Mood,atmosphere, cultural issues touched upon by Albee, cultural background

The general mood of the play struck me as a somewhat asphyxiating, suffocating one, one that makes the reader brace himself and wait for something to happen…though not something as horrible as what we see in the end of the play. This feeling of asphyxiation may well bear correspondence with what Jerry felt like. The “cages” people are stuck in provide little freedom to enjoy.
America, where the action takes place, has itself always been referred to as “The Land of Freedom”, the most democratic country in the world, a manifestation of multiculturalism. It was supposed to be a “melting pot”, wielding together different personalities, races, cultures and social classes. In reality, this scheme often failed to settle in the hearts of the American people and remained an ever-smiling mask on the surface. For human souls are not something that can easily be mixed and smoothened. There’s also the problem of “fitting in” that’s characteristic of a society consisting of many different groups with values juxtaposed unevenly. Those groups, surprisingly, usually have stiff rules about how one is to become a member and how members should behave, although the members are not always aware those rules exist. But day by day, from obediently following those rules, people forget how to think outside their own mind frame and start considering the way they think and behave the only acceptable one…the only convenient one and the only possible one. Peter, for example, fails to understand why Jerry lives where he lives or his question: “Say, what’s the dividing line between upper-middle-middle-class and lower-upper-middle class?”.
The venue Albee chose for his play helps transmit the feeling of trying to merge different classes and different personalities. Central Park lies in the heart of Manhattan, surrounded by the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, north of Broadway and the show district. To the north of Central Park there is Harlem a district where a lot of black and poor people live. Especially black and Puerto Rican families represent the population of Harlem. Thus, Central Park is surrounded by diverse residential areas with people who have different living conditions but who can meet each other in Central Park.
Be it the banker who eats his sandwich in his lunchtime or the wino who is in search for a sleeping berth for the night – they meet each other randomly because Central Park is open to the public and free for everyone. It is the most popular meeting point for the citizens of Manhattan.
Peter and Jerry, two representatives of different social classes, happen to meet each other in Central Park. Peter wants to enjoy his leisure time and Jerry is in search of conversation. Peter is, however, seemingly hidden in a secluded corner of the park, surrounded by thick foliage. This makes Peter believe he owns this place, the bench he sits on and that he will stay unruffled forever, reading his newspaper, being his own comfortable self. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone, doesn’t want to share anything he’s made of, like a selfish-or perhaps persecuted - animal, crawling in a dark corner to gnaw on its bone in the peace of its own isolation.
The feeling of isolation and loneliness, of lack of communication penetrates the atmosphere of the play. In a big city, an individual becomes impersonal and alienated, he`s not an individual anymore, he`s part of the bustling crowd. But in that crowd, he is alone, and no-one really cares about him, as he is just one of many, many other people with similar aims and pains. Even Jerry’s suicide is an attempt of finding real, close contact with someone, so is his trouble in reaching compromise with the landlady’s dog. He finally succeeds in tearing Peter out of his cage and forcing him to make use of his “animal side”, in tying Peter to himself, in establishing a close “villain-victim” relationship between himself and Peter(though it is hard to say which is which…and is it relevant?). The price he pays is somewhat too high, so to say. Peter is let out of his cage- more like dragged out, but, like a zoo animal, he is lost in his own freedom, utterly confused. The ending is an open one, but, to my mind, Peter has an option of either “hiding his head in the sand” like an ostrich or bringing around dramatic changes in his way of life. He can no longer hide in his bench cage, as Jerry – according to the fundamental law of nature - won it.
Even today, in spite of the wide variety of modern communication tools available, mainly young people feel more and more isolated. In theory they can communicate with the whole wide world but in reality they are often locked up in their rooms and absorbed by their computers. An increasing number of young people suffers from lack of social contact and as a result depression has become a wide spread illness among young people. In Germany the suicide rate is higher than the number of mortal victims in traffic accidents; a fact that gives me the chills, personally, isn’t this figure shocking? It gives evidence that an enormous number of people must be in the same situation as Jerry.
As Jerry’s example shows, suicide may be the ultimate attempt to attract the attention of society. The fact that these people are hopeless and lonely does not necessarily mean that they are no valuable members of our society very often they are just different from the mainstream society, they are more sensitive than others and desperately striving to be accepted.
The parallel to Jerry’s fate is evident. That is the reason why I am convinced that Albee’s play, even being looked upon from this one-sided point of view is still of utmost importance and mirrors the problems of today’s society.
To Albee, as to those other analysts of American decay Allan Ginsberg and Randall Jarrell, the zoo has suddenly become a horrifyingly accurate image of a society where furious activity serves only to mask an essential inertia and whose sociability conceals a fundamental isolation.
