British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

frankly participants in the spirit of Spring, the whites laughing constrainedly, awkward in natural emotion ... From the street of the whites a highpitched, nasal tenor sings the chorus of “'Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”. On the street of the blacks a Negro strikes up the chorus of: “I Guess I'll Have to Telegraph My Baby”. As this singing ends, there is laughter, distinctive in quality, from both streets”. Congo mask on the wall of a room has a special relevance - to heighten the oppressive emotions of the couple, who live there. In The Great God Brown (1926) the principal characters wear masks, which are removed from time to time and even transferred from one person to another. In Lazarus Laughed (1927) there are choruses, masked to represent seven stages of life and seven different types of person, each type clad in a distinctive colour, so that there are forty-nine combinations of' period and type. This play was beyond the scope of most little theatres. So was Strange Interlude (1928), a drama relying not only upon expressionist techniques, but rendering the inner thoughts of the characters (often at variance with their conversation). And in the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill seeks an extra dimension of significance by retelling the Greek legend in American circumstances. The end of the Civil War is equated with the downfall of Troy.

The plays mentioned are only a part of O'Neill's output. For twenty years he wrote with seemingly inexhaustible energy. There were naturalistic plays like Anna Christie (1921) and Desire under the Elms (1924). After 1934 O'Neill retired to his study, and though he continued to write, no new play of his was performed until The Iceman Cometh, twelve years later. A year afterwards he wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten. O'Neill died in 1953, and his final work did not reach the stage during his lifetime.

Clifford Odets (1906–1963) was probably the most forceful American playwright since O'Neill. His Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing (both produced in 1935, though the latter was an earlier work) established him as a passionately sincere author fully in sympathy with the ideas of Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. Though it is only a longish one-act piece, Waiting for Lefty is an almost perfect example of a proletarian morality play. It is about a taxi-drivers’ strike and the desperation of their lives. The stage is the platform of a union meeting; there are violent speeches and noisy interjections; half a dozen simple little episodes are interspersed to show the lives of the committee members, and how each came to be present. At this distance the propaganda seems crude, but the play, in common with Odets' other best work, is still curiously moving. Besides, he displays perfect command of the American spoken language.

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His dialogue crackles with life. His villainous capitalists now sound a little absurd; his working men do not: their words are - as Emerson said of their predecessors' speech – “vascular and alive”. This mastery of the common idiom has been one of the main assets of the American theatre.

In the 1920s American drama tended to seek its effects in “theatre poetry” – that is, in stage effects – rather than in the written word. In the 1930s the Depression and its attendant ideologies impregnated the theatre, making the American vernacular seem more impressive than any poetic rendering of speech. Since then, the patriotic war years and the confused aftermath have shown no strong impulse in any particular direction. John Steinbeck has tried, so far without success, to apply his talents to the theatre. Dos Passes, who wrote Airways, Inc. (1929) and other interesting plays at the start of the Depression, has not since returned to the theatre; the adaptation of his novel U.S.A. was done by others. The irrepressible William Saroyan seemed about to capture the field with My Heart's in the Highlands and The Time of Your Life (1939); but in subsequent plays he surrendered too readily to his flair for improvisation, writing pieces that were neither real enough nor fantastic enough. Thornton Wilder, an author of exceptional intelligence and resilience, staged his play Our Town in 1938, it was an immediate success and won the Pulitzer Prize. It portrays the life of two common families in a small town, presents the activities of an ordinary day: milk delivery, cooking, gossiping, school, etc. The central character introduces others, comments upon their actions. The absence of scenery suggests that human experience is eternal and universal. The Skin of our Teeth (1942) combines farce, allegory and deliberate anachronisms in an attempt to suggest that human experience is trans-historical. It also got the Pulitzer Prize.

America's most widely discussed playwrights since the war have been Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Williams (1911-1983) shot to fame with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire

(1947). Both plays are expressionalist in form. The first play reminds of the playwright’s own life in St Lewis, while the latter explores ideas and prejudices about the South and its culture. Typically, Williams's characters are lonely, guilty and passionate. Through them we see a brutal world of irrationality and sexual desire - as well as a sad, defeated past. They are often larger-than-life, dream-like and unreal, and express their feelings in the vivid poetic rhythms of colloquial Southern speech.

