Reading confessional plays: Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, and Peter Shaffer's Amadeus as dramatic monologues

A confessional mode of writing has long appeared in the world of literature in forms of poetry, prose, and also, drama. Typically, confessional writing endows the reader with a sense that they are experiencing the truth about the author. Michel Foucault offers an interesting and ground-breaking insight into a confession in his influential The History of Sexuality which is suitable to approach confessional writing. According to Foucault, a confession is a ritual process to produce a discourse of truth about oneself or a self-definition of a person who articulates a confession under influence of an authority. Basically, the critical perceptions towards confessional writing are on ground of Christian practice and humanist manifestation. A Christian confesses as a sinner to seek God’s forgiveness and salvation according to his religious principles as St. Augustine wrote his Confessions while Romantic activists used a confession to challenge the authority as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions shows. However, today, the notions of authority, truth, and representation evolve. The religious and humanist views might no longer be functional to approach confessional writing. How, thus, can we approach and understand the confessional writing of our time? Therefore, the poetic technique that unravels the thought behind the first person narrative, dramatic monologue, is adapted and applied in order to read modern confessional writing in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, and David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. These plays are selected for the study because the protagonists do not present their confessions with a religious aim. Moreover, the fact that they are fictional confessional writing makes the dramatic monologue reading more effective than the actual confessional writing because the contexts necessary for the reading are available within the texts. The dramatic monologue reading of these selected plays will illuminate the ulterior motives behinds the modern confession and offer a new insight into the modern confessional writing.