Crisis And Redemption

Edward Albee,winner of Pulitzer Prizes(three times)and Tony Awards(twice),is considered as one of the most outstanding American playwrights in the 20th century after Eugene O'Neil,Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.His first play came out in the 1950s,when the American society was in the process of social transformation,with prevailing McCarthyism,quick urbanization and expanding consumerism,all of which were posing a great threat on the psychological and social life of Americans.They were deeply trapped in the idea of "premature consumption" and "excessive consumption",indulged in the illusion of their "American Dream".It's Albee who picked a deep insight into these crises and tried to present them in his works to guide people out of the crises.His innovative writing is highly appreciated:integrating city images into his works to represent social backgrounds,using stage scenes to express the characters' emotions,employing space occupation to illustrate the conflicts among characters.By these means,he managed to construct a totally new reality before the audience to reflect a real living and spiritual state of the city dwellers.This dissertation,by analyzing a large number of city images,attempts to explore the unique city system in Albee's works,and the effects it has on redeeming individuals'self-awareness,reconstructing social relations,and reconciling social conflicts.Based on the features of city images and the themes of different Albee's works,the author will discuss,from the view of urban space,the four aspects of "Marginalized City","Simulated City","Mirrored City"and "Rationalized City" to demonstrate people's living states and Albee's representation of urban space.Through the interpretation of 14 works,this dissertation tries to convey Albee's worries about the city crises and his wishes to save the city.In the introduction,the generalization is provided,firstly,of the playwright's life experiences,writing background,writing style and writing features.After that,the urban space theories and the researches on Edward Albee from home and abroad are summarized,together with an introduction of the framework of this dissertation.This research mainly uses the space theories of Lefebvre and Edward W.Soja,combined with the urban theories from David Harvey,George Simmel and Kevin Lynch,the mirror-image theory of Lacan and the alienation theory of Fromm,to explore the complex conflicting patterns among the individual space,the family space and the social space.Meanwhile,the dissertation reveals the social crises emerging in the city life and illustrates the redemption processes of Albee himself and characters in the plays.The first part explores the "Marginalized City",which focuses on four of Albee's plays.With the analysis of the drama characters' living states accomplished,the marginalized situation which the characters are faced with is revealed.By exploring the historical background of the society,this part tries to present the influences of economy,society and politics on the city development and people's living state.The American urban riots during the 1960s and the economic recession during the 1970s brought about severe crises to the American society.This part analyzes four works of Albee from the aspects of family crisis,social crisis,racial crisis and natural crisis.In The Sandbox,the family crisis is clearly revealed by the lack of ethics.The old grandmother is forced to live under the stove,who curls up in a small place when she dies.Her daughter and son-in-law's maltreatments to her show the weak emotional relation and the separation among the family members.In The Death of Bessie Smith,the woman singer is not allowed to enter the hospital because of her skin color,representing the unfair treatment that the black people suffer in daily life and their serious living situation in contrast to the rapid development of urbanization.It can be inferred from this play that with the speeding up of the American urbanization,the racial crises are becoming more and more serious.In The American Dream,a large number of associations fail to solve social problems effectively.The new president permits the purchase of human beings and even encourages the abandonment of the elderly,revealing the twisted social values and social disorders which then trigger the spread of social crisis.In The Goat,or Who Is Sylvia?,the destruction of natural balance and the disclosure of the horrible desires are hidden behind the wonderful project of "World City".The main character Martin shifts his love to the goat.The twisted love not only ruins his family but also challenges the natural laws,which eventually leads to the natural crisis.Through the description of social life,all crises are embodied,which later become the essential factors to push forward the plot and show the characters' images.By means of creating certain images of marginalized characters and restoring the social space,Albee performs the city space successfully,adding more fruitful connotations to his works at the same time.In the second part of "Simulated City",through analyzing Albee's 3 works,the author discusses how Albee uses the "simulated" model to create the stage scenes and show the potential links among people,objects,events and scenes to the audience.By means of employing theatrical arts,Albee expresses the theme of urban crisis forcibly.In A Delicate Balance,through the use of theatrical stage structure space,Albee simulates the living state of the middle class,and succeeds in revealing the main roles' inner mind and the alienation and subsistence crises of human relation.In Seascape,the large area of sand and beach seems to be the reconstruction of nature.However,with the appearance of two talking lizards,the nature scene becomes the simulation of social space.In the process of communicating with human beings,the lizards make people realize their invasion into nature which as a result,causes the ecological crisis.In The Lady from Dubuque,Albee tries to represent the living scene of the middle class by means of simulating the death scene.The arrival of the death angel stimulates the horror of characters,which reveals their fear towards the unknown and uncontrolled situation.Meanwhile,the increasingly serious spiritual crisis is clearly presented.In these three works,the simulated city restores the city environment innovatively.Through performing the theatrical stage structure space,adding the natural space,mixing the living space and conflicting with the heterogeneous space,Albee fully shows the psychological transformation of main characters when they are confronted with unfamiliar environment and their isolated state