Henry Darger’s The Vivian Girls: Femininity, Dark Play & Death

by: Kajsa Widegren , March 25, 2026

Introduction

The Vivian girls—Catherine, Violet, Jennie, Joy, Angelina, Daisy and Hettie—are seven little female characters created in words and images by the ‘outsider’ artist Henry Darger (1892-1973). They come from Angelinia, an upstanding Christian nation. Still, when they enter the stage, they have just travelled to Glandelinia, a country with which Angelinia is at war. As young as they are—‘eight and ten years old’ (Ohly 2022:1)—they have decided to form a resistance group to fight the evil Glandelinians and free the children they have enslaved. At least, this is how the play begins. The Vivian Girls is an adaptation of Darger’s work, which was rehearsed and performed during the Winter 2022-23 season at Göteborgs Stadsteater (Gothenburg City Theatre). It was developed after an idea by director Linda Forsell, and playwright Felicia Ohly wrote the script.^[1]

This article offers an analysis of the process of adapting Darger’s artworks and unpublished manuscript by following and observing the play’s eight weeks of rehearsal. Darger’s repetitious depiction of little girls, his insistence on their heroic bravery and his horrible accounts of violence and death seem to be the most prominent traits of his work for contemporary viewers. The themes of gender and age in the battles between girls and men (the soldiers) naturally lend a feminist sentiment to the project. In contrast, Darger’s depictions of tortured and dead girls point to repetitive representations of death and femininity in culture (Bronfen 1992b: 146). It is in the unsecured territories of this ‘simultaneousness’ that I ask the questions: How are different understandings of girlhood negotiated when telling a story about little girls who go to war, experience its gruesome violence and risk being killed, in a context that proclaims itself to be feminist? Which discussions and conflicts surround the notions of death and femininity in this contemporary artistic setting?

Darger’s manuscript is an approximately 15,000-page account of a war between two fantasy countries: Glandelinia, where girls are kidnapped, enslaved and killed, and Angelinia, its Christian counterpart. Darger also left behind some 200-300 paintings, which are usually thought of as being illustrations to the manuscript. The paintings depict girls in idealised, Arcadian settings, as well as the Seven Sisters heroically pursuing their cause. But Darger also painted gruesome scenes of war, with soldiers torturing and killing the little girls. Some of these images were actively used in the rehearsal process of The Vivian Girls. They also appear in the script and are thus included in the exploration of girlhood that took place during the rehearsals.

I have followed the director Linda Forsell’s work on girlhood femininity closely since we first met in 2016. In discussions, workshops and joint public ‘performance lectures’ we have investigated norms surrounding girlhood and the cultural representations and narratives that dominate contemporary theatre, as well as girls’ cultural practices in today’s Nordic context

(Forsell 2019: 9). As part of the independent theatre group PotatoPotato Performing Arts, Forsell has produced performances on girls’ ‘radical friendships’, YouTube cultures, scouting and ‘sad culture’ (Formark, Mulari, and Voipio 2017: 1-2; Forsell 2019: 31-38). Challenging mainstream views of girlhood femininity and representing girlhood as a space outside or before heteronormativity and patriarchal norms is Forsell’s way to challenge masculinity norms in contemporary feminism, as well as in the field of contemporary theatre. Girlhood femininity is often portrayed on stage using props from the time when she was a girl herself. These forms of aesthetics have come to be associated with white cis-girls of late-modernity, as well as naturalising the relation between certain bodies and colours like pink and glittery things (Kearney 2015: 264). However, femininity for Forsell is not connected to specific bodies but represents an approach and set of ethics, and that the ‘doing’ of gender can be a pleasurable experience. In that respect, her approach to feminism comes rather close to how Elia A. G. Arfini describes transfeminism:

we all do gender. To release this inescapable labour from the inequalities, exclusions and violence that it justifies, and to make it instead an experience of pleasure and liberation, feminism needs to imagine a radical politics of gender and sexuality that will be trans, or it won’t be.’(Arfini, 2020: 164)

In her performances, girlhood is often represented in dreamy, non-linear repetitions, in the sonic and tactile worlds of softness, in the stupid, foolish and playful. She portrays practices that take place beyond a male and/or adult gaze, in the secluded space of a girl’s room or the Girl Scout troop’s conquering of the wild spaces of nature. It is her explicit ambition to change the cultural perceptions of girls as victimised and arrest the repetitiousness of girlhood being represented as violated and submitted to male and heteronormative restrictions. ‘We already know about violence against women and girls’, she usually says, ‘why would we put that on the stage?’ The active avoidance of further violence against girls on stage is an ethos for Forsell. Adapting Darger’s visual and textual worlds is thus the first time that Forsell has worked with representations of violence on stage. This makes following and observing the rehearsals even more interesting for me—how will the thematics of Darger’s dark and threatening world be actualised and embodied in this feminist context?

