Critique of Consumer Culture in Albee's The American Dream

Abstract

This research is a study of the critique of consumerism that is rampant in the American middle-class under the garb of the optimism of American Dream in Edward Albee’s play The American Dream. Though the notion of American Dream is assumed to create the social condition in which every American is happy and contented, and its source is located in the material progress, it has created the consumers devoid of feeling and human sensibility rather than harmonious and sensible ones. It has emptied the American middle-class of the human values making them demonic and hedonist in nature. Albee criticizes consumerism behind the American Dream with the portrayal of the character of Mommy who attempts to send her old mother to the care center to avoid the expenditure and hassles of caring her in her old age. In the hope to get satisfaction, she buys a boy from Bye-Bye Adoption Center but she kills him as he fails to live up to her expectation. After killing him, she again buys a boy named American Dream from the same adoption center who is devoid of human feeling and sentiment. With the portrayal of these inhuman characters, Albee criticizes consumerism of the American middle-class flaunting the hollowness of the idealized notion of American Dream.