The Holy Idiot Archetype: Madness as a Metaphor for Sanity in Twentieth-Century Drama and Film

• Main Authors: Lin, Yi-Rung, 林宜蓉
• Other Authors: Thomas Price
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/63988423771305067400

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 西洋語文研究所 === 90 === This thesis demonstrates the holy idiot archetype as a major mythical pattern in twentieth-century artistic dramatic creations, through the examples of Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, Peter Barnes’ The Ruling Class and Philippe De Broca’s film King of Hearts. Utilizing Nietzsche’s, Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s philosophical discourses on modes of existence and their analyses on the dialectics of spirituality and worldliness, together with Foucault’s historical research on the treatment of madness, I try to analyze the implications attached to sanity and insanity as presented in the above-mentioned dramatic works. Madness, through dramatization, is romanticized and transformed into a kind of divine madness or holy idiocy that embodies innocence, love, care, conscience and spirituality. On the contrary, normality is ridiculed and defined as synonymous with materialism, hostility, competition, malice and evil. The intentional reversal of the manifestations of sanity as evil and insanity as benevolence functions in these dramatic works in a Jungian manner, as a collective unconscious compensation for the dominant social valorization of material possession, competition, aggression and shrewdness. Through the sublimation of aesthetic form, the dramatists manage to expose problems of normality and provoke a reconsideration of the kind of divine madness and holy idiocy that demonstrate love, care and conscience.