A note on Anton Chekhov

A note on

Anton Chekhov

By

Daryush Feizollahnezhad

Chekhov is one rare literary figure in world literature who attains a high stand in creating two different genres, in a way that he is taken to be the father of both modern drama and modern short story, and his influence over great writers is widely believed. One critic, Teuber, traces this trend back that:

… Chekhov had an immediate and direct impact on such Western writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson; indirectly, most major authors of short stories in the twentieth century, including Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, are in his debt.

However, Joyce once remarked he started reading Chekhov’s short stories after he had written his.

Chekhov’s uniqueness becomes more tangible when we get to know that he had the same inclination, if not more, to pursue his job as a doctor to help improve people’s physical health equally as well.

As for Chekhov’s writing, any endeavor to elaborate on his fiction would seem redundant, because everything is there in his works. The moment one starts reading Chekhov, he is taken into the realm of simple truths of human mystery, and might feel any comment as distraction. Therefore, there is not much need for an analytical investigation to make him plausible unless one fails to feel into his dramatic revelations. What is intended for this introduction is a survey of some general characteristics in Chekhov’s fictional world which will be suitably guided by observing some conspicuous points in his life and some of his notions concerning art, literature, humankind, life and love expressed in his letters or the comments made by his contemporary critics.

Objectivity is one major characteristic in Chekhov’s writing. The narrator goes on scrutinizing the core of a character’s personality without the least provoking expression of feeling or judgment. However, this objectivity does not lead to the narrator’s detachment from each character’s universe; on the contrary, it is so masterfully done that the reader perceives a mute delicate expressed sympathy. Such an approach owes its power to Chekhov’s own personality whose early job as a doctor helped it work throughout his actual life, so that he treated people with the same artistic objectivity, but never nonchalantly. This idea is reinforced by a glance at his letter to Madame M. V. Kiselyov that:

To a chemist nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist, he must lay aside his personal subjective standpoint and must understand that muck heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that the evil passions are as inherent in life as the good ones.

Thus, in his various writings we feel such objectivity and never encounter the slightest hint at the author’s judgment on the personality and situation of his characters, to the extent that hardly without reviewing his letters or the biographical comments of his friends can we be sure of Chekhov’s views and opinion on his typical characters and the pictured situation.

Simplicity is another remarkable feature in Chekhov. Besides having a simple language, he writes with a minimum level of word usage in his descriptions. Such simplicity may, of course, be partly due to the nature of translating his works, though it cannot be overlooked at all that the general criticisms tell of this simplicity in his original language as well. Likewise, simplicity has deeper roots in his own character: Maxim Gorky, his friend and also a great Russian writer, talks of this trait that, “of a beautiful simplicity himself, he loved all that was simple, real, sincere, and he had a way of his own of making others simple.”

In fact, such simplicity matches Chekhov’s objectivity to give rise to the formation of an essential richness for the content of his writings. What has always been pleasing and attractive for his readers is the very truth pervading all over his works, whether in his early humorous sketches, or in his serious tragic fictions. He targets this truth exposure at whatever possible part of man’s life – what makes some critics take him as a realist writer. But actually, he transcends the realistic layer in his fictional world to reach the universal human truth, at least, than any metaphysical or philosophical one.

Chekhov succeeds in depicting character types who all share in one respect: vulgarity. Having a more polished taste in humanity and morality, Chekhov abhors cheap or low figures that doubtlessly were abundant at his time, and will always be. But it does not limit him to a realist writer; if it does, it should be an impressionistic one. On the whole, his writing is so merited that it stands high over any certain critical limitation, and delights all his readers at all times. This is all because each story opens a new horizon as regards human truth, and therefore, his fiction revolves, more than any other element, on character, which itself is concentrated as mood than as action, and giving form to the critical term “Chekhovian mood” in literature.

As for Chekhov’s acute power of reaching truth, there are naturally some deep-seated causes originating from his lifestyle. He had a lineage of peasantry life up to his father. Furthermore, early in his youth, his father in a bankruptcy, fled, together with his family, to Moscow, and Chekhov stayed alone in his hometown studying medicine for a while, but soon joined them just to write humorous stories to help earn his family’s living. Also, coinciding with the appearance of his more serious fictions, Chekhov stayed in Sakhalin, near Siberia, for a time to work, as part of his medical requirements, assisting the people there who were leading a penal life in exile. There he faced many troubles, from financial ones, through bad weather to disgust for people, and writes to A. S. Suvorin, the Conservative anti-Semite who owned and edited the most respected city papers Novoye vremya [“New Times”]:

I am writing my Sakhalin, and I am bored, I am bored.... I am utterly sick of life. Judging from your telegram I have not satisfied you with my story. You should not have hesitated to send it back to me. Oh, how weary I am of sick people! A neighbouring landowner had a nervous stroke and they trundled me off to him in a scurvy jolting britchka. Most of all I am sick of peasant women with babies, and of [medical] powders which it is so tedious to weigh out.

