In August: Osage County, Tracy Letts examines the role of intellectualism in the home of an educated Southern family. The Westons and their descendants represent an element of Southern society usually ignored in American culture. Instead of 'typical' white trailer-trash usually associated with the poverty-stricken state of Oklahoma, the Weston family is mostly comprised of intelligent, educated men and women with moderate success in their careers, if not in personal relationships. In fact, professional and academic recognition seem to come to the Weston family at the cost of personal happiness and the ability to relate in an efficient manner with other human beings. However, even failure to find this kind of success is no guarantee that a Weston descendant can achieve contentment, mostly due to familial and cultural pressures which keep the Weston scions perpetually attached to the physical location of their childhood home and the psychological traumas associated with it. Geography toys with the family members, leaving them to cling to one another in the Southern landscape usually depicted as unfriendly toward academic 'impracticality' and 'elitism'. However, this reliance upon family seems to breed resentment between family members, and education becomes less a tool of self-improvement and more of a weapon for venting social and familial anxieties. Education, and even the lack thereof, also becomes a shield, not only from attacks but from taking responsibility seriously.
The Southern intellectual, especially in states such as Oklahoma, is often portrayed as something of a rare breed. American culture at large seems to assume that there is no such animal, or that the creature is a rare enough aberration that its Southern roots can safely be ignored. The South is not generally known as a hotbed of intellectualism, and those people with interest in scholarship and learning are often isolated in their community. The Westons formed their own conclave of educated individuals, though this act of circling the wagons did little more than isolate the Weston family from the larger community. This larger community is less a fixed geographical point to be marked on a map, and more an idea composed of rather uncertain, metaphorical boundaries which almost seem to shift with the characters as they move (Jackson 5). No matter where they go, Oklahoma stretches out to follow them and remind them of their roots as educated people in a world where higher education is not the ticket to success. The house shared by Beverly and Violet Weston embodies the isolation and slow decay of the Southern intellectual- Letts describes the house as "a century old", with "additions, renovations and repairs [which] have essentially modernized the house until 1972 or so, when all structural care ceased" and the house entered into a state of decline (Letts 9). Though occupied by two human beings, the house has been shuttered and left to rot in the heat of the Oklahoma sun. The intellectual capacity of the house's inhabitants is no match for their sense of abandonment in a region devoid of intellectual drive. Characters such as Ivy and Barbara try to find ways to leave the Oklahoma plains for better prospects elsewhere, but the family home acts as a magnet which draws them back time and again for more punishment. Ivy in particular shows an interest in escaping her life on the Plains and fixates on the city most famous for being a place to escape and find new meaning- New York, a city as known for being as metropolitan and diverse and intellectual as Osage County isn't. Ivy feels entrapped by the limitations of her hometown, and by the close-knit nature of her Southern community. Entrapment is a common theme in Southern literature, and is usually seen either in captivity narratives or in depictions of doomed marriages written by Southern women (Busby 99). However, Letts examines captivity in a geographical sense, essentially locking his characters into place and tying them down to a single location from which they can't escape, no matter how much physical space they attempt to put between themselves and the county they grew up in.
Education doesn't act only as a community barrier in August: Osage County. It also behaves as a weapon for various characters, most notably in Bev Weston and in Barbara and Bill Fordham. Bev utilizes his intellect as a defensive measure against his responsibilities as a husband and father. He plays the part of the wounded poet to avoid dealing with his wife's addiction to pills and the emotional failings of his children. Bev also relies on his status as the misunderstood and maligned artist to excuse his own alcoholism and emotional unavailability. His methods of escape are easy enough to trace as they develop. In the early stages of his marriage to Violet, he found release in books and in writing his poetry. Once he tasted critical acclaim for his academic work, it is likely that he lost some of the feeling of independence his writing may have inspired and turned to drinking as a new source of protecting himself from the daily demands of living which "have over time made burdensome the maintenance of traditional American routine" (Letts 11). When alcoholism no longer blocked out the discomfort of living in a dark, empty house with an unstable wife and the memory of three unhappy daughters, suicide became Bev's final answer. In his case, what started out as a shield of academic success turned into a double-edged knife of isolation and alcoholism, made worse by Bev's genuine intelligence and his difficulty in reconciling his intellect with what he considered to be a mundane world of paying bills and driving the wife to chemotherapy. Meanwhile, Bev's daughter Barbara and her soon-to-be ex-husband Bill put their education to a slightly different task. Instead of leaning on their education to further themselves, Barbara and Bill use their intellects as weapons against one another. Both are highly intelligent people with potentially fulfilling careers, but neither can navigate their relationship without turning a disagreement into an intellectual competition. On one occasion, Barbara accuses Bill of abandoning their daughter, to which he responds "I have not forsook my responsibilities" (Letts 76). She jumps on his use of the word "forsook" and turns the subject of the argument from their daughter's happiness to the lesser issue of her husband's word choice, all for some vague hope of upstaging him on an intellectual issue. Her concern with her husband's intelligence, and more importantly her worry over his perception of her own, reappears in a later scene in which Barbara is speaking to Sherriff Gilbeau. She mentions that Gilbeau's occupation is ironic, given his family history She corrects herself a moment later, stating "it's incongruous. I think I misused "ironic." Oh, if my husband could hear that", showing that even when Bill isn't in the same room she can't escape the need to defend her intellectual capacity while attacking his in a twisted form of self-defense (Letts 125).
