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Not The Queen Identity Essay

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Katja Tuomenvirta, 89568, Scottish Literature, December 22nd 2014 The Women Who Look Like The Queen – The Construction of Identity in Jackie Kay's ”Not the Queen” and Liz Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off In this essay, I will analyze the way identities are constructed in Jackie Kay's ”Not the Queen” and Liz Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. I will focus on the idea of identity as something that is performed and constructed, not as something essential that is ready in us from the moment of our birth. The idea of identity as a performance is a prevalent one in queer theory (see e.g. Butler 2006a), and the idea that identity is something constructed through, for example, social interaction, has been …show more content…

In Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, the identities of Bessie and Marian are not divided, but their roles literally are. The actress shares her time between Queen Elizabeth, Bessie, the Scottish beggar child Leezie, and the modern day child Wee Betty, or Queen Mary, Marian, the Scottish beggar child Mairn, and the modern day child Maree. As a reader, the separateness of these characters is clear, but I would argue that as a viewer of a play, the identities mix in an interesting way. Could these characters be all of the same in a way, to have a similar temperament, which is mirrored back to them in different ways causing them to form different identities? Would Bessie and Queen Elizabeth, or Marian and Queen Mary, be the same if they had been born in similar circumstances? We come back to the eternal question of nature versus nurture, and if there is anything at the centre of a hermeneutic …show more content…

If Maggie had been living before Queen Elizabeth's reign, or if she had been born in a country where Queen Elizabeth is not recognized by her appearance, I claim that her identity would be constructed in a different way. She would not see the Queen when she looks in the mirror, and she would not be reluctant to take part in social situations because of her likeness to Queen Elizabeth. On the other hand, what separates Maggie and Queen Elizabeth, is not that they look like different people, but their circumstances. Maggie is working-class and Scottish, and thus her identity is working-class and Scottish. In "Not the Queen" we do not learn anything about Kay's Queen Elizabeth, which leaves us to form our own theories on whether Maggie and Queen Elizabeth are in the world of the story different only because of their class, or are their internal characters or temperaments in some way different? Would Maggie have become the same as Kay's Queen Elizabeth if she had been born in the same circumstances? If the Scottish identity is divided, is it more influenced by what it is not than what it is, and what does this negated identity do to the Scottish identity? In Kay's Maggie we seen that a negated

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