Quest for Primitive Selfin Edward Albee’sThe Goat Or, Who is Sylvia?

Abstract

This research, based on Edward Albee’s playThe Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?, attempts to analyzeMartin’s shift from a successful architect and faithful husband to a sexual pervert who makes love with a goat. At the zenith of his professional success, Martin, the protagonist, fails to assemble his personal happiness around and between his wife, son, friends, and accolades he was bestowed with; rather, he finds his complacencies fulfilled in the love with Sylvia-a country she-goat. Albee punches in the middle of human existence projecting that human has chosen a wrong path to attain happiness in shunning primordial instincts.Martin’s shift from a successful architect and faithful husband to a sexual pervert who makes love with a goat goes together with the idea that the unconscious and more generally, the functioning of the mental apparatus and culturalprocesses are analogous, and that, like the faulty action, they require analogous methods of analysis. This love for a an animal has been considered in this research paper as a metaphor of human being’s submission to primordial instinct and his rejectionof phony codes and conducts of civilization. Just as a dream tells us about the dreamer’s infantile wishes, Albee tells us about the infantile wishes of the Martin.