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He has had other and more equivocal successes with such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) or Suddenly Last Summer (1958). Both plays reflect the author’s interest in Zigmund Freud’s philosophy. Cat on the Hot Tin Roof investigates family tensions, treats such a taboo theme as homosexuality. The play Suddenly Last Summer describes the devouring by cannibals on a remote island of the maladjusted and homosexual son of a doting mother. Here, like in Sweet Bird of Youth (1957), the gothic element of Williams’s imagination prevails. In Sweet Bird of Youth the father of the seduced girl castrates the man, who has deserted her. In The Night of the Iguana (1962) the iguana chained outside a small Mexican hotel symbolizes the chained passions of the characters. Williams’s main contribution to the theatre is his expansion of its conventional emotional range; his characters’ stories are dramas in themselves, offering theatrical correlatives for deeply felt human desires.

Arthur Miller has always been a moralist. His achievement in Death of a Salesman (1949), for example, reflects his capacity to dramatize the failure of the American dream through a narrative of ordinary people. The relationship between the private and public arenas of the moral life forms the basis of All My Sons, where a war veteran son discovers his father’s dishonesty in selling defective aircraft parts to the Government. Arthur Miller established his reputation with Death of a Salesman (1949) and took it further, among the critics, with The Crucible (1953) – a play based upon the Salem witch-hunts of the late XVII century was immediately interpreted by the audience of the 1950s as a comment on McCarthysm, and two one-act plays composing A View from the Bridge (1955). These plays have wrenched the hearts of American audiences, perhaps because in some instances the characters portrayed come so close to being commonplace, or to revealing in sombre form the current American “problems' and maladies. After a long break Arthur Miller wrote another play, After the Fall (1964). It is a monologue of the main character, the lawyer Quentin, who recollects his life, hopes and disappointments, people he met. His reminiscences are brought back to life on the stage. In this play the author shows the crash of the ideals of American intellectuals during the cold war period.

Edward Franklin Albee is one of the leading American dramatists of the 1960s. He was much influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd. His first play The Zoo Story (1959) was first performed in Berlin. It represents an onslaught on the corrosive effects of American materialism. The author

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sees the main evil in egoistic indifference and social apathy of middle class Americans. The play is symbolic. The protagonist’s middle class family is a kind of menagerie.

Who Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) made his reputation as a leading playwright and continued the attack on middle class values. There are four characters in this play who spend a night, drinking, recollecting the past, speaking about their problems. Illusions and reality are combined here. The play interweaves political, psychological and metaphysical meanings. The names of the characters, George and Martha, evoke the idealism of American Revolution, their harrowing marriage symbolizes the collapse of American idealism. Nick foreshadows a totalitarianism in which “… we will not have much music, much painting, but we will have a civilization of men, smooth, blond, and right at the middleweight limit”. The childlessness of George and Martha represent the sterility of an exhausted culture.

Arthur Kopit is often considered as another American representative of the Theatre of the Absurd. May be it is better to say that they are parodies of this trend. His first play Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet, and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (1961) features a woman, who wants to protect her infantile 17-year-old stammering son from impudent Rosalie. The girl wants to seduce Jonathan, but his father’s corpse, hidden in the closet, and constantly falling out from it, prevents her from doing so. The next play The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis (1965) is a grotesque, open to any interpretations. It tells about a Jewish provincial tennis club, overrun by a group of prostitutes, who want to play tennis. The president of the club (his name is Franklin Delano Cavle, his son’s name is Gerbert Goover Cavle) is at a loss: he is sitting in his office, hearing the noise of the falling balls, as if his world were being broken to pieces. Some critics say the play symbolizes the triumph of “strong” women over “weak” men, others – the dawn of civilization. The play Wings (1978) is a poetic drama about a woman, recovering from a stroke, whose fractured world is revealed through her interior monologue.

So American drama of the second half of the XX century is very controversial, characterized by both humanism and disappointment in humankind, social acuteness and romanticism.

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Tasks

1.Speak on the main tendencies in the development of the XX century American drama.

2.A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is set in New Orleans. Blanche Dubois has fantasies of refinement and grandeur. She is both repelled and attracted by the animal nature of Stanley Kowalski, married to her gentle and delicately beautiful sister Stella, five years younger than herself.

BLANCHE: ... A man like that is someone to go out with – once – twice – three times when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?

STELLA: I have told you I love him.

BLANCHE: Then I tremble for you! I just – tremble for you. ...

