| This dissertation examines the families of four twentieth-century American plays: Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and Marsha Norman's Getting Out in order to analyze the relationships between individual desire and the variety of emotional restrictions that exist within emotional patterns and interactions of the Tyrones, Lomans, Kowalskis, and Howsclaws. The purpose of this dissertation is to (1) interpret and evaluate the families depicted in the texts using psychoanalytic, feminist, and existential theories; (2) illustrate that literary studies are relevant to constructing a theory of the modern family; (3) and demonstrate that the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism, and existential philosophy are relevant to a study of the family in literature (I use Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Walter Davis, Jessica Benjamin, Foucault, Hegel, Sartre, and Nietzsche). For my study the importance of the dysfunctional family lies not so much in its marking any deviation away from "proper" or normal family functioning. Rather, "dysfunction" represents the possibility to disclose how the "normative" restrictions operate within the emotional phenomena of the family to disrupt the "calm" and expose the violence within the "healthy functional" family today. I use a dialectical methodology in order to see how psychological, political, and philosophical definitions of the "self" inform both literary and critical representations of the dysfunctional family. Whereas I analyze the families of O'Neill and Miller to establish the psychological basis for the dialectical interrelationships between the individual and the family, I shift my focus on the families of Williams and Norman to an analysis of the dynamic interrelationships between the family, the individual, and the larger social patterns that are perpetuated by and within the family and individual. Thus, by progressively extending my analysis outward to the socius, each successive chapter--beginning with O'Neill and ending with Norman--reflects a deepened exploration into the "inwardness" of the unconscious. |
