52 pages • 1-hour read
Curse of the Starving Class
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to substance use, mental illness, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and sexual harassment.
The Breakdown of Communication
In Shepard’s play, much of the titular “curse” that has stunted the central characters’ lives stems from a longtime inability (or unwillingness) to nurture or relate to each other by communicating honestly and selflessly. The Tate family members, each isolated by their own grievances, obsessions, selfishness, and fantasies of escape, repeatedly lie to each other and talk at cross purposes, if they talk to each other at all. In addition, the long silences that punctuate their conversations emphasize their awkwardness and lack of trust in sharing their thoughts and feelings.
Early in the play, Ella Tate learns that her daughter, Emma, has begun to menstruate. In a healthy family, this milestone in her daughter’s life would be a prime opportunity to prepare her for the changes of adulthood via sound advice about health, boys, sexuality, etc. Instead, Ella scares her daughter with a gruesome myth about how swimming during menstruation can be fatal, and then rambles on about the spread of dangerous germs, an obsession of hers that is somewhat curious given the state of her home. Repeatedly, Curse of the Starving Class depicts the callous parents abusing the power of communication, psychically impairing their children by (among other things) saddling them with their own fears and weaknesses, often as a controlling tactic to make them fear the outside world. Additionally, Ella selfishly lies to her daughter, Emma, about what happened to the chicken she raised for a 4-H project, trying to conceal the fact that she ate it. As in many dysfunctional families, a cycle of abuse has passed down from parent to child, infecting every member: Not even Wesley, the most levelheaded of the Tates, offers his sister any emotional support at this most fragile time in her life, instead literally showering contempt on her and her aspirations by urinating on her 4-H chart. Presumably, he inherited his antisocial habits from his father, whose abusive rants and vandalism were passed down like the titular “curse.”
Father and son are also alike in the impressionistic, even poetic, eloquence of their two long monologues, which they address to themselves, not to other family members—underscoring the family’s sullen refusal to engage meaningfully with each other—or even to the audience. Ironically, their soliloquies are the opposite of communication; rather, they seem to be futile attempts to escape from family and from their own powerlessness into the airy realm of language. Likewise, the two parents, at different times, both fall asleep onstage, during some of the play’s crucial events: another form of escape from the messiness of each other’s problems and feelings. As a result of this lack of true engagement, the Tates harbor little insight into each other’s hearts and minds, feeding a vicious cycle of hostility and suspicion. Indeed, most of their everyday interactions are either casually contemptuous and belittling, chiefly insults and threats, or bizarrely inappropriate, as when Ella tells her son that his penis closely resembles her own father’s, hinting at a cycle of incest.
Although the action of Shepard’s absurdist play is, by design, highly compressed and comically exaggerated, Shepard conveys the very real consequences of a family estranged from each other: e.g., the lack of warmth, trust, security, and self-esteem, as well as the parents’ modeling of unfeeling, abusive behavior to the children. The family’s emotional stoniness is partly an implicit critique of America’s western states and their traditional “cowboy” ethos of aloofness, self-sufficiency, and violence. This satirical thread reaches its absurdist climax when the barely pubescent Emma, on horseback, shoots up a nightclub and then dies shortly afterward while trying to flee in her parents’ car. As the car burns to ashes right outside the family house, Wesley and Ella stand stoically in the kitchen, their backs turned coldly to each other. Communication, the life blood of a family, has been poisoned by the Tate “curse,” and thus, on their dying family farm, yields the bitterest of fruits.
The Normalization of Violence in Domestic Spaces
The stylized action of Curse of the Starving Class, which condenses the trauma of years of dysfunction and abuse into a couple of days, rarely shows violence onstage, but it hangs continually in the air, always threatening to explode from the wings. As the curtain rises on the first act, the remnants of the previous night’s violence lie scattered on the kitchen floor: fragments of a door demolished by Weston, the family patriarch, when he drunkenly tried to enter the house. Wesley, his son, asks his mother why she called the police on his father, adding that “having the cops come to [our] house […] makes me feel like we’re someone else” (136). His mother says she thought it might have been a stranger breaking in.
