SOURCE: "Female Victims and the Male Protagonist in Václav Havel's Drama," in Modern Drama, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 468-76.

In the following essay, Meche discusses the role of subordinate or victimized women in Havel's drama as a symbolic foil for deficient male protagonists.

Václav Havel's recent rise to political power in the now-dissolved Czechoslovak Republic has only confirmed some critics' contentions that Havel's dramatic works are all basically political in origin and theme. These critics' beliefs are supported by some striking similarities in many of Havel's plays; the bureaucracies that are often seen as thinly veiled representations of totalitarian regimes, for example, are present in or alluded to in all of Havel's major works beginning with The Garden Party (1963) and ending with Temptation (1985). But while the existence of these bureaucratic systems and the protagonists' struggle to retain their personal identity in their dealings with such systems...