Recapturing Animality: Liberalism In Edward Albee’s Plays

Edward Albee is one of the most prominent contemporary American playwrights.Though once labeled as a member of “Theatre of the Absurd”,Albee often demonstrates realistic concerns in his plays because of his intense political and social criticism.The ambivalence between absurdism and realism vibrates recurrently in Albee’s plays: reality often appears absurd in his plays,while absurdism is a disguise over his trenchant criticism of social problems.The duality of absurdism and realism in his plays often leads to absurd scenes that has animals interacting with humans,where animals often serve as a catalyst to evoke animality in human characters and overcome such social maladies as narrow-mindedness,selfishness,and hypocrisy.The recovered animality helps them to see all creatures as equal and treat what were previously abnormal behavior with magnanimity.In this sense,these plays reflect Albee’s critical attitude toward the American social reality and his liberal political stand.Structuring analyses of Albee’s political concerns along the axis of deconstructed humanity-animality dichotomy from the perspective of zoocriticism,this thesis argues that the human characters’ recapturing animality in three of Albee’s plays,At Home at the Zoo(2004),Seascape(1975),The Goat,or Who’s Sylvia?(2002),functions as an antidote against American people’s “intellectual,emotional and moral laziness”.Albee seems to advocate that the Americans,especially the complacent middle-class,should step out of their narrow comfort zone and engage in socio-political life.Chapter I explores an absent sense of socio-political engagement in the middle-class represented by Peter,who lacks animalistic “violence” and passion as a result of his intellectual sloth in At Home at the Zoo,the prequel to Albee’s first play The Zoo Story(1959).Liberalism that advocates intellectual awareness serves to break the illusion of an ideal American society in the context of The Zoo Story’s performance history,the aftermath of Red Scare and the prevalence of conservatism.The second chapter argues that recaptured animality in human characters helps to cure their emotional paralysis in Seascape against the backdrop of the “Me” Decade in the 1970 s.In view of Albee’s doubt about evolution,this chapter investigates an anti-evolution,anti-conservatism transformation of human characters,i.e.,how Charlie undergoes a metamorphosis from rational inertia to irrational passion,and how both Nancy and Charlie transform from sexual numbness to enthusiasm in an encounter with a lizard couple.Chapter III analyzes how the incorporation of animalistic sexual complexities into humanistic gender norms becomes the antidote to moral slumber,i.e.,the conservative return to “normative” conventional morality and ignorance of “abnormal” behaviors at the turn of the new millennium against the background of the culture war in The Goat,or Who’s Sylvia?.Albee transplants classical Greek tragedy into postmodern sexual discourse to redefine tragedy,grafts the clash between humanity and animality onto the conflict between biological sex and sociological gender,and epitomizes a culture war between the conservative and the liberal through the ideologies of different characters.Through the lens of animality,this dissertation expects to yield a fresh understanding of Albee’s perception of humanity as well as liberalism in Albee’s plays and in American society as a whole in the discourse of zoocriticism and the larger socio-political context,which attempts to offer a different perspective in drama studies.