This experimental visit supported his notions about man and life, and being already a physician enhanced his precision in observing different features and diseases that run parallel, if not under, his literary investigations. He comments on this vocational part of his life in a letter to A. S. Suvorin again that:

... You advise me not to hunt after two hares, and not to think of medical work. I do not know why one should not hunt two hares even in the literal sense.... I feel more confident and more satisfied with myself when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides neither of them loses anything from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work I doubt if I could have given my leisure and my spare thoughts to literature. There is no discipline in me.

Being thus considerate to every aspect of human life and having this sensitivity made Chekhov quite apt for his familiarity with and, somewhat, following Tolstoy, since they had many a characteristic in common, namely in matters of morality and human internal enslavement. Tolstoy had undergone so huge a spiritual change that hardly a writer, even Shakespeare, could meet his expectations of an aesthetic dramatization of human moral greatness and honor. However, when observing the rather young Chekhov’s grandeur in unraveling human folly dramatically, he could not help appreciating him, to the extent that he elaborated on the greatness of “The Darling.” Because in this story, Chekhov has a close idea to Tolstoy’s: that women could only find happiness by reflecting their husbands’ delight; and thus it shows a woman without a self who reflects the selves of her men. Such an idea towards women always ran deep in Chekhov; however, it should be noted that it is an attack not on them at all, but at their typical mental and spiritual education; because generally he had a kind and friendly relation with women, as that to his sister, Masha, and his woman colleagues and friends like Madame M. V. Kiselyov and Madame Stanislavsky, and his actress and future wife, Olga Knipper. Again in his letters we can see his disgust at some especial women types, with his equal aspiring tone for their emancipation. In a letter to his sister, for instance, he talks about the bad dressing of German ladies:

... The worst thing here which catches the eye at once is the dress of the ladies. Fearfully bad taste, nowhere do women dress so abominably, with such utter lack of taste. I have not seen one beautiful woman, nor one who was not trimmed with some kind of absurd braid. Now I understand why taste is so slowly developed in Germans in Moscow.

Furthermore, of his conceptions about women psychology, he tells to A. S. Suvorin:

... You say that from compassion women fall in love, from compassion they get married.... And what about men? I don’t like realistic writers to slander women, but I don’t like it either when people put women on a pedestal and attempt to prove that even if they are worse than men, anyway they are angels and men scoundrels. Neither men nor women are worth a brass farthing, but men are more just and more intelligent.

Among his stories, “The Darling” is the most telling of Chekhov’s conviction about women: that the nature of love is far more important for women than the object of love. They are ambitious to have something or someone on which they can topple their instinctual affections. This belief is best materialized in Olenka who when alone is dead hopeless, but soon revives when she is in love with someone. The object of her love is not at all important, even if it costs her individuality’s loss, if there is any. This trend is thoroughly backed up with the Chameleonic change of her mentality into her beloveds’. She is purely obsessed with each lover’s mental obsession, be it theater, timber business, medicine or whatever. This oscillation degrades into her love for a rude schoolboy who representatively hates her superfluous caring attentions.

Such a conviction may sound controversial: How is it that Chekhov knows much about human truth but comes to be ignorant of an evident natural truth about women which was uttered curtly but beautifully by Nietzsche at about the same time that “the happiness of man is ‘I will.’ The happiness of woman is ‘He will.’”? The answer might be that he is criticizing relations that are contaminated by some ultra dependence – an aftermath of spiritual emptiness caused by whatever personal or social reasons. Or that he is projecting his personal expectation of women’s independence which is essential for any artistic creation, whether in daily behavior or in literary career. This expectation shows up in a letter responding to A. S. Suvorin advising him to get married, which his wife, Olga, was to read much later after their marriage: “I promise to be a splendid husband, but find me a wife who like the moon would not shine in my heaven every day.” This inclination came thus true when Chekhov had to live in Yalta upon his doctor’s advice for his health’s sake while Olga resided in Moscow to follow her theater career, and their “life became a series of partings and meetings.” Several times she decided to give it up, but seeing Chekhov’s unexpressed discontent, she kept to her occupation, while never did her first impression about Chekhov fade out: “I felt that life with a man like Chekhov would be free of fear and trouble, for he had a great gift for discarding all the dross, all the petty things, all that obscures and chokes the very essence and beauty of life.”

