Infantilized Adults and Intergenerational Stasis in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article examines the narrative and structural stasis that results from repeated infantilizing exchanges between parents and adult children sharing homes in the highly canonical mid-twentieth-century American plays Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman. These moments of overparenting, which tend to focus on the adult children’s bodies and health, educational and career choices, and language, are met with acts of resistance that in turn perpetuate a cycle of intergenerational conflict. Understanding the psychological effects of infantilization is crucial to recognizing the downward trajectory of both generations in all three plays into a stagnated state of memory rather than future progress. This article engages with relevant sociohistorical and autobiographical contextual material and argues that the cycle of infantilization dramatized in these plays is rooted in mid-century American culture and traditional gender roles.