[In the following essay, Anderson conducts a psychological reading of Tiny Alice, viewing Julian's "conscious spirituality" as based on a "subconscious carnality. "]

Near the end of his lengthy monologue about himself and the dog, Jerry, in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, unleashes a desperate rambling which springs from his deep need to establish contact with something: "If not with people … if not with people … SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach, with a mirror.…" But here he stops: "no, that's too hard, that's one of the last steps." 1 It is approaching this last step that we find the lay brother, Julian, in Tiny Alice, Albee's most cryptic play. Julian's odyssey within Miss Alice's house takes him, in fact, through the looking glass on a quest for self-discovery, a quest resounding with psychic implication and leading (if we accept the conclusion as epiphany) to a revelation of mythic proportion.

Most critics willing to go beyond Robert Brustein's and George Wellwarth's dismissal of the play as "meaningless" have interpreted its theme as ironic; among them, Anne Paolucci and Ruby Cohn agree on a definition of Alice as "an incomprehensible Nothing" while Lee Baxandall and Leighton M. Ballew see her as simply the manifestation of Julian's need to believe in something, the final irony being that he accepts the man-made symbol of God he so strongly resisted.² Harold Clurman pans the play as an ultimately uninteresting effort "to prove the world an intolerably damned place," and only John Gassner is willing to concede that its concern with "the enigmas of life" or "the futility of trying to explain existence rationally" has claimed playwrights' attention from the beginning of literate theatre.³ Albee himself has said of the ending of Tiny Alice:

[Julian] is left with pure abstraction—whatever it be called: God or Alice—and in the end, according to your faith, one of two things happens. Either the abstraction personifies itself, is proven real, or the dying man, in the last necessary effort of self-delusion, creates and believes in what he knows does not exist.⁴

The ironic interpretation remains ultimately unsatisfying, however, especially since in all his drama, most critical interpretations notwithstanding, Albee has never shown himself to be either absurdist or nihilist. In The Zoo Story, he portrays the wasteland of modern society in which the chasm between one human being and another has become so vast that Jerry must sacrifice his life in order to bridge it. But, by so doing, he does, in fact, manage to break through Peter's carefully designed cage of false security and self-preservation. The essence of Jerry's communication with Peter at the moment their lives touch is disturbingly transient and enigmatic. Albee questions the substance of one human being's contact with another, but he never doubts that somehow that contact is possible, and he posits unquestioningly that it is essential.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a purgation rite in which George and Martha strip each other of their defenses, illusions, and fictions. The destruction of their metaphorical son provides at least the potential for their rebirth into a new and more authentic relationship where before none had existed. But again, Albee will not define for us the nature of authenticity nor even suggest whether that authenticity can ever be actualized and sustained between George and Martha. His message is only that in order to begin we must face our past, admit our illusions and our vulnerability, and accept our fear.

In Seascape we find Charlie, who must learn to relinquish the womblike security to which he has retreated (as a child he would descend to a cove at the bottom of the sea where mentally he has remained through his adult life) in order to accept the challenge of assisting a new species, themselves emerging from the sea, to "Begin." In this context, then, it is plausible to give Tiny Alice, despite its dark and foreboding tone, an apocalyptic reading.

It has been suggested often enough that the play operates on numerous levels, the simplest being an apparent betrayal story of a man offered by his church to a group of demonic characters for the sum of a hundred million dollars a year for twenty years. The man is sent as an emissary to the house of the donor, an eccentric woman named simply Miss Alice, to "clear up odds and ends." While there, this man, a celibate and ascetic, is lured into a strange and mysterious world by the temptations of wealth, luxury, friendship, and finally sexuality. He is offered happiness in the form of marriage to Miss Alice; but once he accepts he is abandoned by her and her cohorts (including his Cardinal who sent him on the bizarre mission), fatally shot, and left to die alone on the altar of Alice, the mysterious goddess whom they all seem to serve, thus becoming their sacrifice to her.

