Children or Vampires: The Parasitic Drainage of Parenthood in Edward Bond’s The Testament of This Day, The Angry Roads and The Hungry Bowl

Abstract

Parents children relationship has acquired new dynamics in contemporary world. The draining of parental faculties by children has received considerable attention in contemporary times. The research addresses the problem of parents being driven to extreme measures of self-torture and self-destruction in sustaining their children who grow at the emotional and financial expense of their parents. This raises the question of whether to categorize children as badgering human beings or modern vampires that are draining their parents. The badgering attitude of children depicts how parents are alienated by the children who divest them of their role as human beings and later abandon them. The current research paper endeavours to explore the siphoning relationship of children with their parents and how the paradoxical relationship saps the lifeblood of the parents. Judith Orloff’s theory of energy vampires will be used as a theoretical pulpit to explore this paradoxical dilemma in the selected plays of Edward Bond. The study employs qualitative research design as it uses close textual analysis to examine the parental affiliations. The study’s major findings reveal that Bond highlights the parasitical relationship of parents and children in a capitalist society where filial affection is clouded by monetary considerations and where parents lose their faculties in sustaining their children.