ABSTRACT 

 

 

 

 

Title of Thesis: MADWOMEN IN THE KILLING JAR: 

MADNESS, ADAPTATION, AND 

PERFORMANCE IN KATE SOPER’S VOICES 

FROM THE KILLING JAR 

  

 Jacob LaBarge, Master of Arts, 2025 

  

Thesis Directed By: Associate Professor Olga Haldey, Division of 

Musicology and Ethnomusicology 

 

 

U.S.-American composer, writer, and performer Kate Soper describes a killing jar as “a 

tool used by entomologists to kill butterflies and other insects without damaging their bodies: a 

hermetically sealable glass container, lined with poison, in which the specimen will quickly 

suffocate.” This premise provides the central motif for her 2012 monodrama for soprano and 

chamber ensemble, Voices from the Killing Jar. In the piece, she adapts narrative elements from 

the stories of eight heroines—originating from a wide range of literary and historical sources—

who she believes are trapped in their own metaphorical killing jars. This thesis examines Soper’s 

adaptation of these eight heroines’ texts through the lens of madness and madwomen. I analyze 

the musical and textual contents of three movements: “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” “Mad 

Scene: Emma Bovary,” and “Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan.” Drawing on 

scholarship on performance-based madness and historical psychiatric practices in the United 

States, England, and France, I analyze Voices in the context of madness in music, history, and 

literature. Finally, I address the entire monodrama, engaging with the theme of spectatorship to 



 

 

demonstrate how the piece generates empathy for its “mad” heroines. By interpreting Voices 

from the Killing Jar in the context of madness, adaptation, and performance, this thesis 

contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transmedia adaptation and expands the study of 

madness in musical performance beyond the nineteenth century. 

  



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MADWOMEN IN THE KILLING JAR: MADNESS, ADAPTATION, AND PERFORMANCE 

IN KATE SOPER’S VOICES FROM THE KILLING JAR 

 

 

by 

 

 

Jacob Robert LaBarge 

 

 

 

 

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  

University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment  

of the requirements for the degree of  

Master of Arts in Musicology 

2025 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advisory Committee: 

Associate Professor Olga Haldey, Chair 

Assistant Professor Kelsey Klotz 

Associate Professor William Robin 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright by 

Jacob Robert LaBarge 

2025 

 

 



 

ii 

 

Acknowledgements 

 I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Olga Haldey, for the 

immense time and effort she put into helping me complete this project. Only by introducing me 

to adaptation studies, providing thorough feedback, and sharing her deep knowledge and 

appreciation of opera, did this thesis develop. This process would have been impossible without 

her guidance and support.  

Thank you to Dr. William Robin for supporting me in writing about a piece that was not 

minimalism for a minimalism seminar. Thank you to Dr. Kelsey Klotz for the many discussions 

we have had about this project. Thank you both for serving on my committee and providing 

excellent feedback.  

I also want to take time to thank my friends Betsy Busch, Thi Lettner, and Sara West for 

reading, discussing, and providing feedback on this project (and many others). To the members 

of the Musicology and Ethnomusicology division at UMD: you are all truly an inspiration to me; 

I could not have asked for a better community to grow both as a person and scholar. 

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends. Mom and Dad, thank you for 

supporting me in every aspect of my life. Thank you, Lydia, Tyler, Arianna, and Eftihia, for 

encouraging my love and appreciation for contemporary music. My final thank you is for my 

husband Tyler: words cannot express how much I value you and your endless support.  

 

 



 

iii 

 

Table of Contents 
 

 

Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii 
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iii 
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv 
Introduction: Uncovering the Killing Jar ........................................................................................ 1 

Literature Review........................................................................................................................ 6 
Adaptation ............................................................................................................................... 6 
Madness .................................................................................................................................. 9 

Structure of the Thesis .............................................................................................................. 15 
Chapter 1. A House of Suffocation: Isabel Archer ....................................................................... 18 

Domesticating Isabel Archer ..................................................................................................... 19 
Constructing the Portrait ........................................................................................................... 24 

Isabel’s Silence: The Music .................................................................................................. 26 
Osmond and his Duchess: The Text ...................................................................................... 30 

Chapter 2. Longing for Freedom: Emma Bovary ......................................................................... 36 
Repetitive Prison ....................................................................................................................... 37 
Escaping the Killing Jar(?) ........................................................................................................ 41 
Framing the Killing Jar ............................................................................................................. 48 

Chapter 3. Deathless Song / Siren Song: Daisy Buchanan ........................................................... 52 
Daisy’s Siren Song .................................................................................................................... 54 

Musical Layering .................................................................................................................. 55 
Manipulation of Time ............................................................................................................ 63 

Enchanting the Sailors .............................................................................................................. 66 
The Mad Songstress .................................................................................................................. 73 

Chapter 4. Descending Into the Killing Jar ................................................................................... 76 
Appendices .................................................................................................................................... 84 
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 96 
 



 

iv 

 

List of Figures 

Figure 1.1: “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” Track Layers in Tape Intro. ...........................25 

Figure 1.2: “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” clarinet bisbigliando. .....................................27 

Figure 1.3: “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” mm.14-15.. .....................................................28 

Figure 1.4: “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” mm. 36-37. ....................................................28 

Figure 1.5: “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” mm.2-3 ..........................................................31 

Figure 2.1: “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 1-6 ..................................................................38 

Figure 2.2: “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 2-3 and 10-11 .................................................40 

Figure 2.3: “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 37-42 ..............................................................42 

Figure 2.4: “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” Redirection of the gaze  ..............................................47 

Figure 2.5: “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 65-70 ..............................................................50 

Figure 2.6: “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 98-100 ............................................................50 

Figure 3.1: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 57-66 ............................55 

Figure 3.2: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 1-5 ................................57 

Figure 3.3: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 24-27. ...........................58 

Figure 3.4: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 35-38 ............................60 

Figure 3.5: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 35-38. ...........................60 

Figure 3.6: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” m. 75 .....................................62 

Figure 3.7: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 1-3 ................................64 

Figure 3.8: “VIII. Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan,” mm. 1-4 and 24-26. ..............65 

 



 

1 

 

 

Introduction: Uncovering the Killing Jar 

 

On August 14, 2021, the Long Beach Opera performed Kate Soper’s 2012 Voices from 

the Killing Jar paired with Arnold Schoenberg’s groundbreaking 1912 Pierrot Lunaire. 

According to the program notes, the pairing allowed women to “reframe their own operatic 

portrayal” away from the traditional roles afforded to them, a reworking attributed to the two 

directors—Zoe Aja Moore for Voices and Danielle Agami for Pierrot. 1 Soper is similarly 

credited, as her monodrama reimagines texts either created or mediated by men.2 Apart from this 

similarity, the two monodramas possess another link: madness. Soper’s Voices from the Killing 

Jar draws from and interrogates the tradition of performance-based madness, a lineage which 

includes Schoenberg’s moondrunk Pierrot.  

Voices from the Killing Jar is a multi-movement monodrama that retells the stories of 

eight women in literature and history.3 In her 2011 dissertation accompanying the work, Soper 

defines a killing jar as “a tool used by entomologists to kill butterflies and other insects without 

damaging their bodies: a hermetically sealable glass container, lined with poison, in which the 

 
1 “Pierrot Lunaire / Voices from the Killing Jar,” program notes for Pierrot Lunaire and Voices from the Killing Jar, 

Long Beach Opera, performed August 14 and 15 2021, 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62da2cb6a16dcf1cbdfbaa4d/t/63c83c2aa1590235372f356f/1674067002115/Pi

errot+Lunaire%3AVoices+from+the+Killing+Jar+%282022%29+%5Bprogram%5D.pdf. 

 
2 Almost all of Soper’s literary sources are written by men. The only exception is Lucile Desmoulins’s diary, which 

serves as the source text for the fourth movement, “Midnight’s Tolling: Lucile Duplessis.” Still, Soper cites an 

edition that was edited by Philippe Lejeune. More information on each heroine will be provided later in this chapter.  

 
3 In her dissertation, Soper expresses the difficulty in describing Voices under a specific genre designation. She does 

not provide her preferred label, instead focusing on what the piece is not: “It is not a song-cycle, opera, or 

melodrama, though it shares characteristics with all of these.” I use the term monodrama because of each 

movement’s focus on a singular heroine, the monodrama’s combination of speech and music, and its inclusion under 

the “Stage/Monodrama” section on the composer’s website. Still, I acknowledge that it does not fully capture the 

contents of the work. Kate Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 76. 

 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62da2cb6a16dcf1cbdfbaa4d/t/63c83c2aa1590235372f356f/1674067002115/Pierrot+Lunaire%3AVoices+from+the+Killing+Jar+%282022%29+%5Bprogram%5D.pdf
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62da2cb6a16dcf1cbdfbaa4d/t/63c83c2aa1590235372f356f/1674067002115/Pierrot+Lunaire%3AVoices+from+the+Killing+Jar+%282022%29+%5Bprogram%5D.pdf


 

2 

 

 

specimen will quickly suffocate.”4 The work enacts this concept by depicting the women trapped 

in their own metaphorical killing jars—what she describes as “hopeless situations, inescapable 

fates, impossible fantasies, and other unlucky circumstances.”5 

In recent years, Soper has become a well-known voice in contemporary composition, 

receiving several notable fellowships and awards as well as commissions by major orchestras. In 

2017, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her “philosophy opera” IPSA DIXIT, and, most 

recently, she was awarded the 2024 Kravis Emerging Composer Prize by the New York 

Philharmonic.6 While the Long Beach Opera’s staging of the monodrama garnered the most 

critical attention, Soper originally wrote the piece for the Wet Ink Ensemble while completing 

her DMA in composition at Columbia.  

The ensemble for whom the work was written accounts for its obscure instrumentation. 

As Soper reveals, the piece was “written not for instruments, but for individual players with 

individual skill sets, from the typical (saxophonist plays the clarinet) to the more peculiar (the 

soprano also plays the clarinet).”7 Thus, the piece is inseparable from Wet Ink, an ensemble 

which Soper has co-directed since 2006. Still, Wet Ink’s recent programs rarely feature Voices, 

instead favoring premieres, or popular works such as IPSA DIXIT.8 More recently, several other 

 
4 Soper’s dissertation and the score have the same title. For subsequent citations, I put the dissertation’s title in 

quotation marks and italicize the title of the composition. Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 1.  

