- 영문명
- Reality and Illusion in Edward Albee"s Tiny Alice
- 발행기관
- 한국아메리카학회
- 저자명
- 박용남(Yong-Nam Park)
- 간행물 정보
- 『미국학논집』제36집 2호, 150~172쪽, 전체 23쪽
- 주제분류
- 인문학 > 기타인문학
- 파일형태
- 발행일자
- 2004.09.01
국문 초록
영문 초록
This essay discusses the theme of reality versus illusion portrayed in Edward Albee"s Tiny Alice. The play was the focus for considerable critical debate, public bafflement and eventually, scholastic pedantry. But Albee"s ingenuous belief in the self-evident nature of its subject was convincing.
The continuity with Who"s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is apparent in Tiny Alice, the metaphysical hints of that play now moving to the center of attention in a work which poses Platonic question about the nature of reality, which describes the process of myth-making and which implies the need to seek consolation in the diminished world of the present and the real rather than in abstraction. Where George had created a fantasy son to fill a vacuum in his own life, Julian creates a son of God.
In Tiny Alice, Albee tries to pluck the masks from life and death, sex, love and marriage, God, faith, and organized religion, money-greed wealth, charity and even celibacy. Part of our puzzlement undoubtedly comes from believing that some of these do not wear any mask. but are solid and authentic, at least in our personal value system But no one comes out of the theater with all of his own psychological blinders and colored glasses still in place. Albee penetrates the superficial layers of our conscious personality and, using the mysterious escalators of the unconscious, reaches the citadels of our private certainties and shoots them full of question marks.
Julian remains uncertain of the boundary between the dream and the act; the facts of his past life are perhaps only dreams, hallucinations, but his present life is just as irrational, incomprehensible and mysterious. His death takes on appearance, in many ways, of the heroic sacrifice of a Greek tragedy, with this difference, that neither gods nor destiny nor tragic flaw determines the ineluctable course of the destruction. Albee seems to suggest that this absurd annihilation is the substance of human destiny, that all existence leads to this ultimate nothingness.
The continuity with Who"s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is apparent in Tiny Alice, the metaphysical hints of that play now moving to the center of attention in a work which poses Platonic question about the nature of reality, which describes the process of myth-making and which implies the need to seek consolation in the diminished world of the present and the real rather than in abstraction. Where George had created a fantasy son to fill a vacuum in his own life, Julian creates a son of God.
In Tiny Alice, Albee tries to pluck the masks from life and death, sex, love and marriage, God, faith, and organized religion, money-greed wealth, charity and even celibacy. Part of our puzzlement undoubtedly comes from believing that some of these do not wear any mask. but are solid and authentic, at least in our personal value system But no one comes out of the theater with all of his own psychological blinders and colored glasses still in place. Albee penetrates the superficial layers of our conscious personality and, using the mysterious escalators of the unconscious, reaches the citadels of our private certainties and shoots them full of question marks.
Julian remains uncertain of the boundary between the dream and the act; the facts of his past life are perhaps only dreams, hallucinations, but his present life is just as irrational, incomprehensible and mysterious. His death takes on appearance, in many ways, of the heroic sacrifice of a Greek tragedy, with this difference, that neither gods nor destiny nor tragic flaw determines the ineluctable course of the destruction. Albee seems to suggest that this absurd annihilation is the substance of human destiny, that all existence leads to this ultimate nothingness.
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