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Shepard’s True West: Demythisizing American Manhood

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2007, 20(2), pp.5-26
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

김영덕 1

1경북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Kim, YungdukShepard has openly expressed his fascination with American cowboys, and his True West (1980) represents the frontier myth as an integral part of American life. Focusing on America's concept of the cowboy, the play dramatizes the American male quest for masculinity marked by rugged individualism and independence. Shepard's male characters cherish fantasies of freedom and adventure, and of escape from familial responsibilities and from strictures of civilization, but their pursuit of the idealized cowboy life results in adolescent sibling rivalry and male violence. Their "acting out" of cowboy masculinity shows that it is not an essence but a performance whereby they repeat the ideals of the American cowboy. The mythical American West cannot be materialized in the present, nor can it be embodied in a living cowboy. In Shepard's play, cowboys/fathers as role models are either dead or absent; the brothers in the final tableau end up getting lost in a vast empty space, alienated both from the idealized past of the frontier and from the present wasteland of the city. Cowboy masculinity becomes simply one of the American mythologies that fails to give male characters any stable identity. They are fractured subjects shifting in their masculine pursuits and performances. In this seemingly male-oriented play, Shepard demythisizes the myth of the West and in so doing deconstructs cowboy masculinity.

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