Sam Shepard's Gothic Family Plays
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2003 The Other Side of Love: Sam Shepard’s Gothic Family Plays Eric Andrew Lee University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Eric Andrew, "The Other Side of Love: Sam Shepard’s Gothic Family Plays. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2003. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2112 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Eric Andrew Lee entitled "The Other Side of Love: Sam Shepard’s Gothic Family Plays." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Stanton B. Garner, Jr, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Charles J. Maland, Thomas F. Haddox, Klaus van den Berg Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Eric Andrew Lee entitled “The Other Side of Love: Sam Shepard’s Gothic Family Plays.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Stanton B. Garner, Jr. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Charles J. Maland_________ Thomas F. Haddox________ Klaus van den Berg________ Acceptance for the Council: Anne Mayhew___________ Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies (Original signatures are on file with official student records). THE OTHER SIDE OF LOVE: SAM SHEPARD’S GOTHIC FAMILY PLAYS A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Eric Andrew Lee August 2003 ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Esmerelda;, my sons, Caleb Kristopher Lee and Samuel Sheppard Lee; and to my mother, Glenna Sheppard Lee. iii Acknowledgements I wish to give my warmest thanks to the faculty members who, through their encouragement and tireless efforts on my behalf, made possible the timely completion of this dissertation. My dissertation Director, Dr. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., helped me to secure a Mellon Fellowship through the Appalachian College Association for the 2000- 2001 academic year. Most importantly, Dr. Garner introduced me to Sam Shepard’s Buried Child during my first class at UTK in 1998. I’m quite sure I had the best dissertation Director anyone could hope for. Many thanks are also due to the other members of my dissertation committee. Dr. Charles Maland’s impeccable critical eye has helped to clean up an otherwise cluttered manuscript, and I’m very grateful. Dr. Thomas Haddox’s comments have been critically astute and always provocative, and this dissertation is much stronger for having his input. I greatly appreciate Dr. Klaus van den Berg for serving as my reader from outside the English department. As a professor from the Theater department and an expert in dramaturgy, his help has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Dr. Mary Papke, Director of Graduate Studies in English, for having faith in me and allowing me to enter the PhD program. Thanks also to all of the professors who taught me during my program. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Paul Conn, President of Lee University, for providing funding throughout my doctoral program. iv Abstract From one of his earliest plays—Rock Garden (1964)—to one of his most recent works—The Late Henry Moss (2000)—Sam Shepard has been fascinated by the American family. Shepard, this dissertation argues, presents a markedly “gothic” portrait of the American family by borrowing dramatic techniques from the “gothic” literary tradition in order to critique traditional American myths about the family—including the belief that a type of social harmony, even utopia, will result if each family member adheres strictly to his or her prescribed role within the family unit. Shepard’s critique of the American family is in many ways a critique of modern American culture, though Shepard himself balks at being called a social critic, insisting he is much more interested in highly charged emotional and psychic states of individual characters. Using gothic techniques— including uncanny moments, incest, ghosts, and doppelgängers—Shepard engages in subtle cultural critique without seeming programmatic or didactic. The American gothic family is comprised of identifiable character types: the fallen father, the alienated mother, and the haunted son. These recur in Shepard’s gothic family plays, as well as in the gothic family plays of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. In examining Shepard’s gothic families, this dissertation employs a psychological methodology, including an examination of how attempts to repress traumatic memories ultimately fail, resulting in a gothic “return” of the repressed past. The examination of Shepard’s “family plays” focuses on five major works—Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the v Mind—as well as two relatively “minor” plays: The Holy Ghostly, States of Shock. A final chapter examines The Late Henry Moss, the latest installment in Shepard’s “gothic” project. vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE GOTHIC FAMILIES OF EUGENE O’NEILL AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 31 CHAPTER TWO: SHEPARD’S EARLY GOTHIC FAMILY PLAYS—THE HOLY GHOSTLY AND CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS 103 CHAPTER THREE: SHEPARD’S GOTHIC APEX—BURIED CHILD 166 CHAPTER FOUR GOTHIC EVOLUTIONS—TRUE WEST, FOOL FOR LOVE, AND A LIE OF THE MIND 247 CHAPTER FIVE STRANGELY FAMILIAR—STATES OF SHOCK AND THE LATE HENRY MOSS 322 AFTERWORD 378 BIBLIOGRAPHY 385 VITA 396 vii Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used in citations throughout the dissertation to indicate texts from which quotations and excerpts have been taken. Eugene O’Neill: CP Eugene O’Neill: The Complete Plays, 1932-1943. SP Selected Plays of Eugene O’Neill Tennessee Williams: FP Tennessee Williams: Four Plays Two-CP The Two-Character Play Sam Shepard: 3P Three Plays: The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, and When the World Was Green 7P Seven Plays: True West, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, The Tooth of Crime, Tongues, Savage Love FFL Fool for Love HG The Holy Ghostly LOM A Lie of the Mind EFC Eyes for Consuela viii SOS States of Shock 1 INTRODUCTION In the early 1980’s, after writing his “family trilogy” of Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980), Sam Shepard asked rhetorically, “What doesn’t have to do with family? There isn’t anything. Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family” (qtd. in Dugdale 39). From one of his earliest plays—1964’s Rock Garden—to one of his most recent works—The Late Henry Moss (2000)—Shepard has always been fascinated by the American family, which has proven to be especially fertile ground for his unique brand of theater. Shepard’s original “family trilogy” expanded to include such works as Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), and other works of the past decade deal to a greater or lesser degree with family relationships, including States of Shock (1992), Eyes for Consuela (1999), and The Late Henry Moss (2000). My dissertation will argue that Shepard presents a markedly “gothic” portrait of the American family, borrowing dramatic techniques from the “gothic” literary tradition in order to critique the American family and traditional American myths about the family— including the belief that a type of social harmony, even utopia, will result if each family member adheres strictly to his or her prescribed role within the family. Shepard also questions whether such a felicitous state is even possible in modern America, so his critique of the American family is in many ways a critique of modern American culture. The gothic literary tradition provides Shepard with a collection of ready-made devices 2 with which he can employ his cultural critique. Some of these devices include ghosts, the uncanny, a family curse, grotesque characters, real or implied incest, rebirth or resurrection, and dramatic excess and spectacle. Shepard uses these gothic techniques to portray the modern American family as a dysfunctional social unit whose members are hopelessly alienated, cynical, and still bleeding from psychic and emotional wounds. “Gothic” itself is a somewhat problematic term: it is an expansive, protean label which has been variously applied to a literary genre, a historical literary period (primarily in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain), and to various literary devices and motifs. In this study, I will establish the parameters of “gothic” and the extent to which Shepard uses gothic devices in his family plays. My examination of gothic devices will borrow substantially from works such as Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith’s Modern Gothic: A Reader (1996) and David Punter’s Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law (1998). Both of these works are concerned primarily with showing how gothic remains a viable literary language in the late twentieth century.