Henry Darger’s Girl-world

Darger’s art and writings were discovered in 1973, just before he died at the age of 82. It is unknown if he showed them to anyone before their discovery, but it is clear that they were never shown in public during his lifetime. His watercolour paintings depict little girls, sometimes naked, sometimes in idyllic scenes of blooming fields, and sometimes at war (Rundquist 2021: 75). Darger depicted the naked girls with small penises, which has stirred debate about his work. To this day, Darger’s works raise speculation and nervousness: What does his interest in little girls mean? Is it right to call these characters ‘girls’? All his written and visual work, as well as some of his remaining belongings and the few accounts that have been recorded about his secluded life, have been subject to research. Scholars from various disciplines—from psychoanalysis (MacGregor 2002), art history (Rundquist 2021; Trent, 2012) and literary studies (Bonesteel 2000) to media and cultural studies (Moon, 2012a) have studied his work and life. The assumption of the 1990s and early 2000s, that Darger must have had paedophilic and violent tendencies, as most strongly argued by MacGregor (2002: 23), has become less prominent in more recent scholarship. Not much indicates that Darger ever had any contact with underaged girls, according to Jim Elledge, who published Darger’s biography in 2013 (2013: 25). His engagement with images of girls seems to have had other significance for Darger than sexual, and the idea that a man’s interest in images of girls ought to be violent, sexual and/or transgressive seems to reflect contemporary discourse rather than the psyche or actions of Henry Darger as a person (Moon 2012a: 72; Elledge 2013: 170). Even if biographical interpretations no longer dominate research on Darger, there is still no consensus surrounding his work and repetitive visual representations of girls, and they remain subject to interpretation and a spectrum of emotional responses (Trent 2012: 91; Rundquist 2021: 12; Moon 2012a: xiii).

Linda Forsell and Felicia Ohly never considered integrating Darger’s non-binary representations of ‘girls’ with penises in their adaptation, first and foremost because the seven Vivian girls in the play are never shown naked. The play queers Darger’s characters in a different way, by letting both cis-men and cis-women of different ages, body types and skin colours portray the seven little girls. Art historian Leisa Rundquist—who does engage with Darger’s non-binary theme in her book The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger’s Art—still uses the noun ‘girl’ when analysing Darger’s work, since this is the word that Darger himself used throughout his writings (2021: 14). I use the same approach, despite the incongruence between Darger’s non-binary imagery and his binary use of wording.

Observing Negotiations in a Space of Contestation

This article mainly draws on participant observations made during the rehearsal of the play, including workshops and discussions in which members of the ensemble and artistic team participated. Negotiations of meaning do not take place in a vacuum but are always related to established discourses that both limit and produce possible meanings (Lazar 2007: 142; Mills 2004: 70). In the institutional theatre, financed by taxes and subject to cultural policy and its guidelines on, for example, gender representation, both regarding staff and artistic output, one can say that gender equality is one such discourse (Aston 2017: 306). The director also brings her own interpretation of feminism, mainly developed through a plethora of independent theatre groups. PotatoPotato Performing Arts was formed by a generation of performing artists who have challenged norms regarding gender, sexuality and the canonisation of so-called male genius within the contemporary field of Swedish theatre (Forsell 2019: 9; Rosenberg 2016: 186). My analytical gaze was directed at the ways girlhood was understood and performed in relation to different feminist discourses, developed in discussions throughout the rehearsal process, in Forsell’s directing and in the embodied portrayals of the actors.

The method is not one of participant observation in a strict sense, since I did not participate in the artistic work at the theatre. Most of the time, I observed and made notes on the interactions and dialogues of the ensemble and the rest of the team (DeWalt 2011: 9). Everyday life in a theatre is not repetitive; the focus is always on furthering the process, which is also reflected in the structure of this paper. The director created various situations and employed different methods to advance the artistic work. Some methods resembled the traditional focus group; for example, I was sometimes drawn into the group discussions. Questions were sometimes directed at me, and I was asked to help draw distinctions or problematise. I cannot be the judge of how much this ultimately influenced the play, but I was most certainly part of what I was trying to observe—the processes of meaning making. This mixed and intertwined situation is part of the conditions for participant observations and in line with the feminist epistemological view that knowledge is always situated (Haraway 1988: 581). The persons I observed—the actors, staff and artistic team—are all anonymised throughout the paper, except for Linda Forsell, who agreed to be named. Her position as director is unique in the process, and she is also the one person who sets the boundaries for it. When it comes to the other individuals, I have kept them anonymous to protect their personal integrity. Ultimately, their ‘personal views’ are not the focus of this paper, but rather the discourses that they produce, reproduce and challenge through the artistic process.

In addition to the observations, I conducted an interview with Linda Forsell and the playwright Felicia Ohly in January 2023, after the play’s premiere, mainly focusing on questions that had come up during the observations and that we had not had time to discuss. As I learned, time is short during rehearsals, and the pressure to move the artistic process forward is high. The premiere closes in every minute.

