The Grotesque Lives With Neurosis

Beth Henley is one of the most outstanding women playwrights in America.In1981,the work Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Crimes of the Heart was subsequently made into a major Hollywood film that introduced her work to an international audience in 1986.Like so many twentieth –century American artists,Henley will assume her place as a major dramatist in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.In Beth Henley's plays,her dramas carry on the gloomy,horrible,decay and grotesque Gothic literary tradition and immortalize many incomplete female characters that grow in pent-up and bizarre living environment.This is best illustrated in Crimes of the Heart.It depicts the fortunes of the Magrath sisters who live in Mississippi.One is the lonely Lenny without fertility,one is the radical singer Meg who aspires abnormal life style,the third one is the rich wife Babe who has the death complex and kills her husband because of the abuse.The three sisters gather in Grandpa's house for escaping the real life,the old resentment,the broken emotion,the ugly reality and the grievous situation make them admit these consequences of crimes of the heart,then they can get the freedom and rebirth in life and heart.This thesis aims to make a study of the inner world of the women with the help of Austrian psychiatrist,psychologist and the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic feminist theories in Crimes of the Heart,for displaying how the women who grew up in the environment lacking in maternal love search for the independent identity with the grievous and awaken in special culture background and life environment.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,the thesis is composed of three chapters.The introduction introduces the background of Beth Henley and Crimes of the Heart,as well as the current research on her plays in domestic and overseas countries.It also introduces Freud's theory of personality structure and theory of neurotic personality as well as the critique,integration and development of psychoanalytic feminism and Freud's theory,discussing the inner world of the women who suffer from frustration and distress caused by the absence of love in childhood,restriction of the social norms and the real life from a psychoanalytic perspective.The first chapter focuses on grotesque life with depression,which causes neurotic personality.As the eldest sister,Lenny,experienced a longer childhood devoid of mother's love and a enmeshed youth as a maid for her grandpa who stands for culture and social norms.She is unhappy about the present life but unable to change it.The low self-esteem about her shrunken ovary makes her not to get along with any man.The two factors make her struggle in her grotesque life.To release the depression,Lenny appears to be eager for food which she even can not share with others.In the end,with the love of her sisters,she has the ability to face her heart and the following life finally.The second chapter dwells on Meg' grotesque life.She demonstrates her narcissistic neurotic personality through her indifference to others.She is the first daughter to find their mother's suicide.The evidence of her own eyes brings her non recoverable trauma.She treats others inactively and can not love others but desire to be loved and be paid much attention.While life attacks her dream,she is reduced from a brilliant singer to a grocery attendant and her pursuing vanity breaks into bubbles.She also displays unique oral cravings to drown out the neurosis and reduce her narcissistic lack of empathy for others.She returns to a happier state of oral satisfaction that she had before her mother committed suicide.In the end,the meeting with the doctor makes Meg realize that she can begin to care about others.The third chapter centers on the anxiety that results from the deeply rooted despair of neurosis.Babe is the youngest sister,she lost the most important one who can give her security in her childhood.She could not accept the truth of losing her mother and wondered the cause of her mother's death.Her marriage is her grandpa's capital of making him glorious and boasting,and it is Babe's chain that shackles her thoughts,binds up her freedom and tortures her spirit.Babe's depressive marriage without love and the reason of mother's suicide that make Babe fall into deep anxiety and isolation with others.It is the sister's love that awakens her hope of living and makes her realize she is not lonely.The conclusion is the summary of the analysis.By employing Freud's neurotic theory,this thesis reaches the conclusion that Beth Henley provides a penetrating insight into the feminine spiritual world.The unique culture and the family environment have important impact on the form of the neurotic personality.The three different outcomes of her women characters,either the end of Lenny's getting the birthday cake she has been longing for earnestly,or Meg's starting to face her pasthypocritical life,or Babe's telling her sins sincerely and facing the consequence of killing her husband bravely,all of these are actually the results of searching for independent self getting rid of the imperfect personality.Crimes of the Heart reveals the process of the women's experiences of struggling and awakening in the social reality where women cannot replace the men's political and economy status,it reflects the women's unremitting efforts on pursuing the female self in the process of growing up.