in their daily life,through all of which multiple urban crises are represented.In the third part of "Mirrored City",the author uses Lacan's "mirror-image theory" to analyze Albee's "The Other" image and "The Other" scenes,which are used to confirm Albee's own identity.Through discussing Albee's construction of dramatic scenes and dramatic roles,we present the process of Albee's transformation from the "mirror stage","equal the ego in the mirror to himself 'to the "post mirror stage","separate the ego in the mirror from himself entirely".Albee returns to the real ego and completes his personal redemption.In The Play About the Baby,the missing baby is Albee himself,which implies Albee's adoption experience.The scenes of the Garden of Eden and the running children without clothes build the bridge between the past and present,which reflect Albee's blank memory in the childhood and his loss of self-consciousness due to the adoption experience.In Fragments,eight nameless characters share their stories on stage,through which Albee's real and subtle life experiences are demonstrated.These "Others" use the form of dialogue to illustrate Albee's real life experiences and review Albee's choices objectively,which also shows the playwright's method of using others' dialogues to fulfill his identity.In Three Tall Women,Albee changes his mother's image into "The Other",and lets her come across the young self,middle-aged self and her son in the same room.Regardless of time and space,they succeed in communicating with each other.From his mother's eyes,Albee's personal image is represented,and his own identity is constructed.In "Mirror City",Albee builds the urban space between the real and the imagined,and integrates "The Other" image and "The Other" scene into the drama stage,which emphasizes his reflection on his own identity.Through adding his personal role to the play and his own life experiences to the plot consciously,Albee fits into the real living scene,and thus accomplishes his personal redemption.In the last part of "Rationalized City",the author concentrates on Albee's four works,which mainly perform the alienated individual space,family space and social space,and restore the main roles' psychological processes from being lost to enlightened,from separated to united and from isolated to related.In The Man Who Had Three Arms,the main character hates the life of indulgence,so he uses his alienated body to make money.He isolates himself in the narrow and alienated space and refuses to communicate with other people.The "third arm" symbolizes his lost and isolated state.In Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,Marsha wants her husband George to inherit her father's presidential position,thus she insults George without mercy,which makes their martial relation become intense.When playing games with the guests,Marsha and George use imagined family space to escape from the reality.They fake the fact of having a baby,which further reflects the spiritual crisis of the middle class.In At Home at the Zoo,the zoo is the symbol of the whole alienated social space.Peter,who comes from upper class society,deals with everything around him carefully.He isolates from his wife Anna and tramp Jerry,which is the best interpretation of the alienation theme.In Everything in the Garden,Jenny earns money in an illegal way and squanders her money with her husband.In everyday life,Jenny and her husband conceal their sex trade from the other families in the community,and they use the garden to hide their criminal behaviors.They lose their self-esteem and morality to the purpose of making more money,which reflects a seriously alienated age from a personal,family and social level.Actually,the theme of "Crisis and Redemption" constantly appears in Albee's works.In Three Tall Women,Albee uses the conflicts among three women of different ages to reflect the crisis between his mother and him,as well as his wishes to compromise with his mother and to make up for the hurt that he brought to his mother,through which he can accomplish his redemption.Meanwhile,the theme of "Crisis and Redemption" is much more obvious in the works mentioned in Chapter 4.The man with three arms gradually experiences the epiphany in the disappearance and reappearance of the "third arm",and completes the recognition and regain of his personal identity.He gets involved into the society and finally achieves the goal of self-redemption.Through killing the illusory baby,George drags Marsha out of the imagined space,and he saves the whole family.In At Home at the Zoo,Jerry risks his life and rushes to the knife held by Peter and breaks the isolation between human beings.Jerry's purpose is to save the indifferent and alienated society.In Everything in the Garden,through rebirthing,Jack calls for the moral conscience of the whole society.Obviously,the theme of "Crisis and Redemption" is closely connected with Albee's works.They coexist with each other and push forward the plot jointly,and they further help express Albee's concern over the society.To sum up,Albee,as a playwright,succeeded in using the marginalized people appearing in the marginalized city to represent people's living dilemma,and employing the theatrical stage structure space to simulate the real urban life so as to reveal the family crisis,racial crisis and natural crisis appearing in the background of the industrial civilization.Undoubtedly,his works further reflect the survival predicaments and spiritual confusions which the middle class people encounter in their daily life.When confronted with increasingly serious city crises and writing dilemma,Albee adds "The Other" scene and "The Other" identity to the play,and represents his image in the eyes of "The Other",through which,he re-builds clear self-consciousness,accomplishes more classical works and finally realizes his own redemption.Meanwhile,the main roles in his plays try to break the alienated state by using the form of games,violent confrontations as well as "play in the play".Besides,these roles finally return to real and rational lives,thus realizing their personal,family and social redemption in the process of finding their personal identity,locating the correct family position and integrating themselves into the social relations.That obviously conveys Albee's strong wishes of making a change to the disappointing reality.Briefly speaking,it's through city writing and theatrical performing that Albee not only provides a different way for people to break down their spiritual shackles,relocate their personal identities and realize their values,but also offers the spiritual nourishment to those living in busy cities today threatened with various crises.