My main point, here, is to show that it is always the character of the Old American Dream that acts instead of the New American Dream, and that the New American Dream is crippled in a world filled with aesthetic, emotional and social values. The sample on which I am testing is formed by the characters of the three Albee plays, in which I would like to explain how the paradigms of the Old and the New American Dream clash. In The Lonely Crowd he describes how he divides the American population, and what he means by the terms, “inner-directed,” “other-directed” and “traditional-directed man.” I will transplant the semantic content of the former two terms, relevant in this essay, into what I call: the Old American Dream and the New American Dream. One of the most useful definitions of the American Dream and of the American character provided by David Riesman will serve as the theoretical basis for my analysis. Therefore, I will, exclusively, highlight those Dreams that exist on the social level presented in Albee’s three plays. It is, however, hardly possible to identify all the Dreams since they exist on various levels. As the critic, David Madden says “there are many American Dreams” (Madden, xvii). Centuries later, the paradigm of the American Dream still lives, but it has developed new meanings, and has multiplied itself. At first, the dream was to be fulfilled by those immigrants who arrived there to start a new life in freedom and democracy. The term, American Dream has been used ever since the new continent was discovered.
In this literary analysis, while focusing on the notion of the American Dream, I will use the characters of the three dramas to illustrate how the American Dream shapes them in the dramatic world of Albee. In this paper I would like to investigate what this “picture” of Albee’s America looks like in “our time” with the help of three plays by him: The American Dream, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Play About the Baby. “A picture of our time,” is how Edward Albee characterizes his play, The American Dream. Zsanett Barna graduated from the University of Szeged and currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Edward Albee Dreams of America" by Zsanett Barna
0 kommentar(er)