Going back to Chekhov’s criticism of typical woman characters, it should be admitted that, in any case, “The Darling” embodies the old mystical belief, best expressed by Kierkegaard that “people despair about being lonely and therefore get married. But is this love? I should say it is self-love,” even if it is true about all individuals, and is not directed to one gender. The further critical evaluation of this phenomenon demands wider scopes of at least psychoanalysis and mysticism and it does not suit this introductory writing.

Tolstoy, though highly appreciating “The Darling,” believed that Chekhov unconsciously produced such a masterful piece; that is, he wanted to, intellectualistically, depict and perhaps deride an epidemic situation, but reached unwittingly this emotionally sympathetic presentation. But it seems the contrary is more substantial: Chekhov is a perfect intellectual who is all aware of his doing, and has a conscious rare command over his feelings, and thus sustains his ever-present objectivity. This characteristic is later disclosed in a letter to Madame Stanislavsky where he writes that:

As a writer it is essential for me to observe women, to study them, and so, I regret to say, I cannot be a faithful husband. As I observe women chiefly for the sake of my plays, in my opinion the Art Theatre ought to increase my wife’s salary or give her a pension!

This mighty observational issue of women should not be interpreted in a way that leads to drawing a negative conclusion concerning Chekhov’s view of women, since, first, he repeatedly emphasized his hatred of some certain types who for whatever reason seem far deviated from the established definition of human dignity, man or woman. Secondly, he expressed the proper way of confronting such a case with delicacy in a letter to his uncle that “one must not humiliate people – that is the chief thing. Better say to man ‘My angel’ than hurl ‘Fool’ at his head – though men are more like fools than they are like angels.” Thirdly, the typical woman character in question has its peers among the man ones as well – Old Musatov in “A Father” being just one example of a selfless man. And finally, he always let out his high opinion about the bliss of love and beauty in women off and on, whether in addressing his sister and wife or mentioning it in his letters, like as: “I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things; and in the history of mankind, culture, expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!”

In truth, his interrogation of women’s character belongs to a broader range of his critical investigations which continuously provokes him to dramatize ‘human folly,’ ‘vulgarity,’ ‘weaknesses,’ and covertly, the wrong social educational system of man’s mentality. But he never underscores man’s potential power and dignity, nor does he ever lose hope in man’s emancipation, though some are likely to base part of his writings – like “Misery” or many of his plays – as for a period of his hopelessness in relation to human vulgarity and failure of communication, in contrast to his hopeful period when he foresees a glorious future. Nevertheless, in both cases, Chekhov is persistently picturing vulgarity as he does so for “triviality,” “boredom,” “limitation of human existence,” “futility of human ambitions” which all form his major themes. Maxim Gorky comments on this feature of Chekhov that:

He had the art of exposing vulgarity everywhere, an art which can only be mastered by one whose own demands on life are very high, and which springs from the ardent desire to see simplicity, beauty and harmony in man. He was a severe and merciless judge of vulgarity.

And that:

Vulgarity was his enemy. All his life he fought against it, held it up to scorn, displayed it with a keen, impartial pen, discovering the fungus of vulgarity even where, at first glance, everything seemed to be ordered for the best, the most convenient, and even brilliant.

However, even though he had no illusions about frailty, and exposed triviality and vulgarity, there is a glow of warmth and sympathy under his objective, and often merciless representations.

Here rests his distinguishing feature from many classified schools of art or literature: he knows what truth is; he knows where human weakness lies; he suffers from human shallowness; and he is eager to correct it through a slight revealing of a nasty situation against a standard of thought which is based between the tracks of morality and art, but all while he knows very well the natural essential framework of literature, and does not want or expect it to abolish every human shortcoming. He writes deliberatively to Madame M. V. Kiselyov that:

Human nature is imperfect, and it would therefore be strange to see none but righteous ones on earth. But to think that the duty of literature is to unearth the pearl from the refuse heap means to reject literature itself. “Artistic” literature is only “art” in so far as it paints life as it really is. Its vocation is to be absolutely true and honest. To narrow down its function to the particular task of finding “pearls” is as deadly for it as it would be to make Levitan [Russian painter and also a friend to him] draw a tree without including the dirty bark and the yellow leaves. I agree that “pearls” are a good thing, but then a writer is not a confectioner, not a provider of cosmetics, not an entertainer; he is a man bound, under contract, by his sense of duty and his conscience; having put his hand to the plough he mustn’t turn back, and, however distasteful, he must conquer his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the dirt of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper correspondent out of a feeling of fastidiousness or from a wish to please his readers would describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railway contractors?

