52 pages • 1-hour read
Curse of the Starving Class
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to substance use, mental illness, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and sexual harassment.
The Broken Door
In Curse of the Starving Class, “wooden debris, torn screen, etc.” from “a broken door” are among the first objects illuminated onstage (135). In the play’s timeline, the door has only recently been destroyed, but the timeless damage it connotes—of a broken home, both literally and figuratively—sets the stage for what follows. Because the kitchen is the play’s sole setting, the shattered door, in its various stages of disrepair, is always within view, a gaping wound in the family’s domestic life that the Tates only sporadically acknowledge. Weston, the Tate patriarch, smashed the door in one of his drunken rampages, and its scattered debris symbolizes his long wake of destruction—most recently, his extravagant spending, which put the family deep into debt. His history of callous excess left his family vulnerable, in every sense, to outside threats, such as the con man Taylor and the gangsters Emerson and Slater, all of whom enter the house through the broken door.
In addition, the splintered door symbolizes the deep fissures within the family, whose demoralized members have begun to plot against and pilfer from each other. Over the play’s brief action, Ella steals her daughter’s chicken; Ella steals her mother’s money and tries to steal the family car; Weston and Ella each collude with outsiders to steal the family farm; and even Wesley, the most honest of the Tates, destroys his sister’s 4-H chart by urinating on it. This age-old family strife, according to Ella and Emma, owes to an intergenerational “curse” that “goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes” (174). A “nitroglycerin” in the blood connects the Tates to a long gothic tradition of cursed bloodlines, notably the inbred Ushers of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In true gothic fashion, the Ushers’ physical house becomes a dank manifestation of their decadent lineage and is literally riven by an ancient crack—like the family’s broken door—which widens throughout the story, eventually destroying both the house and the family, much like what happens to the Tates.
Language
Language may be power, but in Curse of the Starving Class, a play about (among other things) misfired masculinity, the masculine characters’ soliloquies underscore disconnection rather than power. To dramatize his characters’ misuse of their power through language, Shepard makes the monologue a solitary expression.
Whereas in most plays one character addresses another or the audience, usually to advance the plot, Curse includes two long monologues (first Wesley’s and then Weston’s) delivered to no one in particular, and their bearing on the plot is tentative at best. The first, Wesley’s Whitmanesque reflections about basking in the smells, sounds, and feelings of the night and then hearing his father breaking down the door, describes events the audience already knows about and seems meant solely for Wesley’s own entertainment; indeed, his mother, who is in the room, totally ignores him. The second of these soliloquies is spoken by his father, who ecstatically mythologizes a long-ago encounter with an eagle. Completely lost in his own thoughts, Weston reacts with annoyance when he discovers that his son is listening to him. In each of these monologues, father and son cocoon themselves in a dreamy, verbal eloquence completely lacking in their dialogue with others, which is terse and usually angry.
Significantly, the two normally taciturn characters lavishly expend these sustained monologues on the empty air rather than meaningfully sharing them with a loved one. Repeatedly in Shepard’s plays, antiheroes try to compensate for their powerlessness and their monetary and/or emotional penury with the power of the word, which becomes (in the end) merely a more self-gratifying version of impotence. Likewise, Weston’s and Wesley’s poetic flights take the place of real communication or meaningful action. Their solipsistic eloquence may provide short-lived escape from their dire situations but bestow no true power. For instance, Weston’s reminiscence about the eagle turns out to be a self-indulgent distortion: According to his wife, the eagle’s wild daring led to its agonizing death. For both Weston and Wesley, the transcendence of their words soon crashes back to earth, like the eagle and cat in the play’s final vignette.
Clothing
In Curse, the use of clothing reflects more than just the characters’ fashion tastes and personalities; in Shepard’s semi-gothic fable about fate and an unchanging “curse” that pursues a family through generations, clothes become a symbol of failed change and therefore of destiny itself. At the play’s start, Wesley’s clothes markedly differ from his father’s: blue jeans and cowboy boots, in contrast to Weston’s “baggy pants” and tennis shoes. Wesley’s durable work clothes, with their macho connotations, hint at his potential to become the man of the household, perhaps its savior. Weston’s slovenly clothing, by contrast, is that of buffoonish ineffectuality, almost of a clown (a “baggy-pants” comedian), and his drunken financial bungling recalls old vaudeville routines about improvident fathers.
Throughout the play, clothes function not only as symbols of identity but also as emblems of the characters’ attempts to escape their destiny. When Weston, waking up to the reality of his wasted life, tries to thwart the family curse by “fixing up” the house and repairing the rift with his family, he first discards his clothing. Putting on “a fresh clean shirt, new pants, [and] shined shoes” (182) gives him a wondrous “feeling of peeling off a whole person” (185). Elated, he tries to pass this miracle on to his relatives by washing their dirty clothes: “And every time I bent down to pick up somebody’s clothes I could feel that person like they were right there in the room. […] Like I knew you through the flesh and blood” (186). Weston’s association of clothing (i.e., surface rituals) with flesh-and-blood identity—and therefore destiny—is absolute: He believes that changing his wardrobe helped change him into a “whole new person” (192). Loudly and repeatedly, but with fading conviction, he claims to have been “reborn.”
Hearing about his father’s “rebirth,” Wesley tries to replicate it on himself, “peeling” off his jeans, boots, and other clothes, and with them (he hopes) his own cursed destiny. However, he feels no different and, disillusioned, dresses himself, fatalistically, in his father’s discarded clothing, which only drags him back into the rut of fate: “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). Having foolishly followed his father’s lead, Wesley watches helplessly as his potential to be his own man, even a savior, ebbs inexorably away, as he falls back into the foul lockstep of his father’s failed life. Weston, seeing his son wearing his own discards, cringes in horror at the “old bum’s clothes that’ve been thrown-up in, pissed in, and God knows what all in” (191). A destiny—or a long history of mistakes—cannot simply be thrown into the trash: Weston’s squalid legacy continues to follow him, zombielike, in the form of his derelict clothes, which have become a prison for his flesh-and-blood son.
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