52 pages • 1-hour read
A Lie Of The Mind: A Play in Three Acts
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, mental illness, illness or death, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and domestic violence.
The Collapse of the American Family
After World War II, the United States entered a period of prosperity that redefined the American way of life. The status quo for the American middle class settled around the concept of a nuclear family with a masculine, provider father, a nurturing stay-at-home mother, and children that grew up to emulate the roles and attitudes of their parents. As Shepard shows in A Lie of the Mind, this illusion of American stability was a fantasy that disintegrated as time passed. Looking at the nationalist symbols in the play, as well as the attitudes of the characters, Shepard highlights how adherence to an unattainable family ideal allows Americans to dwell in nostalgia rather than focusing on how they can shape their own destinies, whether they conform to idealized norms or not. Jake’s planes, his father’s jacket and medals, Baylor’s insistence on hunting, and the flag-folding scene at the end of Act III all reinforce the methods by which these Americans cling to past glory and ignore their agency in the present.
Jake and his father exemplify the tenuous relationship between patriarchal authority, the military, and identity, as they each hide behind military symbols to avoid addressing the flaws in their lives. Jake’s father drank heavily and fled his family, pretending to be sending codes for the government. Jake’s father’s medals are authentic, but Jake and Lorraine both wonder if his “codes” were real, with Jake suggesting: “Maybe he was lyin’ […] So you wouldn’t know what he was up to” (31). Ultimately, Jake’s father wanted to abandon his family and the responsibility that came with it, failing to uphold the American ideal of being the breadwinner father. His military persona was only a way to hide his cowardice behind a national ideal, and it worked to keep Lorraine from figuring out his intentions. Jake, too, comes to Beth draped in an American flag, which he trades for a plain blanket before abandoning her. Though the flag, like his father’s medals, represents the American ideal, Shepard subverts these ideas to show how little an ideal provides without positive action.
Baylor, too, wants to abandon his family, and he does so by immersing himself in the American ideal of the brave frontiersman, embodied in rugged landscapes and in activities like hunting. Though Baylor tells Meg that there is more to hunting than killing animals, he cannot explain its deeper meaning, defaulting to: “It’s deer season. You hunt deer in deer season. That’s what you do” (76). Just as Jake and his father did not investigate their nationalism, Baylor fails to explain the complex mixture of American identity, masculinity, and tradition that forms a critical part of who he is. This intersection of self and country drives Baylor out of the house, away from his family, just as it did Jake and Jake’s father, but the American flag somehow assuages this anxiety. After folding the flag with Meg, Baylor feels reunited with his wife, but his focus is on the success of folding the flag. When Meg says he has not kissed her in 20 years, he insists: “Aw, come on, it ain’t been that long. Let’s go on up to bed now” (94), making an attempt at restoring the family norm that Baylor associates with the flag.
The Fragmentation of Memory and Identity
A Lie of the Mind uses selective memory to show how characters shape their lives around some events while forgetting or suppressing others. For some characters, forgetting allows them to sustain an illusion of happiness or stability, while others use their memories to try to avoid problems in the present. For example, Jake forgets his father’s death to avoid confronting how he has become his father while Lorraine forgets Jake’s marriage because it interferes with her illusion of a united family. The major exception to the theme of memory loss in the play is Beth, whose memory loss is the result of brain damage. Beth’s experience subverts the theme of memory loss as a critical element in sustaining an identity, since she retains enough emotion and understanding to avoid repeating the mistake of choosing Jake. Though tragic, her decision to be with Frankie highlights how memories can help characters move past their former struggles.
Jake and Lorraine suffer contrasting losses of memory, as Jake forgets his father’s death but can’t forget Beth. Conversely, Lorraine cannot remember Beth but can remember her husband’s death. Lorraine reminds Jake of how his father died, saying: “Truck blew up and he went with it. You already know that […]. Because you were there, Jake” (34). Nonetheless, Jake explodes in denial, shouting: “DON’T TELL ME I ALREADY KNOW SOMETHIN’ I DON’T KNOW!” (34). This interaction is critical to understanding how Jake’s cognitive dissonance, his inability to confront contradictory information, triggers his outburst. For Jake, confronting his father’s death means accepting his role in that death, as well as the similarities between himself and his father. When pushed about Beth, Lorraine reacts in a similar fashion, since acknowledging Jake’s marriage means accepting that another man left her home. In each case, the characters are dependent on suppressing their memories to sustain their illusion of happiness, with Jake picturing himself as a better man than his father, while Lorraine pictures herself as a successful wife and mother.
