1 00:00:07,600 --> 00:00:12,000 [Mary Reid Kelley: "You Make Me Iliad"] 2 00:00:12,620 --> 00:00:13,580 [You] 3 00:00:13,580 --> 00:00:14,820 [Make] 4 00:00:14,820 --> 00:00:16,080 [Me] 5 00:00:16,080 --> 00:00:18,080 [Iliad] 6 00:00:23,600 --> 00:00:24,700 Stamped Monday, 7 00:00:25,180 --> 00:00:27,160 the Doctor’s bill of health-- 8 00:00:27,160 --> 00:00:29,450 Unless the Hippocratic Oaf himself 9 00:00:29,450 --> 00:00:32,590 left a blemish on my record, I'm clean. 10 00:00:33,720 --> 00:00:35,060 Good line! 11 00:00:35,060 --> 00:00:37,280 Iʼll put that in the second scene, 12 00:00:37,280 --> 00:00:39,460 along the fortress ramparts. 13 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:43,560 Herr Lieutenant, Mach Schnell, 14 00:00:43,570 --> 00:00:45,310 you only have 10 minutes? 15 00:00:45,870 --> 00:00:48,190 Your flesh is not of interest. 16 00:00:48,190 --> 00:00:51,900 I audition characters to boost my composition. 17 00:00:51,900 --> 00:00:54,760 The verse needs local flavor to be edible, 18 00:00:54,760 --> 00:00:58,240 and as a tragic female, you are most credible. 19 00:00:58,930 --> 00:01:02,790 I've always been very interested in the history of women-- 20 00:01:02,790 --> 00:01:06,680 what women are doing, what the circumstances of their lives are, 21 00:01:06,680 --> 00:01:12,280 how law and politics make women's lives what they are historically. 22 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:22,980 When I started researching "You Make Me Iliad," 23 00:01:23,630 --> 00:01:25,799 I had looked at what women were doing 24 00:01:25,799 --> 00:01:27,909 at different points in the first World War-- 25 00:01:27,909 --> 00:01:28,840 like a nurse, 26 00:01:28,840 --> 00:01:29,860 a factory worker-- 27 00:01:29,860 --> 00:01:32,880 and then I knew I wanted to do a prostitute-- 28 00:01:32,880 --> 00:01:34,049 a sex worker-- 29 00:01:34,049 --> 00:01:36,649 but the information is so scarce. 30 00:01:39,880 --> 00:01:42,869 When I was trying to construct the narrative of this woman, 31 00:01:42,869 --> 00:01:45,119 at first, I was trying to make it more about her 32 00:01:45,119 --> 00:01:47,539 and imagining what would happen to her. 33 00:01:48,430 --> 00:01:53,450 But I felt like I didn't want to fictionalize something 34 00:01:53,450 --> 00:01:57,000 that was so completely lost to history. 35 00:01:57,000 --> 00:01:58,770 And so rather than doing that, 36 00:01:58,770 --> 00:02:03,649 I put her in these bookends of these male characters 37 00:02:03,649 --> 00:02:07,289 that provide what information we do have about these women, 38 00:02:07,289 --> 00:02:11,480 and that was the medical officer and the soldiers that visited them 39 00:02:11,480 --> 00:02:12,590 and wrote about them 40 00:02:12,590 --> 00:02:15,030 and let us know that they were there at all. 41 00:02:17,430 --> 00:02:20,300 I learned the Classics at my Father's Knee. 42 00:02:21,200 --> 00:02:22,140 [hymen karate fest!] 43 00:02:22,150 --> 00:02:24,150 He put verses in my mouth, 44 00:02:24,800 --> 00:02:26,100 which I’d mangle. 45 00:02:26,110 --> 00:02:27,660 [fret thy namesake!] 46 00:02:27,660 --> 00:02:30,440 A forgetful, and a frigid prodigy, 47 00:02:30,460 --> 00:02:31,520 [my frank aesthete!] 48 00:02:31,530 --> 00:02:33,830 unable to express my Sturm and Drangle... 49 00:02:34,760 --> 00:02:36,430 --Trauma, as experienced by women, 50 00:02:36,430 --> 00:02:43,220 is often cut off quite deliberately from artistic expression or artistic experience. 51 00:02:43,220 --> 00:02:44,200 [I'll take my six percent saline solution,] 52 00:02:44,200 --> 00:02:45,320 [and flush away the Species most invasive,] 53 00:02:45,330 --> 00:02:48,780 --Many men who did all kinds of work during the first World War 54 00:02:48,780 --> 00:02:50,190 would have written poetry-- 55 00:02:50,190 --> 00:02:52,110 they would have written a memoir. 56 00:02:52,110 --> 00:02:55,420 Women just didn't have those kinds of opportunities 57 00:02:55,420 --> 00:02:58,280 to process what had happened to them, 58 00:02:58,280 --> 00:03:01,820 so they couldn't put the trauma anywhere other than 59 00:03:01,820 --> 00:03:05,140 into the deep dark recess of history. 60 00:03:08,080 --> 00:03:10,840 In terms of what my role is in it, 61 00:03:10,840 --> 00:03:16,560 it's almost the only way that you can reconstitute that experience that is so lost 62 00:03:16,560 --> 00:03:20,020 is through art, is through imagination. 63 00:03:20,020 --> 00:03:21,870 Do you recall my home? 64 00:03:21,870 --> 00:03:23,310 It was en route. 65 00:03:23,310 --> 00:03:27,090 Your army sacked it as I bawled my eyes out-- 66 00:03:27,090 --> 00:03:29,710 quite helplessly--but in this setting 67 00:03:29,710 --> 00:03:32,510 I'm Alpha Female, and I'm Alpha Betting 68 00:03:32,510 --> 00:03:36,650 That you can author, but can’t spell, disaster. 69 00:03:36,650 --> 00:03:39,710 You're slow to learn, which makes the clean up faster.