Face, Responsibility and Love in Familial Relationships in A Delicate Balance: A Levinasian Reading

This article intends to examine familial relationships in Albee’s A Delicate Balance, through Emmanuel Levinas’s notions of “face”, “responsibility”, and “love”. Edward Albee in A Delicate Balance, illustrates American familial relationships of the late 1950s and the early 1960s in a society which boasts about its nuclear families – powerful fathers, dutiful and loving mothers, and nice children. This study aims to examine these familial relationships in American life from Levinasian ethical point of view in order to find how Americans respond to these ethical notions and whether their familial relations are ethical or not.