My Sister in this House

In the early 1930s, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan published his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality" which introduced the concept of the "insane lesbian" into the dialectic of a culture already deeply ingrained with the idea that femininity was to be feared. In this article which takes Sister My Sister, the film adaptation of My Sister in this House for which Kesselman wrote the screenplay as its subject, author Boyle suggests that the public's fascination with the Papin murderers reveals enduring anxieties around gender, class and sexuality in bourgeois settings, because of the traditional family and religious structures in place there provide residents with a false sense of security. Boyle cites Ann Lloyd who notes, "women who commit violent crimes have breached two laws: "the law of the land, which forbids violence, and the much more fundamental 'natural' law, which says women are passive carers, not active aggressors." Boyle goes on to state that "it is not only the violence, but the murderers' alleged lesbianism that threatens, as the obsession with sexuality" as well as "the anxiety aroused by the incestuous nature of their (alleged) relationship and the apparent revolt against the passive invisibility of their class position." (106) This is useful to the development of a production of My Sister in this House with an eye towards moving beyond depicting the women as monsters and instead looking at them as victims of systemic class repression of females.  

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Boyle, Karen. "Revisiting the Papin Case: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in "Sister My Sister." South Central Review 19/20.4 (2002): 103-118. 

Kamenish discusses public fascination with the violent crimes of the Papin sisters and how that translates to an audience's fascination with portrayals of violence on stage, suggesting that the spread of rumor and imagined violence induces more fright than witnessing the violent act itself. My curiosity about Kesselman's choice to recount the maid's grisly murders off-stage in the form of a voice-over rather than choosing to show the actors explicitly performing the action led me down a path of research about how depictions of violence on stage impact an audience. Using both My Sister in this House and Genet's The Maids, Kamenish posits that the two plays benefit from interpretations that elevate the women's' crime to the realm of art and makes connections to how both the real life audiences and the plays' audiences dark fascination with the case exposes "our own insidious yearnings for an encounter with the violence within us, the spectators." (117) 

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​Kamenish, P. K. "Staging Crime: From Murder to Fine Art in Genet's Les Bonnes and Kesselman's My Sister in this House." The Comparatist, vol. 27 no. 1, 2003, pp. 117-137. 

Kesselman's careful use of silence and sound in My Sister in this House is a storytelling device that impacts the audience's experience of and response to the story. It helps to illustrate in an almost physical way the repression and heart-pounding paranoia in the house of the Danzards in the weeks leading up to the women's brutal murder. Popov's article discusses the ways sounds, silence and music shape in conversation with the performers in what he calls "a breathing extension of human interactions and relationships." (29) The article is mostly focused on the improvisational development of a score during the rehearsal process, but I found the discussion of the spaces before and after silences on stage, and the implications about what is not being said, heard, or is otherwise expressed or not during a stage silence particularly thought-provoking. This can be helpful to a production in deciding how to approach the oh-so-integral sound design of Kesselman's work. 

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Popov, Bagryana. "Music, Silence and the Single Note in the Creation of Meaning in Theatre." Australasian Drama Studies 67 (2015): 28-48. 

The phenomenon of "folie à deux" or "the simultaneous occurrence of symptoms of a mental disorder (as delusions) in two persons who are closely related (as siblings or man and wife)" (www.vocabulary.com) is a rare occurrence, but one that has echoes in the story of Christine and Léa Lutton in Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in this House. In her article, Vargas suggests that there is a link between the disorder and child abuse and neglect. The limited knowledge we are offered about the manipulative and neglectful mother of Christine and Léa Lutton, as well as the hinted-at sexual abuse perpetrated by the nuns who raised the girls could have contributed to the way they commit their violent crime in tandem. The article provides a case study that, while not exactly parallel to the Luttons in the play, does present an interesting theory about delusions having an "influencer" and an "influenced" who — Christine and Léa respectively—who guide and become entangled in a shared fantasy.

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Vargas Alves Nunes, Alessandra. "Folie à Deux and Its Interaction With Early Life Stress: A Case Report." Journal of Medical Case Reports 10.1 (2016): 1-5. 

Voss' article chronicles the change in attitude toward and prevalence of incest in nineteenth century American literature—specifically manifested as the courtship and eventual marriage of brothers and sisters (usually separated at birth or otherwise distant from one another). While seemingly a bit off-topic, my interest in this article stems from the explanations Voss gives about why the characters in the nineteenth century novels choose incest, and why it is socially acceptable when not very long before, representations of brother-sister unions were the result of a sinful ancestry. Like Christine and Léa, many characters in nineteenth century novels have lost or been abandoned by family members (i.e. mom and dad) and choose incest as a way of restoring the family that is lost to them. Another attractive feature according to Voss is that women are able to choose their partner whom they already know and trust, something particularly relevant to the Luttons, who have never had any control over their lives.  

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​Voss, Julie R. "Brothers and Sisters: Incest As Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels. "Women's Studies 44.4 (2015): 499.