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.

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