Spike Heels

“He sees something on the coffee table, picks up a book and slams it down. He takes the book to a small garbage can by his desk and knocks the dead bug off.”

This brief stage direction reveals much about Andrew’s self-righteous prissiness. He cannot have any imperfections in his world—quietly getting rid of the bug underscores his need for control and his ease with wielding power. This quiet extermination is contrasted in Act II when Georgie far more dramatically kills a bug in her apartment.

“I am gracious, I am bright, I am promising. I am being the other person for them because I do want this job but there is a point beyond which I will not be fucked with!”

Georgie wonders whether she consents to her position in the workplace and or whether she doesn’t even have the power of consent. She knows exactly what she is doing with her risqué dress, her double entendres, and her flashy walk. But she also knows that she is smart, a quick learner with genuine people skills—all of which should make her appearance irrelevant.

“Jesus Christ, you guys think you own the world. I mean, who made up these rules, Andrew? And do you think we’re actually buying it?”

Georgie understands the artificial construct of patriarchy that traps her. Georgie’s exasperation speaks for generations of women who have endured the oppressive reality of the male-controlled workplace.

“So he says, he doesn’t have to be polite either and he could just rape me if he wanted to because everybody else is gone and the security guard isn’t due until ten.”

The play does not represent this crucial scene on stage, so Edward’s harassment of Georgie appears only as a classic he-said-she-said impasse. Still, the idea that Edward imagines that threatening Georgie with a violent crime is playful banter is repugnant. Later, he will downplay the remark as a lame joke—exactly the excuse used by various powerful men accused of harassment, including Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, and future presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“All the dinners and the books and the lessons and the job. What is this, anyway? We been doing this for like, six months, or something, you know? I mean—what’s going on here, Andrew?”

Georgie has no idea that what she took as friendship was actually Andrew’s six-month campaign to fix her by introducing her to books, refining her vocabulary, and changing her wardrobe. Andrew is so proprietary of her that he gives her to Edward. She is just beginning to understand that Andrew’s playacting of Pygmalion is closer to that “pig thing”—a man’s way to control and dominate a woman.

“What history teaches is that people have never learned anything from history. Hegel. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape. James Joyce.”

When Georgie offers to have sex with Andrew, he worries about keeping the upper hand. Rather than be physical, the stuffy and prissy professor of political theory reasserts dominance by lecturing her on her mistakes and on her promiscuity—a scolding he delivers with references to Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Hegel, and Joyce to remind Georgie of his intellectual superiority and her under-educated background.

“Relationships mean something. People mean. You don’t sleep with every person you’re attracted to; that’s not the way it works.”

Andrew’s pretentious and extensive argument is about the importance of relationships—a lecture he delivers to explain to Georgie why the two of them cannot be together. Andrew’s hypocrisy is clear: He wants Georgie as a subordinate inferior, not a partner. Later, we see from his relationship with Lydia that he cannot handle being with a woman as powerful as he is. Hypocritically, Andrew dismisses Georgie as shallow, when he is the one making romantic decisions based entirely on appearances.

“Look I thought you were getting a kind of crush on me, so I thought it might be good for you.”

Andrew casually reveals that he wanted Georgie to work for the sexual predator Edward as part of his master plan to acculturate her to office life. With a fiery reaction Georgie finally realizes that she has been a pawn in Andrew’s Pygmalion scheme. The moment exposes Andrew as a controlling manipulator and a threat to Georgie. 

“As a term, ‘sexual harassment’ is so overworked, it’s almost meaningless.”

Edward’s smug defense of his threat to rape Georgie echoes typical dismissive attitudes to sexual harassment claims in the 1990s. Edward dismisses the comment as a joke that only feminists would misconstrue, using the term “feminist” as an insult rather the political philosophy that women deserve the same rights as men. He argues that since he never specifically implied that Georgie could only save her job by having sex with him, he has done nothing to abuse his power as her boss by coercing her.

“I’m not going to make the world a better place. The human race does not do that. We make it worse; we always have…we just pollute everything so nothing can survive here anyway. That is what the human race does.”

Andrew believes that his crusade to fix Georgie without her say-so reflects his idealism—a wildly wrongheaded self-delusion. Edward’s contrary approach to life is pragmatic: History shows that whatever humanity touches it corrodes, so no one can better the human condition.

“I think they look sad and ridiculous.”

Andrew is jealous of the spike heels that Georgie wears to her date with Edward—they indicate her intention to have sex with her boss. Georgie relies on these painful shoes to make her legs look good and to feel tall and thus more empowered within the confines of the system she is trapped in. Andrew insults shoes—this lashing out is the only way he can cling to power over her.

“You’re better than this. I made you better than this.”

