Lacanian psychoanalysis in Albee's and Williams' American dramas

Psychoanalysis Study

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams' a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Words communicate ideas but beautiful words live forever and may keep telling a different story every time. The English literature has a rich heritage of dramas and plays that are often written in early or mid-20th century yet they are as applicable today as they were at the time these were written. The two texts are taken for psychoanalysis namely Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. The dramas are plotted against the American modern lifestyle where people have issues in their relationships as well as work life that affects the quality of life. The Lacanian psychoanalysis approach is used to comment on the two texts. This approach guides that the human conscious self is different from the unconscious self. Also this approach tells that if a person wants to understand true psychology of a man, he needs to see what the man is hiding. And normally one can find true secrets in the unconscious of a person. Thus, the Lacanian approach does not only believe in what the person says in his conscious state of mind without understanding it in the light of his unconscious behavior. While a person uses words and sentences to express conscious ideas, he uses real and imaginary symbols to express his unconscious thoughts. While the dramas advocate that the characters in the stories are psychologically not unified, it is not something unusual. Human beings generally lead split-lives and it is ordinary to have fragmented selves. Even these fragments of a self often collide with each other but this is the reality. Man can surrender to the fragmented life and psychologically partial self so as to accept his weaknesses and enjoy relationships rather regretting them.

Keywords: A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Edward Albee, Lacanian psychoanalysis approach, Tennessee Williams, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Part I

Introduction

psychoanalysis

The psychoanalysis, as the name suggests, deals with assessment of psychology of something. The approach involves set of psychological as w ell as psychotherapeutic theories that were initially forwarded by Sigmund Freud determine how personality is composed not only of inherited characteristics but also the events since a man's childhood. The approach also suggests that behavior, experience and cognition of a person are up to much extent based on the irrational drives that are predominantly unconscious. The psychoanalysis theory aims to make these unconscious irrational desires a part of awareness and also acknowledges that conflict between unconscious and conscious drives can cause mental imbalances and disturbances.

The psychoanalysis is thus an approach that offers psychological treatment to analytic patient by verbalizing their thoughts by means of liberating associations, fantasies, and dreams thus the unconscious conflicts are induced to reveal symptoms of mental disturbance so that they can be treated. The psychoanalyst understands irrational defenses, wishes and guilt of the patient and describes how people can be enemy of their own. The psychoanalysis shows how different we are from our selves i.e. conscious us is far different than the unconscious us.

Lacanian psychoanalysis approach

Lacan or Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst. He believed that the reality can never be fully expressed in words and language. Lucan based his psychoanalysis theory on the Freud's work. He did not try to find a connection between psychoanalysis with the social theory. He focused his efforts on the desires of people and called it a subject of social interaction (Literary Theory and Criticism, 2011). He said that the desire is stated by means of language, culture and the connection among people. He concentrated on the deep human structures of sexuality and gender and studied how human are different from themselves. He was criticized for using sex as a means of understanding psychology of patients too. He wanted to use the unconscious mode of human beings for understanding their psychology like Freud and not the conscious part because people can lie in consciousness but their unconscious never lies. This is often considered an aggressive approach since entering the world on unconscious of a person is a tough game. Humans are fragmented in their conscious and unconscious beings and thus they are different than themselves which everybody does not accept easily.

The Lacanian psychoanalysis approach is often considered coldblooded because it aggressively challenges the sense of completeness. This approach considers that the self-mastery is an illusion and the ego of a person is his self-justifying deceit and a man uses it as a way of resistance to change. The approach says that the people fear of breakdown and fragmentation thus they imagine themselves as an imaginary being that splits their personality. The Lacan approach deals with conversion and change of a human being not by a gradual move towards ending rather than by ending the psychoanalysis session at once.

