Seeing and Judging Accusation: The Mimetic Politics of Shanley’s Doubt

Abstract

This paper locates Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable in the context of a series of modern plays, which problematize accusation and its factual basis through their peculiar uses of the realist convention of revelation. Following suit from Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and David Mamet’s Oleanna which dramatize the accusations made at school, Doubt makes an issue of verifying the factual foundation of an accusation but sets itself apart from the two predecessors by its idiosyncratic abandonment of ‘the scenic’ portion of factual clues. Between ‘the scenic’ and ‘the verbal’ constituents of performative semiotics in the theatre, such abandonment leaves behind ‘the verbal’—the semantics of the languages of characters surrounding an accusation—as the only available source of reference for the audience’s moral judgement. The objective of this paper is to examine the mimetic politics of Doubt—its removal of ‘scenic’ clues that the audience can actually ‘see’ and consequent restriction of their resource to ‘the verbal’—and by doing that, align the play with its realist precursors. Its main argument is that Shanley conceives the postmodern unknowability through the scenic ‘atrophy’ or ‘exhaustion’ of fact, with the result that the whole game of accusation is locked within the fundamentally dissatisfying ‘semantic’ level. The paper finds this aesthetic choice by Shanley setting him apart from Hellman’s and Mamet’s strategies of revelation.