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Ain Shams University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English Language and Literature

The American Nightmare in Selected Plays by Sam Shepard:

A Psychoanalytic and Semiotic Study An M.A. Thesis

Submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature

Of Ain Shams University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts

(English Literature)

Submitted By

Ahmed Mohammed Ali El-Hoseiny

Under the Supervision of

Prof. Nadia Soliman Hafez Mansour Prof. Etaf Ali A. Elbanna Professor of English Literature Professor of English Literature

Faculty of Arts Ain Shams Univ. Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams Univ.

2015

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Table of Contents

Preface ………………………………………………………………………………………I

Chapter One

Sam Shepard: Cultural and Biographical Contexts …………………………………………………1

Chapter Two

The Collapse of the Contemporary Family and Society …………………………………...............47

Chapter Three

Psychopathological Archetypes and Gothicism in Shepard's Curse and Buried Child ………………….95

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………...148

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………..153

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NOTES ON PRESENTATION

The researcher's system of documenting sources (in-text citations and Bibliography) conforms to the requirements laid down in MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed., 2009).

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With all signs of love, this thesis is dedicated to my father's soul, my mother, my wife and, especially my

daughter Malak

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First and foremost, thanks to Allah, The Most Merciful.

I would like to express my endless appreciation to Prof. Nadia S. H. Mansour, and Prof. Etaf Ali

Elbanna, Professors of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, for their continuous

instructions, valuable criticism and sincere advice. It is a great honor to work under their supervision.

Without their guidance and academic support, this thesis would not have seen light. Through their

recommendations and revisions did I learn more.

I cannot forget the favor and the teachings of my professors who taught me during the graduate stage

(Faculty of Education and Faculty of Arts at Menoufia University). Special thanks are due to Prof. Usama

Abdel-Fattah Madany Abd-elbar, Prof. Hosni El-Daly, Prof. Ahmad El-Sayyad, Prof. Elsayed

Usman and Prof. Abd-elmoneim Ali Habib.

My deepest regards to all the professors of English language who taught me during the M. A.

Preliminary Year at Ain Shams Univ., especially Prof. Jeanette Wahba Sourial Atiya, Prof. Waffia

Mohammed Mursy, Prof. Samira Basta and the late Prof. Radwa Ashour (May Allah Have Mercy on

Her). No words can describe my deepest gratitude to them.

Thanks are also due to Prof. Mohammed Enani and Prof. Loubna Youssef, Professors of English

Language and Literature, Cairo Univ. Although I was enrolled in the M. A. Program at Cairo Univ. in

2011 and did not enter the exams for some reasons, I attended the lectures of those professors and learnt a

lot, especially in the fields of criticism and drama. My deepest regards are also due to Prof. Ibrahim El-

Maghraby, Professor of English Language and Literature, Mansoura Univ.

No words can describe my gratitude to my family for their love and support. Thanks are also due to my

loving wife Basma and beautiful daughter Malak.

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Abstract

The present thesis explores two of Sam Shepard's family trilogy, Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child, from

psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives. In these plays, Shepard borrows and, at the same time, subverts the myths long

held about the American family and the American Dream. He is frequently located within both American drama's obsession

with the American Dream and the American Gothic tradition for his vehement critique of the American nation and its

culture. Although these plays reflect the culture of the fifties and the sixties in America, they still have their influence today.

This is due to the fact that the problems and the psychic agonies Shepard's families face and experience in such plays are not

different from those the contemporary global family has to endure. For such a reason, his plays acquire an international

dimension in the sense that it is not only the American family or society faces the problems of violence, narcissism, anomie

and capitalism, but the whole contemporary world as well. The thesis attempt to shed light on the psychological agonies the

American family suffers from and the deteriorated familial bonds from a psychoanalytic angle, employing the theories of

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung, as well as from a semiotic perspective while employing the Peircean model.

Key words: Sam Shepard, Freud, Jung, Lacan, Trauma, American Dream, Gothic, Familial Relations.

