Medical Humanities Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

If skin had chords, it would reverberate its accumulated memories or compose a polyphonic melody. This seems to be the implicit effect in Sarah Ruhl's 2006 acclaimed play, Clean House, where the four female characters have a particular story and type of skin, masterfully orchestrated by the playwright. Smothering a more serious problem, Lane, the female doctor, has a cleaning-related disorder and demands everything to be clean and in its designated place. She hires a maid to tidy up her house. Lane is organized and systematic until one day her husband falls in love with his patient, Ana, and leaves her. As the plot of the play progresses, surprisingly, Lane accepts to take care of Ana. This is the moment that manages to unhinge Lane from her devastating routine. Lane symbolizes the " doctor's skin, " onto which several official discourses are evidently inscribed. As anticipated, Ana represents the " patient's skin. " She is the one who does not want to remain " hostage " in a hospital where she will die an impersonal death. As her body collapses gradually, she has given up on material things; in her home there is a couch, a chair, a bed, and a tank with one fish. Ana does not want her space to be invaded by unnecessary objects. As her illness closes her inner space more and more daily, she needs to expand her external space. When Lane decides to take care of Ana, they are not in a contextual antonymic pair any longer, wife and mistress, respectively. They have even transcended the rather limited relationship that exists between a doctor and her patients. Ana and Lane are two human beings who help each other to understand and cope with what remains after being cheated; the former by an illness, the latter by her partner. Virginia, Lane's sister, stands for the " transitory skin. " Unlike her rigorous sister, Virginia cannot find her place and purpose in this world. When she takes a job as a checkout girl at a supermarket, she has an epiphany as she contemplates the items passing aimlessly on the conveyor belt. Everything happens too fast and we do not quite seem to indulge ourselves in the art of living our lives. Finally, Matilda, Lane's maid, represents the " ebullient skin. " She refuses to accept that life is short and meaningless. Throughout the play, she searches for the perfect joke that would relax our contracted facial muscles. She wants to tone up our skin and thus allow us to have a final, potent laugh (in whomever face we want). Although we never hear Matilda's joke, nevertheless, by the end of the play we realize that what really counts is not the sum of our accumulated histories that are easily erasable, but the present, felt sensations. These four types of skin may be read as a spider's web, where each projected thread is sticky, thin, yet each adjusts and negotiates its needs in relationship with its newly encountered space. In the center of this cobweb, there is Charles. Ignored by his wife, he falls in love with Ana. He is the " skin in love " and hence lasting. He is the catalyst in this dramatic masterpiece. He exhilarates when he is again in love. He goes to Alaska because, as hearsay has it, there is a yew tree there that may cure Ana's cancer. By the time he comes back from his journey, Ana is dead. Charles represents the moment's essence because he lives in and for it. His presence in the play allows us to think how the mind misdirects and transports us perhaps a little bit too dizzyingly from past to present to future. Now let us go back to the title of the play, Clean House. In such a house, there may be order, but there is no joy, fulfillment or excitement. A clean house masks deeper disorders, just as the skin alone is not capable of telling fully (re)covered stories. A clean house is a place where appearances find their perfect place. Finally, a clean house will sooner or later collapse in its own debris, since life is by definition messy. Dialogic stories are unforgettable encounters; although uttered or sometimes hushed in different skin idioms, Lane, Ana, Matilda, and Virginia succeed in having a genuine dialogue about the nature of the human body, its implicit and not explicit meaning that revolves around the word " love. " Like skin, love is elastic, being endowed with the capacity to regenerate itself after a loss, shrinking in times of doubt, and expanding in times of satisfaction. There are days when we perceive our skin as opaque, while our love as liquid; there are other days when our skin seems flexible, while our love stubborn; there may be yet other translucent, crystal clear days when our skin plays the foreplay in the game of love through a touch, an embrace, and a kiss. This essay uses Ruhl's play to develop a phenomenology of skin and love as they envelope each other, like the horizon's lips. The dialogues between skin and love permit a redefinition of the " double referentiality, " an idea that was initially proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While he focused exclusively on the body (" [w]hen I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, as an object, has the strange property of being able to feel too. […] I can identify the hand touched as the same one which will in a moment be touching. […] [The body] tries to touch itself while being touched, " 106), this essay goes a step further by proposing a teasing, but necessary, intertwinement between a sensible medium (" skin ") and a conceptual entity (" love "). My main argument will focus on phenomenology and sensuality as the sentimental, social-intimate dialects of our embodied humanity.