2004, Vol.17, No.3

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

James Herne and Eugene O'Neill has been regarded as innovators of modern American drama, who discarded the conventions of the traditional melodrama. In this paper, however, Herne's Margaret Fleming and O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night are examined from the melodramatic perspective, and it proposes to situate them as the offsprings of the tradition of American family melodrama. Historically, family melodrama has been a dramatic form for the middle class, who considered the family as the locus of their value judgment. But while defending the bourgeois family ideology, family melodrama also has been a "drama of excess" which subtly reveals the inner moral struggle and hysteria against its easy reconciliation. Margaret Fleming ultimately communicated to the audience its unstable happy ending and criticism toward family ideology, while it was concerned with "angel of the house" and her kind heart toward her unfaithful husband and his illegitimate son. O'Neill obviously criticized the family values as the deadlock to the individual's freedom, but he was not altogether free from the idea of family, as the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night were trying to communicate with each other even after their disillusion. Hence the malleability of melodrama is conveyed by Herne and O'Neill through the transformation of the 19th century melodramatic tradition to the modern stage.

The most scandalously well-known ingredient in Oscar Wilde's life and art must be the unconventional sense of sexuality that ended up ruining his career. This essay aims to illuminate the sexual politics he was taking on against the fin de sicle Victorian society increasingly concerned about the ongoing anomalies of sex and gender--a profoundly decadent phenomenon--by reading Salome(1894), a biblical adaptation, in the context of the battle between the Victorian sexual conservativism and the New Woman. The hostility of the Victorian England against the image of the New Woman as sexual libertine seems to be interestingly echoed in a femme fatale destroyed by a political authority in Salome for her brutally candid expressions of sexual desire. While it is an open question whether or not Wilde viewed the New Woman's sexually liberated image as agreeable and positive and it is possible that the hideous representation of the sexually voracious heroine of the play indicates Wilde was probably repulsed by such an image of the woman, this essay concludes that the signs of his identifying or even sympathizing with Salome found either in or out of the text suggest that he may have regarded the sexual challenge of the New Woman as something similar, and even linked, to one he was taking as a homosexual artist. By reading Salome as a radical sociopolitical commentary, this essay tries to demonstrate that there exists more beyond the popular assumption that it is just an apolitical aestheticized jewel.

This study aims to explore how and why Sam Shepard makes use of the rituals and violence in his play, Buried Child (1978). Shepard is an American playwright noted for his performance-oriented plays. Like Antonin Artaud who longed for the Theater of Cruelty, Shepard tries to create total theater that appeals to all the senses. As the theatrical strategies to realize the theme of the play, he prefers using the rituals, violence, audio visual effects to the traditional ones. Through repetitive activities, representation of myth and violence, Shepard succeeds not only in building the ritual stage in this play but in searching for the identity of American people and family. As the mourning activities in the funeral ceremony of the patriarch of the family, roses are given before the body of Dodge by his wife, Halie, dressed in black and his grandson, Vince. Tilden, first son of Dodge, who was once a famous football player but now is considered sick in mind, brings corns, carrots, and corpse of a child from the back yard one by one. In the final scene of the play Tilden brings to the stage the body of the buried child in his arms, which symbolizes a mythic pattern of death, fertility and resurrection. Besides the repetitive activities implying the funeral ceremony, violence is shown as powerful imagery attacking audience's sensibilities and signifying the brutality of man.Buried Child is a play to warn the audience of the death of American dream and the destruction of American family. The purpose of this play seems to make the audience have a great change in the attitude of life. Certainly throughout the stage of Buried Child, rituals and violence have a great effect on inducing the theme of "social consciousness."