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Abstract
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Abstract
Every society has a dominant system of beliefs, values, and obligations that is known as culture. Raymond Williams, one of the most influential figures in literary and cultural studies, considers culture as an experiential entity which has an interdependent relation with economics, politics, and other domains of society. Some huge historical events can deeply influence culture. One of the most influential and dominant forces that affected culture was modernization. It abolished the old culture, establishing new values which were pleasant and achievable only for a limited group. It failed to create a sense of communality and connection amongst the members of society and push individuals into disorientation, alienation, othering, and most importantly identity crisis. According to Piotr Sztompka’s theory of cultural trauma, when culture, as the most vulnerable aspect of a society, is overthrown and replaced with a new belief system due to the changes that happen to other domains, it results in a trauma in social level. Eugene O’Neil’s The Hairy Ape (1922), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) can be studied from Sztompka’s perspective. These plays depict degraded protagonists from the working class, who have to define themselves based on the new values of American and British societies in the twentieth century, and end up in an absolute despair and identity crisis. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the abovementioned plays in the context of cultural trauma theory. Using the framework provided by Sztompka’s approach and probing into the historical and cultural background in which these works have been written, the findings underscore that O’Neil, Miller, and Osborne have tried to illustrate the modern man whose pain resulted from the fast changing norms and culture of modern society. It is concluded that the characters of the aforementioned plays experience a deep trauma which is a social construct. They ca
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