Lacan approach introduces the linguistic domination. It is a desire developed through language. The signifier and signified of the Saussure are the psychic elements formed by interplay. He is convinced that the subject explains itself within language and it depends on the signifier. The language often disguises impracticality of desire. Lacan take unconscious as an inter-subjective space between individuals and exists in a structured manner. He believes that in early age of a human being, a person receives desire from the mother and does not act as an agent of symbolization. This analysis focuses on analyzing the egotistic delusions of the self. Thus summarizing, the core concentration of Lacan psychoanalysis is on:

De-centering of the subject

Loss and impracticality of cohesive psychic life

Importance of signifier over what is signified

Delicate and unwarranted relationship with people

Themes and Symbols

Theme is the main idea around which the literature revolves. It is not the subject, moral or the hidden idea (MHS Composition Guide, n.a.). The story, dialogues, plot hence everything is arranged such that it supports the main idea the writer wants to communicate. If a reader losses to grasp the main theme of the writing, he actually lost the whole purpose of it. The taste of words and the amusement of sentences remain incomplete if the main theme is not understood. A colorful and romantic appearing story may actually be based on the theme of how people hide their insecurities and sad story may be based on the idea of how glorious past keeps reminding people what they have lost. Thus, the theme is the heart of drama or literature.

The purpose is the power that guides the idea and supports the literature. It guides about why something is written and the topic is so important to be talked about. The symbols are the beauty of literature. They offer a little twist to the plain writing but enhance the charm of the writing, drama or film. A cat, for example, symbolizes feminine delicacy as well as doubts in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

PART II

Analysis: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" is a play by Edward Albee in 1962. The play was a challenge for the conservative theater. The play was revolutionary in nature. Edward reclaimed the presence of disability in the drama. The author has criticized gender, sexuality, and the values of middle-class bourgeoisie as well. The disability in the play is evident at many places. Some of the disabilities to mention in the play are schizophrenia, alcoholism and dwarfism. Thus nobody is fully composed and everybody leads a fragmented life. The disability results into sharp contrast in the personalities of people thus making them imperfect. The critics have often said that the characters in the play, George and Martha, have pathological behavior. They seem to be arrested emotionally.

Characters

At New Cathage University, George is a member of the history department and is 46 years old. George and Martha once have a loving relationship but now there relationship turned to be headed by frequent acrimony and sarcasm. Martha is the president's daughter at New Carthage University and is 52 years old. As George has an aborted academic career so Martha, even married to George, is disappointed with the academic status of George. With Nick, Martha tried to have an affair. Nick who is married to Honey is 28 years old clean-cut, Midwestern and good looking man. In the biological department at New Carthage University, Nick has just joined the faculty. Being 26 years old, Honey is the bland and petite wife of Nick. Not being the brightest bulb in the bunch, Honey has a weak stomach.

Because of the powerful theme 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' touched on, in its time it was the great sensation. To illustrate the inherited tension among the audience and actors, Edward Albee wrote a play rather than composing a short story or a novel. Idea of public and private aspects of the most focused relationship of the society, that is marriage, is bring forth by him. Theme of phoniness is what inherited in the faces either being private or public. As per Albee's understanding and experience, in public situations many couples show their falsified image. Indiscretions to the world and person's problems are exposed in the preferred phoniness.

Along with creating the illusions of the wives and husbands, people do compose their fake image for the neighbors and friends and this is all shown by Albee. As Lacan says, he understands people by their desires and not what they do (Literary Theory and Criticism, 2011), the desires of the drama characters tell what they truly are. Both of the couples have real pain in their marriages and to ease the pain unconsciously, both of them have make up a happily married imaginary world and fantasies about their challenging lives. The mask to each other and to themselves (that of Honey, Nick, George and Martha) is well exposed and torn off with the development of the play. This is the same exposure that gives them the area to breathe and thus the exposure frees them.

George's lack of success and productivity at his job is one of the toughest experiences George and Martha faced in their lives. Albee beautifully shows the sarcastic hatred of George towards ambitious and young Nick. George's desire for success destroys one's individuality and self-esteem. Martha's attitude shows that as compare to men, women are more concerned towards the idea of success. Additionally, kids added in family completion and both of the couples have no child at all. As the characters are living like children so Albee thought none among them is ready to have kids.

THEMES AND Symbols

The drama is basically written on the theme of hollow ideals of the Americans (Fox, 2011). It tells that the modern American lifestyle has big question marks and makes the life unsatisfactory. The people so blindly follow the financial aims and their ambitions that they forget the role and importance of satisfaction in their quest to be successful. The modern ideology of achievement is destructive, says the drama. The characters in the drama are all educated and belong to middle class and are the best among the people of America. However, these characters display cruel behavior during nights. Nick is for example, a character who wants to become professionally successful. He is an ambitious youth representing most of America. He is ready to pay any cost and treats his wife like a child. The relationship between husband and wife is critical and they even imagine about a son so that they can meaningfully communicate which otherwise seems so hard. The drama portrays how often in our quest to become successful, we can be inhumane like George is. He needs his wife to be blamed for his failures and in competencies that is so unbelievable from a successful person.

