SOURCE: Barber, Jeffrey A. “Churchill's Cloud Nine.” Explicator 57, no. 4 (summer 1999): 242–44.

In the following essay, Barber examines masculinity and conformity in Cloud Nine.

Caryl Churchill introduces readers of her play Cloud Nine to the concept that men “understand” their role as men and their individual responsibility to manliness through a vague sense of learned or patterned behavior established by another male viewed as “successfully” masculine. As illustration, Clive, a Victorian colonial governor, explains respect to his son Edward as a manly duty:

You should always respect and love me, Edward, not for myself, I may not deserve it, but as I respected and loved my father, because he was my father. Through our father we love our Queen and our God, Edward. Do you understand? It is something men understand.

(Churchill 32)

The concept of “it is something men understand” is a symbolic representation of manliness. Clive is proposing that...