scholarly journals What the Buried Child Stands for: A Thematic Study of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feiyue Zhang

As part of the family trilogy of Sam Shepard, Buried Child has been understood in that the corruption of the nuclear family has been identified as the theme of the play, and the guilt and the secret of this American family is the buried child who is regarded as the incestuous relationship between Halie and Tilden. This paper argues that the buried child is not only the illegitimate child in the family, but Dodge and every family member in the play. First, Shepard builds a multi-dimensional space in the play, in which the passage of time and the experience of characters are different, forming a chaos of narration. There are two main spaces represented in the play; the one is the living room, and the other is the backyard, and Dodge lying in the living room is equivalent to the secret child buried in the backyard. Second, Shepard uses a circular rather than linear movement in the play, which symbolizes that everything happened in the house is a closed story, and as one of elements in this circle, every family member becomes the buried child, or part of the buried child. Shepard titled the play with the buried child, using this image to depict the unchangeable influence of American family’s emotional and spiritual inheritance and how it will affect future generations an even deeper mystery.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-91
Author(s):  
T. E. C.

Almost a century ago editorials such as the one below expressed the fear that the American family was in serious trouble. We do not like to be doleful, but it is impossible to ignore some of the facts that have been presented with the last year or two [1882] by Dr. Goodell, Dr. Nathan Allen, and others. These facts relate to...the decadence of family life among Americans. Dr. Allen, who has been studying this subject for many years, presents the case very directly in an article entitled "The New England Family" (The New Englander). It is asserted that the objects of the institution of the family are three: the propagation of children, the preservation of chastity, mutual help and company. In each of these respects the American family, especially the New England family, shows a marked and progressive deterioration, since one hundred years ago. As regards the propagation of children, it is shown that the average native New England family is very much less productive than formerly.... The birthrate in New England families has been steadily declining until now it is lower than that of any European country except France. One additional element in this, no doubt, is the habit of delaying marriages-a habit made almost necessary by the more expensive style of living which is demanded, and by what some consider the selfishness of young men who prefer not to sacrifice their liberty to the responsibility and expense of domestic life. Another indication of family deterioration is the increase of divorces.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-258
Author(s):  
Arafat Abdali Rakhees ◽  
Jinan F. B. Al-Hajaj

Based on a Freudian psychoanalytic theory, this paper investigates the failures of 1 family in relation to the sudden and untimely death of their only son, Teddy in Edward’s Albee’s A Delicate Balance. It explores Tobias’s personality in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts: sexuality, melancholia, the tripartite psyche and defence mechanisms in order to reveal the unconscious motivations for his behaviour and actions. It also exposes the underlying psychological causes that precipitate the emergence of Tobias’s abnormal character, sexual deviation and the defence mechanisms he adopts so as to defend his ego against feelings of pain and anxiety. The paper attempts to show that the traumatic experiences a person undergoes through his/her life affect his behaviour and actions, and leave a deep scar on his/her own psyche. Besides, it argues that the fear of the unknown, or death, is the catalyst for change in A Delicate Balance and the matter that impacts Tobias and triggers his perverse, passive and indifferent personality. In Albee’s A Delicate Balance, a dysfunctional family is troubled by the death of a family member that occurred more than 30 years ago. Teddy’s death has traumatised the entire household and dated its gradual downfall. Tobias, the father, seems to be the one most shaken by it and on whose account, each and every family member sustains heavy losses. The loss of Teddy makes Tobias hand his role as the head of the family over to his wife, Agnes, and causes his emotional and physical estrangement from her. Afraid to experience another heartbreak, Tobias almost cuts his emotional ties with his daughter, Julia who feels abandoned and unwanted after her brother’s death. Claire loses favour with her sister, Agnes, and sinks deeper in her mess. Suspecting her own sister of seducing Tobias right after Teddy’s death, Agnes incurs a triple loss of son, husband and sister. In all, the Tobias household is rocked to its foundation by Teddy’s death and its corollaries continue to embitter the family and disturb its balance.