But the play seen on this level leaves many ambiguities, the chief of which is, perhaps, the role of the three tempters: Lawyer, Butler, and Miss Alice. They seem at first sinister agents of an evil force sent to undermine the virtues of Julian. But often they indicate to him that they are helping him, that the process he is undergoing, painful though it is, is for his own benefit. In the last act, for instance, when Julian asks Butler, "Are you my friend?" Butler responds, "I am; yes; but you'll probably think not." 5 In the same scene, Julian insists that all his life he has "fought against the symbol" and Miss Alice tells him, "Then you should be happy now" (162), indicating his struggle is over. We must question, too, whether Julian's virtues, sincere though they seem as far as he is aware of them, are in fact genuine. As he begins to reveal himself to Miss Alice, it becomes apparent that his conscious spirituality has been based all along on a subconscious carnality.

This insistent split demands a more subtle interpretation of the play, one focused on Julian's psychology. The disclosure of Julian's personal unconscious with its powerful, repressed sex drive is prepared for early in Tiny Alice by the motif of revealing information (as one would reveal repressed motivations). The first scene between Lawyer and Cardinal is filled with persistent references to secret pasts, dossiers, and the manifestation of defamatory information. When, in the following scene, Julian refuses to reveal to Lawyer the details of his years in the asylum, Lawyer hisses prophetically, "You will … in time. Won't he, Butler? Time? The great revealer?" (42).

The action of the drama will unveil the layers of Julian's psyche, from the exposure of his repressed sexuality to the disclosure of the Oedipal drive and the father-son conflict. And beyond that we will find yet a deeper layer—so that we might concur with Miss Alice when she exclaims "expansively" at one point, "Oh, my Julian! How many layers! Yes?" (114). That the play undertakes a journey through his mind is made clear from the very first scene in which Julian appears and describes his experiences in the mental home to Butler: "I … declined. I … shriveled into myself; a glass dome … descended, and it seemed I was out of reach, unreachable, finally unreaching, in this … paralysis, of sorts" (43). The model house, the home of Alice, a shriveled version of the real house sealed by a glass dome also appears on stage for the first time in this scene. Clearly, it presents itself to us as a symbol of Julian's unconscious.

Butler explicates the theme of self-confrontation when he suggests to Julian that one feels one should see one's self in the model (25). The theory he poses on the care one would take if one had such a "dream toy" made invites psychic correlation: "It would almost be taken for granted—one would think—that if a person or a person's surrogate went to the trouble, and expense, of having such a dream toy made, that the person would have it sealed, so that there'd be no dust" (26). "Dream toy" becomes a significant word choice here when considered in terms of the subconscious. Julian remarks as he gazes into it, "it seemed so … continual" (25); and in response to Butler's comment that the house is enormous he replies,"Endless!" (27). Significantly, in both dimensions, the house has many rooms, as Miss Alice's non sequitur points out: "I … am a very beautiful woman.… And a very rich one.… And I live here, in all these rooms" (63). Throughout the play, other references to rooms, divisions, and partitions—the asylum to which Julian committed himself was "deep inland" and had "buildings, or floors of buildings" (58)—-bolster the mind imagery. The phrenological head is an obvious symbol.

As I've already suggested, it becomes clear early in the play that Julian's expressed intentions are belied by the unconscious drives which motivate them. The fantasies and hallucinations he divulges betray the libidinous forces threatening his conscious self-concept. In his scenes with Miss Alice, Julian is always the one to initiate an atmosphere of high-tensioned eroticism by relating a past fantasy. (Act II, scene iii is surely the best example of this.)

Julian sublimates his sexual drives into a desire to serve and constructs a persona of himself as martyr, refusing to accept that any self-actualization must be channeled into a role which serves his human needs one way or another. In other words, Julian's image of himself as martyr does not eliminate or even substitute for his other needs; it simply displaces them. This repression accounts for the perverse eroticism which fills the stage each time Julian divulges his fantasies. According to C. G. Jung, the ideal relationship of the unconscious to the conscious is compensatory, with the one balancing the extremes of the other. The more repressed the unconscious tendencies—the more, in Julian's case, the sexual needs are denied—the less displaced and the more primitive, even distorted, these tendencies become. The stronger his desires make themselves felt to Julian as doubts or temptations (since the effects of the unconscious will always present themselves as forces outside the person), the more his conscious attitude takes on an extreme, rigid position to compensate. In turn, the unconscious drives become even more exaggerated and grotesque in a continuously vicious cycle. What might have been the healthy expression of his sexuality has become for Julian violent, distorted, and pathological.

