Happy Days Archetype

Samuel Beckett wrote Happy Days in 1961, following his crusade of dramatic sublimity within the framework of a post-modern aesthetic deceit. The central character Winnie, like most Beckettian characters in Beckett’s corpus, refuses to struggle in the face of constraining circumstances. Having “descended all alone” (Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works 163), and sinking perpetually in the bottomless mound of the earth, Winnie is a picture of incoherence inherent in the worldview of nature in relation to that of the theatre. Confined, both within the mound as well as on the stage, caught within the inconsistencies of the desperate playing out of herself and the virtually inconsequential perking up of the one-way chatter, Winnie is the archetype of
In Freudian understanding, it comprises one of human libidinal quests for power over the one being watched. The weapon, the eyes, in the course of time, become the surveyors of not just this side of the looking glass but also of the other side. “Eyes that recognize the right side, the wrong side and the other side: the blur of deformation; the black or white of a loss of identity” (Irigaray, The Looking Glass, from the Other Side 10).

Thus, to return back to Walker, we can safely analogize how a narcissist Winnie, like Milton’s heroine, rips out her body and her element off the male sexual and discursive economy (note how “Eve cease(s) to be a part of Adam, becoming not his rib but her self”- 519) and seeks self-knowledge, not through prescribed lords but through proscribed nature- the earth, the sky, the wilderness.
Winnie becomes disconcerted with the way Willie, along with the eerily perusive audience, looks at her, “Don’t look at me like that! Have you gone off your head, Willie?” (167) and a “strange feeling that someone is looking at me” (155), instances when the dominant phallic politik threatens to invade into the feminine personality that she apparently wishes to sacredly
Hence, it no longer remains the harbinger of death and doom that traditional literature and classical psychoanalysis would have us believe. It is (self) love sans death, a love less of a transcendental nature and more of an earthly kind. I further argue that, like Freudian narcissists, Winnie sure seems to have her ‘object libido’ directed towards her ego, nevertheless, the other end of the thread of their malady is always held strong by auto-eroticism, thereby holding up the Freudian argument on how narcissism is the intermediate state between auto-eroticism and