American Dream

Plot: In essence, the American Dream is about an American family that craves satisfaction. The play opens with a couple, Mommy and Daddy, waiting. When the doorbell finally rings Daddy is persuaded by Mommy to open the door, where Mrs. Barker enters. None of the characters except Grandma seems to know why Mrs. Barker is there, and as the strange absurdist play continues Grandma reveals that Mrs. Barker, who runs the adoption service, sold Mommy and Daddy a baby, which, upon the baby revealing its unsatisfactory traits, was promptly dismembered. Mommy and Daddy now look to buy another baby. Mrs. Barker, being slightly crazy, doesn’t get it and wanders off to think. Meanwhile, with only Grandma on stage, another character enters the apartment: the Young Man. Grandma sets the Young Man up as Mommy and Daddy’s new child and finally leaves the scene, and the apartment, forever.

Setting: Even the setting of the play, the small apartment, contributes to the image of Mommy and Daddy’s small minds, an image reinforced by the fact that neither can find anything in their own apartment.

Theme: dangers of materialism. In describing her hat, Mommy repeats the word “lovely” in order to emphasize her “love” for material objects. But it’s a very shallow love, because she despises the hat as soon as she believes it’s wheat-colored, a reminder of her own bad standing. So when Mommy says, “I love Grandma,” we’re encouraged to believe it’s with the same kind of possessive, shallow love of a child with a toy, though of course Grandma is Mommy’s mother (65). Indeed, whenever the “toy” breaks, or says something Mommy doesn’t like, Mommy threatens her with the van man. Mommy views even Grandma as a possession; just as she viewed her child as a possession, leading to its mutilation.

Tone: Albee’s tone is faintly mocking. He mocks the values of the New American Dream and also mocks power struggles, be they societal, value, gender, or filial.

Societal power struggles are most prominent through Mommy and Mrs. Barker’s continued push for the upper hand. In the beginning, we first learn about Mrs. Barker only as “that dreadful woman,” but because of Mrs. Barker’s position in society, Mommy is “naturally…terribly fond of her.” While Mommy wants to dislike Mrs. Barker because of her position and her deflation of Mommy, she can’t because Mrs. Barker is simply too high up in society. Both women use the word “dear” to refer to each other, though both characters and readers understand that the affection shown by the word is false, biting even. The two women’s respective positions in the social hierarchy is exhibited through Albee’s images of hats. Mommy buys what she believes is a beige hat: a middle class, bland sort of color. Mrs. Barker buys a hat that is exactly the same, but she is very firm on the point that her hat is actually cream. Cream, after all, is a very rich, high class color, not to mention that it is a very Caucasian color. The word cream also refers to cosmetics, like face cream, implying the vain, materialistic attitude Mrs. Barker holds. Mrs. Barker then tells Mommy that Mommy’s hat is actually wheat. Wheat is a color that reminds readers of the farm, simultaneously reminding them of Mommy and Grandma’s “rural,” or lower class, standing, bringing in Albee’s theme of value power struggle: essentials (food) vs. material (toys). Mommy, however, refuses to concede that all three hats are a different color, for she tells Mrs. Barker that she does believe Mrs. Barker has the same hat that she got the other day. Mommy refuses to concede that she is “rural” and from “bad stock” while Mrs. Barker is all cream and upper class. She says that she can’t even tell the color in this “artificial light.” In doing this, Mommy says that class actually doesn’t matter in the environment they’re in—the environment of artificial light, artificial kindness and humanity.

Despite this, Mommy still uses the hats as an excuse for her behavior. Not only does she hold herself in an elevated, dominant position in the household and in society, she puts on a white, or rather, cream hat, in order to pretend innocence and higher standing. She has tried on “blue hat(s) and green hat(s)” but neither fit, for she is neither calm nor new and innocent. Though she frequently threatens and insults Grandma, she berates Daddy for doing the same, even if Daddy is only parroting Mommy’s words. “Daddy! What a terrible thing to say to Grandma!” Mommy says. Grandma points out the hypocrisy when Mommy makes Daddy apologize and Grandma says “Well, that’s all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that’s all that’s important… a sense of dignity.” In this, Grandma illustrates her values while pointedly remarking on Mommy’s lack of dignity. Grandma also reminds Mommy of her lower standing with her own self-deprecation, referring to herself as “bad stock” and “muddleheaded.”

