Awake and Sing! PDF

New Valley University Faculty of Arts Department of English The Themes of Awake and Sing! In Awake and Sing!, Odets sheds light on the contrast between the materialistic and idealistic values in his contemporary society. He expresses his fear of the dominance of materi...

New Valley University Faculty of Arts Department of English The Themes of Awake and Sing! In Awake and Sing!, Odets sheds light on the contrast between the materialistic and idealistic values in his contemporary society. He expresses his fear of the dominance of materialistic concerns over all human values. He stresses the prevalence of materialistic ideals and the importance of money in society. Through his writing, he focuses on the economic burden that is placed on society and how it affects the lives of humans and the way they lead their lives. He also shows how values can become blurred and perceptions can change with experience. Awake and Sing! is a family play that examines the financial insecurity which was experienced in the Great Depression and its effect on family unity. Throughout the play, Odets clearly focuses on the impact of the Great Depression on American families. The Bergers are originally a middle-class family, and as such they are especially vulnerable to the threat and stigma of income loss. Odets examines the impact of the economic crisis on each character in the household, from the idealistic grandfather, to the ineffectual father, to the image-focused mother, and the struggling young adult children. In doing so, Odets also uses the family members as a means to demonstrate the stress the Depression placed on the middle-class family as a structural unit, specifically the impact on marriage. The Depression was known to restrain middle-class marriages not only because of concerns over money but also because of the diminished stability of men to serve as the traditional wage earners. This leads to the spread of spinsterhood. This diminished stability of men put the pressure on the women of the family as they are faced with either maintaining their remove from the economic sphere for the sake of their middle-class image or entering Dr. Alaa E. Mustafa Khalifa El-Nekhely New Valley University Faculty of Arts Department of English their role in the workforce. Odets uses Bessie as a controlling thematic force in the play, the person who keeps life going and who focuses on continuance and the family. The Great Depression is at its peak, and Bessie is haunted by the threat of respectable people who are evicted from their homes, having their furniture thrown into the street. These harsh evictions have become a frequent event as the Depression forces confiscation or makes it impossible for tenants to pay their rent. Bessie Berger, the matriarch, dominates her family. She focuses on materialism and maintaining appearances, she pushes the men in her life—her husband, Myron, and her son, Ralph—to earn more money; she pushes her pregnant daughter, Hennie, into a loveless marriage, all in the name of status. Jacob’s two children, Bessie and Uncle Morty, are Jacob’s opposites and the die-hard capitalists of the play. Uncle Morty demonstrates his love of capitalism with his business insight and his criticism of his father for his Marxist ideas. Bessie’s obsession with money dominates her character as well as almost every word she speaks in the play. Bessie’s husband, Myron, is absolutely ineffectual, the hardworking man who does not and cannot understand how the system, the country, and his family have changed and is thus quickly left behind. The men in Bessie’s life, except for Morty and her boarder, Moe Axelrod, are idealists. Bessie, a realist, has to keep the household running on practically. She has neither time nor sympathy for the socialism adopted by her father or her son. Ralph shares his grandfather’s views and laments leading a poor life of deprivation. He cannot afford to have his teeth fixed. Despite his lofty idealism, it is the materialist factors that annoy Ralph. Jacob, the grandfather, eventually commits suicide, leaving his insurance money to his grandson Ralph, in Dr. Alaa E. Mustafa Khalifa El-Nekhely New Valley University Faculty of Arts Department of English the hopes that Ralph will break away from the capitalistic obligations and interests of his family. He wishes that Ralph can eventually seek the path of purifying Marxism. Ralph closes the play with two idealistic speeches in which he relinquishes the money to his demanding mother, feels reborn, and embraces the path left to him by his grandfather as he sets out to join the Left and remake the world. For Odets, the materialistic thinking and this focus on money above all else infiltrate all levels of American society and place what makes us human in constant danger of being destroyed. Odets highlights the issues of the importance of appearances in relation to respectability in society - how we appear to society is how we improve and gain status. This idea is seen through the character of Bessie whose thinking is preoccupied with her worry about her social prestige. She thinks of how to maintain her social image stable and respectable. Dr. Alaa E. Mustafa Khalifa El-Nekhely