A Decandent Ideology: The American Dream

Maria Luiza Mancinho da Silva

Edward Albee’s The American Dream is a satire about the north-american way
of life. It ridicularizes the american culture using a postmodern structure of drama,
which Martin Esslin called by The Theater of the Absurd in his homonymous text from
1961. Their culture is based upon the ideology commonly known as the American
Dream, that consists in being prosperous, in a good social position (middle class or
higher) , consumerism, personal display, success, self-reliance, the self-made man, the
nuclear family. Albee criticizes this way of living in his absurdist play.

To begin with, it is important to present the characters, which are Mommy,

Daddy, Grandma, Mrs Barker and the Young Man. Daddy is a passive character and for
that Mommy ridicularizes him. There is a passage where he asks “And masculine? Was
I really masculine?” and Mommy answers “Oh, Daddy, you were so masculine; I
shivered and fainted” (p.84) in a sarcastic sense. Although he is the one who have the
money, he does not seem to have much voice in the family. Mommy is the truly ruler.
She domines Daddy and Grandma. She married Daddy because of his money. As
pointed by Quentin Youngberg in his text Mommy's American Dream in Edward
Albee's The American Dream (2010, p. 109),

“Mommy married Daddy not for love, but for what he had—
or, more accurately, for what he could provide to her. Her sense of
entitlement is clear enough when she tells her husband, “I have the
right to live off of you because I married you and because I used to let
you get on top of me and bump your uglies; and I have a right to all
your money when you die”.

This is crucial to understand the American Dream. She married him so she can
have a status, to be in a better social position, to consume and show to people the things
she buys and how these things are trending.

This way of living is what the actual American Dream is about. Mommy is
shallow. Living for the American Dream ideology, people need to be shallow in other to
consume, so capitalism can keep going. As said by Youngberg (2010, p 108), “If The
American Dream is, indeed, about the mutation of American values into lamentable,
unselfconscious egotism and intellectual vacuity, then the character Mommy is the
perfect emblem of that devolution”. The American Dream once was about the self-made
man, it once was about the self-reliance. These ideas still float through american
society, but it seems that they are suspended in the air, while superficiality and
consumerism have taken the principal role on the grounds of the subjectivity of their
people. Their individuality seems to be portraited in the things they own and not in their
self, their personality or in what they do, because the thing they do the most is consume.
In other words, you become what you consume. As Youngberg (2010, p. 108) said,
Mommy is the emblem of this absurd idea which is the american capitalistic dream.
And for that, I quote Bennet (2011): “the Theater of the Absurd is not about absurdity,
but about making like meaningful given our absurd situation”. This idea left americans
in alienation of not-thinking and consuming, and Albee gives us a chance to reflect
about it in order to archieve meaning, in order to stop the automation that people are
living.

And this is built through nonsensical dialogues, envolving repetitions and

nonsensical subjects, such as buying a child and then mutilating him till he dies. Even
the characters names seems to not make sense. But it can be read as allegorical, as they
can represent any Mommy, Daddy, Grandma ou Young Man. Albee also archives
absurdity through nonsensical physical action like Grandma’s boxes or simply the
appearance of the Young Man looking for a job. This is also a characteristic of the
Absurd. It can also be related to a strategy marked by Chklovski in his text Iskusstvo
kak priem (1917) called “strangeness”, which is about making something aesthetically
meaningful but not deliver it easily. This russian formalist says that, because of the
strangeness, is necessary to make an effort to comprehend a piece of art, and that also
happens in The American Dream.

As for Grandma, she is the one that thinks. She does not settle for the vacuity of
thinking of her daughter's generation. She identifies problems in american society such
as segregation, isolation and contempt for the old people. She is marginalized in the
family. And she rebels against it by saying her mind, interrupting Mommy and Daddy.
Mommy’s words explicit the problem: “Old people have nothing to say; and if old
people did have something to say, nobody would listen to them” or when Mrs. Barker
said: “But old people don’t GO anywhere; they’re either taken places, or put places”.
But she does whatever she likes. Also, an interesting fact about this character is that she
speaks to the audience. That is a theatrical strategy called breaking with the fourth wall.
This is also one of the characteristics of The Theater of the Absurd present in this play.
An iconic moment is the closing saying of hers, when she says to the audience: “Well, I
guess that just about wraps it up. I mean, for better or worse, this is a comedy, and I
don’t think we’d better go any further. No, definitely not. So, let’s leave things as they
are right now … while everybody’s happy … while everybody’s got what he wants …
or everybody’s got what he thinks he wants. Good night, dears.”

As for Mrs. Barker, her appearance seems to be nonsensical too. They talk but
then the couple leaves her with Grandma, who remembers who she is: the one that
delivered the child for Mommy and Daddy 20 years ago. And that is an important issue,
since they need a child to actually be a mother and a father, but she gets lost in their
dialogues. She gets so lost that she feels like fainting. They called the person who sold
the child to them so she appeared to give them satisfaction, once they have killed the
child and for that they are not pleased. They needed a baby to be a real family as the
american dream pattern says to, which is a nuclear family: parents and children. Instead,
they got stuck with themselves and Grandma. It was a way that Albee found to criticize
the role of the nuclear family in the north-american culture.

And then the Young Man enters. He is described as beautiful as a movie star,
very handsome. So beautiful that even Grandma’s breath is taken away. As she says, he
is the american dream itself. And the allegory becomes more clear as the play goes,
because he does not have feelings, he cannot feel anything. As he tells his story, it
becomes clear that his twin brother was the adopted son of Mommy and Dad, and since
they killed him, they ended up killing the substance of the Young Man as well. Like the
american dream, the ideology, he is very seducing because of how he looks, but he has
no talent, no substance.

As the play goes to the end, all the Absurd elements conect with each other. The
repetitions, subjects from the beginning come back, the characters interacting with each
other, Grandma talking to the audience. All becomes more nonsensical and at the same
time makes more sense. That is an effect of the Absurd, to connect what seems to not
make sense and somehow end up intelligible. In this case, Albee portraited american
people in order to critize the American Dream, using artificies of The Theater of the
Absurd.

Bibliography:

ALBEE, Edward. Death of Bessie Smith; The Sandbox; The American Dream.
Penguin. 2013.

ESSLIN, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 4,
No. 4 pp. 3-15. The MIT Press. 1960.

CHKLOVSKI, Viktor. Iskusstvo kak priem. 1917.

YOUNGBER, Quentin. Mommy's American Dream in Edward Albee's The

American Dream. Florida Atlantic University: Routledge Publisher. 2010.

BENNET, Michael. Reassessing the Theater of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco,
Genet and Pinter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.