Tussles over Gendered Spaces and Assertions of Female Presence in Anne Le Marquand Hartigan's Play the Secret Game (Critical Essay‪)‬

Abstract This paper is an extract from the PhD thesis entitled "Self-Imaging /Self-Imagining in the Woman's Writing (and Painting) of Anne Le Marquand Hartigan", submitted to University College, Dublin in 2004. The essay discusses Hartigan's unpublished play, The Secret Game (written in Ireland, circa 1995). In particular, it examines the power-struggling taking place between the sexes in the play over different life spaces, including public / political space, the space of language and the space of the female body. The essay examines how, in order to challenge the spatial disinheritance of women, Hartigan makes use of different strategies to stage statements of female resistance.