In the Bosom of the Family: Contradiction and Resolution in Edward Albee

DUPLESSIS 133 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS IN THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY: CONTRADICTION AND RESOLUTION IN EDWARD ALBEE A writer usually creates an art work acting as if its formal unity were possible , and trying to resolve the conflicts or issues expressed by the work. But granted that every reader also "writes" or creates the work by the act of reading, still a reader does not have to "write" it with the same assumptions as the author. Readers and critics have, of course, commonly worked with the same paradigm of unity as the author. In some cases, critics go even further than the author in their claims for the work, smoothing over or filtering out arguments or characters that do not fit; taking images, themes and structures as indications of one tendency, not diverse or divisive tendencies ; even perceiving one firm purpose or ruling idea where there may be several. A reader should try to register and to understand the totality of a workall of its elements-but should not assume that its totality necessarily forms a unity. A whole does not automatically imply a wholeness. There are in fact many works in which the endings are intended to conclude.1 Certain features of a work may stick out and not be assimilated to its other features . There are works in which the author's professed subject violates the traditional conventions, values, or artistic decorum to which s/he also attempts to visibly adhere.2 There are works in which the deeply embodied ideas and the professed ideology of the author are inconsistent.3 In other words, many art works are rather a site of discontinuity and contradictory elements than of continuity and unity. To further discuss this issue, I will focus on contradictory elements in several "family plays" by Edward Albee. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wooip (1961-62) will be the center of interest, but I will also take up A Delicate Balance ( 1 966) and The American Dream (1960)4 Because a writer tries to resolve whatever issues s/he has aroused in the work, the point (often the ending) at which resolution occurs or is being prepared for is the point at which a work's fundamental contradictions are exposed. It is those contradictory elements which, logically, are most in need of resolution and which are most satisfying, for audience and reader, to have resolved. Several general modes of resolution in various works can be discovered and analyzed; a typology of modes of resolution and of the specific mechanisms involved and the reasons for the particular contradiction may be realized. In this paper, I will show that Albee's mode of reso- 134 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW lution for the conflicts in these plays is evasion, and the particular mechanism involved is privatization. Albee transforms social "problems" for which no solution is offered into sexual and family strife, problems for which he has readily available solutions. While this kind of study enables us better to read a literary work as a whole, it has a further value: to root the literary work in its social and historical world. Contradictions and their resolutions are the way in which society and history emerge inside the art work, inscribed in its structure, argument, movement. All of these features are in the work; they are not being "read in," but they do need to be read out by specific critical acts.5 Two prominent problems resolved by the ending of Virginia Woolf'concern the bitch goddess, who is tamed, and the non-existent child, who is "killed." Martha is a brilliantly constructed and dramatically sufficient portrait of the stereotypical emasculating woman. The missing male child is doubly non-existent, for he is first imaginary and at the end of the play he is also dead. It is no secret that parent-child and husband-wife relationships figure importantly in Albee's world, although Albee is squeamish about recognizing this.6 In fact, many relationships in his plays that do not specifically conform to family models can be assimilated to them. Julian is the child of numerous parents-including a destructive sexual mother-in Tiny Alice (1964). These parents are at the mercy...