Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1983 The seU of the Grotesque in the Plays of Edward Bond. Ann Marie Demling Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Demling, Ann Marie, "The sU e of the Grotesque in the Plays of Edward Bond." (1983). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 3842. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/3842 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This reproduction was made from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. 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Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 8318005 Demting, Ann Marie THE USE OF THE GROTESQUE IN THE PLAYS OF EDWARD BOND The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical PH.D. Col1983 University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE USE OF THE GROTESQUE IN THE PLAYS OF EDWARD BOND A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Speech Communication, Theatre, and Communication Disorders by Ann Demling B.A., Oklahoma State University, 1976 M.A., Oklahoma State University, 1978 May 1983 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Demling, for lending me the financial and emotional support that allowed me to persevere. For prodding me ever onward, I am grateful to Dr. Kenneth Cox at Oklahoma State University; Dr. Bill Harbin has provided a steady guiding hand as my advisor. Friends that at least offered a friendly or sym­ pathetic ear are many; among them I especially acknowledge Aileen Hendricks-Wenck, Gwen Olivier, B. Jaye Schooley, and sometimes even Robert G. Staggenborg. To them I wish the best of luck in completing their dissertations. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT............................................. ii ABSTRACT.................................................... iv INTRODUCTION................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE CONCEPT OF THE GROTESQUE................. 13 CHAPTER TWO: THE PLAYS OF SURFACE REALISM:................ 31 The Pope 1s Wedding S ave a The Sea The Worlds CHAPTER THREE: THE PLAYS OF INVENTED OR EMBELLISHED HISTORY........................ 74 "Black Mass" "Stone” A-A-America! Early Morning Bingo The Fool Restoration CHAPTER FOUR: THE WAR PARABLES:........................... 156 Narrow Road to the Deep North "Passion" Lear We Come to the River The Bundle The Woman CONCLUSION................................................. 244 LIST OF WORKS CITED....................................... 263 VITA........................................................ 268 ABSTRACT A contemporary English dramatist, Edward Bond writes plays that have often been controversial because of their use of cruelty, violence, and other forms of bizarre behavior which can be considered grotesque. The grotesque is a concept originating in the fifteenth century as a term referring to primitive artwork combining various forms to create a fanciful design. The term broadened in the eighteenth century to include literature and drama. Possessing a negative connotation, it referred to elements which were ridiculous, incongruous, absurd, or deformed. The Romanticists of the nineteenth century favored the grotesque as a valid aesthetic element which acted as a foil to the sublime and which created variety and contrast. In the twentieth century the grotesque becomes a prevalent force in drama. Theorists recognize that it elicits a dual response of fear and humor by juxtaposing incongruous and incompatible components. Its major purpose is to challenge existent norms and standards by shocking an audience into an awareness of the arbitrary nature of reality. Bond uses the grotesque to make the audience recognize weaknesses in the social structure. People turn into gro­ tesques when victimized by a harsh and unjust political and iv legal system. Objects associated with the grotesque include white coverings such as a sheet or bandage that become con­ nected with violent and unnatural suffering and death. Execution or punishment devices such as the crucifix, the jail, and the gibbet are also associated with the grotesque. Most significantly, Bond uses the grotesque to depict the moral growth of some of his protagonists, who must confront the grotesque and/or become grotesque in order to experience self-realization. As a didactic element, the grotesque threatens to over­ whelm its context, thus failing to orient the audience to the thematic statement. Bond has tended to decrease his use of the grotesque, although it still emerges in his plays to give emotional focus to his dialectic. v THE USE OF THE GROTESQUE IN THE PLAYS OF EDWARD BOND Introduction In assessing Edward Bond's contribution as a dramatist, Richard Scharine comments, "Bond is unique among English playwrights in that he has a world view, an evaluation of human potential and the conditions that obstruct it, that has remained consistent from his earliest work to his most recent."^ Bond's total commitment to an examination of his society has resulted in extremes of critical reception sel­ dom accorded to many writers. Born in Holloway, North London in 1934, Bond's lower class background contributed to his critical outlook on society. His father had been a farm laborer who was forced to move to London when he could not find work in the country. When the war started, Bond was sent to the Cornwall countryside to live with his grandparents. This displacement from his family, Bond states, "obviously had an enormous influence on me. Disruption of that sort makes one aware of all sorts of things that one normally wouldn't be--just the change from London to the countryside was so striking that it brought 2 one up abruptly." Growing up in a war-torn country also forced Bond into an early awareness of the potential for violent disruption 2 underlying everyday life. He recalls collecting shrapnel in the streets after air raids and observing the total des­ truction of houses in which he had once been. Similarly, he remembers his reaction when a sudden explosion in a park stripped the trees bare of leaves. The memory, he states, "was one of the reasons I wrote that scene [the baby's killing] in Saved. There was always the possibility that 3 violence could really explode." Bond adds that his aware­ ness of human evil partially derived from his knowledge of Hitler: "He was a human being, yet he was behaving in a way which was inhuman, grotesque. It created in one's world an image of total evil, you see, which was very curious because it wasn't explained by anything which one had experienced before.Bond's disillusion reflects that of a generation of post-World War II dramatists whose works, as John Russell Taylor describes, contain "a violence harnessed in various ways, through ritual, theatrical formalism, tight verbal control, comic endistancement, but still inescapably there as a motive force in writing."** After the war Bond returned to London, where he attended a modern secondary school until he was fifteen. Maintaining that "what was obsessively in the minds of everybody in the school was obedience, and some sort of conformity,"^ Bond asserts that