The American Dream Essay Questions

What does the story about the hat show us about Mommy?

For one, the story about the hat shows us that Mommy is the dominant partner in her and Daddy's marriage. At the start of the story, she realizes that Daddy isn't listening, then quizzes him throughout the story to make sure that he is.

Secondly, the story shows how eager Mommy is to prove her status and her power in any given situation, often at the expense of logic. She liked the hat when she bought it, but when the chair of the women's club—a woman with more power than her—disputes the color, Mommy cannot simply shrug off the disagreement. Instead, she goes back to the store and makes a scene, screaming and scaring the staff at the store. They go back into the back room and emerge with the same hat, and tell her it's beige, the same color that she thought it was initially. Mommy happily accepts the same hat of the same color, but feels better for having made a scene about it. This shows that Mommy is rather shallow and wants to put on airs and intimidate people into treating her as a powerful person.

Explain the title.

"The American Dream" is commonly understood to refer to the values that Americans share, values like liberty, equality, opportunity, and democracy. It is the promise of living in the United States. When the Young Man first arrives at the apartment, Grandma tells him that he is the American Dream, that everyone is wrong about what the American Dream is, and it's actually just him, a handsome and wholesome young man. In this way, the play suggests that the "American Dream" is a kind of unattainable but appealing idea of youth, attractiveness, and wholesomeness. As the Young Man tells Grandma a little bit about himself, we learn that he is "incomplete," incapable of feeling, and unable to love. This changes our definition of the "American Dream" and shows us that, in fact, the beauty of the exterior is not always matched with depth. Perhaps, then, the "American Dream" is a hollow one. Albee seems to insinuate that the American promise of freedom and opportunity is not all it is cracked up to be, and that capitalistic systems and democratic ideals can also be quite hollow and incapable of taking care of people. "The American Dream," as embodied by the Young Man, is highly easy to project onto, but it doesn't necessarily give back much in return.

What dramatic movement is Edward Albee typically associated with?

Many critics have credited Edward Albee with helping to Americanize the European "Theatre of the Absurd." The "Theatre of the Absurd" was a movement first named by critic Martin Esslin in 1962 and refers to plays written after WWII that seek to dramatize existentialist philosophies, often in comic and absurd ways. Theatre of the Absurd seeks to grapple with the question of how to make meaning in the world, while using absurd stage images and scenarios. Theatre of the Absurd does not seek to argue about the absurd plight of man, but show it. A prominent example of Theatre of the Absurd is Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men await the arrival of a man who never shows up. Other writers in this tradition include Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.

Who is Mrs. Barker?

When she first arrives, no one quite knows who Mrs. Barker is. Even though Mommy and Daddy have been expecting a visitor, and commenting on the fact that they're late, when Mrs. Barker finally arrives, they are mystified. At first, Mrs. Barker tells Mommy that she is the chair of the women's club, the very woman who Mommy told Daddy a story about early on in the play. This is not the entire story. As we learn later on, indirectly, she is also a worker at the adoption agency that gave Mommy and Daddy their first child.

What are Grandma's unusual thoughts on aging?

Grandma maintains that old people do not get older simply because their bodies start working less well, but because they are responding to their worsening treatment by society. She says that once one starts getting older, people start addressing one in a specific tone that is annoying and not very patient. Thus, Grandma alleges, old people go deaf because they grow sick of hearing people talk to them that way. Additionally, she says, old people don't complain, so their bodies get crooked and twisted into the shape of a complaint. In Grandma's eyes, old people are the victims of the world around them and its expectations.