Among the minor themes of the drama is the fact that people often tend to seek refuge in imagination and avoid reality. Thus, they are not willing to take responsibilities. Like George, in order to be successful does not correct his mistakes rather puts the blame on the wife. The life is however about the reality and facing the challenges that can only grow bigger by avoiding and ignoring them. This is what happens to this small family as well. The Lacan perspective on this seeking shelter in the imagination would be to find the depth of feelings of characters and that how much they avoid the reality is proportional to their weakness as a human being. A strong person fights challenges rather than getting escape.

PART III

Analysis: A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a drama written in 1955 to analyze and understand the relationships among human beings. The expressions and behaviors studied in the drama are greed, hollowness, deception, decay, sexual desire, suppression, and death. The drama focuses on the social dynamics of regions of Southern United States yet can be generalized anywhere else since human beings are subject to same relationship challenges and dynamics everywhere. The topics of lies, family and relations issues, illegal relationships, illegal power and deception are more relatable today than they were ever before. There are enough opportunities in the drama for debate about American capitalism. The drama offers realism and ends in ambiguity thus arousing reader to think and seek answers. There is a lot of symbolism in the drama too (Drury, 2012). The drama gives an insight to how people deal with the death of a near one. For some time, the people think and believe that the mortality makes life useless. Man's fate is however not only about the dying at the end.

Themes and Symbols

The drama is based on the themes of homosexuality and lies. The broken manliness is explained in the drama that makes people cripple and some end up in finding themselves in homosexuality. Brick is a broken individual who finds resort in alcohol and illegal relationships. He was once a loved son and behaved indifferently towards the world. He mourns the death of his loved friend Skipper and that makes his life much more difficult. The theme of lies in the drama is also quite eminent. Mama hopes that Brick will become a family man one day but he avoids entering a committed relationship and even lies. Thus Maggie has to lie about the baby she is expecting so that the family life begins.

The fantasy of drama is represented by cat on roof. The cat is delicate and represents the desires of a woman. Maggie is that lady who is panic-stricken and hysterical that makes her a cat. She has a sense of lacking and thus fantasizes things. The drama also discusses how a woman feels incomplete without a child after some age. Her normality as a woman has a question mark and she feels that she cannot acquire a space in Big Daddy's house unless she gets a child.

The drama pictures the father-son relationship beautifully. It is also depicted as a narcissistic relation. The Daddy has self-absorbed love for his son, Brick. The father wants only one thing from Brick at this point of life and that is heir i.e. grandson of Daddy. The theme of a couple without a child is painted as an incomplete and uninsured family. This childlessness makes Maggie restless and she uses the telephone rings as an indication of having spies at home. She and Mama conspires the expecting of baby so that the Daddy lives.

Part IV

Fragmentary Nature of Life

It is so amazing how "free" and "learned" individual of today cannot express self plainly rather has to take help from symbols and signs. Human psychology is so complex and his unconscious being is so different than the conscious being that he offers does not know him. Individuals seek refuge in the symbols of fear, cat, alcohol, anger and aggression to hide their weaknesses. What they forget is that each one of us is facing same challenges and that every person has fragmented self. Suppression our inferiority by being aggressive to other people since we were unable to be as successful as we wanted to be, George for example, does not mean that we really are right to do so but it actually means that our unconscious is insecure that we cannot meet our own standards.

By identifying the symbolic representations of these orders within the texts, we would then examine how each of these symbols demonstrates the fragmentary nature of the self. Such a demonstration would show the reader that all individuals are actually splintered selves. The overall purpose of the paper is to show that a fully integrated and psychologically whole person does not exit and that we must all accept fragmentation. Like Lacan has criticized, man can hide his emotions in his conscious but that composed man is only a deception. It is not in the human formula to be as composed as rocks. Our psychological part is different than what we appear in routine. It is beneath man's anger, aggression, hysteria, sexual problems and mania what he truly is i.e. A fragmented being. A psychologically whole being is a myth as advocated in the two texts Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf and a Cat of a Hot Tin Roof. If human beings were psychologically a whole being, their smiles would be lovelier and love, deeper.

