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War, Music, and Garden: Three Key Words in Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2015, 28(3), pp.5-27
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Hye-Gyong Kwon 1

1동서대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to analyze three key words: war, music, and garden, in Quiara Alegría Hudes’ play Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, which is the first of her ‘Elliot Trilogy.’ Born to a Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother, Hudes tries to dramatize the third-generation Puerto Rican family’s experience of war. As a musical fugue is characterized by its interplay of a subject and counter-subject, the play interweaves the stories of Elliot, returning from his first tour of duty in Iraq, and Elliot’s father and grandfather, both Vietnam and Korean war veterans respectively. In addition to its fugue-based structure, the play also relies on music as an agent of healing when Elliot’s grandfather plays Bach on his flute to relieve other soldiers’ fear and horror during the Korean war. War leaves soldiers with physical and psychological scars. Both Elliot and his father suffer from the trauma of having killed people for the first time in war. As the play progresses, we see the “arguments” and “dissonance” caused by the fugue being gradually resolved and the knot between Elliot and his father being untied. Ginny’s garden, located in Philadelphia, is full of tropical plants and is strongly reminiscent of Puerto Rico. It is a cultural oasis where her family and friends gather and recollect their homeland while living in the U.S., with the garden taking on a ‘subaltern’ position when juxtaposed against American society. In addition, her garden is a space of life and healing where she plants every seed she can find to make it grow during her son’s participation in the war, and it is here that she treats her son’s wound when he returns.

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