Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Réka Cristian: Edward Albee's Castings
are "both the same") that the friend-couple brings uninvited in the house and seems to lack its referent. Julia is the one who reacts and even over-reacts to the arrival of the uninvited guests and their unsaid and euphemized 'thing' they cannot name. Julia's hysterical symptoms at the sight of the guests refer back to a metaphoricized 'skinning of her knees' that started to happen when (after Teddy's death) she found out the "cheating" of her father (and his friend). Her nervous reactions link the fright of the guests with the silenced, elegiac atmosphere of the lack of Teddy. The repressed confrontation with the trauma of losing Teddy, the beloved son, is made real with the coming of the guests. As in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, all the characters from this play are 'afraid' that the 'delicate balance' of the superficial world will break with mentioning the "plague" that has come upon them. It is Julia's mediation through which the blindspot, Teddy becomes visualized and 'mentioned'. For a long time after Teddy's death, Julia could not come in terms with herself. The death of the brother marked her and remained a traumatic event that later plotted her life. Her mother recollects Julia's primary hostile attitude to her brother, which then grew into a deep lack and modeled further failures in her life: Agnes: ... Teddy's birth, and how she felt unwanted, tricked his death, and was she more relieved than lost...? All the schools we sent her to, and did she fail in them through hate... or love? And when we come to marriage, dear: each of them, the fear, the happiness, the sex, the stopping, the infidelities... 4 0 Agnes, the mother, is "a perfectionist" and "very difficult to live with". About herself she says that she is the "ruler of the roost", licensed wife, midnight... nurse" 4 1. She even overrides her chain of definitions in stressing her function as a "wife, a mother, a lover, a homemaker, a nurse, a hostess, an agitator, a pacifier, a truth-teller, a deceiver". She is the phallic woman of the play, the Albee type of strong woman. Tobias has many common features with his friend, Harry. They are, in fact, metonymies of each other (and Claire has been the same mirror for both). The similitude is stressed not only by the fact that they have cheated on their wives in the "same summer 4 0 Ibid., 72. 4 1 Ibid.. 95. 152
