In the play The Visit, Claire returns to her hometown. Much has changed in the forty five years she has been away. She is now a billionaire, so rich that she can buy nearly anything she wants—and so rich that if she desired, she could help the impoverished residents of her old hometown.
But Claire does not come to help anyone; she comes for revenge. All those years ago, Claire had been in love with a man named Anton Schill (in the English translation; his name is Alfred Ill in the original German). Schill had treated Claire horribly, leaving her pregnant and alone as he chased after a wealthy woman, even denying that he was the father of Claire's baby and paying people to lie for him in court. Claire had to leave town and fell into prostitution. In other words, Schill treated Claire like an object to be used and then discarded when he no longer needed or wanted her. To him, she and her child were not people at all, just things to be pushed out of the way and forgotten about.
Now, though, Claire is back, and this time she has something Schill wants: money. She could make a donation that would save the whole town. Again, Schill, even as he flatters Claire, treats her as an object to be used. She is a money source rather than a human being.
It is no wonder that Claire's own identity has been affected by years of such treatment. She, too, has developed the tendency to act as if people were objects rather than humans. Perhaps it began as a defense mechanism so that she could survive her mistreatment by Schill and her time as a prostitute (when she sold herself as a commodity over and over). She had to back away from her personhood just to survive. She had to see herself as something separate; she had to detach to withstand. And she dared not get close to anyone for fear of being hurt again.
Now, Claire treats Schill as though he were an object to be manipulated for her own purposes. She wants him dead. Only then will she make the donation and save the town. She doesn't care that Schill is a human being with rights. To her, he is simply the recipient of her vengeance. The townspeople, too, are merely instruments. They are to murder Schill for Claire. Claire's servants also are no more than objects in her eyes. She can rename them at will, and two of them are even the false witnesses Schill had once called against her, now blinded and castrated by Claire's vindictive whim.
Indeed, after so many years of being treated like an object and then treating others as such, Claire has largely lost her own identity as a human being. She has forgotten what it means to be human and turned herself into a hate-filled revenge machine.
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