Julian's desire for martyrdom, then, is anything but a healthy expression of his faith. It is, rather, an obsessive, fanatical drive to counteract the threat from his unconscious. He is obsessed with martyrdom. We might also see this obsession as an impulse toward self-destruction brought on by the tension between his conflicting desires, as well as an unrealized longing for punishment for his transgressions, unconscious though they be. But Albee is hardly offering us any profound insight when he suggests that religious fanaticism if often based upon sexual repression. If his play sought only to uncover Julian as a fraud at the end, after having uncovered institutional religion as a fraud right from the start, Tiny Alice would simply be a social statement against all the spiritual trappings, even the most strenuous, with which we surround ourselves. There is certainly that statement made in the play, but it is not the central issue. For one thing, unlike Soeur Jeanne des Anges in John Whiting's The Devils, Julian is far too attractive a character. Some critics have suggested that he is, in fact, the most appealing of Albee's protagonists. He is sincerely confused in regard to this area of his life, but in other respects he is open, intelligent, flexible, genuinely simple, and, unlike his Cardinal, without conscious ulterior motives.

And Julian, like George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Jerry in The Zoo Story, is an outsider, belonging wholeheartedly neither to the traditional hierarchical church, which uses God for its own gains, nor to the secular world, which has long since substituted money and technology for God. His title, lay brother, typifies his situation: "You are of the cloth but have not taken it" as Butler puts it (28). Because, like Jerry and George, his sensibility precludes his place within traditional structures, Julian is set apart as a modern hero, who, in Jung's words, "has become 'un-historical in the deepest sense and has estranged himself from the mass of men who live entirely within the bounds of tradition." We find him isolated and at a crossroads: either he must block out the outside world completely and return to the asylum, or he must discard his personal illusions, accept and understand himself, and acknowledge that, again to quote Jung, he "has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and … he stands before the Nothing out of which All may grow."6

Therefore, it is difficult to accept that the main motive of the tempters in Tiny Alice is to uncover Julian's weaknesses and undermine his good intentions simply to punish him with abandonment and death. If it is necessary for Julian to recognize and discard the fictions he has clung to, as it was for George and Martha to discard their fictional son, we might question whether his possibility for new light and understanding should be any less than theirs. And, if these unconscious motives are uncovered, leaving a more balanced Julian, can we accept that he is betrayed and punished for these unless we accept his own original, distorted definition of his "sins"?

The questions turn on the meaning of Alice and the significance of Julian's acceptance of her. The first part of the play, in which Julian's personal unconscious does become inte-grated, is only a first or preparatory step, leading to some understanding of even greater, deeper consequence. What this is can be understood in part by viewing Tiny Alice not in the context of realistic, ironic tragedy, but within the genre of allegorical romance. Several signs in the play point in this direction.

Northrop Frye states that "in romance the characters are still largely dream characters" and that they function as "expressions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfillment or of repugnance." 7 The very first word we hear Julian utter, "Extraordinary," in the light of Frye's definition is very apt. From the moment he enters Miss Alice's house there is a sense that he has entered a dreamlike or extra-ordinary world, where commonsense logic will not apply. The characters who people that world are, by their very names, embodiments of ideas, concepts, or split-off parts of Julian's own psyche, on one level at least. Lawyer, for instance, is the prototype of everything repugnant and reductive, Julian's Shadow or dark side as it were, and critics who accept his commentary as a key to understanding the play are hearing only one bias.

Julian's mission contains the obvious allegorical overtones of the life-cycle quest: the accomplishment of a task to achieve a treasure, represented by the money Miss Alice promises to the church. In traditional mythological format, the hero is sent on a task or journey by a divine superior, a role into which the Cardinal fits nicely (36). Part of his reward is the winning of a bride, whom he takes from the hands of a previous, older lover; the hero, though he must die, is exalted at the end. According to Frye, the quest has three stages: "the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero" (187).

