Notes on Marjorie by Isagani Cruz

Isagani Cruz’s “Marjorie” is a play that depicts a Filipino Woman’s struggle with her identity. It also serves as a satire on some aspects of the Filipinos living, especially the idiosyncrasies that are viewed as stereotypical in the Philippine society. The elements that are crucial in portraying the theme of story are its setting, characterization and the conflict. The first scene is in the Manila Airport, where Marjorie is waiting for her flight to America. The setting is crucial to the theme of the play since it represents Marjorie in terms of who she is and what her motivations are. By being in an airport, she stands neither on Local soil nor on foreign ground. This reflects her struggles throughout the play wherein she cannot decide on her own identity. Is she still a Filipino despite her being married to George, a foreigner and having his children? Or has she become an American? Is she regarded as married even if her husband and children are thousand miles away? Or is her presence in the Philippines suspends any ties made outside her country thus rendering her as a single woman, free to have intimate relations with other Filipino men? Throughout the events that transpire in the story, Marjorie ponders on these questions. Marjorie is a Filipino “balikbayan” who has just returned to the Philippines after ten years of living in America with her husband, George and their two children, Arthur and Wayne. With this, her problem of identity starts to surface. By living in a foreign land for a long time, much of her Filipino characteristics must have faded out and perhaps, she feels that a part of her is missing. And now that she has come back to her homeland, she has to familiarize herself with the Filipino living. We may imply that Marjorie’s primary motive for coming back to the Philippines is that she wants to go back to her roots, to return to her country and rediscover how it feels like to be a Filipino again. Upon her arrival, she seems to cloak herself with certain colonial attributes. The most obvious is her use of language where she speaks to the other characters in English despite them, talking to her in the native tongue. But soon, these features wear off and her discourse eventually becomes more familiar with the local language. This shows that no matter how long Marjorie was kept out of her homeland, some Filipino qualities are still inherent in her. One of the characters in the story that may seem more complex than the others is Jimmy, the husband of Marjorie’s college friend, Sylvia. At first, one might label him as the perfect husband, intelligent, successful and physically appealing. He was also portrayed as committed individual, willing to endure his wife’s jealousy and her absurd antics in trying to exploit his so-called unfaithfulness. One might even conclude that his wife’s jealousy is the one that caused his eventual affair with Marjorie and not his desire for her. But in closer retrospection, one would be able to raise a variety of questions on his own motives. One of the most dubious incidents in the story is his apparent meeting with Marjorie in Davao City. An obvious question that might come into mind is whether the visit is really unintentional. Are we to believe that by coincidence, Jimmy’s business meeting is to take place in the same vicinity where Marjorie lives? Or that it just happens that the person who is supposed to attend the aforementioned conference is sick with flu? Such coincidences make us question Jimmy’s real motives since they all seemed to be contrived. What makes the whole play appealing to the audience is its satirical presentation of the various aspects of Filipino living, the beliefs, traditions and culture. The most notable examples are the different quirks that many Filipinos possess which are amplified or exaggerated by some characters in the play. Many, if not all, of them are stereotypes of Filipinos which are commonly found in telenovelas. Some of them are: the English- speaking balikbayan, the jealous wife, the nosy mother-in-law, the doting mother, the liberal lad and lass, the cheating husband and the gossiping house employees. One of the most exaggerated roles is that of the jealous wife. Her continuous exploitation of her husband’s alleged disloyalty drives him to have an affair with Marjorie. This ironical turn of events is comical and one of the highlights of the play since it shows the great implication caused by one’s idiosyncrasies. In a more serious note, the play also portrays a range of other social issues that are constantly revolving around the Philippine society. An obvious one is the issue on the Filipino women who marry foreigners in order for them to leave the Philippines for a “better” life abroad. In time, these women will have to confront certain problems of identity, much like what Marjorie faces in the play. In living with their foreign husbands, traces of their being Filipinos would likely to fade out and questions of identity would inevitably surface. Other means of oppression towards women are also depicted wherein they are expected to be submissive to men. The main conflict can be observed in the story is Marjorie’s struggles with herself. Throughout the story, a parallelism is made between the life she has in America and her life in the Philippines. The tension between the two is further built when she begins an affair with Jimmy. Her relationship with Jimmy leads her to question the state of her marriage, whether or not her marital obligations are suspended for the time that she is not in America. This also brings up the question on whether to stay in the Philippines with Jimmy or go back to America with George. Throughout the story, she remains conflicted until the very end since she is unable to identify her own path and choices. In a way, Marjorie may be seen as a symbol of Filipinos who are in search of their identity. Because of the great influence caused by colonizers, the question of who we are as a Filipino has become tougher to answer. And in our quest in defining who we are, choices are presented to us, whether to keep our colonial minds and ideals or to hold on to the attributes that makes us Filipinos. In the same way, Marjorie is given a choice between her American husband, George and his Filipino lover, Jimmy. By her obligation to her children, she is forced to choose to go back to foreign land. The final scene of the story conveys her situation wherein she remains in the airport. And like many Filipinos, she is unable to choose for her own. By the end of the play, she is still uncertain of who she is and continuous to ponder on the questions of her identity that were mentioned in the beginning of the story.