined through a sense of choice and playfulness, an obsession with popular culture, and a  reclaiming of femininity. I will argue that, by embracing a vision of female wholeness which encompasses an intriguing variety of desiring and desired female archetypes, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is uniquely in tune with the kind of representation young feminists respond to. My conclusion is that its particular brand of feminism accounts, in large part, for the play’s continuing popularity.