2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen A. McKenna ◽  
Paul W. Power

This article focuses on how the African American family can be an important resource for assisting the family member with a disability to achieve vocational rehabilitation goals. The rehabilitation needs of the African American family will be identified and then an intervention model and needed counselor competencies will be suggested that could assist the rehabilitation counselor to work effectively with this culturally distinct family.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
J. Dlugosh-Yuzvyak ◽  

The article is devoted to the problems of understanding the legal issues of the family in the criminal law of Poland and in criminology. The paper analyzes the issues of the content of the definition of the family. It is necessary to refer to its legal definition. It is concluded that although the concept of family is repeatedly found in the Polish legal system, it is not uniform and has different content for certain areas of law. The article presents a scientific analysis of one of the categories of crimes against the family, i. e. the so-called domestic violence. There is no legal definition of the domestic violence in the Polish legal system, although it is assumed to be a social phenomenon that occurs when a family member or other person living together or managing a household deliberately tries to dominate another family member, physically or mentally. Thus it is possible to talk about domestic violence as a violence occurring among people living in the same household. Its subcategory is the so-called violence in family occurring in the family environment. The paper presents and analyzes examples of domestic violence and police statistics. Some of these behaviours can be classified as crime against the family. Thus it is possible to specify, that, on the one hand, the victims of domestic violence are more likely to be women and, on the other hand, that women are far less likely than men to be suspected of domestic violence. However presently every eighth victim of violence in family is a man. Within the framework of the presented article, it is proposed to turn attention to the problem of women as perpetrators of domestic violence, especially in relation to a man. It is necessary to emphasize that domestic violence perpetrated by women against men, including their husbands, is a growing phenomenon.


1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-79
Author(s):  
Tess O'Toole

Though the marriage plot is the most familiar vehicle in the Victorian novel for reconfiguring the family, the adoption plot is a prominent alternative version. This essay explores the intersection of comic adoption plots with the motif that Alistair Duck-worth has dubbed the "improvement of the estate." In the Victorian novel the variety of arrangements according to which children are transferred to households other than the one to which they are born reflects the fact that institutionalized adoption did not exist in Victorian England. An investment in traditonal patterns of property succession was one of the factors that delayed its advent. In the adoption plots of Dinah Craik's King Arthur: Not a Love Story and Trollope's Doctor Thorne, however, this concern is countered by a representation of adoption as the key to safeguarding or revitalizing the estate. Craik's novel makes a case for institutionalizing adoption by showing that it is the hero's adoption into a middle-class family that equips him to be the worthy steward of an ancestral estate. In Trollope's novel the salvation of the Greshamsbury estate hinges on the rescue of the illegitimate child, Mary, by the uncle who adopts her. Doctor Thorne suggests that adoption is the key to a social mobility that serves not just the individual but society at large.


2019 ◽  
pp. 224-242
Author(s):  
Jürgen Martschukat

The twelfth chapter discusses the transformations of the nuclear family ideal, of its gendered and heteronormative patterns in the wake of the women’s movement and the LGBT movement. At its center stand a lesbian couple and their daughters in San Francisco, supported by the gay fathers who also take responsibility in the family. The author interviewed both couples. The chapter presents their life and the politics of queer families, gay marriage, and the so-called gayby boom in relation to the powerful recent discourse on the “crisis” of the family and to the fatherhood movement, its different and often revisionist subgroups and their politics. At the same time, the chapter presents a queer family as the embodiment of a slow but persistent transformation of the hegemonic nuclear family model that has come about since the 1970s. They represent a historic change toward a greater recognition of patchwork families in general and of many different kinds of living arrangements, particularly in metropolitan centers. Yet the chapter also shows how the current politics of gay marriage and queer families oscillates between a total disintegration of the nuclear family on the one side and the reassertion of its values of love and mutual responsibility on the other side.