From the beginning of Act II, it becomes very clear that little but open hostility exists between Lawyer (the evil ogre) and Miss Alice: lustful pursuit on the part of the one, revulsion and evasion on the part of the other. Lawyer makes such little effort to conceal his tremendous hatred of his successor that Butler can easily observe, "I've noticed, you've let your feelings loose lately; too much: possessiveness, jealousy" (99). Julian himself is fully cognizant of the rivalry, as his accusation to Miss Alice attests: "You have allowed that … that man, your … your lover, to … ridicule me. You have permitted it.… You have allowed him to abuse me, my position, his, the Church; you have tolerated it, and smiled'' (117).

To quote Frye once again, apropos of Miss Alice:

This bride-figure is ambiguous: her psychological connection with the mother in an Oedipus fantasy is more insistent than in comedy. She is often to be found in a perilous, forbidden, or tabooed place … and she is, of course, often rescued from the unwelcome embraces of another and generally older male, or from giants or bandits or other usurpers.

(193)

The tension between Lawyer and Julian reflects the son-father rivalry for the mother. Miss Alice does, in fact, treat Julian as a favored child, referring to him as "my little Julian" and "little recluse." The three characters' interaction as hero/rescuer, bride, and ogre is structured upon the son, mother, father psychological triad in which the child perceives his father as a rival hurting his mother who must be rescued.

That is one level on which the quest motif operates in Tiny Alice. On another level, Miss Alice herself is the temptress, and as mother-figure she personifies the most formidable taboo. Julian articulates his instinctive dread of what she represents toward the end of Act II: "why am i being tested? … And why am I being tempted? By luxury, by ease, by … content … by things I do not care to discuss" (117).

The quest for the treasure is the more generalized version of Julian's specific or personal lifetime preoccupation: the search for the Father, in his terms, God. Within Miss Alice's house his dual purposes converge. He realizes only intuitively at this point that the latter is the search for his Self, a fact implicit in his declaration, "My faith and my sanity … they are one and the same" (45).

The motif of the search for the Self brings us, finally, to the last and most elusive level of Albee's play. If the house is the symbol of Julian's unconscious (as well as a female archetype), and Alice lives there, then Alice must be the personification of something within Julian which he must confront. That something can be explored through the Jungian theory of the Anima, the female principle existing inside all men.

The Anima first appears as an image in a man's mind of the nuturing, all-embracing, protecting mother (but it includes other archetypal images as well, such as the virgin, the temptress, the witch, and the spiritual guide). It is not clear from where this image arises for it does not come from the real mother. Jung attributed it to the collective unconscious, present a priori in a person's mind; while other psychological studies do not accept this completely, they do concede, in the words of Maud Bodkin, that "where forms are assimilated from the environment upon slight contact only, predisposing factors must exist in mind and brain."⁸

In his infantile or immature state, the man will cling to this first image of the mother, his unconscious desire for what Jung calls "the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element."⁹ He projects this desire first onto his real mother and later onto the substitute mother, that is, the wife or lover. Seen in this context, Miss Alice is Julian's projection of part of his Anima or his desire, in Jungian terminology, to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. This is easily supported from the play by the numerous images of envelopment, for instance, Miss Alice's quote from D. H. Lawrence's "Love on the Farm":

And down his mouth comes on my mouth! and down
His bright dark eyes over me …
… his lips meet mine, and a flood
Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown
Against him die and find death good!
                                              (112)

In Julian's fantasies of martyrdom he sees himself devoured by a lion and after a graphic description he concludes: "And as the fangs sank in, the great tongue on my cheek and eye, the splitting of the bone, and the blood … just before the great sound, the coming dark and the silence. I could … experience it all. And was … engulfed" (124). When Julian finally comes to Miss Alice in Act II, scene iii, the stage directions indicate that she opens her gown like great wings unfurling and "Julian utters a sort of dying cry and moves, his arms in front of him, to Miss Alice; when he reaches her, she enfolds him in her great wings" (127). And, of course, in the final scene the darkness moves out of the model house, surrounds Julian as a presence and, again to quote Albee's directions, "his eyes, his head move to all ar eas of the room, noticing his engulfment" (189-90). (All emphases, except the first, mine.)

