Albee and Twain: Demystifying an American Dream

Albee and orthodontic braces Demystifying an Ameri fuel ideate What Happens to a dream differed? / Does it dry up / give c are a rai underworld in the sun / Or fester similar a sore- / etc. And whence run? / Does it stink like malodourous meat? / Or crust with sugar over- / like a mellisonant sweet? / Maybe it secure sags / like a heavy stretch along / Or does it explode? Langston Hughes Ameri send packing Dream was a term that eldest appeared in James Truslow Adamss The Epic of America, where he states The American Dream is that dream of a buck in which life should be purify and richer and sounder for e actually superstar, with luck for each according to ability or achievement.It is non a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, besides a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances o f take or position (Adams, 1931) It is this land Twain throws huckaback and Jim to endure the toilsomeships of life, to hear the thr experience-Inness of being born into the world unprepared, with away choice. Long considered as a necessitate for freedom, Huck-Finn basically is as M.Cox puts it a flight from tyranny, non a flight for freedom (Cox, p172-173, 1966). Freedom is essentially a copulation term, and freedom may manifest itself in physical and psychological realms. maven-half of the world lock up considers itself honored under the nomenclature of The Commonwealth, illustrates the terminus ad quem of physical freedom entirely. One dreams in order to maintain that freedom, scarcely as Schumacher put it, The greatest deprivation anyone can suffers is to have no pretend of looking after himself and making a screwlihood, depriving one of ones existence and disposition of being free. Kumar, p2672, 1991). Being a Post-American Dream novel, Twain did non go to the extent to overthrow the replete(p) socio-political system to emphasize the impossibility and superficiality of American dream. europiumans found the unappeasable lands flourishing with immense economical and religious opportunities. The idea was perhaps that opportunities could not be isolated to lands, and certainly these islands cannot claim to provide equality and actualisation to passel of all races and creed, when its own socio-political apparatus is plagued with racism and fell of consciousness.With Huck and Jim, the racial discrimination prevalent in America was laid bare. Twain does not talk about conscience as a fashion of judgment of human actions rather he infused the transcendental viewpoint of light and innate human instincts as the basis of making choices. Conscience, which are essentially derived from society, the learned distinction between good and bad, contrary to black and white, are merely false constraints upon natural behavior.Such constraint is what H uck rejects (Burg, p303, 1974), something which is seeming when Huck says always do whichever right or wrong come handiest at the cartridge clip. There can be no geographical location which can encompass this distinctness of human quality, to change with time as the instincts render may be not dictated or etched in law, and no moral order of society could circumscribe the complexity and enormousness of intuition. We must not expect Twain to propound any moral view regarding the confrontation of races in Huck-Finn.Although set in the past, the novel peeps into the hereafter and without dealing with complexities of master-slave psychodynamics, interprets the nature of freedom, something which seems to suggest that psychological freedom is hard to achieve in a night with such thing as an Emancipation Proclamation. If organizations like AfroAmerican Unity, Society of African Culture and resistance fronts like Operation Breadbasket and Dont Buy Where You Cant Work were all prevalen t during nevertheless the late 1960s, suggesting the fact that the whole concept of American dream was inconceivable to most of the black Americans.The final chapter of Huckleberry Finn which is often considered as a get down descent is not a flaw in architectural unity, except a denial of celebration of freedom which one would expect from Jims pouch. Twain deliberately de-romanticizes and trivializes the whole concept of freedom, since the idea of equality and opportunity was White American the one who was aware of his past and ensured about his recognition, parturition of his own culture and tradition, the one who assumed the nationality of a land which captured.The slaves, who by now organize the consciousness of a community and not the citizen, was more than concerned with their individual individuation as Joanna Zangrando puts it the quest for black liberation is a search for what whites no longer possess in full measure a clear and purposeful sense of self identity o perator (Zangarando, p154, 1970). Jims never been and would never be free unless he acquires an identity like the slaves of the African culture did. A slave in Nigeria, would still be a Nigerian, while Jim, does not figure into that frame of nationality, and incomplete into that dream which an American saw.The concept of American Dream was built upon the pillars formed by the dislocated and reluctant hands of the slaves, akin to what the Romans did, and except like them, came down the fabrication of entire dream, devastated, stranded and lost. Nationality is not just one issue that can be talked about in reference to American dream. Societal dynamics function through interaction of power, authority and settle. It can well function without the aesthetic and poetic representation of human development. And in a society devoid of sustainable archaic references, financial lieu does become a determining parameter of individual growth.Although not unexpressed in the original idea of J ames Turslow, but economic influence generates its manifestation in the American dream of the common man. Such aspects find distinct voice in Albees works which revolve close to the social fabric. The general view that Edward Albees plays are ferocious attacks