Boundary-Crossing: A Posthumanist Reading of Edward Albee’s Seascape

| ABSTRACT Edward Albee’s Seascape is a well-crafted Pulitzer Prize-winning play. This two-act play features a recently retired American couple, Charlie and Nancy, who were idling their time on a sun-soaked beach and having a conversation about future plan, and suddenly, a lizard-like nonhuman couple, Leslie and Sarah, came from undersea to the land. This essay argues that Seascape is pregnant with Posthumanist wisdom with which we might get access to a better understanding of our place on our planet and foster a more harmonious cohabitatio n with our fellow humans and other species. Albee’s Seascape is a forceful attempt to deconstruct the boundaries that humans set up to distinguish themselves from the world and dissolve the anthropocentric dualistic epistemologies that separate land and sea, men and women, and human and nonhuman. The cross-species encounter in Seascape yields arguments that starkly subvert human’s long -established stereotypical assumptions about themselves, opening up our eyes to see multiplicity and diversity through the prism of Posthumanism.


Introduction
Edward Albee is a renowned American playwright who has won numerous prestigious awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and two Tony Awards for Best Play.Nearly all of his plays grapple with the theme of alienation, focusing on people whose attempts to establish a connection with others are thwarted by their inability to be comprehended.However, in his Pulitzer Prizewinning play Seascape, Albee shifts from his most nuanced representations of interpersonal relationships to inter-species encounters, as he himself announced, "from writing about people to writing about animals" (McCarthy, 1987, p. 115).
Seascape has a simple plot yet with profound undertones.This two-act drama commenced on a sun-soaked seaside with Nancy and Charlie, a retired American couple, discussing issues pertaining to their future arrangement.Suddenly, Leslie and Sarah, a couple of humanoid lizard-like animals, appeared from the water and stunned them.The two spouses then disputed subjects and notions that the two marine animals could not fathom.Leslie and Sarah were ultimately disenchanted with what they saw on the beach and intended to return to the ocean, yet Nancy managed to stop them and offered her assistance.The play concluded with Leslie's anticipating announcement -"All right.Begin" (Albee, 1975, p. 135).

Literature Review
The portrayal of nonhuman creatures in this work has long been the subject of scholarly debate.Some academics dismiss the actual existence of these life forms and designate the work as a fairy tale, attempting to unearth the symbolic significance of the nonhuman in relation to philosophical inquiry into the issue of aging and death.Miller (1986) contends, for instance, that "ultimately we must learn to confront death…and accept it" is most likely "Albee's central subject" in Seascape (p.149).Gabbard (1978) concurs with Miller that Seascape is an "adult fairy tale" about the contemplation of human mortality (p.307).Gabbard suggests that since the seascape is the meeting point of sea and land, it encapsulates the transcendence from life to death, and he interprets "returning to the sea" as "returning to the birth waters of mother's womb," i.e., death (p.308).Regarding the two lizards that have come ashore from the sea, Gabbard believes that "the amphibian quality of the animal is the universal symbol of transcendence" (p.308).Another more speculative biological analysis evaluates the creatures as subhumans in the embryonic stage of human evolution.For instance, Mundhe (2019) interprets the work by applying Darwin's concepts of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection, viewing the nonhuman species as Charlie and Nancy's evolutionary ancestors (p.13).
The three occurrences of jet aviation imagery in the play have been noted by plenty of critics as well.Charlie decried the intrusion of technology into nature and predicted that the plane would crash one day.This, according to Khamari (2021), demonstrates that Charlie and Nancy "believe that after witnessing a long period of prosperity, civilizations will ultimately collapse" (p.12).Besides, Khamari reads the play's title, "seascape" as an escape to the sea, i.e., "the couple's escape from civilization and the monotony of suburban life to the sea" (p.11).Gabbard (1978), on the other hand, does not view the jet plane unfavorably but rather as something that might "represent freedom from gravity" (p.309).
Despite their diversity, these readings are all grounded on the human-centered proposition that the nonhuman figures and implausible narratives in Seascape are intended to represent human concerns.The issue with the aforementioned studies focusing on human experience is that they attempt to diminish the gravity of the human/nonhuman interaction in the scene by blatantly ignoring nonhumans' materiality, agency, and performativity.This problem arises because the Western thinking framework is essentially constituted by a Self-Other dichotomy.It is founded on a dualistic paradigm of vision in which the Self undercuts and starkly excludes the Other.Within that pattern of reasoning, the sea/women/nonhumans are consigned to a subordinate position to land/men/humans.The rationale for this dualistic, hierarchical correlation is to maintain the dominance, authority, and privilege of the hegemonic land/man/human.As a matter of fact, Albee himself once proffered a fascinating explanation for the presence of animals in his plays: "We are animals, are we not?" (Anderson & Ingersoll, 1988, p.170) Rather than establishing a clear distinguishing line between human beings and animals, this phrase showcases that Albee does not regard humans and animals as belonging to essentially disparate domains.