There is no disguising the heavily ironical tone adopted by the play’s protagonist, Jerry, when he announces that he lives in “the greatest city in the world. Amen.” But in the face of indifference and complacency Albee does not lapse into despair. He stresses the need for man to break out of his self-imposed isolation to make contact with his fellow man. What he is calling for, in other words, is a revival of love.
The clash of class values has always been a crucial issue in big, developed societies like America. In his play Edward Albee embarks on this issue by introducing two American citizens of different classes who could not be more different.
There is Peter who lives in well-established structures. He is satisfied with his situation and represents the average middle-class wage earner; the typical father of a family.
Peter lives in a prosperous residential area in Manhattan, he is a well-off textbook publisher Even his appearance provides information about his social class: “He wears tweeds, smokes a pipe, carries horn-rimmed glass. Although he is moving into middle age, his dress and his manner would suggest a man younger.” Peter reflects the typical middle-class American with his anchor in traditional American values. He has adapted himself to his environment.
Peter is seemingly content with his social status. There will be no advancement from upper-middle class to upper class but there will also be no relegation into lower-middle class. He fits into the picture of the model American and as he tells Jerry about his family conditions the recipient could believe that he and his family are broken out of a picture book. Peter belongs to the mainstream of American society.
In contrast to Peter, Jerry is off-beat. He neither has a wife nor a family to live with. His mother, an alcoholic, left his father when he was 10 years old. Thus, his father took to drinking after his wife′ s death and he died in an accident. As a result, Jerry was brought up by a pious aunt who died on the day of his high school graduation.
As opposed to Peter Jerry is not satisfied with his situation, he wants to break out of it. This is explained when he describes his living conditions. He lives in a rooming-house in a small room with a beaverboard partition wall in it which separates him from one of his neighbors. The fact that Jerry has to share his room with someone else shows that he is very poor and not able to afford an apartment for his own. Even his appearance leaves nothing to be questioned. “A man in his late thirties, not poorly dressed, but carelessly. What was once a trim a trim and lightly muscled body has begun to go to fat; and while he is no longer handsome, it is evident that he once was.”
Jerry does not fit into the mainstream and therefore he is seen as a social outsider, by no means representing the model American. He belongs to those people who exist in the American society but whose existence is no subject for conversation – neither at home and nor on television.
Another cultural issue brought up in Peter and Jerry’s dialogue is that of marriage. It seems that Peter is quite happy and safe in his cozy stable environment, with his wife, daughters, cats and parakeets. But as Jerry pokes and prods Peter’s soft spots, we find out that his marriage suppressed the animal in him, that he looks like “an animal man” but can`t stand cats or parakeets which even seem to have more power over his household than he does. On the other hand, Peter believes he is happy and is infatuated by his own “married with kids-executive” image, whereas Jerry fails to experience the charms of love. “I wonder if it's sad that I never see the little ladies more than once. I've never been able to have sex with, or, how is it
put? ... Make love to anybody more than once.” He goes own to reflect on his teen gay relationship with a Greek boy, which could also serve as a means of shaking Peter up and forcing him to think out of his usual frame, to stop responding in a leisurely , cliché - filled pattern.
The Zoo Story was written in 1958, when the movement of the Theatre of Absurd was blooming, flourishing in the literary circles. It emerged in Europe and the United States after World War II, when people were discouraged with the unjustness of the world. Plays falling into this category convey humanity’s sense of alienation and its loss of bearings in an illogical, unjust, and ridiculous world. “In its critique of language the Theatre of the Absurd closely reflects the preoccupation of contemporary philosophy with language, its effort to disentangle language, as a genuine instrument for logic and the discovery of reality, from the welter of emotive, illogical usages, the grammatical conventions that have, in the past, often been confused with genuine logical relationships. And equally, in its emphasis on the basic absurdity of the human condition, on the bankruptcy of all closed systems of thought with claims to provide a total explanation of reality, the Theatre of the Absurd has much in common with the existential philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus,” – writes Martin Esslin, the critic who penned the Theatre of Absurd.
There can be little doubt that such a sense of disillusionment, such a collapse of all previously held firm beliefs is a characteristic feature of our own times. The social and spiritual reasons for such a sense of loss of meaning are manifold and complex: the waning of religious faith that had started with the Enlightenment and led Nietzsche to speak of the 'death of God' by the eighteen-eighties; the breakdown of the liberal faith in inevitable social progress in the wake of the First World War; the disillusionment with the hopes of radical social revolution as predicted by Marx after Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian tyranny; the relapse into barbarism, mass murder, and genocide during Hitler's brief rule over Europe during the Second World War; and, in the aftermath of that war, the spread of spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. There can be no doubt: for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid twentieth century did lose its meaning and simply ceased to make sense.