A Prison of Object Relations: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro

Abstract

Adrienne Kennedy's characters speak obsessively of their own births as well as the births — which are so often the deaths — of their children. Their monologues focus on rape and incest, miscarriage and child murders. Such preoccupations psychologically paralyze the characters, fixing them at — and regressing them to — a primitive stage in development which Melanie Klein, a psychologist of the British object relations school, calls the "paranoid-schizoid position," an infant stage which normally precedes integration. According to Klein, the life instinct and the death instinct, which are both present in the infant from birth, create a polarity of anxieties that the infant deals with through splitting and projective identification; that is, the infant learns to split external objects into representations of good and evil, projecting hopes and fears away from the subject and onto the object. In later phases, the infant learns to unify such splits and to deal with whole objects. Kennedy's characters, however, rarely reach this point of integration: they never progress beyond the paranoid-schizoid position. These characters remain prisoners of object relations, their worlds disordered by irrational, irrevocable splits.