Many of the previous blog posts discussed
about the (in)sanity of the three patients in the asylum. In the play, we all
realized that the three scientists (patients) were actually sane and trying to fake
their insanity to hide THE secret. There is one very interesting transition in
the dialogue that I find very helpful, which also adds on to this sane/insane suspicion.
Every dialogue is spoken very normally.
What I mean is that there is no gibbering mad speech like what I expected from the
usual asylum background. In Act I, there is this argument between the inspector
and the head nurse over the terms used such as (murderers/assailants, murder/accident). It suggests that the hospital recognize that the patients were truly insane and they committed the murder -i mean, accident- out of their madness. There is also this emphasis about the medical institution when Sister Boll
rejected the Inspector’s requests to smoke and drink alcohol.
[pg
14]
Inspector:
The murderer?
Sister
Boll: Please, Inspector – the poor man’s ill, you know.
Inspector:
Well, the assailant?
This argument seems to hint that there is a
real hospital institution with three ordinary crazy patients in it. It seems
that the normal world is in control of the situation. However, there is a reverse
of the dialogue in Act II. The argument is reversed when the Inspector objected
Fraulein Doktor use of the terms to describe the patient.
[pg
58]
Frl.
Doktor: Would you like to have the murderer brought in?
Inspector:
Please, Fraulein Doktor.
Frl.
Doktor: I mean, the assailant.
I think the reversal of the situation kind
of unsettles the audience because we all thought the hospital was the one who
objects the use of the term ‘murderer’ in the beginning. The doctor's use of terms points out to us that they are starting to suspect that the three patients are not as crazy as they thought after all. I think this reversal
in the use of terms in the text is a very important message in hinting that the
patients are in fact, not crazy.
The only thing I can't understand about this is how the Doktor claims that she played her three ladies into the clutches of the three Physicists, and that this was her original design. The fact that the Doktor says murder but that her assistant prefers assailant would suggest to me that the Doktor is in the know, but not Sister Boll, or probably any of her other aides. My emphasis would be on who was doing the talking, probably above where the changes take place, but based on the fact that the speakers are two different people with two different positions.
ReplyDeleteActually in Act 1, like sister Boll, the doktor also called the murder as 'accident' [pg 26]. That means she did not know about their secrets at that time. Only later on in Act 2 she changed her use of terminologies. That is the reason why it makes me think that the point she found out that they were sane were the time she changed the terms from assailant to murderer. I'm sorry I did not mention this example in the post!
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