The Realism In Beth Henley's Crimes Of The Heart

Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley is a Southern playwright that has created a newer approach to realism to show that misfortune in feminist theatre is not a reproduction of life but a reevaluation of it. By portraying the love between the sisters in the play, the author illustrates the existence of a female awareness to find and form yourself as a woman.

Within Crimes of the Heart, a remarkable aspect is how the author depicts the sisters in their quest to form a fresh self in the new world. Henley is noted to be quite the comic and her genius can be seen in the contradiction portrayed in the opening of the play, where the situation improves before becoming worse. We see that the sisters are able to feel one another’s pain without forgetting their own character and they never dive so deep into another sister’s situation that they lose site of just how ridiculous it truly is. This similarity can also be seen in their individual problems; they feel the pain of life but yet maintain enough detachment to see the irrationality in their woes.

We see the presentation of this contradiction in act-three sequentially. We see Babe heading upstairs with the intent to suspend herself and die in the same fashion that her mother did, but quite suddenly runs back downstairs to answer the telephone with a broken rope around her neck. She decides to then attempt to suffocate herself in the oven, but thought into the suicide of her mother causes her to injure her head and then fall to ultimately be rescued my Meg.
Within the play the author offers domestic humor through an absurdist perspective and the blending of these aspects is secondary to the use of a divided, disjointed style of dialogue.

She has truly conquered the ability to depict grotesque comedy via mixing grave, life-threatening situations with daily events. The use of this style allows Henley to (some degree) give more importance to daily occurrences and reduce the seriousness of certain situations to a less severe degree. It is the immense bias between the characters’ value system that leaves the audience in a state of ambiguity, but it should be noted that this ambiguity does not lead to hopelessness. It ends up as a simple state of being that is to be accepted. The audience merely goes on to laugh at the series of misfortunes inflicted upon those who simply lack the ability to avoid them. Ultimately, we can see that the author is successful in combing comedy with

violence.
Henley also makes it a point to insert a great deal of confusion into the beginning of the play. The news of Babe’s endeavor to kill her husband is suddenly replaced by the concern of the passing of a horse and then this is followed by the information that Old Granddaddy’s health has worsened. So ultimately the audience is hit with a sequence of terrible events, which include attempted murder, illness, sexual abuse, and suicide. These events are not seen as being very substantial until the author presents the occurrences of these alarming incidents in an ordinary world. This causes the events to then have a certain level of intimacy to them and they no longer are to be experienced at a distant but instead seen as occurrences that could take place in the most ordinary place or community. Ultimately, increasing the level of intimacy of these events is Henley’s goal and through this she is able to convince the audience that in reality we do face these horrible events in day-to-day life to some degree.
By successfully exhibiting these elements, the author causes the feeling of a widespread relief to flood the audience. These elements are truly in place for a serious drama regarding the alienation of woman. It also implies that the insensitivity of males has pushed many women to the verge of their own self-destruction, similar to that of the mother to the sisters. But, the play does take a comic direction with the exception that it truly doesn’t heal the wounds made by the experience. Thus the feeling of relief comes only after worries or the solving of a mystery, like when Babe discovers the reasoning for why her mother strangled the cat alongside next to herself. Also note that the feverish laughter post the new of Old Granddaddy’s predictable death comes after Meg announcing it in defiance. “He [her granddaddy]’s just gonna have to take me like I am and if that sends him into a coma, that’s too just down bad” (pg.99). Ironically enough, he has just been sent into a coma and Meg’s line causes hysterical laughter among the sisters. The difficulty in performing such a scene that blends a fine line between comedy and terror is directly linked to the contradictory feelings of the sisters in terms of an absent father figure.
It’s this paradox that portrays yet another problematic point. Lenny’s remark that the laugher of the sisters was just for a moment can be seen as a reminder to the audience of the uncertainly of the fates of these sisters and it raises doubt in the continued survival of their new selves.