Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1993 The Absent Father in Modern Drama. Paul Nagim Rosefeldt Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Rosefeldt, Paul Nagim, "The Absent Father in Modern Drama." (1993). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5592. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5592 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 manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. 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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE ABSENT FATHER IN MODERN DRAMA 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 English by Paul Nagim Rosefeldt B.A. University of New Orleans, 1367 M .A. University of New Orleans, 1370 M.F.A. University of New Orleans, 137B August, 1333 © Copyright 1993 Paul Nagim Rosefeldt All rights reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. William Demastes For his careful and patient guidance in helping me shape my ideas; my wife Peggy, without whose assistance this project would never have been completed; and my mother, the late Mrs. Josephine Rosefeldt, whose prayers and encouragement sustained me through many years of arduous study. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................... iii ABSTRACT .................................................. vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................. 1 2 AUENGING THE FATHER: Sophocles’ Oedipus Turannus. Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers. and Shakespeare’s Hamlet ................... SB 3 QUESTIONING THE FATHER’S AUTHORITY: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. Ghosts and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The Pelican ..... 54 4 ESCAPE OF THE FATHER AND THE SON’S HOPELESS QUEST - I: Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller’s Death oF a Salesman ......................... 85 5 ESCAPE OF THE FATHER AND THE SON’S HOPELESS QUEST - II: Sam Shepard’s True West and David Rabe’s The Basic Training oF Pavlo Hummel .............................. 110 G THE ROMANCE OF THE DEAD FATHER: Marsha Norman’s ’night. Mother and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler .................................. 137 7 TRAPPED IN THE FATHER’S DYING WORLD: Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters ................ 1B1 B THE SEARCH FOR GOD, THE FATHER: John Pielmeier’s Agnes oF God and Peter ShaFFer’s Eguus .............................. 179 9 BATTLING WITH GOD, THE FATHER: Peter ShaFFer’s Amadeus ............................ E09 10 THE FATHER AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE: John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger .............. 230 i v 11 THE FATHER AND RACIAL STRIFE: Athol Fugard’s Master Harold ■ ■ ■ and the bous E50 IE THE FATHER AND THE INUISIBLE PATRIARCHY: Caryl Churchill’s To d Girls ................. EBS 13 CONCLUSION ..................................... EB9 WORKS CITED .............................................. 304 UITA ....................................................... 31B v ABSTRACT Theories of modern drama point out the powerful sense of loss and alienation that is woven into the very fabric of modern drama. This sense of loss is connected with the death of God and the destruction of absolute value systems. This study, however, takes the theory of loss one step further, tying the absence of God in modern drama to the absence of the father. The psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Carl Jung view the father as a disembodied presence standing above and outside of culture. These psychological theories of the father can be connected to the theories of the Cambridge Ritualists, who see drama as arising out of the primitive rituals that reenact the dying and rebirth of a fertility god. Applying both sets of theories, one can see how the absent father standing behind the absent or dying god becomes an imposing figure in drama. This all-encompassing father figure emerges in modern drama as an absent character, talked about but never seen. His absence, the source of profound mourning, propels a quest to restore him to presence, a quest which leads to self-destruction. Clearly, one phase of modern drama is haunted by the residual presence of the absent father. In this type of drama, the absent father not only controls the dynamics vi of the plot but also influences the trajectory of the other characters. Through multiple reconstructions of the absent father in the discourse of the other characters, he is projected onto all aspects of the dramatic milieu. As a propelling force, he presents the origin of the drama, initiates the quest, spawns imitators or doubles who trace his path, and becomes the ultimate goal of a destructive quest. The quest for the absent father will be examined in its classical roots and in modern drama using selected works from the following dramatists: Sophocles, Aeschylus, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Peter Shaffer, John Pielmeier, John Osborne, Athol Fugard, and Caryl Churchill. vi i CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION One major thread in the analysis of modern drama holds that modern drama is a reaction to a sense of profound loss, brought about by the death of God, the transcendental father. Robert Brustein notes that ’’modern drama aches with nostalgia, loneliness and regret” Cll). Reeling from the death of God, the modern theatre of revolt ’’fails to build its church and records the failure in a growing mood of despair” C1E) . For Brustein, the modern dramatists hate ’’reality and labor ceaselessly to change it but are pulled back into setting up the continuous tension between illusion and reality” C153. Like Brustein, Tom Driver also sees modern drama as a reaction to loss. He claims that modern drama begins in a romantic quest for ’’something unsearchable that must nevertheless be searched” Cxiii} and leads tD a modern query which asks ’’whether the quest has meaning and whether all search for meaning is futile” Cxiv). Maurice Ualency, Martin Esslin, and George Wellwarth also focus on 1 0 3 s in their assessments of major movements in modern drama. Ualency traces modern drama back to the symbolists for whom ’’the idea of God was inextricably bound up with the idea of nature, the loss of faith in one was necessarily attended by the loss of 1 Faith in the other” Cvi3. According to Ualency, the modern dramatists are reacting to a world that has been lost or shattered. He states: ’’From Eliot to Beckett the artisans of our age speak to us in elegiacal tones as the dazed survivors of a seismic upheaval . In the lBBO’s there was an urgent need to rediscover God, and this time God proved to be more than ordinarily elusive” Cviiil. Looking at a later stage of modern drama, Martin Esslin also Focuses on modern drama’s reaction to loss: He explains how earlier in the twentieth century, ’’the certitudes and unshakable assumptions of Former ages” had been ’’discredited as cheap and somewhat childish i llusions, ” but ’’the decline of religious Faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of Faith in progress, nationalism and various totalitarian fallacies. All this ended with the War” C233. George Wellwarth seems to sum up thB school of critical opinion that sees modern drama as a mourning ritual enacted at the wake of a dead god. Wellwarth describes modern drama as ”an extended meditation on existential rootlessness . a critical analysis of man in the void . into which man was cast by the death of religion” Cl). For the modern dramatist, the world must adjust to the breakdown of a God-centered universe that was ordered and hierarchical. In modern drama, even the search for meaning has become a Futile quest. God, nature, and the very world itself seems to vanish, and all that is left is unaccommodated man living in a scrapyard of meaningless memorabilia. The reality which was once grounded in a teleological ausolute has broken down into a series of Fragmented illusions.