This conscious treatment makes him adore Shakespeare who had, masterfully enough, walked through the same path much earlier, and also it makes him a steady touchstone for the following great writers, to the extent that George Bernard Shaw admits his feeling “like a beginner,” when reading him, and that he worked on his Heartbreak House after “the Chekhov manner.”

It should be noted that Chekhov succeeded in creating the later tragic scenes equally well as he had done for the former comical sketches, since these two essential elements – humor and tragedy – are compliments to one another in his light of human existence. He like Gogol and Maupassant uses humor and satire as a defense mechanism against the sadness and harshness of life, and as Simmons remarks, he “had learned that humor and tragedy, like love and hate, are frequently only the separate sides of the same coin, that life’s misfortunes may be intensified by humor or softened by its wise and gentle smile.”

Another important point for Chekhov was erecting a scope for artistic expression in literature. He believed that we should not expect a writer to know about everything, or if he happened to know, should express it in his writing, be it a psychological fact or a metaphysical truth. He makes it clear that:

It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness.

And defying the accusations of a friend, he adds:

He [the accuser] thinks a writer who is a good psychologist ought to be able to make it out – that is what he is a psychologist for. But I don’t agree with him. It is time that writers, especially those who are artists, recognized that there is no making out anything in this world, as once Socrates recognized it, and Voltaire, too. The mob thinks it knows and understands everything; and the more stupid it is the wider it imagines its outlook to be. And if a writer whom the mob believes in has the courage to say that he does not understand anything of what he sees, that alone will be something gained in the realm of thought and a great step in advance.

While Chekhov uses his experiences, practical or intuitional, his views on life and art are no doubt blended with his reading and liking of previous established writers, so that he reaches a firm footing in expressing human truth. Meantime, he attains a stable point between art and morality that he never shuns expressing his idea that:

I do not know which are right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lopez da Vega, and, speaking generally, the ancients who were not afraid to rummage in the “muck heap,” but were morally far more stable than we are, or the modern writers, priggish on paper but coldly cynical in their souls and in life. I do not know which has bad taste–the Greeks who were not ashamed to describe love as it really is in beautiful nature, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitz, Pierre Bobo [P. D. Boborykin].

In effect, his definition of morality is noteworthy: it is too impious and disinterested to be confined within the framework of some certain establishment like that of religion, or social taboos. In one typical story, “The Chorus Girl,” Chekhov sets the central character, who is rather a woman of easy virtue, to shine against the arrogant empty Nikolai Kolpakov and his cheap wife. The story creates an atmosphere resembling that of Maupassant’s Boule de Suif.

Now with all these possessions, he devises to apply them in one great field which to him is picturing and revealing different aspects of man’s life, and so remedy many of man’s drawbacks harassing him. Doing so, Chekhov proves an able writer who knows much about human nature, and thus the world he creates foreruns the twentieth-century western writers’ that show a world full of depraved characters, and so many other problems consequential to the prevailing lack of communication disaster. Indeed, Chekhov characters suffer from what was labeled by following thinkers as “alienation” in addition to “isolation.” Chekhov’s job was easy; he simply presented a vivid picture of the predicaments of ordinary people, but with a cute detective-like investigation of the causes running deep in their psyche, while never putting any distance or barrier between them and himself. Olga, his wife believes that “Chekhov asserted the rights of the ordinary, simple man with his sufferings and joys, his dissatisfaction and his dreams of a better, ‘indescribably beautiful’ life,” adding that:

In real life too Chekhov regarded the so-called “little man” with extraordinary sympathy and affection, finding in him a beauty of soul often hidden from the superficial observer. And people responded with the same tender affection. They flocked to him, even complete strangers, just to see him and to hear him speak, to beg him teach them how to live. These visits often wearied and tormented him, for he did not care to preach, and did not know how.

Such dualistic treatment could render him some hindrances: on the one hand, he was heartedly inclined to attain a warm simple communication with people; on the other hand, he could not help, as part of his task, detecting the unheeded important afflictions in human nature. However, he coped with the job successfully, as far as his fictional works let us infer: he sets a warm objective link with his characters, then stars to make them inside out without any ultimate judgment or resolution, just like what happens in real life. “The Kiss” is one good illustration of this feature: we never dare to judge the persona’s view on the character of Riabovich. Chekhov is so delicately handling the story that the reader cannot detect any positive or negative hint as for Riabovich’s personality unless he/she resorts to his/her liking in interpreting him and the nature of his love. And if Chekhov is picturing an ironic situation, he does not blame it on his character here, but on “life’s ironic patterns with their pervasive disharmony between people’s hope and the reality of things,” as Simmons says.

Chekhov explains and recommends such an approach towards treating the realities of life to a friend in this way:

Let me remind you that the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic; they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing. Some have more immediate objects – the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka, like Denis Davydov; others have remote objects– God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on. The best of them are realists and paint life as it is, but, through every line’s being soaked in the consciousness of an object, you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that – nothing at all.

