In Peter Shaffer’s Equus, the plot revolves around seventeen year-old Alan Strang’s obsession with horses, culminating in his blinding six horses in one night. Despite committing this terrible crime, Alan is not inherently a bad person; instead, he is the victim of social taboos surrounding religion and sexuality as enforced by his parents and social heterosexual expectations as represented by Jill. Furthermore, no one will hold these people and concepts accountable for their actions. This allows them, a representation of society at large, to continue oppressing those who have deviations from what they consider normal beliefs, personalities, or behaviors. Firstly, Alan does not feel attraction to human females and truly only experiences sexual
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Frank Strang, Alan’s father, mentions Dora and Alan being “thick as thieves” for most of Alan’s life, likely since before Alan could remember (). When Alan was young, his mother told him that, when Christians first arrived in the New World on horses, the natives thought that the horse and rider were one holy being until one of the riders fell off his horse. Around this same time, he developed an obsession with the idea of talking animals. Thus, when he was six and encountered a horse with a rider for the first time, he believed that the horse was speaking to him. According to Alan, the horse said his name was Equus, and he lived in all horses, similar to the way that many Christians believe Jesus, or the holy spirit, lives in all people. When the owner of the horse allows him to ride the horse and his dad subsequently pulls him off, he becomes distraught and cautious about riding horses at all. Because of the significance he attached to falling off horses, he almost certainly interpreted this event, at least subconsciously, as a fall from power or holiness. For most of Alan’s life, Dora reads the Bible to him every night, sometimes for hours at a time. Per Alan’s request, she focuses on passages about horses, but she also reads other passages to him, such as the genealogy, or …show more content…
Though we often like to think of crimes as having a perpetrator and a victim, Equus demonstrates that the perpetrator can also be, and often is, the victim of some stronger external force that will not experience any repercussions for its actions. In Alan’s case, though Frank and Dora’s enforcement of social norms and taboos shaped the person Alan was when he blinded the horses, these two characters, heterosexual standards, and society at large are able to continue enforcing these norms by placing Alan in a psychiatric institution. When social norms become strong enough, it is entirely possible for the conforming class, usually white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgender, heterosexual, upper-middle class men, to subjugate those who do not conform through erasure and institutionalization; we see this in America today with the institutionalization of Black and mentally ill Americans who have committed minor drug offenses while white and neurotypical Americans charged with the same offense are likely to be let off with a warning. With this in mind, Equus provides an unfortunately accurate example of the criminal justice system not addressing the forces behind the crime - in this case, double standards of religion and sexuality - in favor of punishing
Frank Strang, Alan’s father, mentions Dora and Alan being “thick as thieves” for most of Alan’s life, likely since before Alan could remember (). When Alan was young, his mother told him that, when Christians first arrived in the New World on horses, the natives thought that the horse and rider were one holy being until one of the riders fell off his horse. Around this same time, he developed an obsession with the idea of talking animals. Thus, when he was six and encountered a horse with a rider for the first time, he believed that the horse was speaking to him. According to Alan, the horse said his name was Equus, and he lived in all horses, similar to the way that many Christians believe Jesus, or the holy spirit, lives in all people. When the owner of the horse allows him to ride the horse and his dad subsequently pulls him off, he becomes distraught and cautious about riding horses at all. Because of the significance he attached to falling off horses, he almost certainly interpreted this event, at least subconsciously, as a fall from power or holiness. For most of Alan’s life, Dora reads the Bible to him every night, sometimes for hours at a time. Per Alan’s request, she focuses on passages about horses, but she also reads other passages to him, such as the genealogy, or …show more content…
Though we often like to think of crimes as having a perpetrator and a victim, Equus demonstrates that the perpetrator can also be, and often is, the victim of some stronger external force that will not experience any repercussions for its actions. In Alan’s case, though Frank and Dora’s enforcement of social norms and taboos shaped the person Alan was when he blinded the horses, these two characters, heterosexual standards, and society at large are able to continue enforcing these norms by placing Alan in a psychiatric institution. When social norms become strong enough, it is entirely possible for the conforming class, usually white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgender, heterosexual, upper-middle class men, to subjugate those who do not conform through erasure and institutionalization; we see this in America today with the institutionalization of Black and mentally ill Americans who have committed minor drug offenses while white and neurotypical Americans charged with the same offense are likely to be let off with a warning. With this in mind, Equus provides an unfortunately accurate example of the criminal justice system not addressing the forces behind the crime - in this case, double standards of religion and sexuality - in favor of punishing