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A Study on the Rituals and Violence in Buried Child

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2004, 17(3), pp.99-124
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yu Ho-Jun 1

1평택대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

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."

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