Spike Heels

As its characters both exemplify and refute culturally-held gender norms and expectations, the play argues that increasing the fluidity of gender roles can destroy dangerous stereotypes, allow people to find their true identities, and free them from being trapped within patriarchal confines.

Georgie’s gender-neutral name indicates her as yet unstable sense of self. Tutored by the chauvinistic Andrew whose idealization of the perfect woman is just as toxic as Edward’s assertion that women lack souls, Georgie begins the play as performatively overly feminine. She wears provocative clothing and spike heels, uses her sexuality to disguise her imposter syndrome in the office, and relies on seduction as a strategy. However, after communing with Lydia outside of heteronormative boundaries, Georgie comes into her own: a woman in comfortable clothing who has the power to negotiate for what she wants—“make me an offer” (88), she tells the vanquished Edward.

Because Andrew is the diametric opposite of a traditional man’s man—he is a fussy, cerebral, endlessly lecturing tea drinker who is uninterested in sex—the only way he can cling to normative gender expectations is to embrace misogyny. He declares Lydia frigid even as he is the reason for their sexual estrangement, “gives” Georgie to Edward as a sexual object ripe for conquest, and believes that his hectoring is somehow improving Georgie’s chances in the world. Andrew ends the play with his myopia literalized—Lydia removes his glasses as she leaves him, showing how little his erudition actually allows him to see.

Lydia is caricatured by her own fiancé and by her ex-lover as a cold, emotionless emasculator. Georgie is quick to believe this stereotype—a pervasive one in a culture that divides women into the limiting and reductive categories of Madonna and whore. However, real Lydia is a passionate woman, willing to discard her family’s wealth to be with the man she loves, but ready to leave him when he turns out to be false. Lydia enables Georgie to step outside the patriarchal boundaries of femininity, as the two create a strengthening and mutually supportive bond.

Edward begins as a crude predator, full of jokes about rape and dismissive riffs about women as soulless sex objects. In Act II, however, Edward reveals the emotional needs he has repressed to perform this clichéd and deeply unpleasant display of machismo: He rejects Georgie’s offer of casual sex, worried that she is using him and eager for emotional commitment. Edward’s decision to step outside of the narrow masculinity confines enables him to end the play with a burgeoning relationship, rather than alone and blind like Andrew.

The term “sexual harassment” was coined in the mid-1970s amid the fight for women’s equal rights. Before that, the crude behavior Edward inflicts on women in his workplace was dismissed as acceptable, leaving its targets powerless to have recourse and allowing its perpetrators to voice abusive and toxic misogynism like the idea that women don’t have souls.

When Edward dismisses out of hand even the idea of sexual harassment: “As a term, ‘sexual harassment’ is so over-defined, it’s almost meaningless” (36), it is clear that Rebeck is specifically responding to the 1990 confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court, in which Anita Hill laid out a pattern of sexual predation that an all-male senate committee refused to hear and provided a list of women who could confirm her story the committee members refused to call. This tectonic cultural event precipitated a cultural reckoning with workplace culture, moving the concept of sexual harassment from Edward’s narrow definition of quid pro quo to the idea of a hostile work environment that traumatizes women and stymies their careers.

The play refuses to reduce Georgie to a victim. She is clear-eyed when explaining Edward’s vicious behavior to Andrew: “But he wants to have a debate about the pros and cons of whether or not I should screw him [and then he says] he could just rape me if he wanted to” (19). But in order to arrange job security as well as a hefty pay raise, Georgie can only participate in her own sexual degradation, wearing provocative clothing and sexy heels, and trying to seduce her harasser.

As Edward and Georgie sit down for serious negotiations about her future at the law firm at the end of the play, it is unclear whether the ending is ironic or serious, comic or tragic. Should we appreciate that Georgie has mastered the game of sexual politics, or should we feel angry that she can only get ahead inside the patriarchal machine?