Subversion Of The Male Myth--A Study Of Male Images In Albee's Plays

Edward Albee, (1928-)has been widely claimed as one of the most influential and controversial American playwrights, the spokesman of the Theatre of the Absurd in America. As far as the characters are concerned, they are distinctive because most of them have distorted disposition. Especially the male characters, they are passive, emasculated, and play the roles of being defeated and alienated. Although some scholars have attributed this phenomenon to Albee's homosexual identity, no one so far has made a relatively systematic study of the subversion of masculinity through textual analysis of Albee's representative works.The present thesis, through analyzing the distorted male disposition presented by Albee's anti-heroes in "The Zoo Story", "The American Dream" and "Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", examines the different presentations of the subversion of masculinity, investigates the underlying forces that work upon the distortion, and argues that Albee's portrayal of the distorted sexuality relationship, especially the emasculated male characters proves him to be a serious social critic who subverts the long-rooted main stream ideology on which the conventional male images are constructed.The male images are constructed within a cultural and social context. Those conventional male images in literature are the embodiments of classic male myth---they are the self-made men who posses the qualities such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity; they are the symbols of American way of bravery and dignity; they are the reflection of discourse power constructed by power and main stream ideology. Albee'subverted description of male disposition negates the conventional male myth as well as the main stream ideology.Jerry and Peter in The Zoo Story are the representatives of the lower class and the middle class. Both of them encounter a great crisis in masculinity because of the broken male link with the conventional society and the distorted sexual tendency. By portraying the two abnormal male characters, Albee wants to attract people's attention to the numb living conditions and attack traditional male code that restricts people from communicating with each other.In The American Dream, the emasculated Daddy and the deformed Young Man are the symbols of the deformed American mythology. Daddy lives under Mommy's rein and relies on her entirely for the confirmation of his masculinity. The Young Man who embodies the "American spirit" is deformed both physically and mentally. By portraying the two male images, Albee subverts the myth of masculinity and the myth of the American dream, shows his great satire of family violence as well as the artificial social norms.Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a record of the deterioration of masculinity of George who is humiliated in his marriage and keeps his father's image by living in a lie of an imagery son. In this play, Albee examines the relations between truth and illusion and appeals to the public for the realization of the disillusioned fantasy.In conclusion, the subversion of the conventional masculinity is the subversion of the main stream ideology. By doing this, Albee reveals the social evils and breaks the American myth that blinds people. Compared with general absurdist, Albee is a responsible social critic who opened a brand new way for the development of the absurd literature.