Methodology
Instead of being treated as an entertaining fairy tale, Albee's Seascape should be dealt with high seriousness since it reveals a more balanced and environment-friendly method to evaluate ourselves and our place in the world.In my opinion, this work is very instructive for tearing down the Western epistemological dichotomies of nature/culture, subject/object, self/other, reason/nonreason, and human/nonhuman, which have molded institutions such as racism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism, etc. Ergo, evaluating this work necessitates incorporating a Posthumanist perspective, and nonhumans should be viewed as concrete living organisms rather than as imagery or metaphor.In light of this, my objective for this research is to look into how this play criticizes and disrupts the dichotomous mode of cognition in the Western thinking system, as well as how it unsettles the humanist dichotomy of land society and land-based logics of patriarchy and anthropocentrism.In addition, this thesis asserts that towards the end of the play, Albee delivers a marvelous vision.In this Posthumanist future, the humanist paradigm of humanity and selfhood evaporates, and the boundary between superior and inferior collapses, thus inviting an alternative, non-dualistic viewpoint on all forms of existence.

Seascape: De-privileges Land Hegemony
The setting of this absurd and thought-provoking drama, seascape, is worth investigating.Albee's decision to situate the play on the seaside was astute and wise, as it fits the work's subject and primary theme well.Had the narrative been staged in a different location, the charm of this excellent work would have been greatly diminished, and its integrity and overall effect would have been hampered.
In terms of both space and time, seascape, as "spatially heterogeneous and dynamic spaces" (Pittman, 2018, p. 6), leverages its plurality and dynamism to demolish the fixed, stagnant land and its long-standing, human-assigned hegemony over the ocean.The land's dominance is often implicitly acknowledged, and even the lovely azure planet we inhabit is named "Earth," giving the impression that it is composed of solid soil.This delusion is long-standing and deeply ingrained.Centuries ago, humans considered the Earth they lived on to be the center of the solar system, if not the entire vast universe.Today, this anthropocentrism continues to severely distort people's perceptions of themselves and the world.Ecologist Magnuson (1991) states that "three-quarters of the earth is covered by the seas, and the continents are embedded in the seascape at the global scale" (p.21).Humans, on the other hand, see the landscapes they inhabit as the center of the planet, sidelining the oceans instead as an alien presence, a wild realm, and a complementary backdrop to civilization.Humanity has always been smug and proud of its civilizational achievements.Machinery, weaponry, and industrialization have empowered man to detach himself from nature that nourished him, assuming a formidable power over other nonhuman creatures and becoming the ruler of the planet.However, the time span condensed by the seascape dulls the radiance of human civilization.From the vantage point of Deep Time, the seascape crystallizes millions of years ago and the present, "examining very different temporal dynamics -e.g., ephemeral plankton patches (hours or days) to relatively stable seafloor morphology (thousands or millions of years)" (Pittman, 2018, p. 7).Humanity's brief history on land pales in comparison.
The hegemony of the land has been shown to be ludicrous, and the categorization system devised by man, the self-proclaimed lord of the land, falls short when confronted with the seascape, which encompasses a vast, diverse body of water and rich topography.Due to the fluidity of water, the continuous choreography of energy transfer, swap, blending, and recycling, as well as the complex biota and symbiotic systems, the seascape incorporates life and death; motion and stillness; earth and water; plants, animals, and minerals; solids, liquids, gases, sounds, and odors; etc.This implies that it cannot be wholly contained and assimilated within a simple, fixed human classification system.Seascape, a liminal and heterogeneous realm that defies human definition, is capable of dissolving the barrier between land and sea.In the intertidal zone of the coast, land and sea have no defined boundary and cannot be completely separated from each other.The below-horizon sea may engulf the land into the undersea world with rising tidal force, but during low tide, the underwater world can also be exposed as land.Thus, the seascape collapses the fixed boundaries and the rigid dichotomous logic of land.Since the seascape connects the ocean and the land, people who want to join the sea from the land must traverse the seascape; hence, the seascape functions as a bridge, a portal for human and non-human interchange, allowing humans to reexamine the relationship between self and non-human, and even promote intimate kinship with those "oddkin," a phrase coined by Posthumanist critic Donna Haraway to describe nonhuman bodies that are inextricably linked to people's own existence.Haraway calls for humans to cohabit alongside and make kinship with other-than-human beings to achieve "multispecies flourishing on earth" (2016, p. 2).In this play, we witness the human couple Charlie and Nancy, as well as the non-human pair Leslie and Sarah, conversing on the beach and promising to join hands for a better future in which human/nonhuman kinship may be realized.