 
5 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 1. 

 
6 Alex Ross, “Kate Soper’s Philosophy-Opera,” The New Yorker, February 19, 2017, 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/kate-sopers-philosophy-opera.  

 
7 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 1-2.  

 
8 According to captures of Wet Ink’s website, the ensemble has programmed Voices (either in fragments or the 

whole piece) four times since 2010: November 3, 2010; December 8, 2012; December 15, 2013; and October 5, 

2014. This appears to be consistent with other works of hers, apart from IPSA DIXIT, which the ensemble continues 

to program. The 2012 performance is marked as the official premiere on the publisher’s website. “Past Seasons,” 

Wet Ink, April 18, 2018 Capture, https://web.archive.org/web/20180418070941/http://wetink.org/eventsPast.html; 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/kate-sopers-philosophy-opera
https://web.archive.org/web/20180418070941/http:/wetink.org/eventsPast.html


 

3 

 

 

contemporary music ensembles have performed it, such as Ensemble Dal Niente (2015) and 

Musiqa (2018).9  

The heroines of Voices come from a wide range of literary and historical sources. 

Movement One, “Prelude: May Kasahara,” features the morbidly zany sixteen-year-old girl from 

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994). Movement Two, “My Last Duchess: 

Isabel Archer,” stars the eponymous protagonist from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady 

(1881). This movement is unique in that, in addition to the text from James’s novel, Soper also 

incorporates quotations from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” 

(1842). The third movement, “Palilalia: Iphigenia,” focuses on Clytemnestra as depicted by 

Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his Agamemnon.10 Movement Four, “Midnight’s Tolling: 

Lucile Duplessis,” centers on the work’s only non-literary character: Soper sets diary entries of 

Lucile Duplessis (1770-1794), a French revolutionary and wife of Camille Desmoulins. The fifth 

movement, “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” features the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s risqué 

novel Madame Bovary (1857). Movement Six, “Interlude: Asta Sollilja,” pulls a character from 

Halldór Laxness’s Icelandic epic Independent People (1934). Movement Seven, “The Owl and 

the Wren: Lady Macduff,” adapts a brief scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623), the murder 

of Lady Macduff and her children. Finally, the eighth movement, “Her Voice is Full of Money: 

 
“Events,” Wet Ink, https://www.wetink.org/events/; “Voices from the Killing Jar,” PSNY, 

https://www.eamdc.com/psny/composers/kate-soper/works/voices-from-the-killing-jar-with-sax-cl/.  

 
9 Kate Soper performed the monodrama with Musica. Michael Lewansky, “Fragmentary Thoughts on Kate Soper’s 

‘Voices from the Killing Jar,’ at NUNC,” Ensemble Dal Niente, November 8, 2015, 

https://www.dalniente.com/news/2015/11/8/fragmentary-thoughts-on-kate-sopers-voices-from-the-killing-jar-at-

nunc; Eric Skelly, “Review: Trapped in the Experience of Kate Soper’s ‘Killing Jar,’” Houston Chronicle, April 14, 

2018, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/music/article/Review-Trapped-in-the-experience-of-Kate-

12834566.php. 

 
10 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 22. 

 

https://www.wetink.org/events/
https://www.eamdc.com/psny/composers/kate-soper/works/voices-from-the-killing-jar-with-sax-cl/
https://www.dalniente.com/news/2015/11/8/fragmentary-thoughts-on-kate-sopers-voices-from-the-killing-jar-at-nunc
https://www.dalniente.com/news/2015/11/8/fragmentary-thoughts-on-kate-sopers-voices-from-the-killing-jar-at-nunc
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/music/article/Review-Trapped-in-the-experience-of-Kate-12834566.php
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/music/article/Review-Trapped-in-the-experience-of-Kate-12834566.php


 

4 

 

 

Daisy Buchanan,” stars the charming flapper from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby 

(1925).  

Each heroine in Voices expresses her madness in a unique way, thanks to Soper’s various 

approaches to adapting the monodrama’s source texts. Yet the origins of their madness can be 

traced to two root causes: grief and patriarchal oppression. May Kasahara, Clytemnestra, and 

Lady Macduff all descend into madness as a result of a loss of someone close to them. 

Specifically, May Kasahara feels disconnected from the outside world due to the death of her 

friend in a motorcycle accident that she caused. Clytemnestra and Lady Macduff both mourn 

their children. In Women and Madness: The Incarceration of Women in Nineteenth Century 

France, Yannick Ripa points out the prominence of the archetype of a mother who goes mad 

after the death of a child.11 In Clytemnestra’s case, this death is at the hands of her husband 

Agamemnon. In Lady Macduff’s, the murder has not yet occurred, but it is imminent.  

The remaining five characters’ madness stems from the expectation for them to perform 

their gender correctly.12 For example, prior to her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, Isabel Archer 

was an independent, outspoken young woman, traits that contradicted the idealized image of 

nineteenth-century femininity with its cult of domesticity.13 As a revolutionary, Lucille 

Duplessis’s political activism would have been equated to madness due to her gender.14 

 
11 Yannick Ripa, Women and Madness: The Incarceration of Women in Nineteenth Century France, trans. Catherine 

de Pelous Menagé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 64-65. 

 
12 The relevant scholarship will be discussed below in the Literature Review. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and 

Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988).  

 
13 Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, “Introduction,” in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle 

Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 9. 

 
14 Although Ripa’s study covers nineteenth-century madness, her section of “Political Madness” includes French 

revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt. This is to say, had Duplessis survived the revolution, the “madwoman” label 

would have likely been attached to her. Ripa, Women and Madness, 22-23. 

 



 

5 

 

 

Additionally, according to the diary entry translated by Soper, Duplessis makes the connection 

herself with an explicit statement, “I think I’m losing it,” as she feels detached from the outside 

world.15 Emma Bovary and Asta Sollilja escape gendered expectations into their dreamworlds. 

Emma becomes bored and frustrated with her marriage, seeking to reside in Romantic fiction 

instead. Laxness’s character is disowned by her adoptive father for defying her gender 

expectations of virginity and purity, resulting in a hallucinatory journey in frigid temperatures.16 

Daisy Buchanan’s madness stems not only from her objectification by Fitzgerald and the men in 

the novel, but also from the conflict between the power of being the focus of the male gaze and 

the debasement of being a material, and thus discardable, object of it.  

In a presentation given for the Young Women’s Composers Camp in April 2020, Soper 

asserts that what draws her to the texts she adapts is a feeling that “[music] could reveal some 

dimension [of the text] that’s kind of hard to put into words.”17 Notably, while her dissertation on 

Voices addresses several important aspects of her score, such as compositional techniques and 

performance intentions, it spends little time discussing her rationale for and approach to adapting 

source texts.18 I choose to treat this conspicuous non-disclosure as an opening that allows me to 

expand upon Soper’s analysis and interpretation of her own work. While I make use of Soper’s 

dissertation throughout, I am less concerned with the composer’s authorial intent. Instead, I am 

interested in how the resultant piece reshapes and reimagines its textual sources. For this reason, 

 
15 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar (New York: Project Schott New York, 2012), xi. 

 
16 Halldór Laxness, Independent People, trans J. A. Thompson (New York: Vintage Books, 1946), 367. 

 
17 Kate Soper, “Kate Soper: Why What Where When Why Write Opera? (2020),” YouTube, July 21, 2020, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMDWldjSE9w&t=2325s.  

 
18 Furthermore, she wrote her dissertation before making revisions to Voices, which included the addition of the 

movement that features Asta Sollilja. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMDWldjSE9w&t=2325s


 

6 

 

 

I chose not to interview Soper for this project. In this way, this thesis by its very nature acts as an 

“adaptation” of the monodrama. In what follows, I survey existing scholarship that forms the 

basis for my work toward this objective and outline the structure and contents of my thesis.  

Literature Review 

Madness and madwomen are common tropes in Western literature and the performing 

arts. While multiple sources cite Donizetti’s Lucia as a quintessential example of a madwoman, 

the archetype has only grown and expanded since her blood-filled wedding night, resulting in a 

wide array of portrayals and interpretations, both historical and contemporary.19 Indeed, as 

scholars have noted, several of today’s composers and artists have engaged with the familiar 

madwoman trope to critique broader issues in contemporary society. Thus, while the majority of 

scholarship on madness in musical performance continues to interrogate nineteenth-century 

examples, some recent writings have attempted to expand the focus to include newer works.  

This literature review features two areas of scholarly literature that contextualize my 

reading of Voices from the Killing Jar. The first group of studies concerns adaptation, the 

theoretical framework that I will employ to analyze the work; their summary includes an 

overview of relevant terminology. The second includes scholarship on madness (both historical 

and performative), which offers the archetypal models for Soper’s characters.  

Adaptation 

The fundamental premise of adaptation theory, as it initially arose in film studies and 

literary criticism, was an overwhelming concern with an adaptation’s faithfulness to its source, 

with individual adaptations evaluated and critiqued based on the level of their adherence to that 

 
19 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 92; Elaine Showalter, 

The Female Malady, 10; Stephen A. Willer, “Mad Scene,” Grove Music Online, 2002. 

 



 

7 

 

 

premise.20 More recent scholarship, however, aims to depart from the strictures of the so-called 

“fidelity criticism,” engaging instead with the artwork’s potential for reimagining the original 

text to address new contexts and speak to new audiences. In his seminal study on film adaptation, 

for instance, Robert Stam questions the tendency to judge adaptations on their fidelity to the 

source text, pointing out the fallacy of assuming that there is a singular “correct” way that text 

must be interpreted.21 He further argues that for adaptations in certain mediums, such as theater, 

“change is presumed to be the point,” wondering why cinematic adaptations are not afforded the 

same liberties.22 Moreover, as Julie Sanders asserts in Adaptation and Appropriation, value 

judgment should not be the goal of adaptation studies; rather than concerning themselves with 

identifying “good” or “bad” adaptations, the field should be “about analysing [the] process, 

ideology, and methodology” involved in adapting a work of literature.23 

This shift of focus in adaptation studies has paralleled and was partially influenced by a 

similar change of direction in a related field of translation studies. Neither linguistic translation 

nor artistic adaptation of a text can ever be literal and exact, as our understanding of the original 

is inevitably impacted by the process of its transmutation. As translator Peter Cole puts it, “in 

 
20 J. Dudley Andrew, “The Well-Worn Muse: Adaptation in Film Theory,” in Narrative Strategies: Original Essays 

in Film and Prose Fiction, ed. Syndy M. Conger and Janice R. Welsch (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 

1980); Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975); 

Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, ed., The English Novel and the Movies (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981). 

