Curse of the Starving Class

Weston’s erratic, burned-out wife, Ella, embodies the play’s second emblem of failed parenthood. Unfaithful to her husband and shrilly contemptuous of her children, Ella’s haphazard attempts to manage the Tate household generally do more harm than good. Like Weston, she sleeps through part of the play, missing out on several momentous events for her family, and seems incapable of dealing with her children’s daily realities and well-being. When her daughter, Emma, menstruates for the first time, Ella feeds her a steady stream of misinformation, e.g., that swimming during her period can kill her by “drawing” out her life’s blood. Ella’s ludicrous advice also reveals her squeamishness, almost a phobia, of germs, which she tells Emma can jump from dirty quarters onto the sanitary napkins in vending machines. In addition, she argues, with prim revulsion, that she could smell Weston’s “skin” right through the door after his late-night return from a bar. Ironically, she hasn’t conducted own life with much caution or fastidiousness, either: It soon emerges that she’s having an affair with Taylor, the shady “lawyer” who swindled her husband on a land deal and with whom she’s plotting to commit fraud by selling the family home.

Ella’s deception extends to small, everyday matters as well as large ones. Slippery and cagey, she repeatedly tries to wriggle out of blame, as when she claims that she called the police on Weston only because she didn’t know who he was (though Wesley heard them arguing through the door) and tries to justify eating her daughter’s chicken because it didn’t have her “name on it” (141). Her grasp of economics is fuzzy, as when she deludes herself that selling the family farm, in collusion with a known swindler, will make her rich enough to retire to Europe. As Wesley tries to remind her, however, the house is full of termites, is still under mortgage, and has already been borrowed against.

Like her terror of germs, Ella harbors a fatalistic dread of a nameless, invisible “curse” that “goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes” and is “bigger than government” (174). This curse, which “repeats itself” through generations, may explain her desire to flee as far as possible from the family home—to Europe, whose castles and “fancy food,” she thinks, may protect her from the spreading rot. Ella’s fear of squalor and a cursed heredity made her susceptible to her “lawyer friend’s” half-baked promises of escape, but by the play’s end she remains trapped at the family farm, her future as uncertain as her husband’s.

Though largely oblivious to her own situation, Ella at least sees through the sad self-delusion of Weston’s epiphany and supposed “rebirth.” Correcting his anecdote about the magnificent, soaring eagle, Ella describes to Wesley the true ending and moral of the story: the abject, plunging death of the hungry bird, whose chest was torn open in midflight by the equally doomed cat. This cat—hungry, greedy, lashing out in a final, desperate frenzy—could well be a symbol for Ella herself.

The son of Weston and Ella Tate, Wesley lives with them on the family avocado farm and seems to be in his late teens or early twenties. The play’s most thoughtful character, Wesley nevertheless shows signs of following in his father’s volatile footsteps, as when he opens his fly in the family kitchen and urinates all over his sister’s 4-H chart. His mother and sister chalk up his temper to an “explosive” gene (“nitroglycerin”) that has passed down, father to son, through the Tate bloodline—though at first, Wesley seems to have inherited less of it than Weston. Wesley’s clothes (blue jeans and cowboy boots) suggest a vigorous work ethic, and for the first two acts of the play, he’s the only family member who does meaningful work, even if this mostly consists of cleaning up fragments of the door his father destroyed. He also tries to talk sense to both his parents, arguing to Ella that she can’t realistically sell the family house, much less get “rich” from it, and struggles to talk his father down from his midlife epiphany of having been “reborn” as a devoted family man—which has only left him vulnerable to vengeful loan sharks.

In addition to being the least criminal member of his family, Wesley is the only one who seems free of delusions and rationalizations. He thus functions in the play primarily as a spectator and truth-teller rather than as an actor; as he tells his sister late in the play, “I didn’t do a thing. […] I just grew up here” (196). As a relatively passive observer of his family’s dysfunction, Wesley seems a stand-in for the audience, or even the playwright himself. Indeed, the rough outlines of Sam Shepard’s own upbringing resemble those of Wesley Tate.

Unfortunately, Wesley, too, seems stymied by the family’s hereditary “curse,” i.e., the self-destructive rage, aloofness, and naivete that has already doomed his father. Trying haplessly to replicate his father’s “rebirth” in himself, Wesley goes through the same motions—taking hot and cold baths, then walking around naked, and finally putting on his father’s old clothes—which does bring an epiphany, but the wrong kind. As he puts on Weston’s filthy clothes, he experiences a repugnant “change of the guards”: “And every time I put one thing on it seemed like a part of him was growing on me. I could feel him taking over me” (196). The “curse” of the father has twisted the biblical parable of the prodigal son inside out: Instead, Weston is the prodigal father who returns to his son and, rather than finding redemption, drags his son down with him.

Eventually, Weston runs off again, leaving Wesley marooned, perhaps forever, on the ruined family farm with his mother, possibly sliding into the same dysfunctional union with her that his father had. The previous hints of incest between the two make this fatalistic swapping of roles disturbingly credible. All the same, Wesley’s character arc remains ambiguous, for he shows signs of having absorbed some lessons from the failures of his father, sister, and mother. The play ends with Wesley staring steadily “out,” with his back to his mother, even as she talks to him; suggesting that he might yet escape his family “curse,” as did (presumably) Shepard himself.