Mother Church, to which Julian's loyalties lie before he relinquishes them to Miss Alice, is also an archetypal Anima—the female counterpart to Christ, the male Animus. We might recollect, too, that Julian's memory of his first sexual experience which "did or did not happen" involved a woman who believed herself to be yet another female archetype: the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

When Miss Alice appears in Act I, scene iii as, in Albee's directions, a "withered crone, her hair gray and white and matted," bent and moving with two canes, and speaks "with a cracked and ancient voice," this is more than simply an indication that in this play things will not be as they seem, though it certainly is that. The disguise is also a sign, from the outset, that she is playing a role—the donning of a mask transforms the wearer into an archetypal image—a role with mythic significance. In this case, she is the projection of another aspect of the Anima of Julian's psyche: the Terrible Mother, which appears in archetypal dream imagery as a witch or crone. The duality between the Good Mother and the Terrible Mother is explained best by a quotation from Ruth L. Munroe regarding Jungian theory:

For the infant the mother is the major image, regardless of the sex of the child, and the mother remains the symbol of bliss, repose, comfort, and total passivity, the source of life. But a duality is apparent in the definition. Life is not passive. The child must go forth into the real world. So while the man retains a nostalgia for the Eternal Mother … he must also leave the Mother. The Good Mother of his deepest dreams is also the Terrible Mother … within the person's own psyche.¹⁰

The Terrible Mother is associated with death and the dark side of life a man must accept in order to live actively. Therefore, when Miss Alice appears to Julian first as a crone this is a message to him from his own psyche that, in order to find what he is looking for, he must first leave the safety of his secluded world, the confines of Mother Church. In light of this, the exchange between Julian and Miss Alice after she has removed the mask makes more sense than it otherwise would:

Miss alice: Oh, indulge us, please.

Julian: Well, of course, it would be my pleasure … but, considering the importance of our meeting

Miss Alice: Exactly. Considering the importance of our meeting.

Julian: A … a test for me.

(53)

Julian comes very close to a conscious awareness of the meaning of the Terrible Mother when he describes his meeting with her as a test. He will not arrive at full consciousness of everything that is happening to him, however, until the very end of the play. These events and the people who act within them are simply signals from his unconscious, similar to the symbols of dreams, revealing a great deal of what his conscious self cannot immediately comprehend. The extent to which this is true adds weight to the association frequently made between the title of the play and the wonderland of Lewis Carroll's Alice. It may be to her function as a dream symbol (which is experienced but not always understood) that Miss Alice refers when she says early in the play, "It may be I am … noticeable, but almost never identified"(59).

Though Julian is obviously fascinated and enticed by Miss Alice, this alone would not provide sufficient incentive for his renunciation of the safety of Mother Church. Miss Alice must lure him out of that world and into a dynamic participation in life. In her primary role of Temptress, she does this by being to him still another projection of his desire for "the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother." He succumbs to this illusion when he comes to her uttering "a sort of dying cry" and she enfolds him in her wings (127). This is a point of initiation for Julian, necessitating the loss of innocence (Albee, in an interview appearing in the April 1965 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, referred to Julian as an innocent); he undergoes a symbolic death and an entrance into experience resulting in the sacrifice of rigidly idealistic (and, by implication, immature) beliefs. Thus, as the hero, Julian experiences a kind of initial rebirth into a more autonomous individualism, enabling him to continue on his quest to penetrate the mysteries of life and death. A definition from Jung further explicates Miss Alice's role: "the seductress … draws him into life with her Maya [Illusion personified as a celestial maiden]—and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalence where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair counterbalance one another" (Aion, 13).

That Julian has, in fact, progressed in his journey and shed his limiting and self-protecting beliefs is suggested by his words to the Cardinal in the scene following his marriage to Miss Alice:

But then I judge it is God's doing, this … wrenching of my life from one light to another … though not losing God's light, joining it with … my new. I can't tell you, the … radiance, humming, and the witchcraft, I think it must be, the ecstasy of this light, as God's exactly; … the blessed wonder of service with a renewing, not an ending joy—that joy I thought possible only through martyrdom.

(140)

Julian intuits that his entrance into life has had something to do with witchcraft. Though he is focusing on the bright side (which is real), he senses that there is a dark side as well (also real). His first experience of leaving the mother's womblike safety is abandonment. In fact, at the opening of that same scene we see Julian, the bridegroom, confused and anxious as to why everyone, including his new wife, has left him on his wedding day. One of the first things he says is, "I feel quite lost," and a little later, "There I was … one moment married, flooded with white, and … then … the next, alone. Quite alone …" (132). Entering the continuum of life he begins to experience the "frightful paradoxes" Jung speaks of, where light and dark, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, expansion and diminution exist side by side.