With this cringe-worthy remark, Andrew tries to convince Georgie not to go on a date with the man whom Andrew specifically asked to prey on her. Jealous rage makes him slip up here, admitting that he considers Georgie an object that he has been molding. Georgie rightfully storms out, furious to be treated as a commodity.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk.”

In a stunning moment, the sexually predatory Edward is too emotionally vulnerable to have sex. Instead, he wants reassurance about Georgie’s feelings for Andrew. Edward is suddenly worried that Georgie is using him and wants to establish his place in Georgie’s affections. This honest declaration enables Edward a potentially permanent escape from the narrow confines of acceptable masculinity that patriarchy creates.

“You think that makes you something? That doesn’t make you anything. This is all—this is a fucking game to guys like me; you’re a piece of furniture, for God’s sake. I could go through three of you in a week!”

Hurt by Edward’s refusal to have sex, Georgie lashes out at him. In turn wounded by her refusal to talk, Edward returns fire by grasping for the archetype he was about to shed—that of the promiscuous misogynist who only sees women as sexual trophies for men. Edward is vicious, denying Georgie’s humanity and reducing her to a disposable object.

“For the past two months, I have been under the distinct impression that any time I spend the night here, I am actually sleeping with two people—Andrew and yourself.”

Dismissed by Andrew as cold and calculating as a way to minimize his guilt at having an emotional affair, Lydia reveals her sensitivity and awareness. She knows now that her fiancé has an obsession with Georgie that prevents him from committing fully to their marriage, but instead of turning on Georgie, Lydia sympathizes with the other woman. Lydia will be the key to Georgie’s evolution.

“It means that now instead getting harassed by jerks at the local bar, I get harassed by guys in suits. Guys with glasses. Guys who talk nice. Guys in suits. Well, you know what I have to say to all of you? Shame on you.”

Exasperated, Georgie summarizes the plight of all working women: Whether tending bar in a working-class neighborhood or running an office full of educated lawyers, women face harassment. Georgie attempts to shame men in power for viewing women at their workplaces only as sexual objects.

“You know what my father told me, when Andrew and I decided to get married? Never trust a man who thinks he can change the world.”

In many ways, Lydia is the play’s center. After Edward caricatures her as cold and Andrew mocks her for being descended from an old-money family, Lydia reveals the men’s hypocrisy and misogyny. She is nothing like their insults: In fact, Andrew is responsible for the sexual dysfunction at the heart of their relationship, while Lydia is willing to defy her family to marry a lowly academic for love. Lydia has risked her status for Andrew; now, she realizes that he has never done anything of the kind for her.

“I love to dance. It’s so fucking romantic…It always makes we want to have sex. Men are so dumb, they’re so busy trying to get you in bed they even figure that out.”

The dance between Lydia and Georgie provides a beautiful contrast to the other physical couplings in the play: the ugly groping between Andrew and Georgie and the drunken making out between Georgie and Edward. The dance has a loose elegance that suggests the two women have found actual friendship. After this dance, the two leave together for the rest of the night; Georgie returns different—more vital, aware, and confident.

“Fine. Fine…You were right. I think I probably—my feelings for you are stronger—All right. I am in love with you. All right?”

Andrew reluctantly backs into the admission that he may be in love with Georgie. Georgie is far easier to see as a project, a thing he is teaching, than a person. Andrew declaration comes across as defensive—as if he is being made to say something he does not want to say.

“We really are a couple of assholes.”

Clear-sightedly, Edward acknowledges that both men have misjudged Georgie, taking advantage of rather than actually getting to know this complex and vibrant woman.

“Remember when we could just blame everything on women? Not a specific woman. Just, women in general. The whole idea of women.”

Edward’s misogynistic observation summarizes the patriarchal view of women. Men, deliberately and cynically, have always blame women with impunity, denying half of humanity their individuality and treating them as idiotic decorative objects.

“I was fucked up. I mean, yesterday, I was actually going to screw someone I didn’t much like to prove some sort of stupid point that I can’t even remember what it was. It’s the kind of shit I used to do all the time.”

At the center of Georgie’s evolution is the night she spends with Lydia. When she returns, Georgie declares that she is different, that a single night with Lydia has changed her into an empowered woman ready to go toe-to-toe with her boss without using sex for office politics.

“She’s kind of great and you have to stop running around telling everybody she’s a vampire. It’s not funny and you’re a jerk, okay?”

Georgie defends Lydia as far more complex than the men giver her credit for being. In scolding Edward for his shallow vampire comment, Georgie reveals her newfound empathic connection with Lydia. The play suggests that women’s friendships are far more rewarding than heterosexual relationships or male friendships, which depend on one-upmanship and competition.