Meaninglessness of the American Dream in Edward Albee's Tiny Alice and The Death of Bessie Smith Based on George Herbert Mead's Theory

Edward Albee (1928- 2016), is one of the leading American playwrights (Bottoms, 2005: 8) in the twentieth century. He refers to the issue of the American dream and its changes in most of his works. A dream that, as a national belief, has rooted in certain socio-cultural beliefs of American society, but has lost its meaning. Researchers intend to explore the origins of this deviation within the paradoxes of the American society by looking at George Herbert Mead’s theoretical approach to analyze the effect of the other generalized patterns of society on the formation of an organized set of mental attitudes in the individuals. The research method, in this paper, is qualitative with the approach of directed content analysis. The main question of this study is how does the loss of meaning of American dream happen in these two Albee’s plays? The plays of Tiny Alice and The Death of Bessie Smith have been analyzed in this study.