Allegory Of Albee

’s American D Essay, Research Paper

Allegory in Edward Albee’s

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Our understanding of Edward Albee’s achievement in The American Dream (1960) has come a long way since 1961 when Martin Esslin hailed it as a “brilliant first example of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd”1 and 1966 when Nicholas Canaday, Jr. labeled it America’s “best example of what has come to be known as `the theatre of the absurd.’”2

The shrewdest assessment of absurdism in Albee is by Brian Way, who shows convincingly that, although Albee has successfully mastered the techniques of theatrical absurdism, he has nevertheless shied away from embracing the metaphysics that the style implies.3 That is, Albee knows that Theatre of the Absurd is “an absorption-in-art of certain existentialist and post-existentialist philosophical concepts having to do, in the main, with man’s attempts to make sense for himself out of his senseless position in a world which makes no sense.”4 But Albee nevertheless “believes in the validity of reason–that things can be proved, or that events can be shown to have definite meanings.”5 Structurally, the chief evidence for this claim is that Albee’s plays, including The American Dream, move toward resolution, denouement and completion rather than the circularity or open-endedness typical of Theatre of the Absurd.6

In regard to content, Way’s point may be extended by contrasting the implications of the titles of The American Dream and Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, an absurdist drawing room comedy to which Albee’s play seems indebted in many ways. Ionesco’s title derives from the Fireman’s passing reference to the woman who “always wears her hair in the same style.”7 She is not a character in the play, nor is she ever referred to again. She is a non-sequitur, as is everything else in that circular play, since nothing follows logically from what precedes it.

Albee’s title, on the other hand, is rich in intellectual and moral substance, since it refers to a host of ideas and feelings associated with the fondest hopes of participants in the American experience, both historic and contemporary. The title is also a fitting thematic label for the play since the dialogue explicitly refers to the American Dream after the Young Man appears on stage. Ionesco’s title–like all titles, an authorial comment on the text–rightly says that the play lacks meaning; Albee’s says that it refers to a lot of meaning.

That meaning is most obviously associated with the Young Man, since he is specifically identified as the American Dream by the dialogue of the play. The less obvious–but more important–meaning is embodied in Grandma. The goal of this essay will be to clarify how Grandma’s character and experience bear most of the meaning of the American Dream that Albee wants to communicate in this play. As we shall see, that meaning fits squarely within the mainstream American humanist tradition stretching back to the early, idealistic years of the American republic.

Even though she is a physical disaster, many critics have noticed various kinds of attractive qualities in Grandma. Don D. Moore finds her “the most appealing, the most refreshing and the wisest figure in the play.”8 Canaday, who has written the most about Grandma, praises her for her realism, clear vision, enjoyment of living, and creative response to life, especially the way she resolves the knot of the plot.9 Daniel R. Brown rightly, in my opinion, finds in Grandma a “licensed speaker,” someone who tells us what to think and therefore becomes a kind of mouthpiece for the author.10 A few critics have also associated Grandma with the American Dream, among them being A. Robert Lee,11 George E. Wellworth12 and Ronald Hayman. For instance, Hayman says, “There are hints that Albee intends her to be . . . an incarnation of the American nineteenth-century liberal values which were still alive earlier in the twentieth [century].”13 However, all such comments have been incidental, made in passing. They do not do justice to the major role that Grandma plays in the drama. After all, she is the main character in the play, appearing on stage more of the time and having more speeches than any other character. It is, in effect, her play, and she deserves detailed examination as the main bearer of traditional values in the play.

Indeed, she fits squarely within the archetype of “The American Adam” sketched persuasively by R.W.B. Lewis in his seminal book by the same name on American intellectual history.14 The American Adam is, of course, the archetype of a new kind of human being, freed from the corrupt institutions of the Old World and facing an unspoiled garden utopia, armed with power derived from youthful vigor and spiritual innocence. On a rather superficial level, Grandma is Lewis’s agrarian hero subduing the American Eden of a wilderness with industry and ingenuity. Mommy verifies Grandma’s association with the American countryside by saying, “Oh, Mrs. Barker, you must forgive Grandma. She’s rural.”15 Mommy also acknowledges Grandma’s continued industry, despite her old age: “I can’t stand it, watching her do the cooking and the housework, polishing the silver, moving the furniture” (p. 67). And Grandma herself claims the role by saying, “Pioneer stock” (p. 112), when the Young Man admires her resourcefulness in the bakeoff contest, where she has