Emily Jestus

In several of the plays we read and saw, the social climate played a
role in the lives of the characters, affecting them in seen and
unforeseen ways. Choose two plays (The Glass Menagerie and Miss
Julie) to illustrate this point. Use specific characters and plot points.
In the Glass Menagerie, the world has become a difficult place for
Tom and his family. Tom wants to get away, but his family needs him to
support them. Women like Amanda and Laura cannot support
themselves alone in their society, despite Amandas effort. In time
gone by, women like Laura could expect to be supported by a husband
or male family member, despite her frail nature. However, the social
climate has changed. War is on the horizon. There are new, exciting,
and terrible things coming. Tom, like many men of his generation, (and,
indeed, even his own father) is called to action. They are not content to
stick around and just get by, despite their feelings of duty to their
family. As he says at the end, Tom could not save Laura. She has to
blow out her candles. There is no place for women like her anymore.
We do not know what happened to Laura and Amanda after Tom left.
But, if we can use their society as an indicator, and Amanda and
Lauras failed attempts to support themselves on their own in the
show, their fate was not good.
In Miss Julie, the two lovers, Julie and Jean, never had a chance to
come out unscathed against their society. There was simply not

enough choice, not enough ability to change. There is a terrible power

imbalance between the two, servant and master, that is never righted
during the course of the play, even when it seems the roles have
reversed. In the end, everything went back to as it was, even though
everything had gone wrong, been changed and corrupted. Jean went
back to being a servant, submissive before his true master. And Julie
could only go back to being an innocent, submissive, upper class lady.
When she could not reconcile her new knowledge and experiences with
the way others would always view her, she could see no other way but
to end. And, in this time in society, there was no chance of their
interaction ending any other way. All Jean would ever be was a servant,
despite his cravings for more power, destroying her in his attempts. All
Julie would ever be is his master, a more powerful, yet submissive
woman, despite her desire to be an equal. Giving in destroyed her,
took away what little power she had. She could not go on.
~
Theater as a literary form is unique. It lives on the page but is designed
to be experienced live. How is reading a play different experience that
reading a novel? Is a play literature? Why?
A play is literature, but that is not all that it is. In my mind, a play
is of two worlds. It is both literature, and something more, something
alive. There is no denying that it exists on a page. You can read it and
experience it just fine in that capacity. But seeing it, feeling it,

experiencing it onstage engages far more senses and tends to result in

a fuller understanding of the work.
Literature is, by my definition compilations of words arranged
into a plot that are meant to be shared and experienced by other
people. Both novels and plays fit this description. Both have prose,
rhetoric, poetry, and other essential literary elements. However, plays
live, and all of the distinctions stem from this difference. No one gets
up and reads an entire novel out loud in front of an audience. It would
be a very long experience, and the audience would get little more out
of the experience than they would if they read the novel themselves.
Even author readings are typically shortened segments, and even then
they are uncommon. And yet, people perform entire plays, the entire
written work, all the time, and people enjoy the experience. Why?
Plays live in two worlds, the stage and the page, while novels must
confine themselves to being simply a book.
When one writes a play, rarely does the action stop in the middle
for someone to come out and explain the setting or what the
characters are thinking, or what the characters look like. These things
are unnecessary in a play, as the characters and setting are right there
in front of you, appearing as they are and speaking their minds (or
not). This brings a whole other layer to plays that cannot exist in a
novel. A writer of a novel must stop the action every so often to explain
things to his reader. A good descriptive writer will make this as

captivating as the action, but it still is a pause. A writer of a play need

not confine himself in this manner; her action need never cease. She
writes for the page and she writes for the stage. If she achieves this
delicate balance, artfully, she has created fine literature as well as a
fine performance piece. A play is literature, but not quite like a novel. It
transcends the page, becomes more than just words. If done right, it
becomes life.
~
Choose a play we have read and explore how it speaks to a
contemporary audience. This is an analysis of the roles and action and
how they connect to current social, political, and something issues.
(Oedipus the King) (Note: I went a little long in writing this one. If
youd like to just read the first three paragraphs, there should be
plenty of information to satisfy the question without the last
paragraph.)
Although Oedipus the King was written in the time of ancient
Greeks, it still has much applicability to the audience of today. In
Oedipus, Sophocles focuses on themes of power, control of ones
fate, and knowledge and wisdom. This can be related to the power of
government vs. the power of the people, terrorism, and privacy
invasion.
The first of the themes that Oedipus focuses on is power, and
how it can corrupt and affect an individual. I think the most direct

commentary to today is how much power our government has, vs. how
much power is safe to give to one person, or one governing body.
Oedipus has absolute power, and, due to his own personal faults,
nearly leads his people to ruin. In our society, although no one person
has absolute power, the governing body as a whole does, and there are
often arguments among parties over whether bigger or smaller
government is best. In addition, there are many stories times when the
weakness of an elected official can have negative results for the
people he or she serves. Another relation would be that the people
gave Oedipus power knowing nearly nothing about him, except that he
had saved them. This role would comment about the general
population voting without knowing anything about the candidates, or
knowing only one important thing about them, and this leading to
poor choices of elected officials in office.
Another theme is the control of ones fate. I think that this theme
is particularly striking during any time in history, but especially so now.
We live in a climate of fear, just as Oedipus did. Although his fear came
from knowing his terrible fate, and despite his efforts, not being able to
change it, while our societys comes from not knowing what will
happen next, both stem from a place of a lack of control over fate (and
other people). In our society, this mainly connects to terrorism. With
attacks coming from within and without, it seems that we have no
control over our safety. Although our country has tried to increase

security measures, and will continue to in reaction to current events,

just like with Oedipus, it never appears to be enough, and we are never
really safe. His individual fate was far darker than ours, but it appears
that our collective one is bleak at the moment, as well.
Wisdom and knowledge are the final theme that is especially
applicable to today. In his quest for the knowledge of his life, and his
fate, Oedipus destroys himself and those he loves. I think this is
comparable to the privacy invasion that is facing our society, both from
individuals with bad intentions and those in the government with
probable good intentions. We all want information access as quickly as
possible in this day and age. The only way to do this is to do away with
privacy, allowing us to find out things about each other in easier and
more transparent ways, perhaps things that we (or the individual
themselves) would be better off not knowing. As for the government,
this lack of privacy is for the increased safety of all, but still, this quest
for knowledge can reveal quite unsavory things that perhaps the
government is better off knowing, but certainly the individual would
rather keep private. In our day and age, privacy is scarce, and
knowledge is unlimited. Oedipus quested for knowledge, letting no
ones privacy stand in his way, and it destroyed him. Perhaps we
should take a lesson from this.