Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale

Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale LUCINA P. GABBARD EDWARD ALBEE'S SEASCAPE is obviously not a realistic play. When the two great lizards slide onto the stage, behaving like ordinary married human beings and speaking perfect English, realism is immediately dispelled. Encounters between human beings and talking animals are the stuff of fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, describes a fairy tale as a work of art which teaches about inner problems' through the language of symbols' and, therefore, communicates various depths of meaning to various levels of the personality at various times.' This is the method of Seascape. The play's principal concern is the realization of the proximity of death that comes with the passing of middle age. Albee depicts the adjustments that this realization entails, adjustments made difficult in the twentieth century by a tendency to deny mortality. Sigmund Freud spoke of this denial as an inner struggle between Eros and Thanatos which he viewed as the wellspring of aU' neuroses. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the need for a oneness that would embody the affirmation of death as well as life. More recently, Norman O. Brown has maintained that constructing "a human consciousness" capable of accepting death "is a task for the joint efforts of' psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art' Seascape takes up this cause and earns importance because ofi!. Symbols are the play's basic medium. Through symbolism the title announces that death is a part of the flux of life. A seascape is a view of the sea whose ever-moving waters are the meeting place between 301 308 LUCINA P. GABBARD air and ground, heaven and earth, life and death. The waters of the sea are both the source and the goal of life. Returning to the sea is like returning to the birth waters of mother's womb; it is the symbolic equivalent of death.' The seascape is also vast: its final shore is beyond sight; its horizon is beyond reach. So is the flux of life; man is the product of continuous evolution- unstoppable in its insistent progress . The sea is also deep and dark; beneath its bright ripples are undercurrents, eddies, unseen life, and unplumbed depths. So is man's awareness merely the outer rim of an inner self that seethes with the buried life of the subconscious. Thus, the play intertwines three levels of meaning, ingeniously allowing each to add insight to the other. All three are condensed in the symbol of the lizards who come up from the sea. They concretize the evolution of mankind from water animals, the emergence of the individual embryo from its watery womb, and the return to consciousness of the repressed self. All these levels of meaning can be communicated simultaneously when the fairy-tale events of the play are interpreted as an initiation rite. Joseph L. Henderson, in Man and His Symbols, explains the rites of passage and their associated symbols which, he says, can relate to the movement from any stage of life to any other- childhood to adolescence to maturity to old age to death. Moreover, the symbols of these rites are known to appear in the unconscious mind of man just as they did in ancient rituals.' One set of symbols that apply to this final stage of life, Henderson calls "symbols of transcendence" which concern "man's release from ... any confining pattern of existence, as he moves toward a superior ... stage" of his development. They provide for a union between the conscious and the unconscious contents of the mind.' The experience is usually presided over by a "feminine (i.e., anima) figure" who fosters a "spirit of compassion,'" and it occurs between middle age and old age when people are contemplating ways to spend their retirement-whether to travel or to stay home. to work or to play.' Often during this time the subject has dreams which incorporate a piece of wood, natural wood which represents primordial origins and, thus, links "contemporary existence to the distant origins of human life." Other subjects dream of being in a strange, lonely place "near a body of water." Such places are stops on a continuing journey which symbolizes...