Miss Alice seems to be Julian's betrayer by initiating him into that world, but he must take that necessary step toward the goal he has set for himself, a goal he cannot reach without conscious acceptance (in the final scene) of every-thing happening to him so far in his unconscious. His only alternative is complete withdrawal from the world; that is, total surrender to his unconscious, the substitution of hallucination for reality. Lawyer and Butler refer to these two alternatives when they speak of Julian in Act II, scene ii as "walking on the edge of an abyss, but … balancing. Can be pushed … over, back to the asylums. Or over … to the Truth" (106). This Truth will come with the integration of the conscious and the unconscious, with the attainment of the masculine principle to balance the feminine, and with the acceptance of the ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations which will become recognizable. In this sense, it must be remembered that Miss Alice is the projection of Julian's own Anima seeking this balance. And even when, in Act III, he is lost and abandoned after his marriage, he has not forsaken his quest (138). The pain of "the reality of things" is so great, however, that Julian's ego resists it to the point where he almost opts for insanity:"I … cannot … accept … this. … No, no, I will … I will go back! I will … go back to it. To … to … I will go back to the asylum" (169-70).

According to Jung, if the conscious and the unconscious become too split, as in the case of Julian, a tension arises, and the functions of the Anima in a man and the Animus in a woman, "harmless till then, confront the conscious mind in personified form and behave rather like systems split off from the personality, or like part souls" (Aion, 20). It must be made very clear, I think, that on one level Lawyer, Miss Alice, and Butler function as full, three-dimensional characters with independent motivations and psychologies. But on another level, they are projections of Julian's mind. It is because of this dual function that their roles and rhetoric become so confusing.

If, in the case of Julian, the Anima can be withdrawn from projections, these projections can be integrated into consciousness. Thus, to a certain extent, the Anima represents a function which filters the collective unconscious through to the conscious mind. Alluding to this function, Miss Alice attempts to explain to Julian, "I have tried to be … her. No; I have tried to be … what I thought she might, what might make you happy, what you might use, as a … what?" (161), and later, "accept what's real. I am the … illusion" (167); and to which Lawyer refers when he says, "We are surrogates; our task is done now" (162). As functionaries of Julian's psyche, Lawyer's, Butler's, and Miss Alice's tasks are done as they bring him to the point of consciousness, in which they can no longer be personified for him by projections, and so in a sense must abandon him. As archetypal symbols, however, they function beyond Julian's psyche in the realm of a collective unconscious. Therefore, they remain autonomous even after he has integrated them into his ego ("On … and on … we go" [99]). Because of this, Lawyer declares, "You have brought us to the end of our service here. We go on; you stay" (161). The indications are that they will continue to act the same roles within other circumstances (177-78).

Like Sophocles' Oedipus, Julian had been on a search for the truth; like Oedipus who questioned everyone, Julian was sent to Miss Alice's house to take care of "a few questions and answers"; and like Oedipus, Julian had not bargained for the outcome that truth is painful, that it brings with it the recognition of unconscious forces and existential alienation, and that it leads ultimately to self-confrontation. His anger toward, and rejection of, Miss Alice's protective gesture in the last act of Tiny Alice (183) underscores the dawning of his understanding of autonomy and acceptance of responsibility: "It is what I have wanted, have insisted on. Have nagged … for"(188).

Albee has insisted that though "The sound of heartbeats and heavy breathing as the doors open have widely been misinterpreted as being those of an increasingly terrified Julian … they are meant to belong to whatever comes through the door."¹¹ Alice is the abstraction of the Anima which exists in the most sublimated realm of Julian's unconscious—his archetypal or collective unconscious. In recognizing her, Julian finds her counterpart, the Animus, or the God for which he has been searching (190); and consequently he comes to possess himself.