*

My first meeting with the whole team was at a lecture I was invited to give at the theatre on the first day of rehearsal. In the lecture, I talked about my research on visual representations and discourses on girlhood in artistic practices, but I also talked about girlhood studies in general and the cooperation that Linda Forsell has had with researchers of different disciplines (Forsell 2019: 8-14; Widegren 2010: 62-55; 2007: 7-32; 2013: 135-148). The ensemble and the artistic and technical teams were invited. During the Q&A, questions about Henry Darger and his life came up, especially his childhood in different institutions and how that may have influenced him to seek out themes of girlhood, war and violence against girls. The discussions moved rather quickly from visual representations and artistic practices to the ethics of child protection and the difficulty of interpreting children’s behaviour in the context of suspected sexual abuse. These are loaded questions in public discourse, and participating in this discussion seemed to be an important statement for the participants in defining themselves as feminists and part of a feminist organisation, allowing them to engage in caring as well as critical interrogations of gender and age-related power relations. The idea that the theatre is a space for political discourse, with a role to instigate political or ethical discussions, is not a new one, and parts of the team seemed deeply invested in this role (Grehn 2020: 16; Silberman 2012: 169).

While the director wanted the lecture to foster a shared view of girlhood discourses, transforming the theatre into a political space also opened up possibilities for contestation. The combination of the difficult subjects of power and abuse, violation and sexualisation of girls and Darger’s difficult childhood, as well as the aspects of his life that remain unknown, created a space of contestation, which set the tone when entering the rehearsal room.

Boundaries in Representing Girlhood…

When one of the actors expressed their dislike of Darger and his art—‘it gives me the creeps’—rather early in the rehearsal process, I interpreted it as an effect of an overly extensive gap between what is considered a feminist representation of girlhood and Darger’s artistic representations. Concern was raised about what audiences would think of these violent images, of this strange figure, a loner who painted pictures of girls being slaughtered? The notion that a grown man’s interest in little girls must be sexual in nature lingers in the air. When it is time to start working on the play, these tensions around how to actually represent the girls are quite palpable.

*

During the first workshop, I observed, in the first week of rehearsals, the issue of age-related boundaries regarding body movements and an age-appropriate register for girls’ bodies and behaviours was immediately raised. The workshop started with the actors performing the first scenes that they had been working on: the Vivian girls awake, presenting themselves and embarking upon their adventure in a ‘girly’ military formation. Afterwards, a member of the artistic team argued that ‘to embrace each other is something teenage girls do; it’s not consistent with their ages’, referring to the way in which the actors hug and hold each other. Playing with eight to ten-year-old girls meant using movements and gestures that are different to those of teenage girls. The transition from young girl to teenager is understood as a development of one’s movements and the relationship with one’s body. By the same process, ‘girly-ness’ is erased from the body. The question of age-appropriate boundaries for the representation of the girls, their behaviour, movements and modulation of voice, is a recurring theme throughout the rehearsals. In my field notes, I find at least 20 instances of direction on making the body and/or tone of voice soft. To encourage the actors to engage in these new movements, Forsell presents as references scenes from children’s movies and a list of movements, for example, fumbling unconsciously with one’s clothes or maintaining an ‘open gaze’. Much of her feedback to the actors concerns voice and intonation, insisting that children’s speech is straightforward and transparent: ‘children don’t weigh their words, they don’t hesitate,’ she argues. The transformation of the actors from adults to girls involves embodying an attitude that is usually lost in the social process of growing up, and it seems that the actors require regular reminders to help them recapture it.

At the same time, underlining this innocent spontaneity seems to pose a risk. Another participant—at that first workshop—tries to find the right way to put this into words: ‘it is something about being abandoned or left alone. To be free from an outside gaze, to be seen or not seen, by a male, adult gaze. What happens when one develops a consciousness of one’s own body?’ Representing girlhood as a period of someone’s life ‘before’ they are sexualised becomes a feminist ethos, a way to remind the audience of this supposedly natural freedom, from oppressive gazes and the restrictions of gendered norms that girls are born into. But the portrayal of this spontaneous girl, who has not yet developed a sense of suspicion towards her surroundings, need not evoke the sense that she has been abandoned by the adult world. What is prescribed is really a need to draw boundaries with grown-up femininity. The reference to ‘the male gaze’, a concept developed by the feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey in the 1970s, indicates that this is a feminist, well-read and conscious group, but also reasserts a heteronormative understanding of gender, one in which the male gaze seems to sexualise grown-up femininity –at the same time destroying the innocence of the girl.