While he was doing so, he suffered from life enough to turn him into a severe pessimist: though not believing in reaching self-fulfilment through material things, since early life he had to work for money in order to help his family life and even to abolish the debts his brother had brought on, and also to afford the production of some of his plays; he suffered tuberculosis from early youth – at 20 – which at last caused his death apart from other troubles while living. Furthermore, his sufferings were multiplied by the existence of lots of misfits around when living here and there, so as it made him say over and over that:

I am bored, not in the sense of – weltschmerz [world-weariness] –, not in the sense of being weary of existence, but simply bored from want of people, from want of music which I love, and from want of women, of whom there are none in Yalta. I am bored without caviare and pickled cabbage.

To conclude this writing, it is more than helpful to notice his statements in a letter to the editor A. N. Pleshcheev, dating Oct. 4, 1888, which reviews all the mentioned characteristics above:

I am afraid of those who look for a tendency between the lines, and who are determined to regard me either as a liberal or as a conservative. I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms, and am equally repelled by the secretaries of consistories and by Notovitch and Gradovsky. Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom – freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.

And he seems to have been able to work his program out, and instead of any giving-ups, he decided to ignore every shortcoming in life, personal or social, and devote his art to the physical and mental health of people, with no bias or pious obsession.

Daryush Feizollahnezhad

July 2003

References:

Gorky, Maxim. “Anton Chekhov.” Anton Chekhov: 1860-1960. Ed. Julius Katzer. Moscow: Foreign Languages, n.d. 5-30.

Hagan, John. “Chekhov’s Fiction and the Ideal of ‘Objectivity’.” PMLA 81.5 (Oct. 1966): 409-17.

Knipper, Olga. “The Last Years.” Anton Chekhov: 1860-1960. Ed. Julius Katzer. Moscow: Foreign Languages, n.d. 31-55.

Poggioli, Renato. “Storytelling in a Double Key.” The Phoenix and the Spider: A Book of Essays about Some Russian Writers and Their Views of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. 109-130.

Simmons, Ernest J. Foreword. Anton Chekhov: Selected Stories. Trans. and Ed. Ann Dunnigan. New York: Signet, 1960.

Teuber, Andreas. “Anton Chekhov: 1860-1904.” http://people.brabdeis.edu/~teuber/chekhovbio.html.

A note on Edward Albee

Abstract and Introduction of my MA thesis, dating March 2000

Moral Dreams:

The Tradition of Morality Play

In Three Plays of

Edward Albee

By

Daryush Feizollahnezhad

Albee’s plays can be taken as modern morality play since they are linked to its tradition both through their subject and through their form. As to the subject, they are concerned with the predicament of the modern man who is entangled between the social pressure and his own weakness. The former is embodied in the fact of the reversal of values and lack of communication in the contemporary age; and the latter is materialized by man’s inability to face bitter realities of life and also by his escape into his illusions. This is the fall of Albee characters. However, he designs man’s redemption suggested by his ultimate power to confront his problems. Thereby, salvation of the characters lies in their understanding the truth. As to the form, Albee’s plays resemble the morality play in their applying allegorical or typical characters and a universal setting.

Three plays of Albee are chosen for this study which treat the fall and redemption of the characters at three levels of social, family and individual life respectively. The American Dream treats the plight of the modern American society which is due to the substitution of the old humanistic values by the new materialistic ones. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? depicts the cold and terrible relation between a couple who are apparently linked together merely through their verbal attacks. Tiny Alice shows how false beliefs make man blind to the truth, driving him away from realities of life.

All the three plays, however, end with a suggested optimistic redemption for the characters, consisting of the probable revival of the old values, reconciliation of the couple, and the final learning of the truth about faith. These conclusions hint at Albee’s belief in perseverance against the existing shortcomings of the contemporary life, rather than a pessimistic desperation.

1.1 Introduction

The plays of Edward Albee, it can be said, are exceptional in the contemporary American drama in that all of them leave the audience unsure if they have understood them. In fact, there is an unclear portrait of characters, an undeveloped design of plot , together with a close and restricted setting in Albee’s drama which make it difficult to understand. Consequently, critics have passed different judgments on Albee’s plays from the very beginning. Definitely, the oblique and unfamiliar plays of Albee—in contrast to his contemporaries such as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller who produced tangible subjects—caused people to associate him with the Theater of the Absurd which was dominant in Europe at the time when Albee appeared. This association was incited by the fact that Albee’s first play, The Zoo Story (1958), shared the bill at the Provincetown Playhouse with Beckett’s Kraspp’s Last Tape. Moreover, this impression was further reinforced by the idea Albee cherished: lack of communication in the world, which should have been a result of his “exposure to Beckett and the late O’Neil,” he admits, when he started as a playwright (Interview 133).