 
21 Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the 

Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 

2005), 15. 

 
22 Stam, “Introduction,” 16. 

 
23 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 21. 

 



 

8 

 

 

giving the original new life, translation sheds new light on it as well.”24 Similarly, Sanders posits 

that adaptation “is frequently involved in offering commentary on a source text.”25  

The principal theoretical reference source for applying adaptation theory to staged music 

is A Theory of Adaptation by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon. Describing adaptation as a 

“repetition without replication,” Hutcheon defines a transmedia adaptation of literature as both a 

process and a product that results from a shift in a narrative mode of engagement.26 She outlines 

three such modes of engagement: the telling mode (e.g. a novel), the showing mode (e.g. theater 

or film), and the participatory mode (e.g. video games), each offering unique challenges for its 

adaptors. Similar to Cole’s definition of language translation, then, the process of adaptation to 

Hutcheon is “an act of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of 

interpreting and then creating something new.”27 

This “newness” Hutcheon points out can arise from what Alexander Burry in his 

discussion of Dostoevsky adaptations refers to as transpositional openings—material “that had 

already been reworded by Dostoevsky in his creation of the source text, and because of the 

resulting instability, is especially inviting of further transposition.”28 In other words, a 

transpositional opening is derived from a narrative ambiguity or an unresolved question posed by 

the source text, which may then be further explored in its adaptation. Through a series of case 

 
24 Peter Cole “Making Sense in Translation: Toward an Ethics of the Art,” in In Translation: Translators on Their 

Work and What It Means, ed. Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 14. 

 
25 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 18. 

 
26 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7-9. 

 
27 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 20. 

 
28 Literary criticism uses the term “transposition” to describe the same process that film and performance studies call 

“adaptation.” Alexander Burry, Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama 

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 34.  

 



 

9 

 

 

studies, including operatic adaptations, Burry shows how by identifying and exploiting such 

transpositional openings, an adaptation can shed new light on its source texts by offering “critical 

interpretations” of it.29  

Hutcheon also considers how a change of geographical location, newly arising political 

issues, and other shifts of context may affect both the process and product of adaptation. Jozefina 

Komporaly’s 2017 monograph Radical Revival as Adaptation: Theatre, Politics, Society engages 

with these questions further as she interrogates the potential of radical stage direction to speak to 

modern issues, enabling conversation between the past and the present. While Komporaly is 

specifically concerned with the restaging of spoken plays, her work shows how such restaging 

can explore transpositional openings in its source plays to redefine them and unearth new 

meanings that resonate with contemporary audiences. She describes the process as “[situating] 

the newly created work in a position whereby it intervenes on its precursor(s) with an explicit 

aim to revisit, deconstruct and actualize,” a definition that speaks to how all types of adaptation 

may provide commentary both on its contemporary society and its source text.30 As I examine 

Soper’s engagement with her source texts and presentations of “mad” characters, my analysis 

explores the same process. I am interested less in Soper’s fidelity to her sources, but instead in 

probing how she makes use of their transpositional openings and generates new layers of 

meaning.  

Madness 

Soper’s Voices does not just adapt its source texts but also reflects historic 

representations of madness. A foundational work on the study of madness in Western thought, 

 
29 Burry, Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky, 36. 

 
30 Jozefina Komporaly, Radical Revival as Adaptation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4. 

 



 

10 

 

 

history, and culture, Michel Foucault’s 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in 

the Age of Reason needs little introduction. Foucault’s survey of representations of madness in 

literature, philosophy, legislation, and other aspects of Western civilization has served as the 

basis for numerous further studies of madness in society and culture.31 Elaine Showalter notes, 

however, that Foucault’s argument does not sufficiently account for gender differences in 

representations of madness.32 Feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler aims to address this gap in 

her 1972 monograph Women and Madness.33 Encompassing literary criticism, historical case 

studies, and interviews with her contemporaries, Chesler’s book interrogates male dominance in 

the study of madness, and argues that the diagnosis has historically been used to control and 

condemn women. Similarly, Elaine Showalter aims her monograph The Female Malady: 

Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 at addressing gender difference in history of 

psychiatry. Drawing from psychiatric studies, newspapers, and various types of writings created 

by women—such as inmate narratives, diaries, memoirs, and novels—she engages with sexual 

difference in three different time periods of British psychiatry, noting that madness was 

perceived as a “female malady” because it was historically “experienced by more women than 

men.”34 

 While Showalter’s monograph primarily covers madness in British society, she notes an 

“active exchange of ideas between English, American, French and German psychiatrists,” but 

 
31 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard 

(New York: Vintage Books, 1988), ix. 

 
32 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin 

Books, 1985), 211. 

 
33 Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972, rev. 2005), 9. 

 
34 Showalter, The Female Malady, 3. 

 



 

11 

 

 

also argues that cultural context informs a society’s understanding of femininity.35 Yannick 

Ripa’s Women and Madness: The Incarceration of Women in Nineteenth-Century France 

addresses the reception and treatment of madness in France in a time period similar to that 

covered by Showalter. Ripa aims to “examine the background of the ‘moral treatment’ 

undertaken in asylums,” probing how French society’s perception of madness simultaneously 

influenced psychiatric systems and was influenced by them. She establishes that asylums not 

only attempted to treat madwomen but also to protect society, serving as “social regulators” to 

dispose of those who resisted “normal” behavior.36 

Judith Butler’s influential 1988 article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An 

Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” the only non-literary source Soper cites in her 

dissertation, establishes the idea of “gendered acts,” which informed the distinction between 

behaviors that were considered normal and deviant.37 Butler proposes that gender is a system of 

behaviors that society considers either “correct” or “incorrect.” Performing the correct behavior 

is rewarded whereas incorrect behaviors result in punishment. In addition to Ripa, in the context 

of madness, Foucault, Showalter, and Chesler all point out that resistance to these prescribed acts 

(such as sexual excess for women) was often punished by labeling the person “mad,” resulting in 

institutionalization.38 

 Even though Soper’s monodrama is not an opera, it both incorporates an element of 

theatricality in its performance and contains multiple allusions and references to operatic 

 
35 Showalter, The Female Malady, 6. 

 
36 Ripa, Women and Madness, 3 and 29. 

 
37 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 520. 

 
38 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 85; Showalter, The Female Malady, 211; Phyllis Chesler, Women and 

Madness, 99. 

 



 

12 

 

 

repertories, conventions, and individual characters—including the “mad” ones. Studies of 

operatic representations of hysteria and madness, therefore, are particularly relevant to my 

analysis of Voices. Although madness is only minimally addressed in Catherine Clément’s 

cultural critique, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, her work is one of the earliest attempts to 

engage with the concept of madness in an operatic context, discussing the characters such as 

Lucia from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Elvira from Bellini’s I puritani. Clément 

describes the voices of operatic madwomen as “[scaling] the walls of reason, reaching higher 

than what is sensible, far higher than reality.”39 In so doing, these women characters are able to 

escape into madness to provide a sense of reprieve from their lives.  

Building on Clément’s work in her essay titled “Excess and Frame: The Musical 

Representation of Madwomen,” Susan McClary connects scholarship on historical madness—

such as Showalter’s monograph—with musical madness and performance, selecting the nymph 

from Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa, Donizetti’s Lucia and Strauss’s Salome as the 

representative madwomen for her study.40 McClary also addresses how modern composers and 

artists such as Diamanda Galas are “reappropriating the image of the madwomen for political 

purposes.”41 Both Clément and McClary consider the liberatory potential of madness—a 

discourse that remains central to my analysis of Voices from the Killing Jar.42 

In response to Clément and McClary, Mary Ann Smart’s “The Silencing of Lucia” 

pushes back against the notion of operatic madness as a liberatory experience. In the article, she 

 
39 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press, 1988), 88. 

 
40 McClary, Feminine Endings, 84. 

 
41 McClary, Feminine Endings, 110. 

 
42 Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, 90; McClary, Feminine Endings, 101-2. 

 



 

13 

 

 

critiques previous analyses of Donizetti’s Lucia and her madwomen brethren, arguing that while 

they can be seen as “a feminist victory,” these interpretations “assume there is a space for Lucia 

to leap into, that her musical excesses exist in a void.”43 Smart points out that even though 

Lucia’s music appears to have a sense of freedom, it is still confined by musical parameters set 

by the composer.44 Smart is not the only scholar to describe an operatic character’s madness as 

disciplined. Carolyn Abbate’s “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” another response to 

Clément, evaluates the control that performers put on a character’s madness through their own 

creative decisions. Abbate argues that “the central point about [performed genres] is that the 

work does not exist except as it is given phenomenal reality—by performers.” In this sense, 

performers take part in controlling and molding the portrayal of the madwoman.45 

One limitation of all the above-mentioned studies of operatic madness is their temporal 

constraints: their representative examples tend to be located in pre-twentieth century repertoire 

(with 1905 Salome a chronological, albeit hardly a stylistic, exception). Several more recent 

studies of representations of madness in staged music aim to fill this gap by turning their focus 

towards post-1900 repertoires. For instance, Megan Jenkin’s 2010 dissertation “Madness, 

Sexuality, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century Music Theater Works: Four Interpretive 

Essays” surveys madness across different mediums of staged music to interrogate its links to 

queerness in musical performance. Drawing from opera, monodrama, and “ballet chanté” (sung 

ballet), she argues that staged musical productions connect a character’s gender and sexuality to 

 
43 Mary Ann Smart, “The Silencing of Lucia,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 2 (1992): 124. 

 
44 Smart, “The Silencing of Lucia,” 137. 

 
45 Carolyn Abbate, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in 

Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 234. 

