Invisibility in The Unnatural and Accidental Women

“White is a blindness–it has nothing to do with the color of your skin.” This line, spoken by Aunt Shadie in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women is perhaps the most significant.  The play introduces the audience to several distinct and complex Indigenous women, most of whom have been categorized, and therefore blindly discounted, as “victims” of their own unfortunate fate.  The theme of whiteness is recounted over and over throughout the play, for it works make the injustices faced by Aunt Shadie, The Woman, Valerie, Verna, Violet, Marilyn, Penny and Patsy invisible not only in death, but life as well: “[T]he way white people look up and down without seeing you–like you are not worthy of seeing. Extinct, like a ghost … being invisible can kill you.” Blindness allowed these individuals to be stereotyped and categorized into the heap of Unnatural and Accidental women, while a white, privileged male murderer continued to walk through the Lower East Side as a free man.
Further, the theme of invisibility draws attention to the media’s tendency to “re-victimize” those murdered through a narrative that focuses on the perpetrator. Often, media coverage in such cases reproduces a dichotomy where the guilty party is recognized to the point of stardom while the “victims” remain concealed and unrecognized under the weight of that label. This explains why Gilbert Paul Jordan and Robert Pickton become household names, while Valerie, Verna, and Violet persist in anonymous invisibility. The Unnatural and Accidental Women resists this dichotomy by giving the Women control of the narrative. The final scene portrays Rebecca murdering the barber, and subsequently returning the braids to all the women who had been wrongfully dismissed as victims of their own doing. Perhaps this scene symbolizes a newfound justice given to the women who had remained agentless and invisible throughout the biased case and its coverage.