Albee’s later works, however, introduced new subject matters which led to his deviation, in a way, from the Theater of the Absurd in Europe and directed him more towards subjects concerning American civilization. In fact, it is doubted if Albee exclusively belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, since it signifies a group of plays which flourished in the early twentieth-century Europe and presented, through a new technique, the idea that there is no security and meaning in life. This idea, as Martin Esslin claims in his introduction to Absurd Drama, is a kind of reaction to, and an aftermath of the two great wars, Nazi’s mass murder, and similar social anarchies which caused man to feel desperate and insecure in his life (13). Thus, the Theater of the Absurd is realistic since it depicts the illogical and incoherent realities in the society.

Presently, following the Theater of the Absurd, there appeared several playwrights in the States among whom Albee is the focus of this study. Clearly, Albee is influenced by the Theater of the Absurd and its precepts towards communication in the modern world; and Esslin is the first critic who included him in the cycle of the Absurdists; and in his The Theatre of the Absurd, he compared The Zoo Story with Pinter’s world because of its realistic dialogue and its subject of isolation (302). Nevertheless, later critics were not all contented with that and tried to throw more light on the hidden meanings of Albee’s works.

In fact, Albee has some similarities with the Absurdists, while his differences are also conspicuous. He overlaps with The Theater of the Absurd in areas covering the question of man in the modern world, or the lack of communication and love between the individuals. However, while the Absurdists are engaged in depicting the terrible world facing them and the helplessness of the conventional religious, social or whatever myths of order and dignity, Albee proceeds to picture the final possibility of man’s salvation by means of breaking through pervading miserable situation.

The Theater of the Absurd playwrights showed man as a deformed figure at the hand of contemporary life, and their writings were a kind of protest against the resentful life. Any protesting writing has a seed of suggestion for a better situation. Albee, as a complement to the revolting movement of the Absurdists, goes on to show the existence of the potential power of man needed to tolerate the difficulties which may, of course, result in a change of the dominant situation.

Whatever social or psychological reasons differentiating Albee from the Absurdists, he takes up the started process of picturing the contemporary situation and directs it to a possible hopeful end in a calm and humanistic life. These views can be gathered from his article “Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” (1962) written a year after the publication of Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd including him as a new American member to the cycle. Though the article is a criticism on the plays on Broadway, Albee comes to define the Absurd drama as:

an absorption-in-art of certain existentialist and post-existentialist philosophical concepts having to do, in the main, with man’s attempts to make sense—which makes no sense because the moral, religious, political and social structures man has erected to “illusion” himself have collapsed. (Meserve 147)

According to this definition, his plays can be grouped with the Absurdist drama; but this link is on a philosophical ground since his plays unleash themselves practically from that theater through their developing plots. In other words, while the Absurdists wrote—in a protesting manner—plays with no apparent action leading to a decisive result—with whatever philosophy behind them—Albee succeeds to fulfill their prolonged wish for a rescue from the suffocating life reflected in his works where characters reach a final understanding of their state and decide to change it. Thus, Albee’s theater came to be aptly labeled as The Drama of Confrontation by Bigsby in his book Confrontation and Commitment.

The concept of confronting the real world and its merits seems to have always been ringing in Albee’s head; it is proved by his selection of the lines from Esslin he quotes in the mentioned article, which encourage man’s tolerance:

. . . For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions—and to laugh at it. (Meserve 148)

It seems he has caught intuitively the truth of this statement, and more importantly, has applied it in his following plays.

This theme of confrontation in Albee gives rise to the conception of this study which aims at a broader investigation on him and trace his plays back to the medieval morality play. Thus, the present study will focus on the comparison between Albee’s play and the morality play to draw attention to the morality elements in Albee. The basic mutual concern in Albee’s works and the morality play is that both picture an individual undertaking a spiritual journey, who finally attains salvation through his perseverance and understanding of truth.

1.2 Review of Literature

Various approaches have been taken as regards to the criticism of Albee’s theater. Driver, for instance, judges Albee rather severely and considers his plays as senseless and magnifying violence. Taking a realistic approach, he sees the theme of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? merely the insight that “in many marriages illusions grow and have to be ‘exorcised’ . . . in order to save what is left of the partners” (241). Brian Way regards Albee as a failure in absurd drama since “a certain point is reached” in his plays which goes not with the absurd drama (189). Hinchliffe takes Albee as “only a part-time Absurdist, eclectic in his use of techniques and consistent only in the pessimism behind all his plays” (87).

