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The Shawl Critical Analysis

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The Shawl, 1985, by David Mamet deals with issues of truth and money in the middle class. Mamet presents a case of a woman and two men who deceive her. Already in the first act, John, the initiator of the con act, articulates the conflict between belief and truth as he tells the woman she has a small scar on her left knee which she must look at in order to realize it exists, since it is the first time she hears of it from a stranger and convinced she does not have it. John locates truth above belief, because truth clarifies all doubts and makes life coherent. After the first session John says to his skeptic partner Charles that she was won over, which rings a bell and enables the connection to another play by Mamet, House …show more content…

He is so convinced in his analysis whereas the audiences sees him lying to himself,caught in his own creation, which is pathetic.Charle sand John plan to listen to her and gather information about her which she provides inbetween the lines which they interpret according to the female stereotype.Then they will match the pieces of information and will create a story and a sun-conscience personality which they will treat.This is their profession.This is similar to the charade the con men put in front of Margaret in House of Games. Those are empty mind games, however they reveal a lot about the politics of the sexes. How men think the female mind operates and the irony surfaces when they are wrong in their assumption.This is how the grotesque is created in the mutual understanding , or shall I say misunderstanding between the sexes, which is a major theme in Mamet’s works. Edmond is a movie which also deals heavily with the issue of predestined gender roles in society. Edmond discovers how society sees the male role, single, married or wandering, by the kind of place it had expects him to fill under any of the definitions above. A whole industry is built around the conviction men will pay any price for sex, showing how the mechanism of a gender roles is imposed on people by regulatory regimes,whether closed like

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