on lethargy and complacency in American society and a savage denial that everything is just dandy receives a nod from Albee himself (Albee, p8, 1961) and he goes on to confirm his own claim with Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a play through which historicity speaks out for entire American civilization.How subjects receive names is also interesting. While George corresponds to the then president of United States and Martha being her wife, Albee certainly hits the nail on the head, illustrating a family whose life is drowned deep into the artificialities manufactured under in the social machinery. confining the end of the second act of Whos Afraid of Virginia Wolf, George, the professor of history, is left alone onstage whil e Martha, his wife, and Nick are playing the preliminary rounds of whap the hostess in the kitchen.Attempting to control his hurt and anger he reads loud from a book he has taken from the shelf, And the West, encumbered by disqualifying alliances and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the get out of events must eventually fall (II, 174). George is clearly encumbered with a cripple alliance in his marriage to Martha and does seem to be burdened with a kind of morality that makes it difficult for him to respond in kind to her cruel attacks.At the same time, this observation on the movements of history, read in lodge with the events of Georges personal history, is a splendid example of how Albee has managed to endow the events of the family drama with a deeper significance, suggestive of larger events and movements. Upon the historicity and its relation to American Dream, Holton writes One of the read/write head myths on which this country was founded w as the notion that America was a newfound Eden, a second chance ordained by God or capital of Rhode Island in which man could begin all over again, freed from the accumulated sin and corruption of Western history (Holton, p47, 1973).With Holtons comment, we move yet finisher to the objective of this paper, that not only could the American become a rising Adam and found upon the unspoiled continent an ideal human polity, but this new way of life and new order of society could wait on as a shining example to redeem erring Europe from her own sinfulness. Such a dream was essentially impossibility in an imperfect world where multitudes dream their own dreams.Thus the majority of American historians, says David no.le, have been Jeremiahs, decrying Americas involvement within the transitory patterns of European history and name Americans back to their duties and obligations ( noles, p4, 1965). With such a catastrophic dream at hand, the people of American couldnt have gone far with t he nightmare it was to cast.It was not unprecedented, as such a crumbling of social order already move the British machinery where The Angry Young Man was invented during the mid of twentieth vitamin C who looks back in anger and, shouts Id love to live too But I must say, its pretty somber living in the American age (Osborne, p9-14, 1954). This disillusionment and dissatisfaction with life and lack of recognition in society, was soon realized in America as well. In fact the three acts of the play titled Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht and legal ouster may be said to illustrate the historic passage of American civilization from innocence to guilt to foolery.America which began as an un-spoilt continent, convinced that it was extraordinary in human history to create a perfect society, just like the Germans once thought, in a race of differentiation, cut themselves from European tradition and history, in effect killed its parents. But how can one neglect the parenting they once re ceived in Europe, when memories transform into haunting, only by retreating into madness can one escape the vicissitudes of history.Again in the words of Holtan, both George and Martha indicate at various points that back there, in the beginning, when I start-off came to New Carthage, there might have been a chance for them. That chance was lost and now their crippling alliance exacts its toll from both of them (Holtan, p48, 1973). Finally, what Johnson sensed with his panoramic eye while surveying mankind from China to Peru (Johnson, p50, 1749), acknowledging the catholicity of human behavior, holds true for any nation any island claiming to become land of opportunity.Freedom again is a responsibility, that functions under a collective consciousness of being free, consequently whoever, in mans universal condition, chooses freedom chooses it for everybody concludes Franz Adler (Adler, p284, 1949). similarly an idea that negates the masses, devoids itself the potential of transfor mation into a phenomenon, its localization soon consumes its very presence with time. References Adams, James, Truslow, The Epic of America, Simon Publications, 2001.Adler, Franz, The Social Thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 55, none 3 (Nov. , 1949), The University of Chicago Press. Albee, Edward, The American Dream, Coward-McCann, Inc. , New York, 1961. Burg, David, F. , Another View of Huckleberry Finn, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 3, University of California Press, 1974. Cox, James, M. , Mark Twain, The Fate of Humour, Princeton University Press, 1966 Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, edited by Harriet Raghunathan, Worldview Publications, 2004, New Delhi.Noble, David, W. , Historians Against History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1965. Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger, edited by Neeraj Malik, Worldview Publications, 2002, New Delhi. Schumacher, E. F. , Dilemmas of Measuring Human Freedom, Kumar, K, G, Economic and semip olitical Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 47, Economic and Political Weekly, 1991. Zangrando, Schneider, Joanna, Zangrando, L. Robert, Black Protest A Rejection of the American Dream, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, Sage Publications, Inc. , 1970.