STELLA: I can't help your trembling if you insist on trembling! [There is a pause.]

BLANCHE: May I – speak – plainly?

STELLA: Yes, do. Go ahead. As plainly as you want to. [Outside, a train approaches. They are silent till the noise subsides.They are both in the bedroom. Under cover of the train's noise Stanley enters from outside. He stands unseen by the women, holding some packages in his arms, and overhears their following conversation. He wears an under-shirt and grease-stained seersucker pants.]

BLANCHE: Well – if you'll forgive me – he's common! STELLA: Why, yes, I suppose he is.

BLANCHE: Suppose! You can't have forgotten that much of our bringing up, Stella, that you just suppose that any part of a gentleman's in his nature! Nor one particle, no! Oh, if he was just - ordinary! Just plain – but good and wholesome, but – no. There' s something downright – bestial – about him! You're hating me saying this, aren't you?

STELLA: [coldly] Go on and say it all, Blanche.

BLANCHE: He acts like an animal, has an animal's habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There's even something – subhuman – something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something – apelike about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in – anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is-Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you – you here – waiting for him! Maybe pom a low social class he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night f alls and the

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other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! you call it - this party of apes! Somebody growls – some creature snatches at something – the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella – my sister – there has been some progress since then! Such things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching. ... Don't- don't hang back with the brutes!

[Another train passes outside. Stanley hesitates, licking his lips. Then suddenly he turns stealthily about and withdraws through the front door. The women are still unaware of his presence.]

–What can we assume about Stella's “bringing up”?

–How could you describe Blanche's outburst? What effect does it have on us knowing that Stanley is listening?

3. Analyze one of the plays by the above-mentioned authors.

CONCLUSION

History of American literature is incomplete without mentioning Native American literature. The oral cultures of Native Americans remain current in their principal forms of song, ritual drama and story-telling. Although highly diversified in terms of language, religious beliefs and sociocultural patterns, the oral art forms have in common an emphasis on physical and spiritual harmony between humanity and the natural environment. They produced a great influence upon the development of American literature of the XIX–XX centuries.

The earlier development of the Native American novel in the XX century is marked by recurrent treatments of mixed-blood protagonists seeking to secure their individual and communal identities through discussions between tribal traditions and American modernity.

Nowadays Native Americans write mainly in the genre of autobiography and novel. One of the recent authors is Scott Momaday (Kiowa), of Kiowa Indian ancestry. His novel The Names (1976) is an autobiographical account of his ancestry and tribal life, in which he explores Kiowa culture in its contemporary context. Adrian Louis (Paiute) published in 1988 his devastating treatment of alchoholism and substance abuse in the reservations – Fire Water World. Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) deals with com-

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plex family relationships, raises the problem of the importance of women and family (Love Medicine – 1984).

In the late 1960s many Native American authors began producing poetry in English, enriched by the traditions of oral culture (Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Leslie Silko and others). Lynn Riggs (Cherokee) is the best known Native playwright. His celebrated folk-drama Green Grow the Lilacs provided the basis for the musical Oklahoma.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.Barnard Robert. A Short History of English Literature. – Oxford,

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2.Beowulf, ed., Michael Swanton. – Manchester University Press,

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3.Cunliffe M. The Literature of the United States. – New York, 1978.

4.Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature. – Oxford, 1996.

5.Dyakonova N. Three Centuries of English Poetry. – Leningrad,

1967.

6.Gower Roger. Past into Present. An Anthology of British and American Literature. – Longman, 2000.

7.Gray M. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. – Longman York Press,

1999.

8.Gray M., Gray L. Notes to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. – York Press, 2001.

9.Hecker M. et al. American Literature. Moscow, 1978.

10.Messenger N. Notes to Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. – Longman York Press, 2000.

11.Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature, The. – ed. by Jenny Stringer. – Oxford, 1996.

12.Romanticism. An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu. – Oxford, 1998.

13.Schmidt M. The Story of Poetry. English Poets and Poetry from Caedmon to Caxton. – London, 2001.

14.Stephen M., Franks Ph. Studying Shakespeare. – Longman York Press, 1999.

15.The Twentieth Century. The Penguin History of Literature, ed., by Martin Dodsworth. – London, 1994.

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АЛЕХИНА Мария Степановна

BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Учебно-методическое пособие

Компьютерная верстка А.В. Бернацкой

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