Though Beth seems to be in the same predicament as the other characters who suffer from memory loss, as shown in her consistent desire to see and hear about Jake, she is not willfully forgetting. She tells Frankie: “Oh. There was that time. I don’t know. I get them mixed. I get the thought. Mixed. It dangles” (55), showing how she wants to recapture her memories rather than living in ignorance. When Mike tries to force Beth to confront Jake, she has an outburst similar to Jake’s, yelling: “THERE’S A MAN IN HERE! HE’S IN OUR HOUSE!” (93), illustrating how she is no longer intent on reuniting with Jake. Though Beth cannot fully remember why, she retains enough of her memory to know that Jake is dangerous, even if she once loved him. Up until this point, according to Sally and Frankie, Jake has severely abused Beth, but they have willfully forgotten this issue in order to sustain the illusion of love. Now, Beth rejects that illusion, ironically allowing her to form a new identity through her brain damage while the other characters persist in their delusions.
The Role of Gender in Dysfunctional Relationships
The interpersonal dynamics between characters in the play often revolve around gender norms. Some characters subvert these norms while others conform to them, and Shepard highlights the destructive power of weaponizing gender expectations for both women and men. Jake and Baylor embody masculinity as anger and authority: Baylor constantly lashes out to sustain his patriarchal control over his family while Jake abuses Beth to try to force her into submission. Meg and Lorraine, on the other hand, embody a submissive form of femininity, submitting to the men in their lives and prioritizing nurturing over self-interest. In both cases, these extremes harm both the individual and those around them, and the play displays how adherence to dysfunctional gender norms is both counterproductive and actively destructive.
Baylor and Jake are the most obvious cases of dysfunctional masculinity. When Jake imagines Sally is Beth, he exposes the source of his insecurity, saying: “You never did see me, did ya’, Beth? Just had a big wild notion about some dream life up ahead” (24). This “dream life” conflicts with Jake’s masculine ideal of dominance and control. His lack of control over Beth leads him to “bear down on” her, just as he “bears down on” Sally’s wrist. Baylor is the same as Jake, but he largely only damages himself. Meg notes how Baylor has hurt himself, saying: “You’ve got blood all over your pants and shirt. You look like you’ve been in a war or something” (76). Evoking images of the military and warfare touches on the masculinity Baylor is trying to emulate. He feels no control in his home, so he retreats to the woods, staying out in the cold with his rifle for days, hurting himself to feel more masculine. Meg recognizes this root cause to Baylor’s behavior, adding: “He doesn’t really know what he needs. So he ends up dead. By himself” (77-78), foreshadowing the likely ending of Jake’s story after the play.
Meg and Lorraine struggle with performing their own dysfunctional gender norms, with Meg losing herself in her role as a homemaker and Lorraine trying to force unwanted nurturing on Jake. They perform their maternal roles as a form of denial. When Lorraine sees that Jake is sick, she cannot accept her own role in his upbringing, insisting: “We gotta’ get him outa’ here. He’s just goin’ to seed in this dump […] He belongs home” (24). For Lorraine, tending to Jake is the necessary process demanded by her maternal role, even if it only further prods Jake to sink deeper into his delusions. As a result, Jake ends up leaving home, going to Montana, and running into trouble with Mike. Meg enables Baylor’s dysfunctional behavior, as she erases her own feelings and thoughts to suit Baylor. Even at the end of the play, Meg folds the flag and agrees to go to bed with Baylor, despite the fact that she just ended a previous scene by saying she wants him to leave. Leaving Baylor is not a real option because Meg decides to obey Baylor to fulfill her role as a wife and mother, binding her to him regardless of his neglect.
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