Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T12:21:31.065Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Patriarchal pathology from The Holy Ghostly to Silent Tongue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Matthew Roudané
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
Get access

Summary

Shepard's plays have little to say about women outside of their role within the drama of male individuation. Yet, it is precisely in his focus on masculinity and its problems that Shepard's plays provide acute critiques of the destructiveness of patriarchy for both men and women. Shepard's early plays establish his interest in male individuation, especially in regard to the father/son conflict where the son's identity is at stake. In The Rock Garden (1964), for instance, the son's final monologue about his sexuality ends up “killing” the father who falls over, supposedly dead, at the end of the play. Again, in the 1970 play The Holy Ghostly, the son must “kill” the father, or at least the father's spirit, in order to assert his own identity, which he has been struggling to do after changing his name and running away from the “Old West” to New York City. But sons in Shepard's plays never escape the father's legacy, even after the father's death, because they inherit patriarchal ideas of violent masculinity from their fathers and have learned from them to stake their claim to manhood upon the body of a woman.

This last belief leads Shepard’s men to search for completion of themselves in the body of a woman, reflecting how in many of Shepard’s plays and films a man’s sense of his control over his world and of his own identity is usually tied to his ideas of women. In the early play Chicago (1965), we witness Stu, whose self-image has been shattered by the imminent departure of his girlfriend (aptly named Joy), retreat into a childish land of make-believe as he refuses to leave his bathtub. In Fool for Love (1983), Eddie’s inability to let Mae go – his perpetual seeking of her to return to old fantasies in contrast to her continued attempts to forge a new life for herself – demonstrates the differences between men and women’s needs for each other in Shepard’s world.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×