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Preface

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Preface

Sam Shepard, widely ranked as the leading American dramatist of his generation, is regarded as one of the most

controversial and promising contemporary American playwrights, emerging from the Off-Off-Broadway. He has been

widely hailed as one of the most important American playwrights since O'Neill, Miller, Williams and Albee. As the back

(lower) cover of Shepard's Fool for Love and Other Plays (1984) informs, Marsha Norman thinks of Shepard as "the most

exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage". Shepard

developed his career from an amateur and a highway boy addicted to drugs and obsessed with rock and roll music to a

distinguished dramatist. He started by joining a touring theatre company with whom he reached New York after deserting

his family and became drawn in the Off-Off-Broadway through Ralph Cook, the club's head waiter. "Anybody could get

his or her places" in the new theatres just when the Off-Off-Broadway theatrical movement was starting (Baym 2279).

Off-Off-Broadway has been mainly interested in investigating theatrically Man's identity and deteriorated psyche, "apart

from political oppression: locating an individual essence or reality outside conformist social roles" (Saddik 131); therefore

Shepard's protagonists "encounter one another in a space that is psychological rather than literal" (Bercovitch 58). Shepard

began writing plays in the tradition of Open Theatre group that has been "experimenting with 'transformation' from one kind

of reality to another" (Poggi 198). Joseph Chaikin was "indisputably established as the aesthetic leader of the group and his

preference for clear and distilled artistic expression won out over a more communal, egalitarian orientation" (Rabb 25).

Shepard has shown multiple talents and exerted assiduous efforts. His multitalentedness is manifested in his being an

actor, composer, prose writer, director, poet, rock musician, playwright and screenwriter at the same time. Towards the end

of the 1980s, Shepard directed his attention to acting and directing. Although Shepard once admitted that he had never

dreamed of becoming a playwright, his dramatic craft was his main interest: "I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a

rock and roll star" (qtd. in Law 461). Even though Shepard "has a great deal of cinematic experience on both sides of the

camera, he made his professional start in the Off-Off Broadway theaters of New York in the 1960s" (Streufert 9).

Shepard is frequently located within the sphere of American drama's obsession with the notion of the American Dream

as well as within that of the American Gothic tradition due to his vehement critique of the American culture and the nation's

spreading of the fallacy of American justice, prosperity and freedom. Although Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and

Tennessee Williams produced plays that were performed on Broadway, Shepard is frequently placed within the literary

sphere along with them for his familial and psychopathological concerns as well as for his handling the issue of the

American Dream. If O’Neill is regarded as "The Father of American Drama" who dominated the American stage during the

twenties and the thirties of the 20th century, and if Miller ruled it during the fifties and the sixties, Shepard could be

considered the most celebrated playwright in America from the 1960s till now (Mathisen 1). All the four playwrights—

9 Williams, Miller, O’Neill and Shepard—are concerned with the family institution and the American Dream concept. To the

four, one can add another influential playwright who emerged before Shepard, namely, Edward Albee who is famous for

attacking the foundation of American optimism, using a lot of the themes and theatrical devices of the Theatre of Absurd. In

the dramas of those writers, the failure of American Dream is constantly associated with the demise and the disintegration of

the family institution. The family represents the basic unit of each society; if the former faces the abyss of devasting

desperation, the latter cannot endure the predicament either. Neither the 20th century nor the contemporary family has been a

sweet and warm place for its members. Rather, it becomes an area of exercising violence.

Shepard's dramatic corpus generally and persistently laments the decline of the American Dream, the decay of the once

harmoniously established American family, the traditional moral values, and the American national myths. Shepard has

portrayed the degeneration and the spiritual sterility of the American society in which its beliefs, customs, myths and

standards have been eroded. He believes that the horrors found in America have led to the deteriorated state of the American

family and its demise. A persistent concern for Shepard in almost all his works is "the disappearance of the myths on which

American character and spirit" are based (Patraka and Siegel 5). The American society, overwhelmed by its secular,

egotistic or "me-decade" culture as Christopher Lasch calls it, has become spiritually dead and so dehumanized that it has

reached the highest levels of narcissism, alienation, loss and disintegration. "Time goes, there came the time of the Me! Me!

Me! generations of status seekers" (McRobbie 157). Erich Fromm, in Psychoanalysis and Religion, remarks that in spite of

reaching the most fascinating technological levels, Man failed in achieving his authentic identity and never reached the

fulfillment of the dream of wholeness. While we invented fascinating objects, our lives have become void of companionship,

charity, happiness and content (7-9). It seems that the "ongoing American obsession with technological and economic

progress has made it difficult for contemporary subjects to build and construct meaningful lives and relationships" (Crosby

iii). As an inevitable outcome, Man's psychological problems increased, along with the increasing rates of mental and

psychological disturbances, crime, violence and delinquency.

