Breaking Off the Fetters of Ideology: Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story as a Critique of the American Dream

Abstract

This paper argues that Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story presents a powerful critique of the American Dream ideology via dramatizing how it falsifies Americans’ consciousness of their reality. Like all repressive ideologies, it ties individuals to their conditions of living through an imaginary relationship, not a true one. People, under the hypnotism of the American Dream, falsely believe they are happy in their lives, free in their decisions, and autonomous from their socioeconomic milieu. They are blind to the fact that they are subjective to numerous economic, social, and political forces that ideology strives deliberately to conceal. Albee’s critique of the American Dream ideology is centred on how this ideology leads to death both in its physical and spiritual senses. In The Zoo Story, people are left with only two choices, both of them are bitter. They have either to conform to the American Dream ideology and, hence, feel false happiness based on the illusionary belief that they are what they choose to be, or they can refuse to assimilate and, hence, suffer from spiritual vacuum that may lead to physical death as a result. In other words, they have to choose between illusion and death