 



 

14 

 

 

their madness, either by identifying a character as mad due to their queerness or punishing them 

with madness for being so.46  

In her 2022 dissertation “The Ghosts of Madwomen Past: Historical and Psychiatric 

Madness on the Late Twentieth-Century Opera Stage,” Diana Wu defines madness as “a lay 

understanding of non-normative mental states that is heavily gendered, historically flexible, 

stigmatized, and independent of medically understood mental illness.”47 She analyzes nine 

operatic works from the second half of the twentieth century to evaluate the changes in 

representations and performance of the madwoman trope, finding that a developing 

understanding of madness in the late twentieth century shifted its operatic representations away 

from a traditional nineteenth-century “mad scene,” exemplified by Donizetti’s Lucia, toward a 

more comprehensive portrayal.48 

In Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical, Aleksei Grinenko further 

expands a scholarly study of staged madness to encompass musical theatre. Defining madness as 

“an aesthetic quality of an art form given to reproducing reality hyperbolically,” he addresses its 

treatment in the musical’s narrative and the effect of this approach on the medium’s subject 

choices.49 He observes that the Broadway musical integrated representations of madness in order 

to be taken more seriously.  

 
46 Megan B. Jenkins, “Madness, Sexuality, and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Music Theater Works: Four 

Interpretive Essays,” (PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2010), 1. 

 
47 Diana Wu, “The Ghosts of Madwomen Past: Historical and Psychiatric Madness on the Late Twentieth-Century 

Opera Stage,” (PhD diss., The University of Western Ontario, 2022), 3. 

 
48 Diana Wu, “The Ghosts of Madwomen Past,” 17. 

 
49 Aleksei Grinenko, Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical (Ann Arbor: University of 

Michigan Press, 2023), 10. 

 



 

15 

 

 

Even with Jenkin’s, Wu’s, and Grinenko’s work expanding scholarship on madness in 

performance beyond the nineteenth century, their case studies focus on works written primarily 

by men. This thesis builds on their work by addressing a madwoman trope mediated through a 

woman’s creative and singing voice in twenty-first century musical staged performance.  

Structure of the Thesis 

In this thesis, I examine how Soper treats the works of literature she adapts in Voices, 

shedding new light on the monodrama through its recurring themes of madness and audience 

spectatorship. From quoting her sources directly to rewriting them, Soper adapts and 

appropriates representations of women, including the madwoman trope, “letting them speak for a 

moment, and then return[ing] them to history and myth.”50 This thesis not only contributes to 

previous scholars work in examining madness beyond the nineteenth century, but also allows us 

to, as Elaine Showalter writes, “understand exactly what is left out when the mad woman’s story 

is mediated through the male voice.”51 That is, in examining madwomen created by a woman 

composer, one can reveal new aspects of the madwoman trope. Ultimately, I argue that Soper’s 

adaptations draw attention to the audience’s role as observers in the musical performance of mad 

scenes, disrupting representations of madness historically created by men. 

The main portion of my argument relies on in-depth analysis of three out of eight 

movements from the monodrama: movement two, “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer”; movement 

five, “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary”; and movement eight, “Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy 

Buchanan.” These movements were chosen due to their reliance on literary, rather than historical 

sources; Soper’s use of direct quotations from her source texts; the accessibility of these texts; 

 
50 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 1. 

 
51 Showalter, The Female Malady, 79. 



 

16 

 

 

and their length. Conversely, the movements “Prelude: May Kasahara,” “Palilalia: Iphigenia,” 

and “The Owl and the Wren: Lady Macduff” all feature Soper’s own original writing inspired by 

her sources, rather than direct quotations. “Midnight’s Tolling: Lucile Duplessis” incorporates 

direct quotations from Duplessis’s diary; however, it is a historical rather than a literary source, 

and it is currently only available in French. Finally, “Interlude: Asta Sollilja” is the shortest of 

the eight movements, lasting only thirty measures; the next shortest movement is twice its length. 

In addition to the above reasons, Isabel, Emma, and Daisy all fall under the “madness as a result 

of patriarchal oppression” category, allowing their representations to be compared. For my 

analysis, I rely primarily on three formats of the piece: the current printed score, the 2014 album 

released by Carrier Records, and a two-part live recording posted to the composer’s YouTube 

channel. Both recordings were made with the Wet Ink Ensemble. 

This thesis is organized into four chapters. Chapter One, “House of Suffocation: Isabel 

Archer,” explores historical psychiatric institutions and their history of abuse committed against 

women by husbands and patriarchs. With this historical context, I examine how Voices’s second 

movement, “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” presents a portrait of Isabel after her madness has 

been “domesticated” by her husband Osmond, defining her killing jar as an asylum.52  

Chapter Two, “Longing for Freedom: Emma Bovary,” analyzes the fifth movement of 

Voices, “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” in the context of its performance of a traditional 

nineteenth-century operatic madwoman trope. In this movement, Soper draws on a scene from 

the novel, in which Emma attends a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. I 

consider how Soper adapts this opera scene, defining Emma’s killing jar through Soper’s 

compositional techniques and operatic allusions.  

 
52 Showalter, The Female Malady, 29. 



 

17 

 

 

Chapter Three, “Deathless Song/Siren Song: Daisy Buchanan,” diverges from the 

presentations of madwomen found in Chapters 1 and 2 to investigate how Soper adapts the 

image of a mythological siren—a creature that brings about madness in others. I demonstrate 

how the music and text within “Her Voice is Full of Money: Daisy Buchanan” enact sirenic 

power and highlight the ways in which the movement adapts Daisy’s voice as a source of that 

power. At the same time, my analysis addresses how Daisy’s staging limits her to a packaged 

commodity for display in her killing jar.  

Chapter Four, “Descent into the Killing Jar,” engages with the entire monodrama, 

focusing on themes of spectatorship and empathy in the mad scenes. Using “Prelude: May 

Kasahara” as a starting point, I connect the killing jar metaphor to the “well” motif found in 

Haruki Murakami’s fiction—a symbol used to represent a character’s subconscious. I find that 

by its placement as the work’s opening, “Prelude: May Kasahara” inserts the audience into the 

well of the madwoman, allowing them to examine her subconscious through the progression of 

the monodrama. Their involvement with the work ultimately provides an opportunity for 

audiences to experience and connect with the madwomen of Soper’s monodrama on a deeper 

level than they could in a traditional operatic mad scene.  

 



 

18 

 

 

Chapter 1. A House of Suffocation: Isabel Archer 

 

Toward the end of Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of the Lady, Isabel Archer 

travels to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett against her husband Gilbert Osmond’s 

wishes. Describing her demeanor during the passage, the narrator comments that Isabel “had 

moments…which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so 

passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret, that she 

recalled to herself one of those Etruscan figures couched upon the receptacle of their ashes.”1 

This description differs drastically from the young lady introduced at the beginning of the novel. 

Even more puzzling, and a source of debate among literary critics, is the ending where Isabel 

decides to return to her wicked husband, a choice that contradicts her prior characterization of 

having a fondness for “personal independence.”2 Isabel’s marriage has changed her from a bright 

and clever woman to a shell of a person—a butterfly on display. 

Portrait traces Isabel’s transformation from a typical “American Girl” to a burdened 

wife. The novel begins with her arrival at Gardencourt, the residence of her expatriate relatives 

Mr. and Mrs. Touchett. With the help of this family, Isabel enters British society, attracting the 

attention of two men in the process. The first is the wealthy Lord Warburton, a neighbor to the 

Touchetts and a close friend of Ralph; the second is Caspar Goodwood, an American 

businessman. Isabel rejects both men’s proposals, wishing to preserve her independence. 

Following her uncle’s death, however, Isabel inherits a considerable sum of money, drawing 

eyes to her for more sinister reasons. One of these people is Madame Merle, who pulls Isabel 

into a friendship with the sole intention of pairing her up with the widower, Gilbert Osmond. 

 
1 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 607. 

 
2 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 212. 



 

19 

 

 

Once the match is made, Isabel realizes that Osmond is an immoral and cruel man. She also 

discovers the true nature of his relationship with Madame Merle, and that his daughter is the fruit 

of their liaison, rather than the child of Osmond’s deceased wife. The novel ends with Isabel 

returning to Gardencourt to see Ralph on his deathbed. While there, she is again approached by 

Goodwood, who attempts to convince her to leave her husband for him. Isabel rejects him once 

more and returns to the tight grip of her vile husband Osmond. 

This chapter addresses Soper’s adaptation of Portrait in the second movement of Voices 

from the Killing Jar, “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer.” Employing scholarship on nineteenth-

century madness and psychiatric practice by Elaine Showalter, Yannick Ripa, and Phyllis 

Chesler, I interpret Isabel’s killing jar as an asylum: a place where Osmond can restrict, control, 

and mold her into his ideal wife. I begin by providing a brief overview of the “New Woman” 

movement and the “American Girl” literary archetype. Next, I address how nineteenth-century 

psychiatric practices were used to control and reshape women. Finally, I turn towards Isabel’s 

movement in Voices, considering the ways in which Soper deploys both the music and the text to 

create an asylum-like atmosphere of confinement and being observed. 

Domesticating Isabel Archer 

A period that scholar Gail Cunningham marks as one “in which everything could be 

challenged, a time of enthusiastic extremism and gleeful revolt,” the fin de siècle saw increased 

attention to political and social issues concerning women.3 In late Victorian England, women 

were increasingly entering the workforce, acquiring an education, and questioning the 

restrictions placed on them by society and marriage. These trends combined in an emerging 

 
3 Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (London: Macmillan, 1978), 1. 

