Death and the Maiden Themes

Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is a harrowing play that centers on Paulina, a woman attempting to come to terms with having been abducted, tortured, and raped under her country’s previous dictatorial regime. Having suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of her abductors, Paulina is forced to confront her trauma when her husband, Gerardo, is visited by Roberto, a man whose voice and habitual phrases seem to match those of the…

Ariel Dorfman has made no secret of the fact that he wrote Death and the Maiden to study what happens when a dictatorship transitions into a democracy, and moreover how the public relates to this shift in authority. As is written at the start of the play, “the time is the present and the place, a country that is probably Chile but could be any country that has given itself a democratic government just after…

Death and the Maiden seeks to highlight the way in which the threat of, and capacity for, violence lurks beneath the surface of civilization. It asks the viewer to notice the inherent instability of society’s culture and civility and provokes them to think about their own capacity for violence. In doing so, the play functions as a kind of warning—a portent of mankind’s tragic ability to revert to violence and moral depravity. 

Though Paulina…