Humanities 106 Awakening Individuality

Masks, Roles, & the Theater of the Self

Assignment for 19 MAY, THURSDAY.

In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman published his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In this (rather boring) book, he seeks to gain insights into the organization of social life in America by considering everything in terms of the metaphor of theatrical performance. Who is an actor? What is a good performance and what makes a performance bad or a failure? Who is the audience? What are the costumes? What are the sets? Where and what is the stage? Where is the backstage dressing room? What is the script? What props are required? How do these assigned roles shift and change?

As an example, consider a nice restaurant. You arrive at the restaurant (theater building), and make your way to your seat (the maitre d' ushers you there) in the dining room (stage). The waiter (actor) puts the script into action, meeting your expectations by handing you a menu (a prop) and asking you for your order. The kitchen (backstage) goes to work preparing your food (more props) and the waiter delivers it with appropriate ceremony (definitely a performance!). The waiter then disappears to the break area (off stage) that is so carefully hidden in most restaurants. Of course, you have been the audience member at the center of this entire production. But wait––haven't you been acting like a customer, playing the role to the hilt, engaging the waiter with light banter, fussing over special requests, and so on? Just as you have been an audience for the actor playing the waiter, the waiter is your audience as you play the role of the customer. From this perspective, society is one grand act of cooperative ensemble theater.

1. Comment on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. How accurate or true to your personality were your results? Describe a familiar situation in which you seem to follow the tendencies of your personality, and describe a situation in which you seem to be going against the grain of your own personality.

2. Analyze a recurring situation or context in your life in terms of theater. Write about your observations, considering such things as actors, audience, theater performance space, backstage areas, props, script, etc. Look carefully for moments of reversal such as when actors become audience or when backstage areas become the stage.

3. Consider the clothes that you have in your closet and pick two extremes–something very nice or formal and something very informal. If you're wearing such clothes how do you feel? How do you change when you change your clothes? Are you the same person? (Of course you are, but what is different?)

4. In Taking Back Our Lives, Ellen Schwartz comes down rather hard on masks (p. 119). Are masks indeed phony and inauthentic? Are they inevitable? Can a mask be an authentic part of oneself? Do various masks run in parallel to components of your personality (components perhaps identified by the Myers-Briggs assessment)? Do some masks run against the natural grain of your personality? Are they signs of phoniness, or compensations for your personality type, an adjustment you make in pursuit of your ultimate values?

5. Are you stuck in a script, trapped in a bad sit-com? Fire the script-writer! Even if you consider yourself to be quite happy, and your general range of experience feels good to you, is there a repeated situation that could be improved? Is it a script? Could analyzing it in this way lead to insights into how to move through the pattern and fulfill a goal that was previously blocked?

You may respond to the above point-by-point, or meld your thoughts into a single essay. Strive for the usual 2-3 pages.

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Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence.

Philosopher George Santayana in 1922, quoted by Goffman