 



 

20 

 

 

movement for women’s rights known as the “New Woman.” The New Woman was 

characterized by a refusal to conform to ideals of gentility and submission as well as a skepticism 

toward her subservient position in society.4 As such, she was quickly placed in opposition to the 

earlier image of the ideal Victorian femininity embodied by the “angel in the house” archetype.5  

The early novels of Henry James, such as Portrait, were published prior to the 

proliferation of the term. Several of his characters, however, display the New Woman’s disregard 

for gender norms, behaving as outspoken and independent women. In her article “The American 

Girl and the New Woman,” Kate Flint links James’s earlier heroines to a similar “American 

Girl” archetype, tracing its origins in his writings to a 1878 novella Daisy Miller.6 For Flint, the 

social defiance exhibited by the characters of the “American Girl” type are used to critique 

“British parochialism and excessive moral caution.”7 However, she also argues that, generally, 

“American Girl” novels are “much less openly confrontational” in their societal criticism “than 

those works which have come to be classified under the label of ‘new woman writing.’”8  

The social critique in James’s novels has generated much discourse in literary criticism. 

As Donatella Izzo notes in her monograph Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the 

Short Stories of Henry James, scholarship on James tends to depict him in one of two ways: as a 

supporter or a critic of patriarchal society.9 The diverging interpretations arise from James’s 

 
4 Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel, 3. 

 
5 Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University 

Press, 1990), 13. 

 
6 Kate Flint, “The American Girl and the New Woman,” Women’s Writing 3, no. 3 (1996): 217. 

 
7 Flint, “The American Girl and the New Woman,” 226.  

 
8 Flint, “The American Girl and the New Woman,” 217. 

 
9 Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James (Lincoln: 

University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 7 



 

21 

 

 

simultaneous use of characters that fit the “American Girl” archetype, while also featuring plots 

that center the mistreatment of women.10 Nigel Bell posit this conflict exists because nineteenth-

century male novelists were “aware of what was then called the ‘Woman Question’” but were 

not “ideologically committed to the feminist cause.”11 Carolyn Porter contextualizes James’s 

victimization of his heroines as a reflection of a cultural reality in his novels.12 

The narrator in Portrait describes Isabel as being different from the women who embody 

ideal femininity in Victorian English society: “Most women did with themselves nothing at all; 

they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish 

them with a destiny. Isabel’s originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions 

of her own.”13 Isabel is portrayed as a voracious learner, at times engaging in debates and 

political conversations with the men of the novel. On top of that, she demonstrates her agency 

over her own life when she rejects the proposals of both Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood. 

In the end, it is her decision to marry, a choice that shocks the characters around her, including 

her cousin, who says: “You were the last person I expected to see caught.”14  

Following her marriage, the rest of the novel chronicles a series of discoveries Isabel 

makes regarding her ill-fated pairing with Osmond, including her cousin’s role in her acquisition 

of her uncle’s fortune, as well as Osmond’s and Madame Merle’s plot to poach it. While 

 
10 Izzo, Portraying the Lady, 9. 

 
11 Nigel Bell, “The ‘Woman Question’, the ‘New Woman’, and Some Late Victorian Fiction,” English Academy 

Review 30, no. 2 (2013): 80. 

 
12 Carolyn Porter, “Gender and Value in The American,” in New Essays on the American, ed. Martha Banta 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 124. 

 
13 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 116. 

 
14 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 392. 

 



 

22 

 

 

occasionally defying her husband, such as when she visits her dying cousin at Gardencourt, 

Isabel withers away through the rest of the novel, gradually losing the traits of her individualistic 

former self. In a conversation between Osmond and Madame Merle, he boasts that he and his 

wife are “as united [...] as the candlestick and the snuffers.”15 He does not clarify who is who, 

but the metaphor is clear: the snuffer extinguishes the light. Even Madame Merle, his partner in 

crime, accuses him of making his wife afraid of him.16 

Isabel’s situation was quite common for the real-life women represented by the American 

Girl or New Woman archetypes. While Isabel is dampened by her husband in the confines of her 

Roman residence, Palazzo Roccanera—which she “has grown to think of [...] as the place where 

people have suffered”—many women in the nineteenth century underwent a similar experience 

while imprisoned in an asylum. Elaine Showalter defines these institutions as “part of a 

paternalistic tradition in which ‘humanitarianism was inextricably linked to the practice of 

domination.’”17 She maintains that a chief development of psychiatric Victorianism was their 

“domestication of insanity,” as asylums became sites of “moral management” and attempted to 

alter patient behavior to reflect societal norms.18 Under this system, values that aligned with the 

Victorian image of the “angel in the house” such as “silence, decorum, taste, service, piety, and 

gratitude” were prioritized in patients.19 

 
15 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 552. 

 
16 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 570. 

 
17 Showalter, The Female Malady, 50. 

 
18 Showalter, The Female Malady, 28-29. 

 
19 Showalter, The Female Malady, 28-29. 

 



 

23 

 

 

This lasted until the 1870s when Darwinian psychiatry took over. Still, “mental hygiene 

as a model of social discipline” was dominant.20 Along with this change came an increasingly 

ambiguous definition of madness. The vagueness that defined madness allowed dominant forces 

to “narrow the parameters of ‘normal behavior,’” a definition that varied between the genders.21 

Furthermore, as Michel Foucault notes, “Madness is responsible only for that part of itself which 

is visible…Madness no longer exists except as seen.”22 Phyllis Chesler argues, “since women are 

more strictly confined to their role-sphere than men are, women, more than men, will commit 

more behaviors that are seen as ill or unacceptable.”23 She finds that mad behaviors in men are 

not seen as mad, allowing them to avoid suffering at the hands of the psychiatric system. In 

contrast, women who do not conform to the ideal “angel in the house” trope are defined as mad 

and committed. Ripa highlights that there was often confusion as to the boundary between 

nonconformity and genuine madness.24 Consequently, husbands or fathers would commit their 

wives or daughters for disobeying, causing the asylum to become a method of controlling them. 

In Portrait, Osmond tells Madame Merle that Isabel has “only one fault [...] too many 

ideas.”25 Isabel later remembers Osmond’s command for her to “get rid of them” before their 

marriage: “The words had been nothing superficially; but when in the light of deepening 

experience she had looked into them they had then appeared portentous. He had really meant it—

 
20 Showalter, The Female Malady, 29. 

 
21 Ripa, Women and Madness, 4. 

 
22 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 250.  

 
23 Chesler, Women and Madness, 99. 

 
24 Ripa, Women and Madness, 15. 

 
25 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 335. 

 



 

24 

 

 

he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance.”26 Like a 

nineteenth-century asylum, Palazzo Roccanera became a place for Osmond to dominate Isabel, 

to make her fit within his ideal image of “normal behavior.” 

Asylums also served as spaces to protect society from madness.27 This did not mean that 

outside observers were not permitted, however, as members of the public often visited asylums 

for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, for the women confined there, being accessible did not 

equate to being heard. Instead, Foucault describes what they encounter as “only the nearness of 

observation that watches, that spies, that comes closer in order to see better but moves ever 

farther away since it accepts and acknowledges only the value of the Stranger.”28 The experience 

of “madwomen” in these asylums was thus one of entrapment at the hands of the patriarchy, 

observation, and silence. All these traits are notable features in Soper’s adaptation of Portrait. 

Constructing the Portrait 

“My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer” opens with a “prelude,” in which three pre-recorded 

quotations from Portrait, read by Soper, are projected through the speakers in a sequence of 

layered audio tracks: 

She had had the best of everything, and had never known anything particularly 

unpleasant. She had a fixed determination to see the world as a place of brightness, of 

free expansion, of irresistible action. She had an infinite hope that she would never do 

anything wrong. 

 

She had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the truth. She had taken all the 

first steps in the purest confidence, and then, she had suddenly found life to be a dark, 

narrow alley, with a dead wall at the end. A sense of darkness and suffocation took 

possession of her. 

 

 
26 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 477. 

 
27 Ripa, Women and Madness, 4.  

 
28 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 250. 

 



 

25 

 

 

The shadows had begun to gather. With incredulous terror she had taken the measure of 

her dwelling. It was the house of darkness, the house of dimness, the house of 

suffocation. Between these four walls she had lived ever since. They were to surround her 

for the rest of her life.29 

 

Each track begins before the conclusion of the former, with each subsequent track 

increasing in distortion and vocal processing effects to correspond with the tone of the quotations 

(Figure 1.1).30 

 

Figure 1.1. Kate Soper, “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” Track Layers in Tape Intro 

The first one features little distortion, allowing the words to be clearly heard. On the 

other hand, the last track is full of distortion, clipping, and static. The words can still be 

perceived but are “almost beyond intelligibility.”31 In addition, Soper’s range is lowered with 

each quotation, from high in the first one to low in the last. As she explains, “With the entrance 

of each successive section of text, the prelude moves from bright to dark and high to low, in 

terms of both mood and of timbre and vocal range.”32 With the start of each new track, the words 

 
29 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, ix. It should be noted that the quotes spoken in Voices are a composite of 

several sections of the novel. For example, the first quotation includes lines from chapters 4 and 6. Appendix B 

includes a comparison between James’s novel and Soper’s text to highlight where she draws the quotations. 

 
30 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 14.  

 
31 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 15.  

 
32 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 14. A more detailed account of the effects used can be found in Soper’s 

dissertation.  

 



 

26 

 

 

of the previous track begin to become increasingly muffled and fade into the background, 

causing the final track to overpower the first two. 

The texts Soper utilizes in the prelude originate from vastly different moments in the 

novel’s narrative: Track 1 reflects the feelings of a naïve American girl upon her arrival at 

Gardencourt, while Tracks 2 and 3 portray the muzzled wife she gradually becomes after her 

marriage to Osmond. Thus, the sequence of the taped quotations mirrors her character’s 

trajectory, while their acoustical presentation indicates that only the last “portrait”—one that 

shows Isabel suffocating in the asylum of Palazzo Roccanera—is the one that the audience will 

observe in Soper’s adaptation of the novel. In the remainder of the movement, we indeed only 

encounter a domesticated “madwoman,” conquered by her tyrannical husband. 

Isabel’s Silence: The Music 

Other than a single exchange at the movement’s conclusion, the text for “My Last 

Duchess: Isabel Archer” is delivered via the electronics.33 The soprano picks up a clarinet instead 

of speaking and singing. Assuming the role of an instrumentalist, her part blends in with the 

ensemble, rather than standing out as a soloist—her position in the other seven movements of 

Voices. Soper clearly specifies that the soprano “is to be identified with the protagonist here—

with Isabel—as directly and literally as she is with any of the other movements in which she 

sings or speaks the protagonist’s words.” Yet this identification would not be accomplished here 

through the soprano’s voice, only through her “physical stage presence, as she waits for her cue 

to begin playing.”34 

 
33 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 16. 