One of the major concepts that have various and vague perceptions, distinguishing American literature from the

mainstream European and British literature, is the presence of the notion of the American Dream that is specifically linked to

the American continent. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were among

the most influential and transcendental writers who addressed the concept of the American Dream. Their writings both

celebrate the American yearnings for freedom, success, social stability, self-reliance and authentic meaning of life, and, in the

same vein, warn against materialistic misconceptions (Merbah 1-2). However, the origin of the American Dream is

attributed to Europe. In The Theatre of the Absurd (1969), Martin Esslin contends that "the American dream of the good life

is still very strong. In the United States the belief in progress that characterized Europe in the nineteenth century has been

maintained into the middle of the twentieth" (qtd. in Anderson 4). In American Dreams, American Nightmares (1970),

10 David Madden notes that "There has never been a purely American Dream, because in the beginning all Europe lay down in

'the American Dream bed' and dreamed universal dreams" (qtd. in Anderson 4).

"American Dream", as a term, was first coined by the historian James Truslow Adams, a White male investment

banker and Yale graduate, in an article he wrote in 1931 for the Catholic Worker as well as in his book The Epic of America

(Rather xiv). He defines it as "that dream of land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with

opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement" (404). It is ''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 of birth or position" (Adams 404).

Modern scholars concede that traditional American Dream individualism focuses on autonomy and creativity. The

idealization of the independent, self-sufficient individual constitutes a basic aspect of the American Dream. The dignity and

importance of the individual are emphasized. The focus on the human Self is given a priority. However, there is a belief that

the American Dream has to do solely with the economic prosperity. While the American Dream had been a dogma or a state

religion since the founding of the New World, Lynda G. Adamson, in Thematic Guide to the American Novel (2002), claims

that "the American Dream is social and material, not emotional or spiritual,” and quotes the Oxford English Dictionary’s

definition of the American Dream as "the ideal of a democratic and prosperous society which the traditional aim of the

American people; a catch-phrase used to symbolize American social or material values in general" (21).Whether the Dream

was economic, political or religious, it is true that the fact that it had come to refer merely to economic prosperity bothered

many American intellectuals, and so they concentrated on it.

America was the first nation to be founded upon an ideal or an Edenic concept of being a promised land of freedom,

love and adventure. The ideal was that each individual has undeniable rights that no man or government body can strip

away. Historically, the American Dream implies an attitude of faith and hope that seeks the fulfillment of human desires

expressed in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence of 1776. In this Declaration, America's founding Fathers plainly

established the true meaning of the American Dream whose main and capsuled meaning is found in the second sentence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain

unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" (qtd. in Addison 299-300). Thus, the

faith in the Creator and Freedom are closely interwoven and inexorable. The materialistic pursuit, for the founding Fathers,

was not the ultimate goal. However, the American Dream has undergone a shift from these two noble aims (Faith in Creator

and Freedom) to mundane and materialistic goals. In this respect, John E. Nestler, in his article "The American Dream"

(1973), points out that "Whereas the American Dream was once equated with certain principles of freedom, it is now

equated with things. The American Dream has undergone a metamorphosis from principles to materialism . . . When people

are concerned more with the attainment of things than with the maintenance of principles, it is a sign of moral decay. And it

is through such decay that loss of freedom occurs" (594).

11 Despite increasing secularization, a degree of social integration was nevertheless maintained on the basis of common

values such as the belief in Man's ability to achieve much more technological and scientific inventions and the faith in the

Protestant ethic of virtuous acts. The horrible and the unparalleled destructiveness of WWI, WWII, and the Great

Depression of 1929 shook the pillars of the American society. Rapid social changes, especially the transformation of

America from an agricultural to an industrial and technological community caused the break-up of the social order. This

resulted in man's estrangement and the inability of the society to provide its members with a meaningful Self. The society

became heterogeneous and the center no longer was able to hold its parts. Individuals experienced sufferings and anxieties;

the sense of social dislocation dominated the American scene.

