Reclaiming Narrative Authority: Gendered Violence and Feminist Reauthorship in Sharon Pollock's Saucy Jack

Abstract

This article examines Sharon Pollock’s Saucy Jack (1994) as a feminist intervention into the narrative structures that have sustained the cultural authority of Jack the Ripper mythology. Drawing on feminist historiography, particularly Judith Walkowitz’s analysis of male violence as narrative structure and Hallie Rubenhold’s reclamation of the murdered women’s lived histories, the essay argues that Ripper narratives depend on three interlocking conventions: killer-centered focalization, the erasure of women’s lives, and the aestheticization of death as spectacle. Through close performance analysis, the article shows how Pollock dismantles these conventions by centering Kate, a music hall actress whose reenactments transform performance into refusal, reclamation, and reauthorship. By naming the women, foregrounding relationality, and denying the pleasures of reenacted violence, Saucy Jack transfers narrative authority from the killer to the performer. The play thus offers a feminist model of narrative reclamation grounded in embodiment, ethical witnessing, and resistance to misogynist spectacle.