Presumably, the Tates don’t normally call the police, regardless of what happens. Much of the play’s absurdist humor flows from the characters’ lack of reaction to the violence in their lives; unfortunately, this is a common phenomenon in families with a long history of domestic violence. Numbed by frequent violence and psychological cruelty, family members develop a sense of helplessness and a hard shell of fatalism, which is partly what the “curse” in Shepard’s title refers to. The pubescent Emma explains her father and brother’s volatility as “chemical […] Something in the blood. Hereditary. Highly explosive” (152), and her mother says the “curse […] comes even when you do everything to stop it from coming” (173).
However, the Tates, like many dysfunctional families, seem to have given up trying to stop it or even to repair the damage. The door to their house remains broken for two acts; and when, early in the play, Wesley opens his fly in the family kitchen to spray urine over his sister’s 4-H project, no one bothers to wipe it up: Sometime later, Emma points out to a visitor her brother’s “piss right there on the floor” (154). When the “nitroglycerin” in Emma’s own blood finally explodes, her father smirks in amusement as he shrugs off her “malicious vandalism” and assault with a deadly weapon; he even hints at fatherly pride: “Well, she always was a fireball” (188). Rage and abuse, forever the family’s customary behavior toward each other, finally bursts through their broken door into the outside world, and no one seems too surprised.
The peculiar relationship between Ella and Wesley also hints at a possible legacy of incestuous abuse. After Wesley urinates on his sister’s 4-H chart, exposing himself to his mother, she comments that his penis is “almost identical” to his grandfather’s, glibly excusing her intimate knowledge of her father’s genitals with the quip, “We lived in a small house” (144). Similarly, both Wesley’s and Weston’s ease with “walk[ing] through the whole damn house in [their] birthday suit” (185) raises unsavory implications about the family’s home life. What’s clear is that the household lacks any respected head of the family: The relationships between Wesley and Emma and their parents seem closer to those of bickering married couples than to siblings or offspring. Over the years—perhaps generations—of violence and abuse, the family’s traditional domestic roles have broken down as completely as their shattered kitchen door.
The Illusion of the American Dream
For much of US history, the American West was the golden symbol of the ever-elusive American Dream—the belief that success and riches are within reach for anyone, regardless of background, who works hard enough. For close to a century, the vast, unspoiled bounty of the West beckoned millions of dreamers from the East and abroad, many seeking to reinvent themselves within its seemingly inexhaustible promise of gold, oil, wood, coal, farm and grazing land, and much more.
As the 20th century progressed, the West’s magical allure endured for many, even as it quickly became less moored in reality. Inseparable from this American myth of strike-it-rich upward mobility was the timeless appeal of the frontiersmen: cowboys, prospectors, trappers, and other (often solitary) exemplars of rugged individualism and independence. In many of his plays, Sam Shepard takes potshots at these romantic tropes, wryly dramatizing how the lure of Western riches and the sanctification of go-it-alone individualism ruined far more lives and fortunes than they ever made.
In Curse of the Starving Class, inveterate dreamer Weston Tate, whose first name indicates his pitfall, has blown his family’s savings (and then some) on a worthless strip of parched desert, “just a bunch of strings on sticks, with the lizards blowing across it” (158). Convinced by a silver-tongued salesman that it was a prime location for “golf courses, shopping centers, sauna baths” (158), Weston succumbed to a sort of “fool’s gold”: the antiquated myth of the West as a dynamo of ever-burgeoning industry, raw capital, and opportunity for the solitary dreamer. Later, the same swindler admits, with false commiseration, that poverty and suburbanization are now the West’s main growth industries: “Of course it’s a shame to see agriculture being slowly pushed into the background in deference to low-cost housing, but that’s simply a product of the times we live in” (153). This man deceived Weston’s wife, too, claiming to have “corporations” behind him, “executive management! People of influence” (179). The money men, it becomes clear, have fixed the game against people like the Tates, just as mid-century developers paved over much of California’s richest farmland by conning poor farmers out of their property.
In the modern West, and perhaps the country as a whole, small-time investor/adventurers have little chance of getting rich. Many, like Weston, will lose whatever meager property they have (and perhaps their lives) to banks and loan sharks after taking out foolhardy loans for shady investments and other materialistic purchases that they equate with “success” and the American Dream: “refrigerators, […] cars, houses, lots” (194). This “bounty,” however it may glitter, comes not from hard work, grit, enterprise, or even luck, but from pure illusion, “invisible money […] all plastic shuffling back and forth” (194). Credit is Weston’s fool’s gold, and it has buried him too deep for him to ever crawl out again.
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