Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma

warning her not to call her before ten o'clock in the morning, leaves Jenny's home peacefully, and Jenny picks up the bills from the floor. After all, it is money. She locks it up in a drawer, and takes her husband out to dinner. The chief motive underlying Jenny's choice is not voluptuous inconstancy, or capricious coquetry, or inexperienced levity as is the case with Cressida in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Nor is it poverty, the plight of Mrs Warren in her early years in G. B. Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession and the predicament of Anna in O'Neill's Anna Christie. Nor is it greed, the propelling force in Mrs Warren's later career or in Leda's attitude in O'Neill's The Calms of Capricorn. Nor is it the momentary excitement of a cheap, if lucrative, adventure as it is with the nameless Woman in Miller's Death of a Salesman. It is not even pathological disintegration of the personality as it appears to be in the case of Blanche in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Jenny's decision is fundamentally motivated by the garden as a symbol of social and financial status.

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3 This is where Cooper's originality lies in the conception and elaboration of Everything in the Garden; and this is the leitmotiv which caught Albee's ironic attention. In the exposition of his play, however, Albee traces Cooper's dramatic blueprint with a difference. He removes Leonie's Jewish background, deletes her concentration camp experience, obliterates her Polish nationality, does away with her uneducated, racy and foreign accent, makes her English, and rechristens her as Mrs Toothe, a tag-name with a different connotation. In this way, Mrs Toothe's profession ceases to be a matter external to middle-class life, and the conflict becomes internalized, generalized and sharpened. Accordingly, she is no longer Cooper's "squat, square űguré\ "an extraordinary creature"

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4 but "an elegantly dressed, handsome lady, 50 or so",

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5 as she would usually appear and appeal to people of good society, where everybody is "pleasant-looking" (like Richard 1

3 Cf. M. E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest, p. 173. G. Cooper, Everything in the Garden, p. 152. 1

5 E. Albee, Everything in the Garden, p. 1. 31