Sam Shepard produces a family trilogy that depicts the failure of the American Dream and the dissolution of the

contemporary American family and society. Curse, Buried Child and True West constitute such a trilogy that has the realistic

style. Through the family, Shepard reflects the whole society. The family is treated as a metaphor as well as a metonymy:

through the family does Shepard makes a critique of the contemporary society and the part (the family as a microcosm)

reflects the whole (the society as a macrocosm). Although Curse and Buried Child were written towards the end of the

seventies of the twentieth century in 1976 and 1978 respectively, the two plays reflect the dilemma of our contemporary

family and society.

The thesis adopts a two-fold purpose: firstly, to examine the failure of the American Dream and the subsequent

emergence of the American Nightmare in Shepard's two family plays Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child,

secondly, to examine the collapse of the contemporary family and society within psychoanalytic and semiotic perspectives

in these plays. The American Dream , in its relation to the family unit, was the main preoccupation of Shepard's dramatic

forefathers and has been the mainstream of American drama since O'Neill. The gothic elements in Shepard's plays under

investigation will be explored through psychoanalytic and semiotic lens.

The researcher's selection of Shepard's Curse and Buried Child in particular, while excluding True West from the scope

of the present study is due to two reasons. Firstly, not only do the plays in question reflect the cultural aspects of the fifties and

the sixties of America, but they also bear and reflect international phenomena like violence, narcissism, the curse of the

capitalistic system, incest, familial problems, etc. The contemporary world has grown spiritually dead due its obsession with

the technological and the industrial developments while leaving the ideals and the simple agricultural life. People have

become selfish, seeking money greedily, leaving what is essential like bringing their children up in a caring way, maintaining

familial warmth (whether physically or emotionally), establishing fruitful interpersonal relationships at the social level, caring

for their lands and properties instead of selling them to mean capitalists who suck the poor's blood and strength, etc.

Secondly, both plays depict the demise of the American Dream which is simultaneously juxtaposed with the failure of the

American family that was supposed to be the safest haven, rather than an arena of struggle, for its members. Excluding True

West from the scope of the present study is due to the fact that some of the major issues tackled in the earlier plays Curse and

12 Buried Child are found in True West. It would be a sort of redundancy to repeat what has been explored in the previous

plays. In other words, Curse and Buried Child are taken as examples or paradigms of psychopathological phenomena such

as violence, narcissism, betrayal, sibling rivalry, etc.

Despite being one of the foremost and splendid American dramatists, Sam Shepard has not obtained adequate notice for

examining his dramas from psychoanalytic and semiotic angles. Most of the previous studies concentrated largely on the

images of masculinity and the myth of the American family solely from thematic perspectives as well as on his techniques of

supra-realism and postmodernism . Psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches are going to be employed as basic research

methodologies in the present study. Such approaches are going to be applied to Curse and Buried Child, making use of the

psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung. The semiotic approach proposed by C. S. Peirce

will serve in discussing the dramatic signs and symbols that permeate the plays under investigation. The theories of John

Searle, H. P. Grice, Geoffrey Leech, Brown and Levinson will help explore the nature of the verbal communication among

the family members in the plays. The gothic and the psychopathological aspects in Shepard's plays will be investigated by

applying both approaches simultaneously. There will be no separation between the approaches employed as they are going

to be proven complementary. The research paper will also make use of trauma theory and Family Systems Theory (FSA) as

Shepard's plays deal with the influence of the past on the present and the family institution that is on the verge of collapse.

The significance of the present study lies in two major reasons. Firstly, it tackles a very noticeable phenomenon that

transcends the national border of America to the international one. The phenomenon of the contemporary alienated and

disintegrated family preoccupies the academic researchers in the fields of Social Psychology, Criminology, Psychoanalysis,

Sociology, Abnormal Psychology, Mass Media, etc. Secondly, the study contributes in enriching the research scope

interested in the American Dream and the American Gothic.

There are several questions the present study attempts to answer: "To what extent did Shepard reflect the cultural

aspects of the 1950s and the 1960s in Curse and Buried Child?"; "To what extent was Shepard influenced by his dramatic

forefathers O'Neill, Miller, Williams and Albee in his depiction of family problems in the plays in question?"; "Being a

myth-maker, which myths did Shepard borrow and assail in his plays?"; "What are the gothic aspects and the pathological

archetypes in the plays under investigation?"; "How are such aspects and archetypes depicted on the dramatic stage and

manifested in the characters' behaviors?" and "Do the plays under study represent an alarm to the twenty-first century society

despite being written in the previous century?".

