|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Liz LochheadLiz Lochhead
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyScottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in 1947, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and taught art at schools in Glasgow and Bristol. She was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-7) and Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988. Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections including Penguin Modern Poets 4 (1995).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Drama, Poetry, Screenplay, Translation
BibliographyRiddle-Me-Ree The Compton Poetry Fund / University of London, 1970 Memo for Spring Reprographia, 1972 Alasdair Gray: Retrospective Exhibition (includes poems by Liz Lochhead) Strathclyde University, 1974 Islands Glasgow Print Studio, 1978 Liz Lochhead (Writers in Brief Series: No. 1) National Book League, 1978 The Grimm Sisters Next Editions in association with Faber and Faber, 1981 Blood and Ice Salamander Press, 1982 Dreaming Frankenstein Polygon, 1984 Pinball (Methuen Theatrefile Volume 4) Methuen, 1985 Tartuffe: A translation into Scots from the original by Molière Polygon, 1985 True Confessions and New Clichés Polygon, 1985 For Bram Stoker: A Sequence of Poems National Book League, 1986 Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off: and Dracula Penguin, 1989 Bagpipe Muzak Penguin, 1991 Penguin Modern Poets 4 (Liz Lochhead, Roger McGough, Sharon Olds) Penguin, 1995 Three Scottish Poets (Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead) Canongate, 1996 Cuba / Dog House (includes play 'Cuba' by Liz Lochhead) Faber and Faber, 1997 Perfect Days Nick Hern Books, 1998 Medea Nick Hern Books, 2000 Misery Guts Nick Hern Books, 2002 The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003 Polygon, 2003 Thebans Nick Hern Books, 2003 Good Things Nick Hern Books, 2006
Prizes and awards1972 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Memo for Spring 2001 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award Medea
Critical PerspectiveLiz Lochhead is a writer whose work has been persistently preoccupied with the Gothic. Not only has she adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the stage and been consistently concerned with the leitmotifs of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in her poetry, but has also dwelt on some of the bloodier aspects of Scottish history and European literature in her other stage adaptations - for example, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989) and Medea (2000). Traditionally, the Gothic has been a genre in which feminine sexuality has been mediated through representations of the uncanny. There would seem to be a direct relation between the uterine fantasies of uncanny phenomena and the Gothic as a literary effect. In this respect, Liz Lochhead is part of a tradition of Scottish horror fiction: one might think of James Hogg’s Life and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Indeed, Mary Shelley herself drew inspiration from her childhood visits to Dundee for the atmospheric setting of her novel, as much as from her experience of life in the Alpine regions of Europe. However, Mary Shelley’s relation to Scotland was not simply concerned with the appreciation of nature. She visited Scotland at the bequest of her father William Godwin in order to escape the tense domestic environment which existed in Godwin’s house after the death of Mary’s mother, Mary Wollestonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. If Scotland can be said to have a relation to this most remarkable of Gothic novels then it is from its very origin a fraught relation, based on the ruins of sexual difference.
Like the Edinburgh novelist Muriel Spark (the author of the first critical biography of Mary Shelley), Lochhead has been drawn time and again to the issues of the horrific usurpation of maternity with which Shelley’s novel deals. Similarly, in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Lochhead is interested in the supplement and substitution of the mother, in this case the historical and hysterical mother of Scottish Modernity, the French émigré Mary. In her adaptation of Medea she explores the condition of the wrong and vengeful mother, while in a dramatic version of the Dracula myth she is concerned with the liberatory effect of vampirism on female sexuality. In all of these cases Lochhead’s concern is not merely that of the translator or the self-referential adaptor of other writers’ works. There is always a subtle and cunning metaphorisation of these classic works as a commentary on the contemporary condition of women, and in particular the Scottish working-class woman, who is both marginalised by patriarchal Scottish culture and is simultaneously the pillar and carer for that culture. The lyricism of her writing as well as the visual sweep of her grammar attempts to negotiate this double bind as an educated woman reflecting back upon both her own ontogenesis, and the violence which formed her as a writer and intellectual.
The title poem of her collection of poetry, Dreaming Frankenstein (1984), exemplifies these preoccupations, delivered with considerable élan in a powerfully suggestive lyrical economy. It opens with a recognition of the multiple narrative structure which frames Mary Shelley’s own novel:
'She said she
The double repetition of the female pronoun in the opening line tells us that this is a poem by a woman commenting on women, reflecting on the sexual act in order to account for it without the mediation of the male voice. The metaphor that runs through the poem is the ambiguity between the ‘she’ as Mary Shelley the author who, in her dream, imagines the story of Frankenstein, and an allegorical ‘she’ who simultaneously and importantly reflects on a sexual encounter that is brutal, monstrous, uncanny and shocking. In line 4, we see the importance of the maternal to this poet in the substitution and displacement of the maternal function into the linguistic production and reproduction of poems, as is exemplified by Lochhead’s own name, suggestive of both the specificities of the Scottish language and a conjunction of cerebral speculation. As in Shelley’s novel, the brain comes to supplant the womb, as Frankenstein creates life outside of the physiological. Similarly, textual production for Lochhead substitutes for sexual reproduction in the gestation and delivery of her poetry. The poem, like any child, is uncontrollable and comes in a monstrous misshapen unknowable form (‘ ... he came with a name/that was none of her making’).
The poem continues on the double-strand of the ambiguous relation between Shelley’s creation and the reported female’s sexual encounter:
'Later, stark staring awake to everything This was the penetration
'Eyes on those high peaks
In the cold light of day the heat of the creative act has gone, but the meeting of the pen and ink on frigid paper enables the writer to redeem the time that has passed.
Much of Lochhead’s writing can be characterised as an attempt to redeem the energies spent in the clash and struggles of sexual difference.
Dr. M. McQuillan, 2003
Further reading on this site
Contact information
Related links
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
