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The American Dream

The American Dream by Edward Albee

The American Dream is personified by the Young Man, a clean-cut, Midwestern beauty, a self-described "type". Though physically perfect, he remains incomplete, having lost all feeling and desire in the murder of an identical twin from which he was separated as a child. This twin-Mommy and Daddy's first adopted son-stands against his brother as a consummate deformity. He lacks a head, spine, guts, feet of flesh, and onward. Moreover, he suffers a progressive disfigurement under Mommy's sadistic tortures, punishments specifically directed at each of his bodily excesses and infantile desires. Thus: an eye for only having eyes for Daddy, his "you-know-what" for masturbation, and onward.
In his unruliness, this child-the so-called "bumble of joy"-fails to provide Mommy and Daddy what the demand above all: "satisfaction". The result of these tortures is the Young Man, a man disemboweled, voided of interiority but perfect in form, a figure who cannot relate to others but accepts the "syntax" around him in knowing that others must relate to him. Thus he becomes the son who provides Mommy and Daddy the satisfaction they believe that they have long desired. Doing anything for money, he is in some sense their perfect commodity, the merchandise they wanted all along.
Albee's allegory of the American Dream is certainly strange. The American Dream does not appear as that which one lives out or even as ideology, but as a person and possession. One possible reading of this allegory involves the all-important theatrical concept of the mask. Linked indissolubly, the twins are in some sense figures for the actor and his mask. The Young Man as American Dream is a mask without a man behind it, a personification without a person. As he tells Grandma, he is a type. The murder of his double is the murder of the man behind the mask, the elimination of the unruly body-indeed, the "bumble"-that can only mould itself into the perfect form through its...