Some critics, however, have done more comprehensive criticism on American drama, and on Albee specifically. Baxandall, for example, criticizes Albee’s theater on the ground of family relationship, and classifies three types of character in accordance to different cultural and historical periods:

Three generations comprise Albee’s archetypal family: Then, the epoch of a still-dynamic national ethic and vision; Now, a phase which breaks down into several tangents of decay; and Nowhere, a darkly prophesied future generation. (81)

Amacher approaches Albee’s works from a structural aspect, while, he has not ignored historical and social facts at all. Allan Lewis, in his book on American drama, devotes one chapter exclusively to Albee. He notes that in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? “Albee has captured in modern terms the dramatic power of man, destroyed by his own acts, still clinging to life, still groping for meaning” (94). This characteristic especially applies to the morality play.

Bigsby has written several books on American theater, and on Albee specially, which give a quite comprehensive understanding of his theater. He takes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and After the Fall, by Arthur Miller, as modern secular morality plays, and believes that “the gospel they teach . . . is the primacy of human contact based on an acceptance of reality” (Confrontation and Commitment 84). He believes that there is a need to confront reality; and any failure to accept this need not only deprives man of dignity but leaves him “adrift in incomprehension, in flight from the world as it really is. This is the modern hell of Albee’s morality plays” (85).

In all his plays, Albee tries to show man’s perseverance against his difficulties, overcoming them and getting salvation; and his characters act as prophets to preach his gospel. Since his first play, he has used Christian images making critics pass religious judgments on his plays. In this light, Jerry in The Zoo Story can be taken as a messianic figure who sacrifices himself to make communication possible in the modern world. Zimbardo believes:

Albee, in recreating this theme, has used a pattern of symbolism that is an immensely expanded allusion to the story of Christ’ sacrifice. But the symbolism is not outside of the story which he has to tell, which is the story of modern man and his isolation and hope for salvation. He uses the allusion to support his own story. He has chosen traditional Christian symbols, I think, not because they are tricky attention-getters, but because the sacrifice of Christ is perhaps the most effective way that the story has been told in the past. (53)

In this way, Albee begins to create meanings for himself in the heat of the turmoil of meaninglessness, as the Absurists cried out (Bennett 56). He takes up his gospel-teaching through Christian tone and images in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and Tiny Alice. In the former, it is suggested by Martha’s exclamations of “Christ!” or “Jesus!” either addressed to George or just preceded by “George!” (11, 57, 104). Further, it is upheld by sacrificial humiliation of George to make a better life, and as Bigsby believes—affirming Ihab Hassan’s critique on Saul Bellow—there is a progress from humiliation to humanity (Confrontation and Commitment 72). On the other hand, the death of their fantasy son can be taken symbolically as a sacrificial act to save them from their illusions; at any case, there is a sacred image. The religious image and tone are concrete in Tiny Alice: its religious figures, and the image of Julian’s death—bleeding—which is brought on after his illumination. If Albee succeeded in The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to teach the gospel that the primacy of human contact is based on an acceptance of reality, in Tiny Alice, he presents a saint for his religion (Bigsby, Confrontation and Commitment 88).

Thus, Albee’s plays have been criticized from different points of views; however, it is fair to claim that a comprehensive study on Albee’s plays, especially, on the common grounds with morality plays, has not been undertaken so far. Therefore, while all the criticisms on Albee are invaluable and helpful in making Albee’s works understandable, this study intends to investigate the traditional elements of the morality play in Albee and the impact of this tradition on the criticism of Albee’s drama.

1.3 Objectives and Significance of the Study

The most important aim of this study is to find similarities between Albee’s theater and the morality play, both in subject and form, and draw conclusion on the significance of this comparison. In fact, the term “morality play” can be applied to much of Albee’s works, since they depict an individual person undertaking a spiritual journey. The individual is confronted with a distressing situation whether in his family life or out in the society, but rather than giving up his hope, or even his life, he gets to know the truth and realities of life so that he attains a sort of salvation. In other words, Albee’s characters undergo a morality-type redemption.

Needless to say, a study of the role of fun and games, and also the importance of perseverance is the focal point of this study. Both theaters—Albee’s and the morality play—are to an extent, didactic; and both are closely linked to the notion of the dream. The two historical periods concerned are presented in the plays as times when ideals and value systems are not consistent with the contemporary realities. Besides, they both express the isolation of the characters.

