Allegory Of Albee — страница 2

  • Просмотров 640
  • Скачиваний 12
  • Размер файла 21
    Кб

incarnation of the American nineteenth-century liberal values which were still alive earlier in the twentieth [century].”13 However, all such comments have been incidental, made in passing. They do not do justice to the major role that Grandma plays in the drama. After all, she is the main character in the play, appearing on stage more of the time and having more speeches than any other character. It is, in effect, her play, and she deserves detailed examination as the main bearer of traditional values in the play. Indeed, she fits squarely within the archetype of “The American Adam” sketched persuasively by R.W.B. Lewis in his seminal book by the same name on American intellectual history.14 The American Adam is, of course, the archetype of a new kind of human being, freed

from the corrupt institutions of the Old World and facing an unspoiled garden utopia, armed with power derived from youthful vigor and spiritual innocence. On a rather superficial level, Grandma is Lewis’s agrarian hero subduing the American Eden of a wilderness with industry and ingenuity. Mommy verifies Grandma’s association with the American countryside by saying, “Oh, Mrs. Barker, you must forgive Grandma. She’s rural.”15 Mommy also acknowledges Grandma’s continued industry, despite her old age: “I can’t stand it, watching her do the cooking and the housework, polishing the silver, moving the furniture” (p. 67). And Grandma herself claims the role by saying, “Pioneer stock” (p. 112), when the Young Man admires her resourcefulness in the bakeoff contest,

where she has indeed shown a kind of Yankee ingenuity. Of course, Grandma represents this ideal in its declining, hence less attractive and potent, years. “My sacks are empty, the fluid in my eyeballs is all caked on the inside edges, my spine is made of sugar candy; I breathe ice” (p. 82), she says. But for an otherwise absurdist play, she embodies and speaks the truths associated with America’s earliest and best impulses. Her explicit identification with the American Adam is depicted by Albee in two rather subtle, cryptic ways. First, when Grandma examines the Young Man for the first time, she exclaims: “Yup . . . yup. You know, if I were about a hundred and fifty years younger I could go for you” (p. 106). Here literary criticism must become mathematical: The play

was written in 1960, which means that Grandma literally has in mind the year 1810, when the United States (with its new constitution) was 21 years old–newly come of age, full of idealism and on the verge of its incredible expansion. At that time in history, the Young Man would have made a perfect mate for Grandma. Second, although Grandma is literally a woman–the American Eve?–Albee has worked into his characterization and text elements that help bridge the gender gap, making his American Dream androgynous if not wholly masculine. “I look just as much like an old man as I do like an old woman,” “Grandma declares (p. 111). And in the bake-off contest, of course, her nom de boulangere is “Uncle Henry” (p. 111). The “Henry” gives Grandma a masculine dimension.

The “Uncle” even associates her with “Uncle Sam,” that ubiquitous image in popular culture that approximates the American Adam in Lewis’s literary culture. In fact, Albee may have designed his play fully conscious of the early American theatrical convention of depicting a true blue American hero on the stage in the form of an Uncle Sam stage type. Walter Meserve points out that, in early American theater, the Yankee character, the Negro character and the Indian character were the three stage types that American playwrights added to the caricatures that they had inherited from Europe.16 This Yankee character, first called “Jonathan,” appears in over 100 American plays from 1800 to 1850–early (1787) as Master Jonathan in Tyler’s The Contrast and late (1845) as

Adam Trueman in Mowatt’s Fashion. The type even developed a stylized red, white and blue costume, “much after the present caricature of Uncle Sam, minus the stars but glorifying in the stripes.”17 Theater historians and directors of the play will be struck by the many similarities indeed between Grandma and Adam Trueman, namely their blunt, outspoken natures; their support of the traditional American values that they see being undermined by newfangledness; and, most important, their prescience and practical ability that enable them to resolve by their own contrivings the very complicated knots in their respective plays. To communicate this role to twentieth-century audiences who may not be familiar with the convention, a director might want to make Grandma look something