Even though clearly there is a power struggle between Mommy and Grandma, Grandma still shows kindness when she tries to give Mommy a sense of dignity. When she was a little kid, Grandma would give Mommy her own food to take to school, so Mommy wouldn’t be embarrassed by going to school without lunch. Grandma is not only frugal but gives her daughter what dignity she can.

The power struggle between Mommy and Mrs. Barker continues when Mrs. Barker pays a visit to the apartment. While Mommy sheds public attention on what is essentially private, she highlights both inner values and the societal power struggle she undergoes. Mommy invites Mrs. Barker to take off her dress, which she does. Mommy then realizes this is a bad move when Daddy blushes, giggles, and goes “sticky wet.” Not only does this make Mommy realize that Mrs. Barker is now taking Daddy’s attention, but it highlights for readers that something is seriously wrong with gender roles between Mommy and Daddy. Mommy is completely dominating while Daddy is blushing and giggling. Albee has switched traditional gender roles in a strange and comical exaggeration to show readers that nobody can fit inside the box, and that perhaps we shouldn’t have boxes at all.

Mrs. Barker then suggests smoking, a term which is laden with sexual implications, not only for the actual cigarette but for its double meaning, as in “smoking hot.” Mommy essentially blows up at Mrs. Barker, having realized what a bad move she made, and also realizing that Mrs. Barker is playing it up to get an upper hand. Daddy, though, stands up for Mrs. Barker, justifying smoking by saying, “Grandma smokes and drinks.” Mrs. Barker has won over Daddy, all right, and Mommy can’t stand not being the object of attention.

In this way, Mommy is like a vain and dominating husband, illustrating the power struggle between genders. She and Daddy have switched roles. Daddy has “tubes where he used to have tracts,” implying that his masculinity has been replaced with something much more feminine. “the doctors took out something that was there and put in something that wasn’t there,” Mommy says (83). Mommy seems to have taken the role from him and left him with a traditional female role: obedient, parroting, doting. Daddy wrings his hands, blushes, and giggles. While Daddy is rather resigned to this (“If I must…I must,” he says), he hasn’t completely given up. Though Mommy pushes for him to send Grandma away, Daddy refuses. Mrs. Barker, when she comes, gives Daddy a sense of empowerment as he is allowed to stop giving so much attention to Mommy and focus on his more masculine senses. He begins to stand up for Grandma, saying, “Leave Grandma alone.”

Even with his small victories, though, Daddy cannot stand against the masculine will of his wife. Mommy uses the reverse gender role to manipulate Daddy. When Mrs. Barker arrives, Daddy, with his newfound conscience, hesitates to open the door. Mommy begins by telling Daddy he was right, empowering him. She continues, “so firm; so firm…. SO decisive! Oh, I shivered…. So masculine; I shivered and fainted” (74). In giving Daddy his masculinity and pretending the young girl, Mommy gives Daddy the authority to open the door. Then, when Mommy affirms Grandma by saying “Some of your opinions aren’t so bad,” Daddy realizes that Grandma’s older, wiser values may be the powerful ones, and backs off. Mommy has maintained the power to take Daddy’s authority away, though. When Daddy backs off from the door, Mommy says, “you’re a woman.” Because of Mommy’s continued influence over Daddy, continues to parrot Mommy and to do what she says, though he clearly understands what is going on. “The Pekinese may be blind, but Daddy isn’t,” he says, and “don’t talk to me about tubes.”

Albee uses Mommy to illustrate the power struggle between parent and child. Despite Mommy’s dominating role in the household, she is really the child of the house. Even her name, “Mommy,” shows us the mind of a child as she refers to “Daddy” and “Grandma.” She throws hissy fits, like the one she threw in the shop after Mrs. Barker told her her hat wasn’t beige. She constantly seeks attention, like the child tugging at the parent’s sleeve, saying “listen, pay attention!”

Mommy is also single-mindedly focused on material, on the “toys” of a child. Mommy talks of the “bumble” as if it were merely a toy: it was broken, so they “fixed” it by cutting off the broken parts. It cried, so she cut off its tongue. And she is upset not because she just ripped apart a baby, but because of the money she spent to get it. “You just can’t get satisfaction,” she repeats throughout the play, as if money and toys are the most important things in the world.

And, like a child, Mommy does not seem to know how to love. When Mommy rips apart the child, she really rips apart her own ability to love. She tears off everything needed for the act: a tongue for speech, hands for touching, eyes for seeing, and a sexual part for doing. This idea is emphasized when the young man comes along, who had been the twin of the baby and felt everything it felt. The young man describes his eyes burning, a pain to his groin, and then goes on to say that from that moment, he was “incapable of feeling love.”

