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MADNESS, THE SUPERNATURAL, AND CHILD MURDER IN TRAGEDY by GENNIFER ARWEN HUTCHISON DAVID DEUTSCH, COMMITTEE CHAIR YOLANDA MANORA WILLIAM ULMER HILARY GREEN A THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2017 Copyright Gennifer Arwen Hutchison 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Child murder in modern American drama draws heavily from Greek tragic traditions, both stylistically and thematically. The number of playwrights (and authors) who have chosen to include infanticide in their works in both ancient Greece and modern America is larger than is to be expected of a topic considered taboo in both of these societies. The three great tragedians, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, each chose to include the act in at least one of their plays. Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and Eugene O’Neill utilized the structure of Greek tragedy in their own plays, including child murder. This thesis will look into the connections between classical Greek tragedies—specifically those written by Euripides—that include filicide, madness, and the supernatural—and modern American literature and drama, including Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. These plays and novels showcase an even balance between mothers committing the act of child murder and fathers committing the act of child murder. Furthermore, the works chosen demonstrate diversity of race, socio-economic positioning, geographic locale, and historical time. Of primary import, these connections will show recurring instances of the past haunting the present to create the future. ii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my wonderfully supportive family. I could fill one hundred pages more naming all the ways that each of you helped me become the woman who I am today, the woman who wrote this thesis. Know that I am, and will forever be, so appreciative of all of you. Jackson, thank you so much for being my rock now and always. I am lucky to have you in my life and I can not wait until May 20th. It will be my greatest joy to spend the rest of our lives together. I love you. My mother, my father, and my aunt deserve special mention because they each helped to mold the student that I am today. With the three of you loving English as much as you do, I do not think I ever had a chance of loving anything else. For that, I am eternally grateful. To my mother, who inspired my love of writing and literature from the very start, you make me keep pushing forward, even when I want to give up. You tell me “yes” a hundred times when I tell you “no” ninety-nine. I would not be here today, in graduate school and in life, without your love, support, and encouragement. I am proud to be just like you. I love you. To my father, who inspired my love of literature just as much as my mother, thank you for always showing me how to fix what is broken, in life and in my writing. I love you. To my aunt, who wrote her own Master’s thesis in 2008 to show me that girls like us can and girls like us should. I will always remember that as the moment I knew I wanted to follow in your footsteps. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do for me. I love you. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am honored to have this opportunity to thank the many colleagues, friends, and faculty members who supported me throughout the process of researching and writing this thesis. I am especially grateful for the help of David Deutsch, the chairman of my thesis. I would not have been able to complete this project without his guidance and understanding. He widened my perspective with comprehensive and invaluable feedback. Moreover, he encouraged me to set a reasonable timeline and commit to it. He truly helped make this entire project as painless as possible by urging me to sit down and write this piece out chapter by chapter, focusing only on one section at a time before considering the entire work as a whole. I will be forever grateful to him for playing such a major role in the development of my thesis. I would also like to thank all of my committee members, William Ulmer, Yolanda Manora, and Hilary Green for their instrumental input, probing questions, and support of the project itself. Dr. Ulmer and Dr. Manora, as I knew them in my undergraduate career, played an integral role in the development of my writing skills and love of literature and I am so thankful that they could participate in this next step of my academic career. It meant the world to me to defend my thesis in front of two of my greatest undergraduate mentors. I am also appreciative that this project allowed me the opportunity to meet Hilary Green, who helped provide a much- needed historical dimension to this project. Finally, I am indebted to the love and support of my friends within the program. I could not have done this without your support along the way. Thank you for always answering my many questions. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………....ii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………….…...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………........iv I. Introduction: Madness, the Supernatural, and Child Murder……………………..............1 II. A Complementary Duo: A Look at Infanticide, Madness, and Reason in Euripides’ Herakles and Medea…………………………………………………………………........6 III. Reemergence of a Woman Scorned: A Study of Infanticide and Maternal Influence in Desire Under the Elms…………………………………………………………………...18 IV. Resurrection of the Past: An Exploration of Filicide and Redemption in Toni Morrison’s Beloved………………………………………………………………………33 V. Return of Repressed Culpability: An Investigation of Infanticide and Hallucination in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child……………………………………………………………..53 VI. A Trio of Guilt: An Examination of Child Murder and Damnation in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark………………………………………………………………….69 VII. Conclusion: Madness Re-envisioned…………………………………………………….84 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………......89 v ‘ I. Introduction: Madness, the Supernatural, and Child Murder “And the murderer won’t know / That his hands are stained by the blood of children / He bred from his own flesh—until in his breast the storm / Of my frenzy blows itself out.” Madness, Euripides’ Herakles Infanticide and filicide, the killing of one’s infant or child, have existed since the pre- history of mankind. In societies such as Sardinia, Syria, Egypt, and Carthage, the practice was not commonplace, but did occur with infants and children, specifically those of the elite, being ritualistically sacrificed to communal gods. According to Joseph Quinn, professor of ancient history at Oxford University, child sacrifice in the ancient world has often been “dismissed as black propaganda because in modern times people just didn't want to believe it… But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic, and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they [Carthaginians] did kill their children" (Kennedy). Additionally, “[c]hild skeletons with the marks of sacrifice have been found in Egypt dating 950-720 B.C.” (Tort 165). In 5th century B.C., Euripides takes the act of child sacrifice and places it on the stage for contemplation. It is during this time that he begins the tradition of using the conscious act of child murder, committed by a parent, as a tragic trope in literature in works like Medea and Herakles. The deaths of Medea’s sons and Herakles’ sons do not come about as a result of a sacrifice to the gods, at least not directly. Medea kills her children to save them from a life of 1 exile. Herakles kills his sons because he is possessed by an outside force. Both of these staged instances suggest a movement toward understanding the human condition. No longer was filicide solely part of daily ritual; Greek literature began to personalize the act. As such, Medea’s choice became a topic for discussion. As orators considered her motives, child murder developed into an act worthy of judgment and condemnation. Euripides’ Medea and Herakles, Sophocles’ Tereus, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy all include child murder. The modern tragedy has grown out of this tradition. Playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and Eugene O’Neill have followed suit by including infanticide or filicide in many of their plays. Most notably, the following plays of modernity include infanticide or filicide in some form: Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, Eugene O’Neill’s Abortion, Desire Under the Elms, and Strange Interlude, and, finally, Edward Albee’s American Dream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Classical influence does not end with its applicability to the dramatic stage only; modern, tragic novels have also been influenced by works of ancient Greece. George Elliot’s Adam Bede, Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark all offer a rich field of investigative discovery when considering the topic of child murder in relation to the classics. While many critics have discussed the child murder which occurs in each of these plays and novels separately, few have attempted to tackle the question of why child murder is included so heavily in modern American novels and plays altogether. Interestingly, with the commonality of the inclusion of child murder in modern American drama, I, like critic Peter Hays, expected to discover a wide variety of critics attempting to explain the patterns of infanticide and filicide usage. Hays comments that in “[t]rying to find who might explain this pattern to [him], [he] found only one essay on the subject, John Ditsky’s” (434).

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