American Family Essay

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AMERICAN FAMILY For years we have read stories and talked about the American family, and how they operate in our society. Though we sometimes forget to look further back into time when authors like Edward Albee who wrote The American Dream, and Thorton Wilder who wrote Our Town. To get a better grasp of the ideas we have today about the American family, how they relate in different societies. Through these stories we are able to grasp a understanding of how the typical American family relates from the good, the bad, and the ugly. To begin, Edward Albee’s “The American Dream” is considered by many to be one of the most influential playwrights of the seventeenth century. Albee wrote his plays around the typical themes associated with the American drama. They were not just plays about family life; instead, they frequently focused on family dysfunctions and the underlying motives of family structure. In this work, Albee portrays many of aspects of absence in the American home. One of the major motifs present is the idea that the playwright possessed little or no concern for traditional play structure and form. A second prominent trait of the absence is the lack of effective communication between the play’s major characters. Albee’s play, “The American Dream,” is an accurate depiction of the popular trends associated with the movement’s establishment in America. As Albee quotes, The first conclusion that Albee makes in reference to “The American Dream” is that it is a portrayal of how artificial values have replaced real values in the American society. This theme is apparent in the study of how the family replaces Grandma with the Young Man. To Albee, Grandma represents the way life used to be, a time when real values and self-worth mattered. Grandma is an overall depiction of how American’s have not learned from their past. Instead, they “talk past it” and ignore its
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