Edward Albee

The post-world war II American social and cultural setting was ambiguously featured with enforced conformity in the name of prosperity and Americanization of the nation. Despite of this fact, American writers, especially, dramatists conveyed their message against this fixation through variety and intellectuality. Edward Albee's The Zoo Story is one of those literary assets which dedicatedly cut through the illusions of contemporary American social and cultural ethos. Here, his characters are seen struggling constantly with their insecurities and existential angst in the society. He presents America, the so-called 'Land of Free and Home of Braves' (note 1), in such a portrayal that unveils the traps of cages and confinement underneath. The target of this paper is to trace Edward Albee's heightened awareness about the postwar American socio-cultural reality evident in The Zoo Story. It also looks for the voice in which the text echoes out the anti-communist, materialistic, gender-coded boundaries, coupled with paradoxical media representations, religious bordering and how Albee challenges these issues with an anti-establishment tone.

This dissertation aims at a reevaluation of the critical views regarding some of the female characters that appear in the plays of the American playwright, Edward Albee. In this research, I hope to disavow the traditionally reductive readings of these characters which have resulted in serious charges of misogyny against their author. Rejecting such views, I draw on feminism and psychoanalytical criticism, especially Luce Irigaray’s theories of mimesis to propose a new reading of these characters, demonstrating Albee’s acute awareness of the flawed phallic economy which objectifies, commodifies and marginalizes women. Furthermore, by attending to the differences between his earlier works and the later ones, I trace the signs of development in his representations of women. These differences prove his growing consciousness and sensitivity about the way he depicts women in his works, and implies the influence of the increasing power and acceptability of the feminist discourse.
The introductory chapter to my dissertation includes a comparative timeline of Albee’s career and the struggles of the Women’s Movement in America, as well as an overview of the basic theoretical framework used in this study. The second chapter focuses on the character of Nurse in The Death of Bessie Smith, and points out Albee’s awareness of the oppressive economical, social and political aspects of a woman’s life. Chapter Three deals with the female characters of All Over, a play which belongs to the middle phase of Albee’s career. This play, it is argued, is a chilling portrayal of the deadness of familial links and feminine pleasure that patriarchy breeds, yet it also includes female characters who try to avoid being tied down by tradition. Unlike the dominant trend in analyzing these women, I propose that Albee’s depiction of these characters does not intend to degrade women, but to condemn what the phallocentric logic of the social order does to women. The fourth chapter is devoted to the tracing of Irigaray’s subversive mimetic strategy in two plays. It is in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that we see woman as a self-conscious actor. Martha is the first of Albee’s women who deliberately and consistently indulges in the task of subversive mimicry of the feminine gender role to challenge the patriarchal social order and the phallocentric discourse. The idea of woman as the mimos is developed further in the analysis of Occupant, where the woman’s theatricalization of her role as a woman is more decisive and effective, without the excessive anxiety that this process seems to engender in Martha, since it is combined with the empowering creativity that is at the heart of woman’s subjectivity. In the final chapter I conclude, primarily, that Albee’s representations of women in his plays are far from hostile and, secondly, that Albee has demonstrated the possibility of change by gradually allowing his female characters the playful mimicry which is in Irigaray’s thought a necessary prerequisite for revolutionizing the dominant phallocentric frame of mind.

During his lifelong career, Albee has created a world inhabited by people struggling to understand and assert their identity within a social sphere of change and crisis, as his plays, being critiques of humans and their society, bring to light psychosocial, sexual, philosophical, and political problems lying at the heart of human existence. In like manner, Butler, tracking changes in contemporary social and political arena, has drawn upon various traditions in psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminism, and queer criticism in order to develop a wide set of reflections on gender, sexuality, language, and identity. This study has tried to merge Albee’s worldview expressed in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf into Butler’s philosophy to illuminate Albeean world through a Butlerian perspective.

Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story is about the interaction
between its two main characters Peter and Jerry dramatizing
the former’s disillusionment in the hands of the latter;
Jerry’s speech and action aim at shattering Peter’s obsession
with material things, his easy justification for stability, and
his reluctance to understand the alienation at the core of his
life. Jerry’s success in changing Peter comes at the cost of
his life; however, there are interesting techniques deployed
by him in order to convert Peter from an incommunicative
person to someone who finally understands the value of
human connection. Concentration on the conflicts between
the two characters, detecting the causes of their alienation,
and finally analyzing the techniques that Jerry employs to
convert Peter, are the main issues discussed in this study
with the hope to enlighten the hidden corners and revealing
the implied meanings of a play which is quite rich in its
symbolic suggestiveness.

Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story has been a staple of absurdist drama since its premiere in 1959. The play has been interpreted to be a social protest statement, but just what is being protested is up for debate. Many have argued that the play’s focus is anti-capitalism, pro-homosexuality, or other causes which Albee was known to address; nevertheless, despite the disagreement upon what the message was intended to be, the themes of the play are nearly unanimously agreed upon: loneliness, isolation and miscommunication. The play begins innocently enough, albeit in a very strange fashion; however, by the end Albee has completely shocked his audience with the suicide of the presumptive hero, Jerry.  Much conflict has arisen over whether Jerry intended to kill himself on that day, or chose to do so in the heat of the moment; however a close examination of the text affirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jerry’s suicide was premeditated, not as his primary purpose, but as a means to achieve his ultimate goal: to finally be understood.

