A Study Of Alienation In David Mamet's Plays

David Mamet(1947-),a famous American playwright,has won numerous awards in the U.S.and the U.K.,including the Pulitzer Prize,the Obie Award,the British Society of West End Theatres Awards,and so on,and is widely acclaimed as one of the most prolific and most popular playwrights.The construction of his characters,the language features and humanistic concern in the drama have won the praise of many scholars and aroused the interest of academic circles from many countries ever since the publication of his early dramatic works such as Lakeboat,Duck Variation,Sexual Perversity in Chicago.The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed his quick rise from an obscure playwright into a famous master.Although the study of Mamet began later in China than in America,it has evolved into one of the most heated research objects due to Mamet's achievements and scholars'enthusiasm.Up until now,Mamet's plays have been studied from the perspectives of ethics studies,feminist criticism,discourse analysis,stylistics studies and so on.Since most of the research works are presented in the form of journal articles,they can not reflect the overall glory of Mamet's drama.In addition,the research perspectives are relatively limited and unable to broaden the vision of Mamet's study.Therefore,the dissertation having done a relatively systematic review on the research works of Mamet from home and abroad,attempts to apply Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's theory of alienation to analyze Mamet's American Buffalo,Glengarry Glen Ross and some other plays in order to reveal the deep reasons that cause the severe contradictions between the characters in the plays.The first part of the dissertation is an introduction.It firstly introduces the research objects,classifies existing research works and defines the theory of alienation used in this dissertation.Because Mamet has written many plays and that the research works on them employ various methods,it seems necessary to conduct a comprehensive summary and classification on the plays and research results so that an appropriate point can be chosen for the present study.Secondly,this part makes a comparison between different concepts of alienation because philosophers and scholars have diversified interpretations on the notion.Thirdly,this part also lists the research methods used in this dissertation,points out the new findings,and shows the directions for future work.Apart from the introduction,the dissertation consists of three chapters,aiming to analyze respectively the alienation phenomenon in business activities,interpersonal relationship and love.The tide of commodity economy has greatest influence on the society in a direct and violent way and business activities are the most common and noticeable in society.Therefore,the first chapter of the dissertation lays stress on the influence and exact forms of alienation in business activities.The research objects of this part are Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning work Glengarry Glen Ross and another play The Water Engine:An American Fable which also talks about commercial crime.The alienation in the form of "money worship" is analyzed in this part.The study of Glengarry Glen Ross concentrates on the salesmen,their office manager Williamson's performance and the firm's owners.The dissertation analyzes the roles mentioned above and their performance and finds that the immoral or illegal behaviors are closely connected with alienation which originates from the way in which the competition is conceived.The Water Engine:An American Fable focuses on the businessman Lawrence Oberman's performance and compares his performance with his actual deeds and exposes how the sanctimonious man works with others to chase biased objectives.Both plays have such plots that business activities and crimes are mixed together.On the surface the incentive is attributed to the lack of ethics and moral imbalance;however,the reason behind it is the pursuit of one's interest.The alienated people view physical materials and money as the ultimate purpose for which they try every means available even criminal actions to obtain.The fourth part of the chapter studies the language of the plays and tries to find how David Mamet use language to vivify the characters and exhibits the negative role of alienation in the business activities.The interpersonal relationship is important,for it binds the people together and in this sense it decides how people interact with each other and exerts fundamental effect on society,so the second chapter conducts a research on alienation in the interpersonal relationship of Oleanna and American Buffalo.In the normal social atmosphere,care and help are the common forms of interpersonal interaction;however,in an alienated social relationship,the individual's indifference and hatred prevail,the usual intimate relationship between people gradually disappears.Teach in American Buffalo persuades the owner of the junk shop to change his assistant in the theft,conceives most details of the stealing and keeps on maligning others.In effect,he is the character who makes story move forward and therefore his performance can be regarded as the focus of the play.The dissertation avails itself of social performance studies to examine the contradiction in his words and deeds and finds that there is deep-rooted sense of alienation in him.Carol in Oleanna undergoes the transformation from a solicitant to a bully and she is determined to destroy everything the professor owns,just because the professor refuses to satisfy her improper requests.Therefore,the dissertation concentrates on the discussion of the great difference in her performances when she respectively acts as a vulnerable or mighty individual and exposes the alienation features in her deeds and words.The dissertation analyzes the two plays,exposes the influences alienation exposes on interpersonal relationship and makes an attempt to trace to the root which causes it come into being.The fourth part of the chapter focuses on plot-and-scene analysis,examining how the plot develops in each scene.With a close reading of the text,the author reveals how the author reveals how Mamet chooses various special scenes to exhibit the disastrous impact that alienation exerts on the interpersonal relationship.Love is the mightiest form of all human feelings and is essential to human beings;love is also an inseparable part to literature and literary research.Coincidentally,Mamet produces many plays concerning the alienation in love which is also worth studying.The third chapter conducts a research on the alienation in love embodied in Mamet's The Woods and Boston Marriage.Mamet's works such as The Woods and Boston Marriage develops around the characters in love and contemporary people's attitudes towards love are revealed through the conflict of the characters in the play.When The Woods was put on the stage,it caused a lot of media attention and comments which mainly focused on the language and plot;Boston Marriage paid much attention to lesbian love,loyalty and so on.But in the author's point of view,these two plays reflect the "alienated" characters shaped by the capitalist industrial production mode.Nick in The Woods shows little interest in what his lover Ruth cares about and refuses to take his obligation in love;instead,he asks for love from Ruth when he needs and is keen on sexual desire.The dissertation studies his behaviors from the perspective of performance studies and reveals how his inability to love is exhibited in the play and how this kind alienation affects life.Anna in Boston Marriage starts a new close relationship with a man who is married with the excuse that she can get enough money to support her lesbian lover Claire.The dissertation analyzes his words and deeds by means of examining her performance closely and refutes her excuse and points out that what Anna plans is rooted in alienation.As a result,the dissertation analyzes her several tendencies originating from alienation such as money worship and non-frustration principles and shows that both her views and her actions are unrealistic.The chapter concludes that alienation is changing people's usual view on love and undermines its basis.The last part of the chapter explores how Mamet uses alienation effect to highlight the catastrophic effect of alienation in love.The last part provides a conclusion which reiterates the research findings on the alienation in Mamet's plays in the previous three chapters.This part concludes that alienation analyzed in the previous chapters is a wide-spread phenomenon in almost all of Mamet's plays,which reflects Mamet's anxiety over the deviation from regular norms of society.The dissertation makes use of theory from performance studies to analyze alienation of different forms in the six plays,which exhibits the concrete ways alienation exerts effect on society and reveals the rooted reasons of alienation.Since alienation casts undesirable influence on society and hampers the benign development of society and regular interaction between people,all the members of society should keep an eye on it.Fomm's theory on alienation can not only explore the deep-rooted reasons of characters' queer behaviors in the plays but also trace their origin from social development.What is more,the research results of Mamet's plays from the perspective of alienation can function as a precious reference to the construction of a harmonious society.