 
34 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 16. 

 



 

27 

 

 

The soprano performs a series of repetitive bisbigliando on the clarinet: the first figure 

for eight measures, the second for nine measures, the third for three measures, the fourth for five 

measures, the fifth for four measures, the sixth for five measures, and the seventh for nine 

measures. In Figure 1.2 below, the performer progresses through the sequence, with the distance 

gradually shrinking between the lowest note and the highest.35 Specifically, the figures’ range 

narrows down from minor seventh (A♭ to G♭) to minor sixth (B♭ to G♭), augmented fifth (C to 

G♯), minor sixth (C to A♭), perfect fourth (E to A), major third (F to A), and finally to major 

second (G to A).  

 

Figure 1.2. Kate Soper, “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” clarinet bisbigliando.36 

Pitch material in the piano, bass flute, saxophone, and violin accompany the 

soprano/clarinet. The piano sustains pitch clusters that change once Isabel’s next repetitive figure 

begins. In the remaining instrumental parts, the clarinet figures are “matched in character by the 

rapid, detached or fluttering melodic fragments, trills, or staccato sounds.”37 Although the 

agitated nature is similar, their musical material is rhythmically unpredictable, contrasting with 

Isabel’s robotic repetition, and features several extended techniques such as pitched air sound, 

 
35 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 17. 

 
36 This figure is adapted from the one that Soper provides in her dissertation. I have updated it to reflect the measure 

numbers found in the current published score.  

 
37 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 18. 

 



 

28 

 

 

simultaneous singing and playing, and tongue pizzicato in the wind instruments, as well as jeté, 

sul ponticello, and sul tasto in the violin (Figure 1.3). 

 

Figure 1.3. Kate Soper, “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” Ensemble Texture, mm.14-15. 

The mix of techniques among these players creates a timbral flurry that periodically swells in 

dynamics, then decreases in volume. Moreover, the bass flute, saxophone, and violin 

occasionally play sustained pitches that match those of the piano, before returning to their own 

frantic material; Soper describes the effect as a “gradual inundation of the initially turbulent 

material with static lines” (Figure 1.4).38  

 

Figure 1.4. Kate Soper, “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” Ensemble Texture, mm. 36-37. 

 
38 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 15-16 and 18. 

 



 

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The overwhelming amount and variety of sounds that surrounds Isabel’s clarinet part causes it to 

become buried in the texture of the other instruments. Together with the increasingly shrinking 

range of her bisbigliando, this disappearance paints a portrait of Isabel’s subjugation to her 

husband.  

 Commenting on Isabel’s character in James’s novel, Soper states that her “tragedy is that 

she orchestrates her own undoing,” describing her marriage to Osmond as a “self-made 

prison.”39 In “The Portrait of Isabel Archer,” Juliet McMaster describes Isabel’s acquisition of a 

fortune as a “moral embarrassment,” asserting that “her money had been a burden” and that she 

“was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more 

prepared receptacle.”40 In order to rid herself of it, she marries, as Soper puts it, a “penniless 

man.”41 McMaster insists, however, that Isabel is “a victim of circumstances and of unscrupulous 

manipulators” even though, “it lies within herself that she is such easy prey to them.”42 Soper 

does acknowledge that Isabel was misled, but I argue that her interpretation diminishes the 

pivotal roles played by James’s other characters in constructing Isabel’s prison. Isabel would not 

be in England to meet Osmond were it not for her aunt Mrs. Touchett’s influence. Similarly, she 

only becomes a target for the “villains” of the novel, Osmond and Madame Merle, after Mr. 

Touchett leaves her a fortune following his passing—which he is convinced to do by his son, 

Isabel’s cousin Ralph. While she certainly contributes to her own fate, I argue that Isabel is not 

the sole architect of her prison.  

 
39 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 16. 

 
40 Juliet McMaster, “The Portrait of Isabel Archer,” American Literature 45, no. 1 (1973): 55. 

 
41 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 16. 

 
42 McMaster, “The Portrait of Isabel Archer,” 57. 

 



 

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Soper posits that the pitch material for the instruments accompanying Isabel (i.e., bass 

flute, saxophone, violin, and piano) derives from her clarinet’s bisbigliando, representing 

Isabel’s exclusive construction of the prison.43 However, I interpret Isabel’s prison to be co-

constructed by her pitches from the bisbigliando and the pitch material of the ensemble: they do 

not derive from each other, but rather exist simultaneously. In contributing to the killing jar that 

confines Isabel, the ensemble functions as the other characters in Portrait, emphasizing Isabel’s 

function as part of the ensemble. Yet blending in with the group strips off her identity as an 

individual; she rids herself of “ideas,” of her unique voice, just as Osmond demanded.  

Osmond and his Duchess: The Text 

 While Soper is clear in her title and accompanying discussion that Portrait’s Isabel 

Archer is the heroine of the movement, after the quotes from the prologue, almost none of the 

movements text comes from James’s novel. Instead, she adapts the text of Robert Browning’s 

1842 dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess.”44 Browning’s protagonist is an unnamed 

widowed Duke, who is giving a tour around his house to a representative of his future wife’s 

family. Displaying a painting of his late wife, the duke sets out his expectations for his 

prospective bride, while hinting that he murdered his “last duchess” for not living up to these 

standards. Soper’s choice in text, by her own account, is predicated on the fact that “the tone, 

subject, and personality of the speaker are an uncanny match for the aristocratic, morally corrupt, 

Osmond.”45 Their intertextual connection identifies Osmond with the duke, showcasing the 

portrait of his former wife.  

 
43 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 17. 

 
44 For clarity, I will always use “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer” when referring to the movement and “My Last 

Duchess” when referring to the Browning poem.  

 
45 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 20. 



 

31 

 

 

Between the end of the prelude and the entry of Isabel’s clarinet line, the percussion and 

piano parts play accented hits (Figure 1.5).  

 

Figure 1.5. Kate Soper, “II. My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” Percussion and Piano, mm.2-3. 

Following the third attack, Osmond/Duke speaks for the first time, drawing his interlocutor’s 

attention to the soprano on stage: “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if 

she were alive.” Isabel does not begin her bisbigliando until Osmond commands the imaginary 

guest to “sit and look at her.” 

  Throughout the movement, Osmond/Duke is the character reciting the majority of the 

text—delivered through a pre-recorded audio track featuring Soper’s voice—while Isabel, as 

discussed above, remains silent and blends in with the ensemble. Although the composer ties 

Osmond to the voice reciting Browning’s monologue emanating from the speakers on stage, the 

question we must ask is where his character is located in relation to Isabel’s killing jar. Some 

contemporary musical representations of madness associate bodiless voices with auditory 

hallucinations, such as Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry 

James’s 1898 novella of the same name. I argue, however, that it is not the case in this 



 

32 

 

 

movement.46 Rather than hallucinations, Osmond’s disembodied voice evokes the image of an 

ultimate power or divine entity. He is positioned above both Isabel and his interlocutor, 

perpetuating his power over them. Isabel is the portrait described in Browning’s poem and 

James’s novel, and the representative from his bride-to-be’s family must obey Osmond’s 

commands to “look at her.” I believe that Isabel and Osmond’s relative positions exemplify 

Patricia Johnson’s contention, in the wake of Foucault, that, “the person who gazes is 

empowered over the person who is the object of the gaze.”47 Specifically, I place Osmond 

outside the killing jar, as an observer looking at his wife through the glass.48 

In the second half of Portrait, Osmond asks Madame Merle for information about Isabel, 

phrasing his inquiry as follows: “Is she beautiful, clever, rich, splendid, universally intelligent 

and unprecedentedly virtuous?” Madame Merle responds, “She fills all your requirements.”49 

Annette Niemtzow describes Osmond’s words as “those of a connoisseur in quest of a precious 

object,” characterizing him as a collector.50 It is as if Osmond were looking for a particularly rare 

specimen rather than a woman he wanted to marry.  

In her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that 

“traditionally, the woman displayed had functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the 

 
46 Wu, “The Ghosts of Madwomen Past,” 78. 

 
47 Patricia E. Johnson, “The Gendered Politics of the Gaze: Henry James and George Eliot,” Mosaic: An 

Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 30, no. 1 (1997): 39. 

 
48 This technique of utilizing a pre-recorded sample of a text by a character other than the heroine appears in another 

movement in Voices: “The Owl and the Wren: Lady Macbeth” (Lady Macbeth and the witches). I would describe 

these characters as similarly positioned outside the killing jar. 

 
49 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 291. 

 
50 Annette Niemtzow, “Marriage and the New Woman in The Portrait of a Lady,” American Literature 47, no. 3 

(1975): 390.  

 



 

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characters within the […] story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium.”51 

Applying this idea to James’s novel, Johnson claims that the “possession of Isabel as an art 

object is the ultimate desire of the gaze,” thus broadening the gaze beyond Osmond alone to 

encompass the novel’s narrator, its other male characters, and the reader as perpetrators against 

Isabel.52 Soper’s adaptation adds the audience to this list. In employing Browning’s monologue 

as the text for Isabel’s movement, the audience is integrated into the performance. They embody 

both the interlocutor within monologue—ushered around by the Osmond/Duke—and the 

spectator in the auditorium. 

Just as the duke and Osmond are conflated, so too are Isabel and the “last duchess.” 

Physically gagged by the mouthpiece of her clarinet, the monodrama puts Isabel on display only 

after Osmond successfully refashions her into the ideal image of a Victorian wife: silent and 

obedient.53 The duke’s drastic retaliation over a “perceived slight” parallels the system of “moral 

management” present in Victorian psychiatric practice.54 As noted earlier, Isabel’s one fault in 

Osmond’s eyes was that she had “too many ideas.”55 Comparable to the outspoken women 

sentenced to the asylum by the men in their families, both Isabel and the duke’s “last duchess” 

are threatened and punished for falling outside of the code of behavior outlined by their spouses.  

