A Study Of The Docile Body Of Modern Man In Edward Albee's Two Early Plays

A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. Edward Albee employs his talent of language to create a world filled with power and physical control. In his plays it is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body-to the body that is manipulated, tortured, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces. Mr. Albee concentrates mainly on the negative, repressive conception of power, one which exercises the intense and continuous hold on the body for assuring the docility and utility of all the individuals. In Albee's plays The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the modern man's body is at the center of body issue which reigns the notion of "docility", which joins the analyzable body to the manipulable body. Albee's Plays are dedicated to an exposing that personal relationships are corrupted by the super-civilization society to serve material and powerful ends. Foucault is very important in understanding of docile body of the modern man. He advocates that in each society, it is always the body that is at issue-the body and its force, its utility and its docility, its distribution and its submission.In the modern world, the body is still in the grip of very strict power which explores it, trains it and uses it under a quite different new technology of power. This thesis explores body question in Albee's two representative plays from five parts. The first part is the introduction, through which the background information concerning Edward Albee and the critical materials on him have been briefly included. What is more, Foucault's power theory and writing on the body theory are very useful and crucial to the new interpretation of Albee's works, so they will be also mentioned in this part. As for the second part, it consists of a history of the body and a detailed body analysis in Albee's two famous early plays. While being as the crucial parts of the thesis, the third and fourth parts will use Foucault's theory to explain that it is power at the center of the issue—power exercises over the body for assuring the docility and utility of all the modern men. In the last part, it comes to the conclusion that Albee's plays aim to attack that personal relationships are corrupted by the modern civilization society in which people can be identified only by their functions.