The Vagina Monologues

The unnamed narrator of “Hair,” one of the original monologues in the first edition of the play, exemplifies the type of individualized storytelling typical of many of the Monologues. While the narrator shares a specific experience from her own life—her husband pressured her to shave her vulva—the speaker’s anonymity lends an archetypal, “everywoman” aspect to her character: She is not the only woman who has been pressured to alter her appearance (or sexual behavior) to please her partner. In this sense, the woman’s relative anonymity, including her agelessness, serves to make her story relatable to a broad range of women who have experienced similar oppression.

Several characters in the first-edition monologues, including “The Flood” and “The Vagina Workshop”—who are assigned Jewish Queens and English accents, respectively—are similarly individualized characters.

The narrator of “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy” is a sex worker who, in her late thirties, left her “boring” job as a tax lawyer to engage in sex work—specifically dominating other women. She is portrayed as confident and knowledgeable as she describes her “art.” The narrator notes the change in her dress, trading “blue corporate suits” for “lace and silk and leather” (77). The narrator is especially fascinated with the act of moaning, saying, “I couldn’t believe that big, outrageous, ungoverned sounds like that just came out of women” (78). She notes that she used to feel embarrassed about moaning, particularly when she was with men. Throughout her narrative, she describes learning about the sexual needs of other women, describing her role as that of a “conductor, maybe, or a bandleader” (80).

In contrast to the many speakers whose narratives focus on sexual trauma or ignorance of their own bodies, this narrator’s story represents a celebration of discovering one’s personal sexuality, with a focus on the joy she experiences in both her own sexual fulfillment and that of other women. Her story thus furthers the theme of Feminine Community and Empowerment.

The first edition of The Vagina Monologues received criticism for its exclusion of the stories of trans women and its conflation of womanhood with having a vagina. In this “Spotlight Monologue,” a soliloquy written in verse focuses on the experience of a transgender woman who finds joy and peace through socially and surgically transitioning after a childhood and early adulthood marked by trauma and pain, only to experience her boyfriend being beaten to death for his relationship with her.

While the narrative focuses on the arc of an individual character, this monologue exemplifies the way V has compiled interviews with multiple women to create a singular, representative character. The author applies a similar strategy to the character at the center of “Crooked Braid,” whose character was compiled through interviews with multiple women on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The narrator for “My Vagina Was My Village” gives voice to the travesties of the Bosnian War, where more than 50,000 women were raped, tortured, and murdered. In the story, the narrator uses her vagina metaphorically to describe the violence inflicted upon women and the consequences of such traumatic violence—including being unable to experience pleasure and disassociating from the body.

The narrator also conflates her vagina with the villages of Bosnia that were also destroyed by violence; the vagina becomes not only a source of pleasure and violence but also a home once loved and now lost. The narrator moves from reminiscence of both home and her vagina to the present day, where both are now lost to her. While the monologue represents the experiences of thousands of women in Bosnia, the story is told from the perspective of a single narrator.