Osmond’s ability to display Isabel for the audience would not be possible without his 

suppression of her “mad” qualities: her independence and intelligence. Unlike historic operatic 

 
51 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 

eds. Leo Braudy and Marshal Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 838. 

 
52 Johnson, “The Gendered Politics of the Gaze,” 45.  

 
53 Chesler, Women and Madness, 100. 

 
54 Showalter, The Female Malady, 29. 

 
55 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 335. 

 



 

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madwomen, the audience never bears witness to her madness. By the time the tape prelude 

concludes, Isabel’s madness is already constrained and suppressed by her tyrannical husband. 

The audience are purely spectators, obeying the command of the autocratic Osmond, as he takes 

them on a tour of his wares. 

Soper stresses how physically exhausting Isabel’s performance is, going so far as to 

describe the soprano’s breaths as “gasping,” emphasizing Isabel’s capacity as the erotic object 

for the audience’s gaze.56 When she no longer has to play, the composer claims that the soprano 

will be “visibly out of breath from the strenuousness of continuous playing, providing an 

affecting visual for the final words of the tape,” which includes the phrase “There she stands, as 

if alive.”57 

 At the end of the movement, the soprano finally speaks, exchanging words with the 

violinist who plays Ralph.58 Their dialogue comes from a moment in the narrative just before 

Isabel’s marriage. Ralph, worried about Osmond’s intentions in marrying his cousin, warns her 

about her potential fate: 

 Ralph: “You’re going to be put in a cage.” 

 Isabel: “If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you.”59 

Although Soper does not designate it as such, I would argue that this scene functions as a 

flashback. It offers us a glimpse of the idealistic “American-Girl” Isabel, before she is subsumed 

 
56 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 17. 

 
57 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 21.  

 
58 Her recitation at the end of the movement does not disqualify her from being part of the collective. Soper 

frequently uses members of the ensemble to speak lines of text. This occurs across her compositional catalog in 

pieces other than Voices. See, for example: IPSA DIXIT (2010-2016), Nadja (2015), and Hex (2022). 

 
59 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 392. 

 



 

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into the grim reality the audience has just witnessed. In the score, the conversation is placed after 

the lines “Will’t please you rise?” from the Browning text. In the monologue, this is the line with 

which the duke invites his interlocutor to stand up so they may go downstairs to meet “the 

company below.” Following it, then, the duke leaves the room, and the portrait of his last 

duchess is no longer subjected to his gaze. In the context of “My Last Duchess: Isabel Archer,” 

the placement of Isabel’s lines suggest that she is only able to speak once Osmond is no longer 

observing her. Without his scrutiny, the scene showcases the Isabel that Osmond so detested: a 

woman with ideas, pushing back against the male authority.  

In sum, I interpret Soper’s adaptation of Portrait’s Isabel Archer as reflective of the 

oppression of moral management. The women who did not fit behavioral standards of the time 

were categorized under the broad label of “moral insanity” and thrown into the asylums to 

protect society. The audience observes her performance for pure entertainment, while being 

indoctrinated by her proprietorial husband and protected from her madness by the glass of the 

killing jar. 

 

 

 



 

36 

 

 

Chapter 2. Longing for Freedom: Emma Bovary 

 

 Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary centers on the whims and affairs of the 

eponymous character, Emma Bovary. During the novel, Emma grows tired of her marriage to her 

husband Charles and seeks pleasure in two other men: Léon Dupuis and Rodolphe Boulanger. 

Voices from the Killing Jar’s fifth movement, “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” draws inspiration 

from a scene in the second half of the novel in which Emma and her husband Charles attend a 

production of Lucia di Lammermoor. In the scene, Flaubert’s narration makes it clear that Emma 

is misinterpreting the action on stage to feed her craving for romance, formed by the novels of 

her youth. During the performance, the opera’s plot bores and confuses Charles, who asks his 

wife: “Now, why… is that lord persecuting her so?”1 Emma, caught up in the romance her 

imagination has conjured up, replies: “But he isn’t…he’s her lover.”2 Giving in, Charles admits 

he cannot “follow the story, because of the music—which interfere[s] greatly with the words.”3 

While the couple remains through the conclusion of the performance, Emma pays less and less 

attention to the events unfolding on stage, feeling that they “all took place at a distance, as if the 

instruments had become less resonant and the characters more remote.”4 The opera scene 

becomes a climactic moment for a leading thread in the novel: Emma’s desire to replicate the 

romance from the novels she reads into her own life. 

  In Madness and Civilization, Foucault reminds us that “imagination is not madness”: 

 
1 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 196. 

 
2 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 197. 

 
3 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 197. 

 
4 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 199. 

 



 

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rather, madness begins when a person believes their imagination to have some value of truth.5 

The opera scene from Madame Bovary illustrates his assertion well. During the performance, 

Emma is increasingly enthralled with the tenor singing the role of Edgardo. She begins to picture 

living a romantic life with him, joining him on his tours around Europe and attending his 

performances at prestigious opera houses. Slowly, she starts to believe that he is actually looking 

at and singing to her, increasingly certain that her fantasies and desires are becoming reality: 

“But a kind of madness came over her: he was looking at her now, she was sure of it.”6 

Throughout the rest of the novel, Emma continues to shape the events of her life into scenes from 

romantic literature, even arranging her own death—a suicide by arsenic—in line with her 

obsessive desire to imagine herself a romantic heroine. This endless longing to escape life into 

art forms the basis for Soper’s adaptation of Emma Bovary in Voices.  

 In this chapter, I argue that in her adaptation of Madame Bovary, Soper modernizes the 

historical trope of the operatic mad scene to critique gendered representations of madness. She 

splits Emma’s movement into two roughly equal sections. The first section, consisting of the first 

fifty-five measures, is constructed from short, repetitive musical loops. The second, from 

measure 56 and through the end of the movement, is built around embedded musical and textual 

quotations from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Verdi’s La traviata. Through my analysis, I 

examine and interpret Soper’s musical and textual representation of madness, connecting her 

adaptation of Flaubert’s novel to the traditional operatic mad scene.  

Repetitive Prison 

  The first section of Emma’s movement contains three types of musical material. The first 

 
5 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 93. 

 
6 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 198. 

 



 

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is a group of short musical cells that Soper instructs the performers to repeat a designated 

number of times. The second are fragments of those repeated cells. The third is what I identify as 

“non-cell” material, or in other words, music that is not repeated or related to the repeated cells. 

In Figure 2.1 below, the repeated cells are marked in pink, cell fragments are marked in green, 

and non-cell material is marked in blue; the same color key is used to mark other score examples 

in this chapter (for more details, see Appendix A). 

 

Figure 2.1 Kate Soper, “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” in Voices from the Killing Jar, mm. 1-6. 

 While the movement’s frenzied repetition may give the impression that it lacks structural 

coherence, Rebecca Leydon’s 2002 article “Toward a Typology of Minimalist Tropes” offers 

some assistance in decoding the chaotic fabric of the music. In the article, she adapts Richard 

Middleton’s concepts of musematic and discursive repetition to construct a typology of 

minimalist music, musematic referring to repetition of small cells and discursive to large-scale 

structural repetition, such as the exposition repeat in a sonata form. Through this model, she 

outlines six forms of repetition in minimalism including maternal, mantric, kinetic, totalitarian, 

motoric, and aphasic.7 Her totalitarian trope may be applied to understand the use of short-cell 

repetition in the first section of Emma’s movement. Leydon describes the trope as a type of 

 
7 Rebecca Leydon, “Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes,” Music Theory Online 8, no. 4 (2002): 16. 

 



 

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musematic repetition that “suggests a kind of ‘prison house’ effect, an inability for the musical 

subject to break free of an obstinate musematic strategy.”8 Leydon further posits that a change in 

the contents of the musical cells being repeated may indicate that the musical material is 

“overcoming the obstinate musematic strategy.”9 

 Through the lens of the totalitarian trope, then, Soper’s use of repetitive cycles of musical 

cells in the opening 55 measures of “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary” may be interpreted as the 

composer’s construction of Emma’s own prison—her killing jar. In “Mad Scene,” after the 

completion of each cell’s designated amount of repetition, Soper introduces new musical 

material, suggesting that Emma is succeeding in escaping her prison.10 Thus, her repetition, 

unlike Isabel’s, appears to lead to freedom. The composer fractures this illusion in measure 10, 

as the vocal fry cell (labeled Cell A in Figure 1.1), which originally appeared in measures 2 

through 4, returns (Figure 1.2). At this moment, the progress toward a conclusion reveals itself 

instead as a circular motion, leading back toward the initial repeated cell’s material, and in so 

doing, resetting Emma’s position in the killing jar. 

 
8 Leydon, “Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes,” 17. 

 
9 Leydon, “Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes,” 17. 

 
10 Leydon, “Towards a Typology of Minimalist Tropes,” 17. 

 



 

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Figure 2.2. “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 2-3 and 10-11. 

  Following the reappearance and repetition of the vocal fry cell, the soprano speaks two 

phrases in French: “J’aime bien les soleil couchant” (I think nothing is as wonderful as a sunset) 

and “Que m’importe, qu’il me trompe” (What do I care if he’s deceiving).11 Spoken 

consecutively, the two lines are incongruous: they do not belong together. While both phrases are 

related to Emma’s relationship with her lover Léon, they are extracted from separate, contrasting 

scenes in Flaubert’s novel. The first line is taken from the conversation during the couple’s 

introduction and the second from the moment when their relationship collapses, as Emma 

assumes Léon has betrayed her. Set side by side, the two lines are essentially meaningless 

gibberish, signaling Emma’s madness no less overtly than the unintelligible “nyeah” and 

“mmah” syllables she sings earlier in the section.12 In addition, the performer is instructed to 

give a sharply contrasting emotional charge to each line (“coquettishly” vs “furiously”). This 

difference contributes to the trope of Emma’s “operatic” madness, as rapid emotional shifts have 

historically been used as a sign of madness in operatic characters.13  

 
11 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 71 and 251. 

 
12 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, 66. 

 
13 Ellen Rosand, “Operatic Madness: A Challenge to Convention,” in Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven 

Paul Scher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 264. 



