"A kind of Alaska": women in the plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard

Abstract

In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading literary works, Ann C. offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study women characters in modern dramatic texts Eugene O Neill, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard. This is first study to treat these three writers in tandem, while uses work Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid necessary part feminist dramatic criticism but a part theatrical production as well. From s play A Kind Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for patriarchal oppression women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination O Neill s madonnas, s whores, Shepard s female saviors as they are represented in O Neill s Iceman Cometh, Long Day s Journey into Night, A Moon for Misbegotten; Pinter s Homecoming, No Man s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind Alaska; and Shepard s Buried Child, True West, A Lie of the Mind. Since works O Neill, Pinter, Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, hopes that a better understanding female characters in these plays will influence performances themselves.