Deconstructing The Western Myth: A Study Of American Masculinity In Sam Shepard's Three Family Plays

Sam Shepard began his play-writing career in 1964 in the off-off-Broadway theatre,and later won his fame and popularity with his family quintet: Curse of the Starving Class(1977),Buried Child(1978),True West(1980),Fool for Love(1983)and A Lie of the Mind(1985).In the 1990 s,he returned with four new plays.His plays explore the roots of America's contemporary bewilderment.The theme of the cowboy and the West as the foundational American myth recurs in Shepard's works.Through a comparative study of Shepard's plays with the Western Formula,this thesis seeks to get a better understanding of his works.The West as a concept has recurred in much American writing,and they have formulated some conventions about it.The West is a regenerative,free land in which men could experience harmony between nature and the self.As the iconic figure of the West,the cowboy is an individualist who stands apart from society and disciplinedly utilizes violence.In dealing with these conventions,Shepard communicates his vision of the Western myth in his works.This thesis investigates the shaping and representation of masculinity in his three family plays.They are his primary family play Curse of the Starving Class in 1977,his fourth family play Fool for Love in 1983 and after a hiatus The Late Henry Moss in 2000.This selection allows us to appreciate the full development of Shepard's thinking on the West and the cowboy in his works.This thesis is divided into five parts.Chapter One is the introduction.In addition to a brief look into Shepard and his works,a literature review of the major Shepard criticism,it briefly introduces the beginnings and development of the Western Formula,and elucidates the major characteristics of its two key components: the Western setting and the Western hero.Chapter Two mainly analyzes how the ideal image of the cowboy as a lone drifter soaring above society is overturned in Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class.Setting the play against the drawbacks of a growing consumerist society,Shepard represents through a grotesque satire the male protagonist Weston(a homophone of ‘Western')the chaotic and nonsensical life in which he struggles in: he is incapable of recognizing and interpreting his true circumstances,fails to impose order on this chaos,and finally has no alternative but to be alienated from his community.Instead of his reluctance to choose a domestic life like the western hero,his drifting is mainly due to his inability to cope with the disparity between the ideal life of the cowboy and his own abject life,and shoulder familial responsibilities.Chapter Three looks into the crisis of the contemporary cowboy with regard to self-reliance in Shepard's Fool for Love.The cowboy is no longer an individualist,but one caught in conflicts between fantasy and reality.He is unable to fill the gap between role-playing(trying to measure up to an ego-ideal)and having no role models(ego-ideals)to measure up to,only to assert his individualism in his imaginative world.In an attempt to highlight the inner instability of the male protagonist and his neurotic anxiety about identity,Shepard intervenes in what would otherwise be a naturalist representation of gender conflicts a temporally incomprehensive and hallucinatory staging,blurring the distance between reality and psychological fantasy.Chapter Four investigates the crisis of masculinity as manifested in the subversion of the Western myth of violence as a regenerative force in Shepard's The Late Henry Moss.This play manifests the physical and psychological damage of this violent legacy to a man's family and himself.In this play,Shepard breaks the ambivalent attitude toward hard masculinity in his previous plays and points directly his finger of blame at violent American manhood.In an effort to demonstrate American men's unstable subconscious or conflicted psyche underneath their tough appearances,Shepard unwinds the play in almost totally fragmentary,anti-realistic and nonlinear form closer to a postmodern quotation of surrealism.The last chapter is the conclusion.In the traditional American Westerns,the self-made cowboy,riding a horse alone in a vast landscape,enters the community briefly to help it restore law and order with his violent skills.Shepard's west,instead,is depicted as a frontier wasteland roamed by aberrations of the traditional cowboy.In these three plays,the masculine domination collapses,and the men are trapped between the idealizations created in the Western myth and the disillusionment of postwar reality.This entrapment triggers their psychic “split”.It is contended that by subverting the traditional ideal images of masculinity in the American Western,Shepard exposes that a number of men in contemporary America are experiencing a crisis of existence.