Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

Abstract

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.