Education and the thirst for knowledge affect the lives of the entire Weston family. Little Charles Fordham illustrates the family attitude toward learning in an interesting manner. He is the only 'failure' in the family with relation to his drive to learn and showcase his knowledge. He is the family black sheep for lacking interest in Bev's constructed community for intellectuals and preferring his non-scholarly puttering to any pursuit of higher learning. In the larger Oklahoma community, this would hardly be abnormal and may even be perceived as a more practical endeavor than Bev Weston's poetry, but within the Weston family Little Charles is a failure. His mother lashes out at him verbally on several occasions, making no secret of her disappointment in him. Ivy and his father attempt to protect him, but Little Charles often seems content to be run over by the hostility the other family members hold for him for not fitting into the Weston model of the capable intellectual. He seems to feel that he deserves their derision and makes no attempt to prove to anyone but Ivy that he is anything more than the family fool. By playing the helpless child, he dodges the familial responsibilities he would otherwise have to shoulder- he even manages to skip attending Beverly's funeral through intentionally "accidentally" sleeping through his alarm clock. The Weston family sees his lack of interest in scholarly activities as a symptom of his lifelong aversion to adulthood and the duties he is expected to perform. Likewise, Ivy accuses Barbara of abandoning her familial duties under the guise of furthering her career in Colorado. Like Little Charles, Barbara uses her intellectual status as a way to dodge her supposed responsibility to take care of her mother Violet. She escapes to her new teaching job and her growing family and leaves her younger sister to deal with their mother's insecurities and whims. She is only able to do this, of course, because she is herself of the intellectual class, just as her father was, and other than her sister there is no one in the family who will call her out on her abandonment. Any other character who would accuse Barbara of skirting her duties would open him- or herself to an equal accusation, as the entire family is guilty of putting personal gain first and familial responsibilities second at some time or another. Even Ivy, for all her talk of how "the obligation of caring for [their] parents was [hers] alone" wants to cut her ties with Violet and flee to the distant, almost-mystical city of New York where freedom waits and no angry old women horde bottles of pills in rehab (Letts 103). Still, because she is the oldest daughter, tradition would dictate that Barbara should be the one calling the shots in what remains of the family after the various breakdowns suffered by her parents, sisters, and husband. However, Barbara leans upon her academic responsibilities as a way to deflect her familial duties onto other people, much as Little Charles uses his academic ineptitude to avoid responsibility altogether.
Letts seems to believe that intellectualism plays an odd role in the lives of Southerners with academic aspirations, especially in people imprisoned in the South with only other family members to share their academic aspirations with. The Westons created a community in miniature to support their academic pursuits in a region where academia is not the usual career choice, but their ring of scholarly 'support' is rife with competitiveness, feeling of inadequacy, and outright hostility to any form of either success or failure. The Weston mini-community is less a circle of academic thought and more a boxing ring which allows for familial jealousies to air and for family members to attack one another either verbally or, on several occasions during the course of the play, physically and with intent to harm. Repressed anger does not stay repressed in this family for very long, and almost all of the family members spoil for a good fight at some point in the play. Academia and aggression are not commonly associated with one another in this manner, but Letts does not seem to want to depict his scholars as pacifists and do-gooders- he wants the audience to know that the people walking on his stage have problems stemming from jealousy and insecurity and a great deal of pent-up anger, and that these issues are likely fed by the family's awareness of their own isolation from one another and from the Southern community they seek to escape. Responsibility to the family is a secondary concern to the extended family of the Westons, and it falls after scholarly success which does not seem to provide emotional fulfillment for any of the characters. Instead, seeking recognition in one or more fields of study rather than working out issues within the family in a way forces the Westons to view one another as competitors rather than family members, therefore perpetuating the cycle of hostility and undercutting. Intelligent and self-aware though they are, the Weston family members are more concerned with arming themselves against one another and deflecting blame than in seeking out one another and truly being a family.
Works Cited
Busby, Mark. "The Significance of the Frontier in Contemporary American Fiction." The Frontier Experience and the American Dream. Ed. Mogen, David, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 95-103.
Jackson, Robert. Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2005.
Letts, Tracy. August: Osage County. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008.