Girlhood femininity, as expressed in wider visual culture, is moderated to both resemble women’s femininity and maintain boundaries: girls and women cannot be too alike. Maintaining these boundaries is, in a feminist context, a way to underline adults’ responsibility to protect girls from sexual exploitation. In this specific context, that means avoiding reproducing stereotyped and/or sexualised representations of femininity. Adult educational and developmental projections of femininity are often treated as a threat to girls’ emancipation. The notion that feminism and femininity are opposites has firm historical roots in universalising ideas on how to enlighten and educate girls to widen their intellectual scope, building these ideals on norms of masculine boyhood (Formark 2013: 12). In the 1970s, norms of feminism, such as ‘gender neutral’ looks and behaviours, also relied on masculine norms. In Swedish gender equality discourse, in particular, the gender neutrality of children’s clothes, toys and games has had pedagogical implications, promoting the raising of ‘gender equal’ children and encouraging girls to engage in male-dominated subject areas, educational paths and careers (Formark, Mulari, and Voipio 2017: 11).

It seems from the discussions that the girl the team wants to present is free and adventurous, as well as being unaffected by the kind of self-surveillance associated with teenage girls. The girl needs to be perceived as young enough not to be sexualised but also strong and independent, so as not to be viewed as an easy victim of sexual violence. What the group and the director are looking for is something direct and spontaneous, that is not overthought, reflective or hesitant. The notion of a girl who is not self-conscious, and who has an innocence in relation to her own appearance, is central to the discourse of the ‘romantic child’, a nineteenth-century imagination of children’s innocence as something inherent to them and both admirable and adorable to adults. However, the childhood theorist James Kincaid argues that the romantic child and its spontaneous innocence were sexualised in its time not despite this innocence but because of it (Kincaid 1992: 120; Rundquist 2021: 91). Cherishing the emotionality of the child, its unspoiled charm, created cultural overlap between a girl in childhood and a woman, both creatures with natural sexuality that should remain unspoiled by the self-consciousness of active seduction. Innocence and spontaneity thus do not serve to suppress the sexualisation of girls but rather as an aspect of it. The lingering question of the paedophilic gaze—looking out for a girl who is not protected by other adults—could suggest a concern that any representation of girls will evoke hidden and lurking sexual feelings in some people and that the best way of avoiding this is to erase all visual signs of ‘femininity’.

…and Femininity, Pleasure and Excess

On the floor, working on different scenes and beyond explicit discourse, the actors developed the depictions of the girls, mostly inspired by notions of strong and free girlhood and Nordic ideals of gender equality. However, sometimes I also observe subtle cues that allude to the aesthetics of traditional ‘girly’ femininity.

Femininity as a concept is usually used to highlight the socially constructed nature of behaviours, looks, actions and characteristics associated with girls and women, or, in other words, the norms to which girls and women are expected to conform in cultural orders of patriarchy and heteronormativity. These perspectives, however, seem to naturalise the relationship between femininity as a social and cultural practice and specific anatomies, collapsing the analytical distinction between sex and gender. Queering femininity underlines the fact that aesthetic practices of femininity are not related to specific bodies and can be described as a practice of undermining and ironising naturalisations of sexual differences (Andersson 2006: 25; Dahl 2016: 9). Theorising queer femininity has been important for perspectives on femininity connected to pleasure and playfulness, as well as fluctuations between observing and flouting stereotypical representations of traditional femininity. This represents an important step away from notions of femininity as inherently oppressive, as associated with shallow consumerism, or as a patriarchal construction that serves as a cage for girls and women (Kearney 2015: 264).

When juxtaposing the concept of femininity with its masculine ‘counterpart’, there is always a risk of reasserting heteronormative assumptions and ideas of sexual complementarity (Dahl 2016: 13). However, it is necessary to touch on the fact that femininity, in relation to masculinity, always seems to be understood as related to excess and abundance. Consider the widely cited concept of respectability in relation to working-class femininity, as developed by Beverly Skeggs (1997: 13-14). The imperative to be restrained and understated, as well as to avoid a specific combination of working class signifiers and femininity, shows that social roles for middle-class women, and others who identify with expressions of femininity, are intertwined with moderation—with respect to makeup, use of colour, body language, voice, laughter, emotional expression and so on (Russo 1994: 44).

In the first scene of the play, the Vivian girls engage in a march, whispering as they assemble into a military formation: ‘right, left, forward march’. Their arms and legs are stretched in an earnest imitation of military discipline. The girls seem happy to march to war and pursue their mission, their portrayal of girlhood reflecting the discourse on free, strong and independent girls. A slight sway of the hip, a subtle yet distinct sign of aesthetic pleasure and flamboyance, is subtly woven into the portrayal of the girls as strong, competent, and ‘gender equal’. This sway is not contested by the team; it is not even mentioned. With their bodies, the actors can let the ‘gender equal’ girl be intertwined with femininity as excess and pleasure. These two depictions seem able to co-exist within the frame of the girls playing soldiers in their own military formation.

*

In the rehearsal room, 17 of Darger’s images hang on the wall, serving as illustrations of the play’s scenes and entries into Darger’s visual world. A couple of the paintings also appear in the manuscript, in scenes where two of the Vivian girls quiz each other on one of Darger’s paintings and thoroughly describe the horrific scenes. When the two actors begin rehearsing this scene, it sets in motion a process of doing girlhood in relation to Darger’s art. At this point, about halfway through the rehearsal period, the tensions from the first weeks are no longer as present, but the question of ‘sexualisation’ still lingers.

