What Is Taboo?
It is not by accident that Martin’s son is gay. It is not purely egregious self-interest that makes Martin lash out at his son’s homosexuality when Billy imputes his father’s decision to engage in interspecies sexuality. It is not by accident that Ross loses what marbles remain upon seeing Martin and Billy locked in a passionate kiss. The overarching thematic concern is on full display here: what is a sexual taboo? What should be accepted and what should be rejected as being within the confines of normalcy. Most people would certainly place bestiality and incest outside the mainstream. The same could be said of most of humanity through the civilization when it comes to homosexuality. For almost the entirety that humans have lived within codified conventions of social behavior, homosexuality has existed pretty much along the same moral plane as bestiality and incest. There is one more thing that is not sheer accident worth mentioning: the playwright was quite openly homosexual.
Is Truth Fundamentally an Objective Good?
When Martin confesses to Ross, the initial shock briefly turns philosophical. Ross is the person who informs Martin’s wife about Sylvia. To Martin this breaches an ethical agreement which he is willing to place upon the same plane as bestiality. Martin and Ross debate the various moral considerations at play. What is the real crime Ross has committed here? Is it merely the outing of Martin’s sexual proclivity? Is the judgment that Ross has placed upon that proclivity? It is the breach of confidentiality in Ross betraying his friend by taking an action upon himself more ethically left to Martin? The real issue underlying all these various potential paths of decency which Ross himself crossed all boil down to the same essential however. The truth is out and what did it benefit? More to the point, what harm would Ross staying out of it entirely have done? Inevitably, even if after death, Martin’s respectable position in his field is going to crumble because now too many people know. On the other hand, what Martin is doing is far outside the pale of acceptability to the point of actually being criminal, perhaps. Is exposing the truth always a fundamentally, objective good?
The Secret Darkness of Heterosexual Marriage
Marriage has been deemed so sacrosanct throughout history that—even in the 21st century—the rights it guarantees are arbitrarily denied to some based on the kind of moral outrage and judgmental perspective occupied by the position of Ross in the play. Ross is open-minded enough that he probably—most likely—would not actively try to disallow homosexual couples from getting married. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to suspect that his mind would not be so open as to support interspecies marriage or incestuous marriages. The theme being explored here is not moral relativism, but rather than even within the confines of a supposedly perfectly normal marriage—heterosexual man and woman—unseen darkness can pervade. Heterosexual couples raise homosexual children and no one questions their right to stay married, but many question the right of homosexual couples to raise a heterosexual child. Marriage is a place of very dark secrets in the world of Edward Albee—this is the guy who wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, after all—and The Goat is yet another collection to that pervasive exploration of that particular theme.
