9 - Patriarchal pathology from The Holy Ghostly to Silent Tongue

Summary

Shepard's plays have little to say about women outside of their role within the drama of male individuation. Yet, it is precisely in his focus on masculinity and its problems that Shepard's plays provide acute critiques of the destructiveness of patriarchy for both men and women. Shepard's early plays establish his interest in male individuation, especially in regard to the father/son conflict where the son's identity is at stake. In The Rock Garden (1964), for instance, the son's final monologue about his sexuality ends up “killing” the father who falls over, supposedly dead, at the end of the play. Again, in the 1970 play The Holy Ghostly, the son must “kill” the father, or at least the father's spirit, in order to assert his own identity, which he has been struggling to do after changing his name and running away from the “Old West” to New York City. But sons in Shepard's plays never escape the father's legacy, even after the father's death, because they inherit patriarchal ideas of violent masculinity from their fathers and have learned from them to stake their claim to manhood upon the body of a woman.

This last belief leads Shepard’s men to search for completion of themselves in the body of a woman, reflecting how in many of Shepard’s plays and films a man’s sense of his control over his world and of his own identity is usually tied to his ideas of women. In the early play Chicago (1965), we witness Stu, whose self-image has been shattered by the imminent departure of his girlfriend (aptly named Joy), retreat into a childish land of make-believe as he refuses to leave his bathtub. In Fool for Love (1983), Eddie’s inability to let Mae go – his perpetual seeking of her to return to old fantasies in contrast to her continued attempts to forge a new life for herself – demonstrates the differences between men and women’s needs for each other in Shepard’s world.