| Family drama is an enduring staple of the American tradition, which attempts, in all its art forms, to forge an identity for a nation so diffuse that its whole is the sum of seemingly unrelated parts. The visionary emphasis on the well-ordered and healthy family as perhaps the highest good has given way in the modern period to more specular and often spectacular visions of familial disease, as we move from the cheerful and beneficent symbolism of the First Family ruling the country to the Manson family terrorizing it. Many modern American dramas seem dedicated to the proposition that the individuals presented as a family share nothing more than the stage itself. And yet, the more disparate the parts, the tighter the whole and the hold they have over each other.; This dissertation examines in detail selected dramatic works of Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Edward Albee (The American Dream, The Zoo Story, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, True West) within the context of their shared obsession with family violence. In these plays, what should defy the idea of family serves instead to define it. None of the violence is random or impersonal: everyone is related by the blood in their veins as well as the blood they spill. But as Rene Girard argues in Violence and the Sacred, violence often results when difference and distinction (within a family or an entire culture) collapse; violence is the reflex action of a cultural system attempting to reassert its own integrity and difference, and thus its identity. Using archetypical examples from Greek and Jacobean drama, I examine the family as a dramatic unit by focusing on certain members of the family of violence--fratri-/patricide, incest, and revenge in the form of sibling rivalry--to investigate a time-honored dramatic tradition: the violation of the family by the family for the family. |
