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Eve EnslerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Content Warning: The source text and this study guide feature graphic depictions and discussion of rape, sexual assault, and domestic and systemic violence against women.
The vagina, as a word and an anatomical attribute, operates as both a symbol and motif in The Vagina Monologues. The author establishes in the Preface that while the vagina is only one part of the anatomy, she specifically chose the word “vagina” because she’s “not supposed to say it […] a word that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt, and disgust” (xxi), thus symbolizing resistance to social repression. The vagina symbolizes more than womanhood; is a locus of both erasure and empowerment, a site of pain and of pleasure—of life, agency, and death.
As a motif in the text, the vagina is a recurring means of connection and political empowerment for women. V uses the vagina as an entry point through which women eventually discuss sexual violence, orgasm, birth, abuse, and personal discovery. Vaginas come to represent a site of community and political and personal action, which carries into the real world in tangible ways.
The vagina acts as a symbol for Bosnian villages decimated during the war: “My vagina a live wet water village. They invaded it. Butchered it and burned it down. I do not touch now” (51). It also acts as a source of community since V begins the play by saying, “I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas—a community, a culture of vaginas” (3). The vagina comes to represent a site of power, pleasure, violence, pain, and experience throughout the play to carry larger themes of feminine empowerment, community, and violence against women.
Anonymous speakers represent the community V creates, or exposes, through her interviews with multiple women. Aside from a few narrators who are assigned accents or whose ages or ethnicities are indicated, most of the monologues feature nameless narrators without physical descriptions. This allows the narrator—or readers, in live performances—to move through a range of bodies to explore the play’s themes of violence, pleasure, oppression, and community as they relate to being a woman in both shared communities and patriarchal systems. By choosing not to name (most of) the speakers, the author also makes it more difficult to dismiss their stories as mere rants or anecdotes, rather than indictments of larger cultural systems.
The Vagina Monologues becomes a mouthpiece for the myriad of experiences women hold, both positive and negative, and the addition of the “Spotlight Monologues” creates a more inclusive look at what women experience globally in relation to their bodies.
Anonymous speakers therefore give rise to the consequences of such systems and the benefits of community; through the play, the reader can either identify with or learn from a range of stories. This format affords the kind of reach that blends art and activism to create cultural rifts that can change the world.
Repetition is a motif for power, comfort, and truth throughout the play. Repetition functions as a method for empowerment because it forces the reader, or listener, to face the utterance—whatever it might be. The play repeats “vagina” with the intent of naming a part of the body that often goes unnamed. V writes, “As more and more women say the word, saying it becomes less of a big deal; it becomes part of our language, part of our lives. Our vaginas become integrated and respected and sacred” (xxvi). V thus acknowledges the strength in repetition, particularly for the word “vagina.”
Repetition appears in other ways throughout the play, including monologues like “Say It,” where the comfort women repeat, “We are sorry” and “Say it to me” (129), creating an insistent tone. In “Hey Miss Pat,” the repeated “Watcha cookin?” and “I’m cookin’” are words of rebellion against a system that failed the people of New Orleans after Katrina struck (145-46). Repetition also appears in the second “Vagina Fact,” which notes that, with 8,000 nerving endings, the clitoris has “twice…twice…twice the number in the penis” (41); repetition here serves to draw attention to the countless ways in which the female anatomy is overlooked, particularly compared to male anatomy. Throughout the play, repetition thus functions as a motif for empowerment as it draws attention to specific facts, truths, and actions.