It is human fragmented psychology that Brick could not completely leave the dead friend's love and could not completely accept the love of Maggie. He had issues with his life and he could not decide whether to live in past, present or future. I consider his alcoholic habits as an indication of his split self that he is confused and seeks some time away from pain by being alcoholic. Maggie on the other hand also has a split personality. She wants a secure future in Brick's house but takes support of love of Brick. She cannot utter her true wishes thus has to make plans to justify her love.

Real and Imaginary Symbols

The human psychology makes them interesting as well as weird. The "wise creation" is often fool enough to take help from false imagination. There are often real symbols of expression like anger is the real symbol of failure as depicted in Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It is apparent that people blame others for their failures. Also the love of son as well as the demand of heir is a real symbol for love of power and wealth. However, the more interesting subject is the imaginary symbols. Maggie, for instance complains about a cat which is an imaginary symbol of her delicacy and fears. It is the beautiful use of symbolism that makes the text much more exciting. Even the reader/viewer's imagination is set free to add meanings about what else the symbol indicates.

Reading the two plays, reader realizes that things are often hard to do. It is easy to say that one should forget about the past but- easy said hard done. A person can deceit himself that he does not care about his past yet lives in it for long. Man is often divided between his past, present and future being. He has worries about insecure future, like Maggie, and regrets about past, like Brick, but cannot make it to excel in present like George. Our problems land us into the other problems like the professional problems spoil relationships and make the lives even worse and even fragmented. Thus it can be said that despite gender and the age of human beings, the fully composed and psychologically whole is not possible. Man is a different conscious being than his unconscious being. He can ignore his current problems but then they get locked in the unconscious and keep alarming about dangers of future.

Human beings are often not what they appear only. They have their presence in terms of dreams and fantasies as well. The human fantasies, as psychoanalysis says, indicate the unconscious life of a person which cannot be separated from the individual physically walking on earth. Even the Big Daddy, who seems so powerful, is fragmented between his love for wealth and the love for relationships. Also a man can be riding two boats of love and fear, success and love, present and past or truth and lie. This should be accepted as a reality of life and man should not deny the compartmentalized life but should embrace it and try to reduce the gap between reality and the dreams.

Reality and Dreams

We are not what we may seem but also not exactly we dream ourselves to be. The normality of life and the true essence of it lies somewhere between reality and dreams. It is a state where we are conscious as well as unconscious, where we are truth but also some portion of lie. Thus, individuals are different than themselves and this is to be accepted if a person wants to live a satisfied life. Lacan would judge people by their unconscious being i.e. understanding their dreams and fantasies but that would be unjust to totally ignore the conscious efforts of a person towards life. Accepting the difference of us from ourselves relieves us from many pains. It sets us free of troubles and concerns regarding the realities of life. One should accept that reality and dreams and fantasies are all our components and should not be fought against rather one should accept the fragmented nature of life.

Part V

Conclusion

Human relationships of love, belonging and care will remain same as they have since history. What changes is the environment in which these relationships grow and prosper. It is in the genes and instincts of human beings to seek love like Maggie, Brick, Daddy, George and Martha. The love can take different shapes and forms. It can be mild, wild, passionate, and regretful of insecure. The dilemma of our generation is that with time our relationships are less close and our love is uncertain. The two dramas, Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof narrate how modern time has corrupted our relationships. Depression, hysteria and other psychological issues are common and make it harder for people to enjoy their relationships. Also people are more inclined to be "successful' and to "achieve" than to realize what truly is the treasure of life.

The two dramas have extensively focused on how every individual today is broken and is leading a fragmented life. People might seem to be composed from outside but from within they are torn and worn out. People have insecurities and doubts even about the most closed ones in their lives. The experiences of life and exposure to hard realities make people's lives miserable. Since every character in the two dramas leads a splinted life, one cannot complain anymore that only his or her life is a mess. Because, human beings are not machines. They rather have conscious, unconscious, emotions and psychology that make them much more complex and often compartmentalized.