The morality play concentrates on an individual whose inherent weaknesses are attacked and used by diabolic forces, but at last, he chooses redemption through enlisting the aid of some ecclesiastical figures. Potter believes that:

The human drama of a morality play is an analogous, but crucially different, presentation of the life cycle. Beginning in innocence man falls by exercise of free will and appetite into a dilemma of his own making. From these depths, however, he is inexorably delivered by divine grace to achieve salvation and eternal life. The end of human life is not ‘mere oblivion’ but regeneration: never death, always a rebirth. (10)

This process happens in Albee’s works as well. However, while the fall in the morality play is due to man’s engagement in worldly affairs and his ignorance of divinity, in Albee, it is because of his escape from reality into an illusory private world. So, illusion becomes the base of man’s fall. But since they grow strong enough, at the end, to accept their weaknesses, they are redeemed—through an understanding of truth. In this manner, salvation is reached through knowledge, as it is expressed by Lawyer confirming Cardinal in Tiny Alice that “[an act of faith] It is what we believe, therefore what we know. Is that not right? Faith is knowledge?” (101).

Through resorting to illusion, George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? choose a life full of fancy and escapes from reality. When the fancy of their twenty-one-year-old son is shattered, they enter a new life which portrays realities. The same outcome is true about the other couple in the play, Honey and Nick.

Julian in Tiny Alice lives a similar life in fancy and false concept of faith; he has put his faith against real love, what many a clergyman do. But at the last moment of his life, when he is about to be killed, Julian understands that he has produced a reverse martyrdom. The very understanding of this fact saves him from illusion and changes him. Bigsby, in his Confrontation and Commitment, remarks that “Albee’s protagonists . . . come to understand that genuine existence lies only through the acceptance of reality and the establishment of a true relationship between individuals” (72).

1.4 Material and Methodology

For a more practical investigation of the two theaters, Albee’s major plays—The American Dream (1961), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Tiny Alice (1964)—will be compared with some morality plays; especially, The Castle of Perseverance (1405-25). The role of illusion and fancy-making will be analyzed to show that the unreal world of the characters in the plays needs to be destroyed in order that they can be led to their salvation.

Furthermore, the function of human vices in the form of violent verbal conflicts, orgies, or temptations which are of importance in this content will be analyzed. Besides, the comic elements in shape of funs and games in the plays will be studied to comment on their impact on the overall understanding of the works.

A close reading of the plays is important in order to explore the morality elements in Albee’s theater. The approach will be eclectic; hence, formalistic, social-historical, and psychological approaches will be used when necessary.

1.5 Organization of the Study

This study consists of five chapters:

Chapter I, the present chapter, aimed at giving a general introduction to Albee and the scope of the criticisms done on his theater.

Chapter II treats the morality play and its characteristics, importance, role in literature, and also its influence on later plays.

Chapter III studies the morality elements in Albee’s plays, the role of illusion and reality, and perseverance needed to save the characters.

Chapter IV is a study of the structural elements of language, fun and games, and parables in Albee, and also their significance in the interpretation of the plays.

Chapter V is the conclusion of the study about the similarities between Albee’s theater and the morality play, ending up with this major point that characters are saved through a redemption causing them to understand reality and truth.

REFERENCES

Albee, Edward. The American Dream and The Zoo Story. New York: Singet, 1963.

-----------. Tiny Alice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

-----------.Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

-----------. “Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” Discussions of Modern Drama. Ed. Walter J. Meserve. Boston: Heath, 1966. 145-150.

-----------. Interview. The American Theater. Ed. Alan S. Downer. VOA Forum Series, 1975. 122-35.

Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Baxandall, Lee. “The Theater of Edward Albee.” The Modern Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Alvin B. Kerman. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1967. 80-98.

Bennet, Robert B. “Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story.” Modern Drama 20 (1977): 55 66.

Bigsby, C. W. E. Albee. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyds, 1969.

-----------. Confrontation and Commitment. Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1969.

-----------. Modern Drama: 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Castle of Perseverance, The. The Macro Plays. Ed. Mark Eccles. London: Oxford UP, 1969. 1-111.

Driver, Tom F. “What’s the Matter with Edward Albee?” American Drama and Its Critics. Ed. Alan S. Downer. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1965. 240-244.

Esslin, Martin. Absurd Drama. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

-----------. The Theatre of the Absurd. Rev. Ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Hinchliffe, Arnold P. The Absurd. London: Methuen, 1972.

Lewis, Allan. American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theater. Rev. Ed. New York: Crown, 1970.

Potter, Robert. The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge, 1975.

Way, Brian. “Albee and the Absurd: ‘The American Dream’ and ‘The Zoo Story’.” American Theater. Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, 10. Eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris. London: Edward Arnold, 1967. 188-208.

Zimbardo, Rose A. “Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee’s ‘The Zoo Story’.” Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. C. W. E. Bigsby. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1975. 45-53.