The thesis is divided into three chapters and a conclusion. Despite being divided as a natural procedure, each chapter

serves the other. Chapterization runs as follows:

Chapter One, entitled "Sam Shepard: Cultural and Biographical Contexts", provides a cultural as well as

biographical background for Shepard's plays Curse and Buried Child. Such a two-fold background establishes the reasons

for witnessing violence, hatred, narcissism, moral degeneration and other phenomena in the plays under investigation. In this

chapter, the researcher conducts a Cultural Materialistic approach.

13 Chapter Two, entitled "The Collapse of the Contemporary Family and Society", explores the demise of the

American Dream and the decay of the American family in the plays in question from psychoanalytic and semiotic

perspectives.

Chapter Three, entitled "Psychopathological Archetypes and Gothicism in Shepard's Curse and Buried Child",

investigates the gothic aspects and the anti-archetypes employed by Shepard to assault both the complacent notions long held

about the nuclear family and the myth of the American Dream. In this chapter, the researcher continues in applying

psychoanalytic and semiotic aspects.

Finally, a Conclusion sums up the main points and the findings of the thesis.

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Chapter One

Sam Shepard:

Cultural and Biographical Contexts

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Chapter One

Sam Shepard:

Cultural and Biographical Contexts

Sam Shepard (1943- ), one of the towering geniuses in the world of American drama and whose plays have been

performed on several stages of Europe, has attracted popular and academic audiences alike. Approximately twenty-seven of

his plays have been performed, not only in the US and the UK, "but in Canada and Australia as well. At least twelve plays

have been performed in London alone, where he has been living for the past four years" (Bachman 405). Shepard won a

dozen Obie awards, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, a Rockefeller Playwriting Grant, the prestigious Pulitzer Prize

for Best Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child, and Edgar Award for Best Mystery Play for his provocative farce or dark

comedy The God of Hell. After Cowboys had been produced in October, 1964 by Theatre Genesis at St. Mark's In-the-

Bowery, Shepard wrote over fifty plays and won "more Obie awards than any other living playwright" (Innes 218); within

just two years (1966-1967), Shepard got three Obie awards for his Red Cross, Chicago and Icarus's Mother. His winning or

garnering of these awards and the Pulitzer Prize has brought him publicity and international literary acclaim, affirming his

impact on the contemporary theatrical milieu (Bigsby, A Critical Introduction 221). He deserves to be unquestionably

acknowledged as "the greatest American playwright of his generation" (Shewey 11).

Stanley Kauffmann, in New Republic, praises Shepard as being "the most talented of his generation"; Edward Albee and

Elizabeth Hardwick acclaim him as "one of the three or four most gifted playwrights alive" (qtd. in Bachman 405). He

"might top any serious critics' poll for Best American Playwright" (Hoffman 25). "Not many critics would dispute the

proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting American playwrights" (Gilman xi). Approaching

Shepard's works through Bakhtinian dialogism, Leslie Wade claims that "No playwright in the recent history of the

American theatre has garnered more attention and acclaim than Sam Shepard" who "has fascinated audiences with an

effulgent, often hypnotic drama of American anxiety and ambition", achieving "rank and stature accorded such figures as

Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller" (1). Bigsby hails Shepard as being one of the most idiosyncratic

and "powerful voices of the 1970s and 1980s" (A Critical Introduction 219).

Shepard entered the theatrical scene as a "renegade" in the Sixties, widely hailed as one of the most critically acclaimed,

prolific, protean, controversial and promising contemporary American playwrights, emerging from the Off-Off-Broadway

theatrical movement that is frequently regarded as a complete rejection of or a revolt against the commercial Broadway.

Shepard, as DeRose describes, became "one of the most talented and important playwrights of his generation" (ix). Off-Off-

Broadway, remarks Bottoms, "found its home in cafés, churches, lofts, and basements of New York's Greenwich Village and

East Village districts" and was "an intrinsic part of the counter-cultural mood of the period" ("Shepard and Off-Off-

Broadway …" 34). Discovering Shepard is "its major achievement to date" (Orzel and Smith 11). "Shepard has admitted