Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays: A Study on the Saving Maternity in the Modern Wasteland

Abstract

This paper newly interprets Joan Didion’s Hollywood-dystopia, Play It As It Lays from a critical viewpoint of rather affirmative potential lurked in the novel, which has been neglected or biasedly interpreted, especially, by male critics. The major hypothesis of criticism suggested in this paper is that in the midst of Didion’s all those dystopian delineations about the modern wasteland, the novelist in the novel renders the heroine Maria’s instinctive affection toward her handicapped daughter Kate, the aborted baby, and also her tragic childhood-family as integral and pivotal to the heroine’s reason for survival and the origin of her moral inspiration. The first half of this paper mostly concerns what kind of an environment where Maria is located and how she feels in the place--a modern version of Babylonia, where everybody is an enemy for each other and accordingly, no type of spiritual imperative ever exists, while all kinds of desires and instincts are floated around in great chaos. In the second half of this paper it is suggested that Maria’s instinctive longing for the utopian family (its center, of course, being her daughter Kate) in which caring and love only matter, can be seen as Didion’s humanist vision manifested in the heroine’s maternal love and her nostalgia for the family. In this respect Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays is a marvellous, feminine novel centering maternity as a saving morality, and what makes the novel greater is not just its theme but also her essential, beautiful writing-style and appropriate literary allusion.