Stylistically Disempowered Masculinity in Shepard’s Buried Child

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss masculinity in Shepard’s Buried Child. Shepard’s plays have often been viewed as geared significantly towards a male audience, and seen to be filled with concepts which reinforce masculine ideology. The aforesaid point provided the motivation for an investigation into Shepard’s work based mainly on linguistic factors to draw a conclusion about the workings of masculinity in the aforementioned play. To achieve the said goal, two excerpts were chosen: the first excerpt illustrates the dominance and power of one female character, Halie, over the male characters, and the second portrays Shelly’s significant supremacy (who is the only other female character) in comparison to the male characters. Each excerpt consisted of turns which were numbered for ease of reference. Each turn was then analyzed using the stylistic tools of politeness, impoliteness, and speech act theory in conjunction with various masculinity theories. For politeness, Brown and Levinson’s model was employed, while for impoliteness, Culpeper’s ideas were put to use, and Searle’s speech act theory provided the last piece of the stylistic puzzle. The results of the linguistic analysis were utilized to make easier the analysis done through traditional masculinity theories such as Connell’s model of gender.

Keywords

• buried child
• masculinity
• politeness
• impoliteness
• speech act theory