The first actor says: ‘To the right?’
The other answers: ‘To the right in the grass is a naked soldier who lies on his back while a girl sits on him. He holds his hands in a steady grip around her neck. He has a lot of pomade in his hair. Next to them lies a child that he is already finished with, a younger child who he has already used. The belly is cut up and the child has been thrown among some wooden junk. There will be a pile of bodies there’ (Ohly, 2022: 49).

The first actor stops the reading: ‘Shit, this text is disgusting! Is he fucking children or what? The soldier is naked and finished.’ They move over to look closer at the reproduction of the painting they are describing. They try to make sense of what they see: ‘I don’t see these images as sexual at all.’ ‘Well, I don’t know,’ the other replies, ‘but Catherine has this line about sexual services’ (Ohly 2022: 2). They both express disgust. They prepare to start over again, agreeing on tone of voice and attitude: ‘We will say it in a light tone. The text is dark, but they are just describing what they see. The darkness is on them. But the tone can be light.’

Henry Darger’s violent images from the battlefields of the Angelinian-Glandelinian war have been the subject of many different interpretations. Given the context of previous discussions and dominant contemporary discourses on girlhood, the actors expect Darger’s images to be more in line with the sexualisation of women and girls in contemporary visual culture. The painting seems incomprehensible against the backdrop of contemporary discourses on girls’ vulnerability—the image is not ‘sexual at all’. Despite the actors expressing their disgust at the violence depicted, both in the text and in Darger’s images, they still seem to find something to help them with their portrayal of girlhood—a form of distance.

Michael Moon notes that an important trait of Darger’s aesthetic is the meticulous detail in which he depicts the girls’ anatomy. The ‘quasi-scientific anatomical detail with which [Darger] sometimes depicts the mutilations of the children’s bodies’ should be seen as a modernisation of traditionally more affect-driven religious painting styles, in which these motifs were common (Moon 2012a: xii). The withdrawn emotions of what Moon calls a ‘quasi-scientific’ depiction imparts a more distant attitude: ‘they just tell what they see’. When they do not find a more affect-driven, seductive and sexual nature to the images, which would be more in line with the critique and tensions expressed about Darger at the beginning of the rehearsals, the actors can instead identify with his gaze. In relation to Darger’s image, another possible portrayal of girls is elaborated. They present the gruesome image in a light tone, one that is also innocent, as if their lack of preconception, that is, their childish lack of experience, makes them accept what they see, no matter how terrible. They are being good girls, accepting a terrible situation. This means keeping the voice light but neutral when describing Darger’s painting. It becomes a way of retaining innocence in the portrayal of girlhood, but at the same time, a commentary on girlhood socialisation: the importance of being a good girl who does her homework without questioning or showing emotions. In relation to the Darger painting, an emotionally withdrawn femininity is developed, one that represents innocence but is unrelated to the innocent child’s adorable spontaneity and therefore does not risk sexualising the representation.

The different representations of the girls that are being developed and balanced against each other—spontaneous and adorable, strong and independent, ironic and feminine, distanced and obedient—all to fend off the threats of sexualising girlhood and the darkness of Darger’s visual world are also important for the way the ensemble came to interpret the play’s ending.

Is Death a Bright Thing?

The narrative of The Vivian Girls—one in which children are freed from the brutal regime of violent adult men—its feminist subtext and the feminist context in which it is being produced, seem to call for some sort of final success, brought about through the narrative by characters equal to their mission. Has this adventure ultimately been undertaken by strong ‘gender-equal’ girls or by girls whose expressions of culturally determined notions of femininity doom them from the outset to be victims of male power? Is sexualisation a part of this unequal relationship? While these issues are still undecided, so is the question of how to present the play’s ending. The manuscript suggests a tragic ending: the seven little girls lose the war and die on the battlefield. But is that really the case? The play has an open ending, and several of the closing scenes can be interpreted in various ways. The ending is told as two conflicting or palimpsestic stories. In one, the girls get help from Blengins at the last minute and win the war—‘surely, this is how it ends, right?’ (Ohly 2022: 59). In the other, a story of the everyday life and routines of warfare is told—the girls are eating, doing the washing and sharpening a knife—is accompanied by a simple statement: ‘There is no doubt we could have won in many different ways, but this time they are winning’ (Ohly 2022: 59). This final scene even underlines the notion of storytelling as being a deeply ambiguous and arbitrary process, conditioned by the impossibility of capturing events and impressions: ‘It’s hard to remember. It’s hard to count time. A colour. A shift in temperature’ (Ohly 2022: 60).

