The Road to Mecca

Fugard based his play, The Road to Mecca (1985), on an actual person, Helen Martins, who lived in the remote town of New Bethesda in South Africa. Fugard knew the woman only by her reputation in the town as an eccentric artist who had turned her house and grounds into a fantastical landscape. Martins eventually committed suicide by drinking lye, which corroded her intestines and killed her. In Fugard's fictionalization of her story, Miss Helen is still alive at the end of the play, suggesting the playwright's hope that, with caring intervention, she might have been saved.

The play takes place one night in Miss Helen's house, as Elsa Barlow, a much younger friend, a teac

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ght, James (1994) would have described her reaction as freezing, a bodily response to fear, connected with her childhood trauma (p. 12). However, what she may have been experiencing at that moment instead was a thrill of power that temporarily overrode her instinct for self preservation. Miss Helen may not herself know what she was actually feeling. She is clearer on her feelings the night of her husband's funeral. The experience, while sad and stressful, was also liberating in a completely unexpected way. While many sociologists have studied the impact of loss and grief, they are less likely to consider the ways in which death and loss can also free the individual from significant burdens. Pat Conway (1988), for instance, argues that all losses of any kind result in some form of grieving (p. 542), yet does not explore the possibility that they may also result in feelings of relief, freedom, and self-revelation, as Stefanus' death does for Miss Helen. In fact, the conventional expectation that the death of a spouse is an entirely negative experience may blind social workers to the potential for positive side effects, as well. Marius and others within the community appear to believe that grief unhinged Miss Helen rather than
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3198
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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