Mommy doesn’t feel “nothing,” like the young man, but what she feels is immature and undeveloped as a child. In describing her hat, Mommy repeats the word “lovely” about ten times, in order to emphasize her “love” for material objects. But it’s clearly a very shallow love, because she despises the hat as soon as she believes it’s wheat, a reminder of her own bad standing. So when Mommy says, “I love Grandma,” we’re encouraged to believe it’s with the same kind of possessive, shallow love of a child with a toy, though of course Grandma is Mommy’s mother (65). Indeed, whenever the “toy” breaks, or says something Mommy doesn’t like, Mommy threatens her with the van man, rather like a parent tells a child to be good or the monsters will get him. In this way, Mommy seeks to underscore her childishness by imitating parenthood, though, like her imitation of masculinity, she falls far from the mark.

Even Mrs. Barker illustrates Mommy’s youth by telling Grandma, “You’re your daughter’s mother, all right!” (95). This syntax reverses the normal “mother’s daughter so that the emphasis is on the word daughter rather than mother, focusing on Mommy, and her youth.

Grandma is the humane character of the play. She represents the values of the old American Dream, values of frugality, essentials, and hard work. This is shown when Daddy mentions how Grandma is always cleaning to earn her keep, rather than just living off of Daddy as Mommy does. Grandma also illustrates her “waste not want not” attitude with her resourcefulness in winning a baking contest with “day old cake.” Grandma is literally tied to the old values, and in the same way, the old values tie her together. This is shown in Grandma’s boxes that she carries around, “neatly wrapped and tied.” Mommy and Daddy, of course, couldn’t care less about Grandma’s old values or what’s inside the boxes, rather, what’s inside Grandma. They only care about the pretty outside. Grandma says in the end that the boxes contain “a couple of regrets….86 years of living…some sounds…” The boxes are Grandma’s entire life, and despite her carrying them around, Grandma is not in the box. She thinks outside the box, shown in her resourcefulness with the day old cake. It frightened her to wrap the boxes, she says, most likely because it is like wrapping yourself away. Grandma illustrates Mommy and Daddy’s incompetence by dumping the boxes at Daddy’s feet, showing not only that they think inside the box but that the old values they contain are viewed as worthless.

In the struggle between old and new values, new values technically win. In the end of the play, Grandma and her old values finally leave for good. Mommy, with her shallow love for Grandma, is sad until she gets a new “toy” in the young man, who represents new, materialist values (“I’ll do anything for money,” he says). Mommy literally adopts the new values (the young man) from Mrs. Barker, who runs the adoption service. “You must learn to count,” she tells the young man, referring both to math and to importance. The subtle threat is there: if you’re broken, or unimportant, you will be thrown away too.

But we can’t completely give up hope on the old values. After all, Grandma isn’t completely gone. She’s there, off stage, telling us that everyone has got what he “thinks he wants.” In the end, Grandma shows us the pride of being whoever you want to be, despite class. Grandma is resourceful, and as she says, it is because she is “pioneer stock” (112). The change from bad stock to pioneer stock indicates there is no stock. You are what you make yourself. Grandma implies that despite the characters’ shallow intentions, needs, and motivations, perhaps someday they will realize what it is that truly matters: a sense of dignity and love and the resources to bring them together.

Quotes: “The American Dream... the American Dream, the American Dream, dammit!” (108). This quote by Grandma at the end of the play doesn’t just show her admitting to the loss of old values and her replacement with new ones (and the Young Man). Grandma repeats the words “the American Dream” three times, as if she tolls a bell. Three tolls of the bell traditionally means someone’s death, and not only do the old American Dream values die, but Grandma herself kind of dies, as she exits the scene, and her family, forever.

“I’d do anything for money” (109). This quote by the Young Man reaffirms his status as the New American Dream, the dream of wealth and beauty. Him replacing Grandma at the end then stands as a complete transition into the new way of thinking, getting rid of that nagging conscience.

“And lo and behold, it was beige!” (60). This was said by Mommy after she threw a fit in the shop over her hat being wheat. The shopkeepers gave her a new hat, the same hat, and told her it was beige. So she went outside and looked at it and found that “it was beige!” The quote represents the quest for reality and the disillusionment that many felt after WWII. Reality is so distorted by the media (Mrs. Barker, or the shop owners) that people believe anything they’re told without question.