Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse Of A Negro Analysis

Through her dramaturgy, the playwright Adrienne Kennedy portrays African American female protagonists who suffer psychic fragmentation. Feeling alienated, dislocated and rejected by the surrounding oppressing society, they try to form their self-integration by relating to the white dominating society. They try to establish identity wholeness by rejecting the black heritage that they feel it as threat. According to Melanie Klein’s theory, the infant is born with life and death instincts. These instincts create anxiety that the infant tries to deal with by using mechanisms of defense, such as splitting and projective identification. The infant, in order to deal with the anxiety he feels, projects it in an object outside the self as a good or evil project. After dealing with these anxieties the infant learns how to unit these splits and how to deal with them as a whole object. The infant projects the death instincts into an outside object which is called the persecutory object. This persecutory object is felt to be bad and threating the infant ego. The ego also projects the life instinct into a good and idealized object that the child identifies with.
“The infant’s aim is to try to acquire, to keep inside and to identify with the ideal object, seen as life-giving and protective, and to keep out the bad object and

Torn between the two cultures, Sarah rejects her black heritage and aims to identify herself with the white background. E. Barsely Brown explains “Sarah occupies a liminal space between blackness and whiteness, and thus can find neither a place to belong in either race nor a unified conception of self” (283). Unable to find herself identification Sarah splits into four selves. Through the play, Sarah and her four selves try to achieve a whole identified self, but they fail and Sarah by the end of the play commit