According to the playwright Felicia Ohly, the openness of the manuscript’s ending is due to the fact that Darger’s text lacks a conventional conclusion, and this is reflected in the play’s script (interview 2023-01-18). The Vivian Girls is inspired by the approximately 15,000-page manuscript that Darger probably started writing in 1910-12, having escaped the institution for ‘feebleminded children’ to which he was admitted during parts of his childhood and early teens (Bonesteel 2000: 10). It is hard to tell for how long he worked on this story, and a considerable amount of energy has been put into trying to understand the different parts of the text and arrange it into a coherent narrative structure. The first volumes were bound and numbered by Darger, but later parts do not seem to have been ordered, several duplications of volumes and chapters exist, and a lack of page numbers makes it almost impossible to get a picture of Darger’s own narrative intentions (Bonesteel 2009: 264; Moon 2012a: 12). The re-construction of a coherent textual body has resulted in preliminary agreement among scholars of Darger’s work that the narrative was left with two different endings. In one, the country of Angelinia and the Vivian girls win the war and live happily ever after. In the other, the Glandelinians decide not to sign a proposed peace treaty and are seen laughing as they ride away on their horses singing ‘We were only, only fooling/ we were only, only fooling’ (Moon 2012a: 107). This ‘ending’ alludes to the possibility of further attacks and kidnappings, the continued murder of children and an eternal war, with endless narrative turns, characterised by temporary advances and setbacks. One way to see it is that Darger never finished the story but rather abandoned it. Michael Moon is one researcher on Darger’s work who questions the notion of the story as ‘a novel’ altogether, describing it as an example of ‘sequelating’ and thus in a constant state of continuation (Moon 2012a: xvi; Bonesteel, 2009: 254). There is no final victory, as the Glandelinians could always be preparing for yet another attack.

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The team is about halfway through rehearsals when it is time to start working on the play’s ending. When Forsell announces that they are going to talk about ‘the end’, it seems that she means both the end of the play and the end of life: ‘We will talk about how we want the ending to be. This is what we will fantasise about after lunch. Do they die, do they want to die, is death a bright thing?’ The two different endings open up discussions about choosing one; the options for exploring concepts of death and its meaning are central to Forsell.

The openness of Darger’s unfinished manuscript, Ohly’s interpretation and Forsell’s invitation to the ensemble to ‘fantasise’ about death instigates negotiations around girlhood and death but also narrative structure. During the afternoon’s reading and discussion of the text, it becomes clear that there is far from a consensus on whether the girls should survive the play or if it should end with their deaths. For some of the actors, it is difficult to accept that the story would end with the death of the Vivian girls. To kill them off would seem to be another example of popular culture or traditional ‘fine art’ exploiting dead women and girls, presenting the girls as passive and objectified. It also represents total defeat in a narrative that can be read as a feminist struggle against the brutal execution of patriarchal power.

Many of the actors have experience working in productions where they had little influence on the artistic choices. Their experiences gave them a specific perspective on the repetitiousness of the dramatic field, and they want to use the opportunity afforded by this field of contestation to protect the play as a feminist project. But a counterpoint is raised, grounded in the idea that too much hope is projected onto the act of just ‘putting a girl on the stage’. It is not that simple, some argue, as letting the girls be strong and visible (on stage) and having them win the war. It is too simplistic a narrative, and to have violence met with more violence reproduces masculine norms of strength and invincibility. Both letting the Vivian girls die and letting them live will hold problematic connotations.

When main characters die at the end of a story, it is usually associated with a tragic narrative. It is also a characteristic, especially with a focus on female characters, of film noir’s destructive forces, which chase its characters in webs of paranoid inevitability (Mulvey 1975: 813). As Elisabeth Bronfen notes, images of dead (beautiful) young women flooded Western culture to the extent that it had become a cliché even during the nineteenth century (1992a: 3). Traditional narratives like ‘the tragedy’ and repetitious representations of binary gendered roles have also been a longstanding subject for feminist cultural critique. So has the notion of narratives as a ‘structure’ of interchangeable elements. Judith Roof argues that if we keep analysing stories within the narrative model of structure, ‘all of the elements we might identify arrive already as binaries distributed into passive/active, boundary/passage, inside/outside positions in the story’ (2015: 46). This binary structure is echoed throughout the ensemble’s negotiations of how to portray the girls. The tragic narrative carries the same formalised binary structure: the tragic hero is the role of a man, while the role of tragic victim is reserved for women (Aston 2017: 297). The narrative of the tragic male hero, who seeks to do right but is overwhelmed by powers beyond his own, seems to fit an overly simplified description of the plot of The Vivian Girls. But Forsell does not want to rely on notions of heroism built on masculine norms. Re-interpreting death and its meanings can be seen as a form of resistance against the repetitiveness of dramatic genres, especially the tragedy.

