Dora Cubed

Dora is a multiplicitous being who transcends time, space, and reality like a cubist painting. A fictional, literary character based on a once living woman, Ida Bauer, Dora is an amalgamation of Ida and of Freud, who published the sole account of Ida's case of hysteria. I will research the two most striking iterations of Dora Bauer -the casebook Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and the stage play Portrait of Dora by Hélène Cixous. My multimodal form of analysis encompasses three distinct modes. Through the first mode, metaethics, I aim to assess Freud and Cixous' arguments and ethics of representation, not to judge, but to reveal the validity of their potential motivations when viewed through each one's individual matrix of ethics. Through the second, Naomi Scheman's multiplicitous identity theory, I will investigate the signs of multiplicity in Dora's portrayal by both Freud and Cixous. Through the final mode of analysis, cubism as an art form in concert with Non-Euclidean geometry, I will reveal both Freud and Cixous' fourth dimensional quality of writing and of representation. Metaethics, multiplicitous identity, and cubism can be modes of resistance, of therapy for the theatre. In concert with this thesis, I have created a rehearsal process in which the actors and I investigated these modes within the theatre. With Dora as our subject, we have created an experimental reading of Cixous' Portrait of Dora, and we have written and composed an original play with music The Dora Project. I will explain in the final chapter how we set about manifesting this scholarship on stage and what we encountered along the way.