The Animus or Logos representing the male aspect of spirit and intellect, and the Anima or Eros representing the female or Earth Mother are, as Jung tells us, godlike because of the great psychic energy they produce:

Both of them are unconscious powers, "gods" in fact, as the ancient world quite rightly conceived them to be. To call them by this name is to give them that central position in the scale of psychological values which has always been theirs whether consciously acknowledged or not; for their power grows in proportion to the degree that they remain unconscious.

(Aion. 21)

In accepting them both, Julian has reached his epiphany which, according to Northrop Frye, is:

the symbolic presentation of the point at which the un-displaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment.… Its most common settings are the mountain-top, the island, the tower, the lighthouse, and the ladder or staircase. Folk tales and mythologies are full of stories of an original connection between heaven or the sun and earth.… The movement from one world to the other may be symbolized by the golden fire that descends from the sun … and by its human response, the fire kindled on the sacrificial altar.

(203-04)

The setting for Julian is up against the model house, the altar of Alice, but it is interesting that Albee originally intended him to be locked in an attic closet (corresponding more closely to Frye's tower or ladder), an idea he had to forego for the sake of dramatic effect. The movement of the world of Nature (Alice) into the world of the Spirit (God) comes in the form of the light descending through the rooms of the model house into the room Julian occupies (Frye's golden fire descending from the sun). Julian is the human response on the sacrificial altar.

Through a modern rite of initiation Julian comes, at last, to achieve the integration he sought. What the drama depicts, finally, is a birth-rebirth ritual in which he is first outfitted in ritual robes (in his case, a business suit), shot with a pistol (phallic symbol of fertility), and united with the Earth Mother who destroys in order to immortalize. In an impressive feat of dramatic compression, the scene of his death, with heartbeats and ensuing darkness, carries unmistakable overtones of a birth—expulsion from the womb. The modern audience may well remain impervious, however, to the suggestion of spiritual rebirth for Julian since, as Jung argues in his essay "Freud and Jung," our civilization has by and large forgotten the meaning of divine procreation and tends to overlook the possibility that incestuous longings go back past the desire for the temporal father and mother to a primal desire for unity with the spirit and with nature.¹²

Perhaps in this play, in which Albee must surely have been working out of his own unconscious, his contention that the use of the unconscious is twentieth-century theatre's most interesting development comes most fully to bear." The psychological processes dissected here occur simultaneously in the play so that the overall effect contributes to its most fascinating element: the capacity to re-create the atmosphere of the dream. Thus, it is haunting and disturbing despite its resistance to discursive logic.

Like many of Albee's plays, the effect of the ending of Tiny Alice is one of suspended motion; there is a sense of resolution but it remains intangible. Julian's epiphany is as elusive as the elation Jerry experiences right before his death in The Zoo Story: a bright flash of light before what remains, for us, darkness. Both characters, at their deaths, take the full implication of their visions with them, leaving the audience to ponder, finally, the persistent sense of mystery which remains.

Notes

¹"The American Dream " and "The Zoo Story " (New York: Signet, 1963), p. 34.

²Robert Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 308; George Wellwarth, The Theatre of Protest and Paradox, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), p. 332; Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1972), p. 96; Ruby Cohn, Currents in Contemporary Drama (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 249; Lee Baxandall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama Review, 9 (Summer 1965), 35; Leighton M. Ballew, "Who's Afraid of Tiny Alice?" Georgia Review, 20 (1966), 299.

³Harold Clurman, The Naked Image (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 24; John Gassner, Dramatic Soundings (New York: Crown, 1968), p. 602.

⁴Quoted in Alice Mandanis, "Symbol and Substance in Tiny Alice," Modern Drama, 12 (May 1969), 92.

⁵Tiny Alice (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 138. All page references are from this edition.

⁶Carl Gustav Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man," in Civilization in Transition, Vol. X of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Bollingen, 1964), p. 75.

⁷Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 206. All page references are from this edition.

⁸Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), pp. 4-5.

⁹C. G. Jung, "The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," in Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self Vol. DC of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Bollingen, 1959), p. 11.

¹⁰"Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought: An Exposition, Critique, and Attempt at Integration (New York: Henry Holt, 1955), p. 542.

¹¹Quoted in Henry Hewes, "The Tiny Alice Caper," Saturday Review, 30 Jan. 1965, p. 39.

¹²C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933), p. 123.

¹³"Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York: Avon, 1969), p. 227.