유진 오닐의 The Great God Brown에 나타난..미국문화비판

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Neill's The Great God Brown(1925) by using Laing's concept of "divided self," and then to articulate O'Neill's criticism on American culture.
Laing is known as an existential-phenomenological psychiatrist or an anti-psychiatrist, who denies simply seeing the human being as the product of blind instinctual forces, because the traditional psychiatry's approach to the human being apparently excludes the whole social context in which an individual acts. While Laing in The Divided Self introduces the concepts of "ontological security" and "ontological insecurity" to express the conditions of sanity and insanity, his understanding of sanity and insanity in The Politics of Experience is mainly reflected in his discussion of the "normal" and "abnormal" person in society. Laing's basic ideas for the study of schizophrenia, shown in the two books, reveal that society itself is mad and a sick society makes all individuals helpless victims. For Laing, madness is not a simple mental illness. Laing's interpretation of schizophrenia is reflected in the concepts of "choice" and "being in the world." In other words, the schizophrenic experience, which is charged with existential and social meanings, may be an individual's choice as a way of being-in-the-world to survive in an unlivable situation. In fact, through the two books, Laing questions the actual societal value system on which our notions of "madness" and "normality" are based.
As a mask drama, O'Neill's The Great God Brown investigates the ontological insecurity of modern people by showing the human soul's strangulation by soulless materialism, presenting Laing's ideas. In the play, Dion experiences his ontological insecurity in modern, materialized civilization and faces the real world with his false self in order to protect his vulnerable inner self in an unlivable situation. As a non-conformist to the established material values, Dion wears the Pan-Mephistophelean mask, his false self. To conceal and to protect his vulnerable inner self as a sensitive and spiritual artist, Dion looks at the world through the Pan-Mephistophelean mask, which the real world requires.
Through Dion's divided self, O'Neill reveals a marked antipathy for American philistinism. Dion's unprotected, spiritual, creative power is completely drained by Brown. However, ironically, while the material Brown has been the good boy, the good friend and the good man, the spiritual Dion has been a cry-baby, a nuisance. Brown's material greed has become the main stream of the American social current. So O'Neill accuses the materialistic, soulless Brown as the destroyer of human spiritual values. Along with Dion's death, Brown's indifference to Dion's spiritual life force means the crisis of modern culture. And, by emphasizing the symbolical breakdown of material culture through the death of Brown as well as the symbolical absence of the human soul through the death of Dion, O'Neill shows modern culture's self-destruction in the play.

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유진오닐,   미국문화,   비판,   현대사회,   종교집단,   산업자본주의