2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Rousseau ◽  
Jean-Pierre Lavoie ◽  
Nancy Guberman ◽  
Michel Fournier ◽  
François Béland ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTThis study compares the normative expectations of 1315 Québécois survey-takers about the responsibilities of spouses and ex-spouses, on the one hand, and adult children and stepchildren, on the other hand, regarding the support they are to offer an elderly family member with incapacities. The comments of survey-takers in relation to fictional yet concrete scenario descriptions provided a basis with which to identify respondents' expectations along with the social factors surrounding these expectations. The results of this survey suggest that the nature and scale of support-related expectations vary according to the family tie with elderly relative. Expectations toward spouses are high and unmitigated, whereas expectations toward ex-spouses and adult stepchildren appear to be limited. Expectations toward adult children are more pronounced than those exhibited toward stepchildren. Where offspring are specifically concerned, expectations are strongly influenced by the given context; for this category of survey-taker, the demands of support should not interfere with their family life and career.


Author(s):  
K. Urban ◽  
Z. Zhang ◽  
M. Wollgarten ◽  
D. Gratias

Recently dislocations have been observed by electron microscopy in the icosahedral quasicrystalline (IQ) phase of Al65Cu20Fe15. These dislocations exhibit diffraction contrast similar to that known for dislocations in conventional crystals. The contrast becomes extinct for certain diffraction vectors g. In the following the basis of electron diffraction contrast of dislocations in the IQ phase is described. Taking account of the six-dimensional nature of the Burgers vector a “strong” and a “weak” extinction condition are found.Dislocations in quasicrystals canot be described on the basis of simple shear or insertion of a lattice plane only. In order to achieve a complete characterization of these dislocations it is advantageous to make use of the one to one correspondence of the lattice geometry in our three-dimensional space (R3) and that in the six-dimensional reference space (R6) where full periodicity is recovered . Therefore the contrast extinction condition has to be written as gpbp + gobo = 0 (1). The diffraction vector g and the Burgers vector b decompose into two vectors gp, bp and go, bo in, respectively, the physical and the orthogonal three-dimensional sub-spaces of R6.


1970 ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
May Abu Jaber

Violence against women (VAW) continues to exist as a pervasive, structural,systematic, and institutionalized violation of women’s basic human rights (UNDivision of Advancement for Women, 2006). It cuts across the boundaries of age, race, class, education, and religion which affect women of all ages and all backgrounds in every corner of the world. Such violence is used to control and subjugate women by instilling a sense of insecurity that keeps them “bound to the home, economically exploited and socially suppressed” (Mathu, 2008, p. 65). It is estimated that one out of every five women worldwide will be abused during her lifetime with rates reaching up to 70 percent in some countries (WHO, 2005). Whether this abuse is perpetrated by the state and its agents, by family members, or even by strangers, VAW is closely related to the regulation of sexuality in a gender specific (patriarchal) manner. This regulation is, on the one hand, maintained through the implementation of strict cultural, communal, and religious norms, and on the other hand, through particular legal measures that sustain these norms. Therefore, religious institutions, the media, the family/tribe, cultural networks, and the legal system continually disciplinewomen’s sexuality and punish those women (and in some instances men) who have transgressed or allegedly contravened the social boundaries of ‘appropriateness’ as delineated by each society. Such women/men may include lesbians/gays, women who appear ‘too masculine’ or men who appear ‘too feminine,’ women who try to exercise their rights freely or men who do not assert their rights as ‘real men’ should, women/men who have been sexually assaulted or raped, and women/men who challenge male/older male authority.


Think India ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Ang Bao

The objective of this paper is to find the relationship between family firms’ CSR engagement and their non-family member employees’ organisational identification. Drawing upon the existing literature on social identity theory, corporate social responsibility and family firms, the author proposes that family firms engage actively in CSR programs in a balanced manner to increase non-family member employees’ organisational identification. The findings of the research suggest that by developing and implementing balanced CSR programs, and actively getting engaged in CSR activities, family firms may help their non-family member employees better identify themselves with the firms. The article points out that due to unbalanced CSR resource allocation, family firms face the problem of inefficient CSR program implementation, and are suggested to switch alternatively to an improved scheme. Family firms may be advised to take corresponding steps to select right employees, communicate better with non-family member employees, use resources better and handle firms’ succession problems efficiently. The paper extends employees’ identification and CSR research into the family firm research domain and points out some drawbacks in family firms’ CSR resource allocation while formerly were seldom noticed.


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