"I want a bath!": On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice

Abstract

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• “I want a bath!”: On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice
• Michel Büch (bio)

Sarah Ruhl’s early play Eurydice (2003) is a liquefied version of the well-known myth. Set in an underwaterworld, her adaptation overflows with affect and undulates our understanding of sexuality, family bonds, and agency. Two recurring points dominate the substantial scholarly and journalistic debate around the play: the argument that it grants agency to a traditionally objectified figure (Eurydice), and the interpretation of its themes through the Jungian lens of the Electra complex. While both readings have merit and are not inherently contradictory, they tend to complicate and offset one another. Moreover, both risk reducing the play to fixed frames of reference, overlooking its broader artistic and thematic dimensions. In this essay, I step away from these conventional approaches to focus on the role of water as metaphor, material, and mindset within the drama. I consider the play’s text alongside its 2024 staging by the [End Page 406] University Players, a student ensemble at the University of Hamburg. I take my cue from Joanne Stroud’s foreword to Bachelard’s Water and Dreams, which encourages readers to “read images centrifugally [like] the ripples from a center point, constantly expanding our way of seeing.”¹ I allow myself to sink into the motives and visual elements that provoke perceptive experiences, rather than focusing on how the play or a character develops or what a specific image means. I hope this method allows a more organic engagement with the play and its production—one that resists the reductive tendencies of rigid methodologies. This approach is inspired by the pragmatic Deweyan shift from recognition to perception and enables us to look at what the play does rather than what the critic knows. By embracing this flexibility and vulnerability, I aim to contribute not only to the study of Eurydice but to the broader critique of its axiomatic ground, questioning the universalism that underlies both the play and the discourse it has inspired.

Though a modernized version with additional characters and elements (the Father, the stones as a chorus), Ruhl’s aqueous play does maintain the central plot points of the traditional tale: the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice’s accidental death (in some tellings a consequence of fleeing from her rapist, which is evoked in Ruhl’s play), Orpheus’s lamentations and katabasis into the underworld (where he charms Hades and Persephone with his music), and the subsequent bargain that Orpheus and Eurydice can return to the world of the living on the condition that he does not turn to look at her until they arrive (a condition he ultimately fails to meet). Ruhl’s play simultaneously pays tribute to and subverts the myth, recognizing the way the storyline as is performs in the Western literary context, except that Eurydice actively causes Orpheus to turn around by calling out his name in Ruhl’s version. Like the ancient re-tellers of the myth, Ruhl makes use of the “authoritative status of myth discourse” and mobilizes the “narrative logic of the tale . . . to articulate the distinctions that are important” to her.² Eurydice’s intentional responsibility for the failed bargain is a key moment of Ruhl’s play “as an adaption,” to use Hutcheon’s phrase.³ It crystallizes the “feminist twist”⁴ of the play in focusing on Eurydice, traditionally merely a cipher for a quest, an ambiguously erotic and funerary male desire “for one who is absent,” for the unknowable, ungraspable animator of musings both [End Page 407] artistic and philosophic.⁵ In Blanchot’s words, she is “the furthest that art can reach. Under a name that hides her and a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend.”⁶ In Ruhl’s version, Eurydice is no such vanishing point. The play focuses on “her choices and actions”⁷ and she becomes a “more vocal player in the myth.”⁸ And yet I am not sure that the play “ultimately [puts] Eurydice’s fate firmly back in her own hands,” as a review...