Thesis:
Edward Albee claims in the subtitle of his drama, The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, that the play falls within the category of tragedy. In this abstract of my final thesis, I review this claim, by applying Aristotle's famous definition of Tragedy in Poetics to The Goat and comparing The Goat to other drama. Through this review I can gain a deeper understanding of whether Albee's claim holds up in Aristotle's definition, that is still widely recognized today. Another possibility may be that Albee's intention was to trick the recipient, or be ironic and critical of society by claiming such an absolute statement.

(invited chapter)  “Who Is not Sylvia? A Character Analysis of Stevie from Edward Albee’s The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?” Contemporary Literature Criticism on Edward Albee. Ed. by Lawrence Trudeau. Layman Poupard Publishing, Columbia, SC, 2018 (forthcoming) (Reprint)

Knjiga po prvi puta primjenjuje konstitutivno načelo odnosa Američke drame prema Američkom snu, temeljnom mitu pokretaču američkog društva. Time se dobiva nova klasifikacija Američke drame jer je primjena načela pokazala da unutar realističke američke drame postoje dva jasno izražena pravca afirmativnu koja pokazuje uspješne likove unutar američkog društva i subverzivnu koju opisuje ova knjiga. Subverzivna američka drama prikazuje gubitnike (losere) koji ne uspijevaju u "savršenom svijetu" i koji se neprestano osjećaju kao stranci čime negira funkcioniranje Američkog sna. Analizirajući pedesetak reprezentativnih drama autorica nudi dalju podjelu subverzivne drame na staru i novu subverzivnu dramu. Stara (O'Neill, Miller, Williams, Hellman, Inge) piše iz vjere u Američki san i zato gubitništvo smatra grijehom, traži i nalazi razloge i opravdanja za nj, a gubitnike na kraju kažnjava ne bi li ih iskupila. Nova pak (Albee, Rabe, Mamet, Shepard) više ne misli da je biti gubitnik grijeh nego vlastiti izbor, odnosno njihovi gubitnici unatoč predispozicijama za uspjeh ne uspijevaju jer su jednostavno nesposobni prilagodbi i okolini.

This essay considers texts in which adults consciously invent children whom they represent to the world as “real,” children who can then richly investigate the ethical limits that their inventors may test in other people.  Drawing on clinical psychological theories of children’s imaginary playmates – and the health that psychologists ascribe to the juvenile practice of inventing imaginary children – I consider what the adult invention of the child might suggest for the “uses” of children more generally.  Texts under consideration are Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, and Armistead Maupin’s quasi-biographical The Night Listener.

To obtain the full paper, please contact the author directly via email:
niladrimahapatra222@gmail.com


This paper is an endeavour to make a study of the tension between the society and the individual self in the celebrated play The Zoo Story by Edward Albee; and this tension, at the end of the play, behoves a sickness like nausea which brings the death of the main protagonist Jerry to get rid of the claustrophobic existence in an absurd world that seems like a zoo. Herein, the play represents a society, which indicates the topsy-turvy condition of 1950s America where the postwar disillusionment and the McCarthyism were occurred, as a form of macabre ideology of larger social self through which the little self of Jerry, is dominated. Jerry, being a denizen of purposeless absurd world, tries to make a relation between this larger self and his little self; but again and again all has gone in fiasco. He is alienated not only with other people but also with animals; and victimized by deadening loneliness like a 'lone wolf'. Jerry tries to find a real meaning of life and wants to escape from 'death-in-life' condition of living but repeatedly, he is hurled in an alienation of no exit. At last, the paper shows that alienation becomes a nauseous disease for Jerry; and in an outburst of it, he commits suicide which is very much philosophical.


To obtain the full paper, please contact the author directly via email:
niladrimahapatra222@gmail.com

If, as C.W.E. Bigsby noted in his seminal article "The Strategy of Madness," it is true that the terror that Edna and Harry relate at the heart of A Delicate Balance, is really an "awareness of absurdity [that] can itself emerge from the apparently reassuring repetitions of daily life" (224), then we might ask after the significance of the repeated confessions that Agnes makes to frame the play itself, repetitions that are themselves a consciousness of madness or of going mad. Is there not something "reassuring" in the act of repeating or confessing the fact that one may go mad? Is there not something normalizing, controlling, interning that happens in her repeating those words? That is, isn't there something about her repetition that maintains that she is not going mad because she is repeating the fact that she may go mad?

These:
Edward Albee formuliert in seinem Untertitel den Anspruch, bei dem Drama Die Ziege oder Wer ist Sylvia? handle es sich um ein Stück, welches der Definition der Tragödie entspreche. Ich untersuche in der vorliegenden Abhandlung anhand einer Analyse des Werks und historischer Werkvergleiche, der Definition von Tragödie in Poetik von Aristoteles und anhand von Texten der Theaterwissenschaftlerin Margret Dietrich, inwieweit diese Aussage standhalten kann. Das heißt, ob das Stück in das Genre Tragödie einzuordnen ist, oder ob der Untertitel ironisch oder sarkastisch zu verstehen ist.

Terms like "anguish", "void", "dehumanization", "estrangement" and "nothingness" have become, if not household words, at least basic to the jargon of the literature that describes socioeconomic realities. Twentieth century American drama is highly preoccupied with the impact of material life on the individual. It describes the amount of fissure and the damaging cracks in the US family due to the consumerist tradition. Edward Albee's The American Dream is glaring example of what might be called a textbook case of the response of the American drama to this existential vacuum. This article offers a Baudrillardian reading of Albee's magnum opus. Considering materialism as the hyper-real which substitutes the real values, the aim of this scrutiny is to highlight its negative effects on family, society, and the American dream.