Gloria’s Struggle for Recognition

Abstract

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is one of the American prolific playwrights, who deals with various themes related to landscapes of American society and culture. As known many awards winners, he is an outstanding playwright. His main foci on plays raise diverse questions such as existential consciousness of modern people, slavery as well. In particular, his play, An Octoroon, is regarded as a revised version of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, which portrays African-Americans’ travail in terms of an octoroon. Appropriate is a sort of appropriated text from traditional American plays including O’Neill’s and Shepard’s. This study puts an emphasis on his work, Gloria, which deals with narratives of Gloria without Gloria. This play reveals a peculiar theme of authorship and obscures Gloria herself. In Gloria, he contrasts two Acts: Gloria’s mass shooting in Act 1 whereas Act 2 shows three authors’ exploiting the incident as their respective writing material. What made her commit that tragedy? In this paper its critical point is to read the reason of the incident, not as a source for writing. It is pivotal to examine the reason why Gloria’s gunshot and suicide happened. Basically this study explores Gloria’s side in terms of social recognition. What is noteworthy is Gloria’s lack of social recognition from others, especially her colleagues. As for Gloria, winning social recognition is of significance to prove herself and how social values and meanings in her community operate to get recognition from others. This analysis employs a view to Axel Honneth’s struggle for recognition relating to Georg Hegel’s desire. As Jacobs-Jenkins presents, Gloria’s struggle for recognition was so desperate to end up with abnormal and weird committing suicide as well as shooting colleagues. This is a stubborn process for seeking her genuine identity, which was supposed to be destroyed and nobody recognized.