Forsell’s suggestion that death in the context of girlhood could be ‘bright’ brings with it specific connotations. For example, the light-heartedness and directness of her depiction of girlhood could encompass even the end of life. In this context, ‘bright’ could be a reference to Christian notions of the afterlife in paradise or to popularised accounts of ‘near-death experiences’ in which people describe ‘going towards the light’. It is also an intertext to the well-known narrative of the children’s book The Brothers Lionheart (1979) by Astrid Lindgren and its final line ‘Jonathan, I can see the light’, delivered in the film adaptation with a heartfelt longing and hope for death: a relief from the pain and misery of the present conditions. This is not necessarily to equate death with passive bodily remains, as is often the case with depictions of feminine bodies where they are rendered objects. Instead, it is a question of focalisation—the dead body is an object only to those left behind (Bal 1981: 205). When the very epitome of eternal childhood, James Mathew Barrie’s Peter Pan, faces death, chained to a rock as an impending flood looms, his emotional response changes triumphantly from despair to excitement—‘It would be a tremendous adventure to die’ (1907: 34).

The dilemma of submitting to reproduced narratives of dead girls and women on the one side versus not reproducing fantasies about the prevalence of gender-equal girls on the other remains when the day is over. Elaborating on and affirming a multitude of discourses on girlhood in portraying the seven Vivian girls keeps the process suspended in relation to the specific girlhood ethos that Forsell brought with her to the theatre. Passing me quickly in the corridor during a break, she says, half to me and half to herself, that she needs to come up with more ‘utopian elements’ for the play. Regardless of the ending, Forsell seems determined not to make The Vivian Girls a tragedy. The openness of the ending is thus a question of the possibility of turning death into something beyond the repetitiousness of traditional tragic narratives and beyond the dichotomies of life/death, man/woman or active/passive.

Bodies of Horror and Humour

Hans-Thies Lehmann argues in Postdramatic Theatre that the body, technological devices, non-theatrical media, space and time are the postdramatic theatre’s means to problematise and challenge earlier forms of drama and its mimetic claims (Lehmann 2006: 36). Postdramatic theatre’s move away from concepts like ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ towards the materiality of diverse bodies on stage is in line with the theoretical development of feminist posthumanist and new materialist perspectives. These perspectives aim to flatten the relationship between different human and more-than-human materialities and challenge the Western tradition of dichotomising body and mind (Braidotti & Åsberg 2018: 4). Feminist posthuman materiality theorises bodies as agentic and always intertwined with discursive production.

Without evolving her arguments in relation to theatre, but rather to personal experiences of mourning and death, Nina Lykke’s concept of vibrant death brings feminist posthumanism to the subject of death. Her aim is ‘de-exceptionalising and reontologising death as part of a flat sequence of vibrant events, taking place beyond dualist divisions of life/death, spirit/matter, human/non-human, organic/inorganic, culture/nature’ (Lykke 2021: 200). And while Lykke does not theorise artistic work, I will suggest that the ensemble’s work with its bodies in The Vivian Girls come to ‘de-exceptionalise’ the portrayal of death.

*

As the premiere draws near, the frames of work change. The open and contesting atmosphere of the first couple of weeks, characterised by intense discussions of concepts, has now subsided. Now it is the text, the relationship between the scenes and the overall narrative that are the focus. Alongside rehearsals with the director, the ensemble works with a choreographer. The workshops with her are not word-driven but characterised by a concentrated yet playful trial-and-error approach. The actors work with their bodies in motion, trying out different poses, interactions and faces; it is a work that involves the physics of the body—its balance, weight and capacity to make meaning. The actors, together with Forsell and the choreographer, work more directly with one of Darger’s paintings. The painting depicts an execution and features a myriad of characters. Different groups of soldiers and girls are engaged in action. Besides the crucifixion and the hanging of girls, individual soldiers are also depicted choking and cutting up girls. Michael Moon notes that a new turn in research on Darger is interested in the classical references of his visual art and compares Darger’s battle and execution scenes to those of the Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Massacre of the Innocents (Moon 2012a: xii; Moon 2012b: 109). The swarm of people depicted beating, cutting, strangling, bleeding, fighting and dying could also be compared to scenes from the fifteenth-century painter Hieronymus Bosch’s gruesome depictions of hell. All three paintings consist of multiple interactions, scenes that are played out in parallel yet remain separate. This visual frame of multiple scenes becomes important for the portrayal of death.

The actors are asked to zoom in on these individual interactions: the strangulations, cuttings and disembowelments. Grouped in twos or threes, the actors are instructed to copy poses from Darger’s painting, slowly shifting from one pose to the next. They all move between the poses, shifting over and over again between positions and characters: from girl to man to girl, and from victim to perpetrator to victim. Slowly, their grimaces become more and more alike. Tongues out of mouths, faces of aggression and violence morph into those of horror, slowly becoming harder and harder to tell apart.

Lehmann points out that the technique of slow motion, which is used in this work to embody Darger’s image, exposes the body in its concreteness. Disrupted from its naturalised rhythm and pace, it can be seen as an aesthetic phenomenon, which Lehmann calls ‘alienation’ (Lehmann 2006: 163). I prefer to describe this as a flattening out of the differences between human and more-than-human materialities, as part of an assembly of scenography, light, sound and bodies. The slow motion makes the thingness of the actors’ bodies more apparent. Focusing on these flattened relations between light, sound, and different bodies transforms the scene into a meta-reflection on how death is portrayed in traditional dramatic theatre as an exceptional, human-centred event.

