Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Lenke Németh: David Mamet's Women Characters: Conceptions and Misconceptions

as their drive to keep their families together —with varying success, though (Amanda Wingfield in Williams's The Glass Menagerie , Big Mamma in Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Kate Keller in Miller's AIL My Sons , Linda Loman in Miller's Death of a Salesman )—in Mamet's plays mothers and wives appear to be both estranged from their families and dysfunctional. In The Cryptogram the absent husband's alienation from his wife, Donny, and his ten-year-old son, Del, finds parallel in the wife's similar estrangement. Donny's acts and discourse in the play are best characterized by an oxymoronic combination: her distanced presence. Her first offstage appearance, marked by a crash (her breaking the teapot) evokes a dysfunctional and distanced mother and wife, who, as the play unfolds, turns out to be incapacitated to keep her family together. "Mamet's family den in The Cryptogram ," as Martin Schaub claims, "has completely lost its function as a protective haven; his [Mamet's] protagonists are drifting and, quite literally, on the move" (327). The loss of the "protective haven" function of the living-room is a metonymical indicator of mothers' and wives' inability to sustain this vital function. Simultaneously, the radical transformations of conventional routines and the prevalence of uprooted patterns in the lives of families indicates the presence of a carnivalized world where the most protective familial setting is degraded into a transitory shelter. The pattern of spiritual brokenness equally applies to The Old Neighborhood. The protagonist, the middle-aged Bobby Gould returns to the old neighborhood in a series of encounters with his past only to realize his depressing present overshadowed by a broken marriage and an impending divorce. Untypically for Mamet, both in Jolly and in Deeny, certain details about Bobby's past are narrated from the female characters' points of view: Jolly, Bobby's sister recalls her childhood grievances, while Deeny, Gould's first love, meanders about gardening, molecules, and her work only to conceal her agitated state of mind when confronting the man she once loved. The "parodying double" role of these two female characters departs from the former ones in the sense that they cease to function as "crooked mirrors" (Bakhtin, Problems 127) for their male counterparts: instead of reflecting, emulating, and even distorting unfavorable sides of their 43

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