August: Osage County

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the play’s treatment of death by suicide, alcohol addiction, narcotic addiction, racism, incest, sexual assault of a minor, and child abuse.

The visible signs of maturity and aging on women’s bodies are a focal point of the play. When Jean first steps into the house, Mattie Fae loudly calls attention to her body, which has gone through puberty since they last saw each other. Twice, Mattie Fae exclaims with incredulity about the size of Jean’s breasts, feeling authorized to comment on parts of her body that signal sexual development. At 14, Jean is on the cusp of becoming a woman, which she tries to force with adult behaviors like smoking. But although she is precocious and intelligent, she is still very much a child.

Jean discovers that becoming a woman means learning how to handle unwanted eyes and even hands on her body, even before she enters womanhood. If the role of older women is to guide and protect the younger ones, their generational wisdom is entirely dysfunctional from the top down. Just as the older Weston sisters are mocked for aging out of sexual attractiveness, Jean is mocked for becoming sexually attractive, signaling that in the play’s world, women’s bodies are always subject to scrutiny and judgment. This is reinforced by the theme of the story’s men, including Beverly, Bill, and Steve, choosing younger women over their aging wives.

As the oldest woman in the play and the family matriarch, Violet is at the opposite end of the aging spectrum. Violet insists that although men become more attractive with age, women become ugly and lose all sex appeal, a notion that she seems to accept matter-of-factly for herself and Mattie Fae. But in other moments, particularly while in a drugged stupor, Violet’s secret fear of aging and becoming ugly seeps in. In the Prologue, while Violet is high, she calls Johnna pretty and asks if Johnna thinks Violet is pretty. When Ivy questions Violet about her Clapton album, Violet asserts, “I’m not old, you know” (28), and the Clapton album becomes a symbol of youth that she returns to throughout the play. In many ways, Violet is so tough and unyielding that the possibility of decline due to aging seems impossible. She has cancer, although she is in treatment, and there is no indication that it’s expected to be fatal. She takes pain pills and is undoubtedly addicted, but she is also in legitimate pain, which her family knows but has trouble reconciling with her seeming invincibility. Violet may have sustained brain damage from the painkillers, but maybe she is just acting out while high. When it comes to observing and guessing family secrets, or cleaning out the safety deposit box, Violet is perfectly sharp. In this way, Violet symbolizes the indestructibility of the female body when sexual attractiveness is no longer a concern. Neither drugs, nor disease, nor sadness can dominate her, and though she terrorizes those around her, she is vitally alive. The tragic irony is that because she pushes everyone away, she ensures that she will spend the rest of her life alone.

The middle-aged Weston daughters grapple with their own aging. The oldest daughter, Barbara, is going through menopause and experiencing hot flashes while also dealing with a likely divorce from her husband. Bill claims that he cheated with a woman half his age because Barbara is too closed off. In other words, young women don’t carry decades of emotional trauma. When Violet guesses the state of their marriage, she states that it’s impossible to compete with a younger woman.

For Ivy, aging is an impetus to seize the day and go to New York with Little Charles, particularly since she had her own secret bout with cancer and is now unable to bear children. Ivy’s infertility is important because the stigma of incest revolves around the potential for conceiving genetically compromised children. Though perhaps morally taboo as well, their relationship does not carry that risk and is the only loving, mutually supportive relationship in the play. Like his father, Little Charles is the only other man in the Weston clan not to cheat on his significant other, implying that he will not react badly to Ivy’s aging.

Karen, who is 40, is clinging to Steve as if he is her last chance at love, which she once imagined would be much simpler as a teen pretending to kiss her pillow. Violet nonchalantly strikes out at Karen’s belief in her own youth by noting that she’s starting to show signs of aging and becoming ugly. She decides to stay with Steve even after he molests Jean, whisking him away from temptation as if she is accepting Violet’s claim that it’s impossible to compete with younger women. In doing so, she chooses denial and the fantasy of happiness rather than acknowledge that Steve is likely to cheat and assault a minor again.

When Barbara slaps Jean and her family leaves, she sinks into a state in which she isn’t only dealing with the prospect of becoming an old woman, but she is also beginning to show signs of becoming her mother. Ultimately, the three women need to escape the house. They will still grow older, but they won’t have to accept their mother’s outdated, misogynistic beliefs.