The actors lie down on the floor, forming a pile of corpses. When they try to form the same pile while standing up, the group’s bodies start to resemble zombies: slow, mindless, and determined, with empty eyes and no sense of self-monitoring or adjusting to external control or gazes (Figs. 1 and 2).

 

 

 

As Jack Halberstam argues, contemporary zombies tend to represent new forms of collectivity but also embody the pleasures of letting old structures shatter (2020: 165). Still, compared to Darger’s painting—or those of Bosch or Ghirlandaio—the scenes that the ensemble performs are not entirely frightening. There are moments of these slow-motion movements, the grimaces and the violence, that are more comic than horrific. This juxtaposition of horror and humour shows how volatile the affective registers of both fear and amusement are; the second the monstrous appearance stops being scary, it becomes ridiculous instead (Carroll 1999: 153). The act of balancing on this aesthetic tightrope brings to mind the tipping point between fear and humour that children experience at amusement parks or during Halloween.

Recent research on children’s cultures also suggests that children benefit from ‘dark play’ and use horror narratives to make sense of their everyday lives, which are restricted and surveilled. The ambiguity of horror cultures for children relies on the uncertainty of whether the horrible thing is real. Only in that undecidedness can the real pleasures of horror occur (Powell & Somerville 2022: 965; Bjartveit & Panayotidis 2017: 115; Henward & MacGillivray 2014: 737). Nina Lykke, however, sees the zombie and other kindred ‘twilight creatures’ as the endpoint of a discourse that insists on the human corpse as disgusting:

I shall contend that it is precisely this liminality, this being in-between elevated, exceptionally human qualities and base, low, inhuman, material qualities which makes the human corpse abject and uncanny. It is, I suggest, also the liminal position between these two poles that turns the corpse into a breeding ground for ghosts, vampires and other twilight creatures, considered dubious, haunting and evil, insofar as they remind living human beings of the uncanny fall into the abyss of the abject that their bodies will inevitably undergo when they die (Lykke, 2021: 79)

Contrary to Lykke’s description, when the Vivian girls turn into ‘zombies’, they do not represent one side of a dualist relation between the uncanny corpse and the idealised living human. In portraying death, The Vivian Girls as a theatrical process shifts its focus from ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ to challenging the dichotomies in the recurring discussions from rehearsal—the strong versus the victimised girl or the happy versus the tragic ending. They are now neither subjects nor objects. They are no longer defined by their identities; their roles are shifting. It is the choreographed movements, the slow shifting of positions and the juxtaposition of horror and humour that make it possible for the actors to be both little girls and murderous soldiers, but also neither of these.

The End

‘It is hard to remember. It’s hard to count time. A colour. A shift in temperature.’ This closing line from The Vivian Girls perfectly describes the withering feeling of writing about participant observations. What was actually happening during those eight weeks? It also perfectly describes how hard it is for the grown-up to remember what girlhood felt like. Representing girlhood is necessarily about both capturing those fading memories and engaging with and critically examining the feminist perspectives that may have shaped the process of growing up. The conflicting perspectives on girlhood and femininity expressed during the rehearsals of The Vivian Girls were situational. In the discussions and workshops, critiques of expressions of femininity were related to both age (what is appropriate, what gives the ‘impression’ of youth) and to structures of inequality and exploitation. The strong, independent girl seems still to be the best ‘protection’ against sexualisation. In the context of the political space of the theatre, Henry Darger’s violent images of battlefields and execution sites become a source of frustration. They diverge from contemporary forms of sexualisation of women and girls, but are difficult to make sense of. However, their distant and ‘objective’ attitude also helps develop an innocent portrayal of girlhood, without relying on the tradition of adorable femininity. The active use of Darger’s visual world later in the process became a way of representing girlhood and death without adapting to heroic, tragic narratives or cultural reproductions of objectified femininity. Instead, the play becomes a form of ‘dark play’, through which the audience, as well as the artistic team, can explore complex topics in the aesthetic zone of simultaneous horror and humour.

Notes

[1] The script is freely developed by Felicia Ohly, inspired by, but not faithful to, Darger’s monumental manuscript. Darger’s text is called ‘The Story of The Vivian Girls, In What is Known as The Realm of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion’. Ohly relies on some simplifications, for example, Darger refers to his fantasy creatures as both ‘Blengiglomeneans’ and ‘Blengins’ in his manuscript, while Ohly consistently calls them Blengins. When referring to the ‘Vivian girls’ in this paper, I am referring to the characters created by Darger, Ohly and/or the actors on stage—Vivian being the girls’ surname. When referring to The Vivian Girls, I am referring specifically to Ohly’s script. The script is written in Swedish, and all translations have been done by me.