 

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  While unintelligible sounds are a more general indicator of Emma’s madness, Soper’s 

choice to assign her character linguistically comprehensible but incongruous text linked to 

specific moments in the novel carries additional meaning. In doing so, the composer incorporates 

Emma’s own emotional life and romantic relationships into the construction of her killing jar, 

driving the repetitive music. Flaubert’s heroine starts all her love affairs longing to experience 

the romance found in her novels (as illustrated in her flirtatious tone of “I think nothing is as 

wonderful as a sunset”) but concludes them furious and bored, when they inevitably fail to meet 

her expectations (demonstrated in screaming “If he’s deceiving me, what do I care”), before the 

cycle begins again.14 Similarly, Soper’s Emma continues to repeat her already-used melodic 

cells, as she remains imprisoned in a killing jar, her only hope of escape being her fantasies.  

Escaping the Killing Jar(?) 

 Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma demonstrates an obsessive desire to become a 

fictional heroine. She “[daydreams] of her youth, by seeing herself as [the] type of amorous 

woman she had envied” in literature, and during the scene at the opera, imagines herself growing 

wings “to escape from life and fly off in an embrace.”15 These dreams never become reality, and 

she remains dissatisfied in her life and marriage. In her essay “Minima Romantica,” Susan 

McClary uses film music such as Philip Glass’s score to The Hours to argue that musical 

repetition can be interpreted as a symbol of unfulfilled obsessive desire, with the desire itself 

represented through repetition, while a lack of clear climax or resolution reveals it to be 

unfulfilled.16 Soper employs this compositional strategy in her 2021 opera The Romance of the 

 
14 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, 67.  

 
15 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 71, 251. 

 
16 Susan McClary, “Minima Romantica,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel 

Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 59. 



 

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Rose, where a repetitive motif that does not fully resolve until the end, not dissimilar to 

Wagner’s Tristan chord, represents the protagonist’s love for a rose.17 

 In the same way, I argue that in “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary” Soper’s use of repetition 

represents Emma’s obsessive desire to escape, while the lack of clear motion toward a 

conclusion or climax implies her desire is unfulfilled. At measure 40, the first glimpse of a 

potential resolution appears. The repeated cells halt after Emma’s “vocal warm-ups” become 

“increasingly out of control,” and the music begins to radiate a dreamlike stillness that is unlike 

any of the previous material heard in the movement, suggesting Emma has finally entered her 

imaginary literary world.18 Her escape yet again proves illusory, though: as with the reprise of 

the vocal fry cell at measure 10, Soper shatters the atmosphere of calm by reintroducing the 

police whistle and a pattern of quarter notes in the percussion from measure 1, as Emma re-

enters her killing jar and the repetitive material returns (Figure 2.3). 

 

 

Figure 2.3. “V. Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” mm. 37-42 

  At measure 56, a similar gesture away from repetition occurs once again. This time, 

 
17 Her dissertation mentions that she was working on a piece based on Roman de la Rose while she was completing 

Voices. Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 83.  

 
18 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, 70. 



 

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however, Soper no longer leads us on by implying progress, then circling back to the reprise of 

repetitive cells. Rather, the audience remains in the world of Emma’s fantasies.  

 The piano enters with the opening chords of Count Almaviva’s recitative and aria “Hai 

già vinta la causa” (You’ve already won the case) from Act 3 of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. 

Throughout the opera, Almaviva tries to seduce his wife’s lady’s maid, Susanna. In Act 3, the 

Count is made aware of Susana and Figaro’s plot against him, and, upon hearing this, he 

becomes enraged and swears his revenge. Soper’s inclusion of Mozart’s music marks the 

beginning of the second section of the movement, where Soper introduces a second singer, a 

baritone, who stands up in the middle of the audience, moves toward the stage, and is instructed 

in the score to “pay no attention to the soprano.”19  

 By introducing the baritone, Soper creates a clear counterpart to the opera scene from 

Madame Bovary, in which Emma is enchanted with the tenor from the Donizetti production. 

Notably, however, the composer replaces Lucia’s Edgardo with Count Almaviva from Figaro. 

She explains her choice by suggesting that the Count makes a perfect parallel for Emma: “He is 

arrogant yet resentful, privileged yet entitled, and suffers from persecution fantasies and 

insatiable desire for new romantic adventures despite a devoted spouse.”20 In addition, I argue 

that Soper’s choice of this recitative and aria parallels Flaubert’s description of Emma’s 

disregard of an opera’s plot in favor of her own fantasy. Here, her tendency toward 

misinterpretation prompts her to imagine Count Almaviva as a lover calling her to a late-night 

garden rendezvous, rather than a devious antagonist threatening revenge, “a lord persecuting” 

her. 

 
19 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, 73-74. 

 
20 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 43. 

 



 

44 

 

 

 Soper’s treatment of Mozart’s music similarly leans into Emma’s romantic fantasy, as 

Soper’s Count sings his aria at a much slower tempo than the original. At measure 65 in Voices, 

the baritone begins to sing “Ah, no! I won’t leave this happiness in peace.”21 Mozart’s Count 

sings this section at Allegro Assai with rapid changes in dynamics and loud orchestral tutti, 

punctuating the endings of each phrase.22 On the other hand, Soper marks a moderate tempo and 

lacks the accented endings. This lends a gentler and less confrontational tone to her Count.23 I 

assert that Soper’s changes to Mozart’s score allow the audience to hear the Count through 

Emma’s ears, drawing us into her romantic fantasy, despite the “reality” of Mozart’s plot and his 

character’s actual message. 

  The text that Soper’s Count sings is also worth noting, as he performs excerpts from the 

recitative and aria.24 At measure 57, the baritone stands up and sings the opening of the recitative 

from Figaro: “‘Now we’ve won the case.’ What’s this? Have I fallen into a trap?”25 In the 

context of Voices, the Count is no longer discovering the other characters’ scheme to deceive 

him, as was the case in Figaro. Rather, the text signals the literal trap that he is in; he is 

imprisoned in the killing jar with Emma. Held against his will, his threats of revenge become 

targeted at the person imprisoning him.26 

 
21 “Ah, no! lasciarti in pace…” Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, x. Translation provided by Soper.  

 
22 On the recordings of Le nozze di Figaro I have listened to, the aria’s tempo ranges from ♩ = 170-190. Wolfgang 

Amadeus Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro, ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1973).  

 
23 Soper marks the section as ♩ = 112 in the score. 

 
24 Appendix D compares the full text of the recitative and aria to the text that Soper uses in Voices. 

 
25 “‘Ha gia vinta la causa.’ Cosa sento? In qual laccio cadea?” Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, x. (emphasis 

added). 

 
26 “Già la speranza sola della vendette mie quest’anima consola, e giubilar mi fa.” (Now the hope of revenge alone 

Consoles my soul and makes me rejoice). Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, x. 

 



 

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  As Emma notices the count, she sings “folie, folie!” —the opening to “Follie! Delirio 

vano è questo!” (“It’s madness! It’s empty delirium!”), a tempo di mezzo of Violetta’s aria from 

Act 1 of Verdi’s La Traviata.27 By quoting Verdi’s aria, Soper’s Emma invites the audience to 

perceive her as an operatic heroine, but unlike Violetta, who tries to sing herself out of the 

madness, Emma embraces hers. Specifically, in La traviata, “Follie! Delirio vano è questo!” is 

Violetta’s reminder to herself that Alfredo’s love is an illusion, and her desire for it is madness: 

“Free and aimless I must flutter from pleasure to pleasure,” she tells us (and herself) in her 

cabaletta.28 Yet, while Emma in Voices imitates Violetta’s cry, for her it is not a call to sanity; 

instead she immediately shifts her attention to the Count/baritone, singing: “He is looking at 

me.”29 Soper’s Emma does not define freedom as a love-free zone, the way Violetta does in her 

aria. Instead, in the same manner as Flaubert’s Emma at the performance of Lucia, she imagines 

that “the Count” is looking at her and begs him to embrace her as a lover.30  

 While Emma has achieved her desire to escape into her fictional world, it is a false 

freedom. Soper creates several obstacles between Emma and the fantasy of being embraced by 

the baritone that she longs to inhabit, reinforcing the distance between them. The first obstacle is 

the fact that the two singers speak different languages: Emma sings Flaubert’s text in French, 

while the baritone sings da Ponte’s in Italian. As a result, no matter how much Emma desires a 

romantic connection, the language barrier will always separate them. Secondly, there is a conflict 

of musical styles, as the baritone performs excerpts from Mozart’s tonal, high-Classical D-major 

 
27 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, 74. 

 
28 “Sempre libera degg’io folleggiar di gioia in gioia.” 

 
29 “Il me regard.” Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, x. 

 
30 Soper, Voices from the Killing Jar, x. 

 



 

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aria to piano accompaniment. Emma remains in her world of atonality, supported by the other 

members of the ensemble.  

 Finally, I must consider Soper’s use of performative space. The baritone, placed in the 

auditorium since the beginning of the monodrama, startles the rest of the audience by standing up 

suddenly in the middle of the fifth movement, thus revealing himself as a performer. This results 

in a deliberate redirection of the audience’s gaze, and a shift of position between the performer 

and the spectator. Soper describes this effect as intentionally “recalibrating the stage”: “The 

audience itself is now ‘onstage’ with the baritone, and the soprano is the spectator.”31 This action 

not only complicates the audience’s role in the mad scene but also the direction and power of the 

gaze.32 Soprano/Emma is no longer the object being observed by the audience; instead, their gaze 

is split between Emma and the baritone. Moreover, replicating her position in Flaubert’s opera 

scene, Emma becomes the audience, watching the “stage” (populated by the actual audience and 

the Count/baritone) from her newly recalibrated place in the “auditorium” (Figure 2.4). 

 
31 Soper, “Voices from the Killing Jar,” 43. 

 
32 Johnson, “The Gendered Politics of the Gaze,” 39. 

 



 

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Figure 2.4. “Mad Scene: Emma Bovary,” Redirection of the gaze.  

Even though the baritone eventually repositions himself to the stage, the original recalibration of 

the performance space cannot be ignored.33 The adjustment in the gaze may also explain why the 

baritone “pays no attention to the soprano.” In a real-life operatic performance, the bright