Intra-action with the Sea: Troubles Gender Dualism
Albee paints in the discourse between Charlie and Nancy images of men and women who transcend gender preconceptions, invariably in regard to their connection to the sea.Nancy's desire to be a "seaside nomad" (Albee, 1975, p. 5), brimming with a relish for adventure and a curiosity for new things, is a far cry from the traditional woman who views her house and kitchen as her proper space.Charlie, on the other hand, was considerably quieter and reserved; he preferred to sit at home and do nothing (p.8).This is a reversal of the typical ideas of masculinity and femininity.In classic literature, it is usually the lady who awaits her husband's return from an excursion overseas.Patricia Mills studies The Odyssey and remarks in her extraordinary feminist work Woman, Nature, and Psyche (1987) that the male's seafaring adventure must be presupposed that the female is at home; otherwise, the male's voyage would "have neither source nor goal, neither origin nor telos" (p.190).In summary, women are passive background figures with no agency, like princesses in medieval sagas waiting for their knights to redeem them.While men indulge in self-inquiry via maritime exploration, women are denied the right to own and express their Selves.
For centuries, women have been compelled to be estranged and isolated from the ocean.Despite the fact that ecofeminists generally emphasize the intrinsic connection between women and nature, the nature embodied in their frequently mentioned Mother Earth Trope typically refers to the land, not to the sea.Women have traditionally been barred from boarding ships.Most mariners had the superstition of women on board as bad luck.The reason for this is most likely that the sailors, most of whom were men, believed that the goddesses who blessed the voyage would grow enraged and envious upon discovering the presence of other women on board.Hence, in men's opinion, even the goddess was nothing more than a jealous woman.
However, the anti-conventional images of males sitting at home and women yearning to promenade down to the seashore only serve to strengthen the gender disparity in the opposite way, so Albee next unveils the husband Charlie's repressed desire for undersea aquatic life.We learn through Charlie's recollections that, as a young boy, Charlie enjoyed diving underwater and having intimate intra-action with the waves, ocean floor, flora, and fauna.According to Posthumanist critic Barad, the matter is essentially "intra-active" as opposed to "interactive" because "interaction" presupposes the presence of separate, independent entities and, thus, remaining dualist limits.In contrast, "intra-action" prioritizes the notion that all bodies of materials, creatures, and elements in the environment are in a permanent state of actions and reactions with one another as one inalienable system.Charlie's boyhood underwater experience serves as a prime example of this.Little Charlie stripped naked, exposed his body, and briefly escaped the restrictions of mainstream civilization on land, sinking into the ocean, "soft landing without a sound," making unobstructed intraaction with seaweed and gravel on the bottom of the sea, and even speaking with the fish (Albee, 1975, pp. 16-17).He was neither male nor female at the time, but rather a "fishlike" creature with limbs and legs who could dwell freely in the water, "live down in the coral and the ferns, come home for lunch and bed and stories" (p.13).In little Charlie, we witness how water's transforming power tangibly unites humans with aquatic life via the fluids that circulate through all forms of matter and bodies in a multitude of symphonies, allowing the human and the non-human to transcend boundaries and form a symbiotic ensemble.The passage of water across geographies, nonhuman creatures, and humans, regardless of gender or sex, illustrates how all beings are unfettered, liminal, and interwoven in infinite waves, which New Materialist and Posthumanist Stacy Alaimo refers to as "trans-corporeality" and "aqueous posthumanism.""Trans-corporeality" is a notion proposed by Alaimo in Bodily Nature (2010) that promotes boundary-crossings since the human is always "inter-meshed with the more-than-human world" (p.2).Later, in "States of Suspension: Trans-Corporeality at Sea" (2012) and Exposed (2016), she examines a more liquid style of trans-corporeality in terms of the relationship between humans and the sea.Charlie's intra-active, trans-corporeal mingling with aqueous materials braids him in a whirling immensity of an unsettlingly familiar otherworld, in which the continuity with the eternal ongoingness of the sea perturbs the patriarchal ideology and opens up fresh options for alternative ways of constructing meaning on land.
As a result of his affinity to and fixation with marine life, Charlie's parents and the rest of the adult world considered him a "trouble" (Albee, 1975, p. 16).The trouble is, in fact, a Posthumanist condition, as it contains the implication "to stir up," "to make cloudy," and "to disturb" the existing rigid order (Haraway, 2016, p. 1).By advocating alternative modes of intra-action between beings and nonbeings, trouble may perform positive change that disrupts the status quo of things.As trouble, little Charlie is a constant reminder of the underwater world that is denied and despised by the dichotomous dogma of terrestrial society, showing the intimate intra-action between human and non-human "oddkin," which threatens the uniqueness of human beings who boast of being the primate of all creatures.Consequently, whenever little Charlie plunged himself into the sea, relishing the world beneath the horizon, his parents would impede him in every way, reprimanding and regulating little Charlie the trouble.Charlie matured over time, internalizing terrestrial reasoning and viewing his history of intimacy with non-humans as a shame.So, despite his wife Nancy's persistent pleas and urging, Charlie remained reticent and hesitant to relate his boyhood underwater experience.
As an adult, Charlie's avoidance of his prior life in the sea can be interpreted as abjection.This notion, established by Julia Kristeva, refers to the human response to what is meaningless according to the dominant ideology and mainstream culture.This theory is applied by Ni Chleirchin (2010) to the analysis of the on-land mermaid imagery in Irish poetry: "Since the abject is situated outside of the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience" (p.

158).
She explains that, owing to the psychology of abjection, the first generation of merfolk descendant is petrified of everything waterrelated after she comes ashore and becomes "human."The merfolk refuses to acknowledge her trans-corporeal intra-action with water because water represents the otherworld that the heteronormative land community has exiled into the fringe notch and thus threatens to reintroduce her into untamed and wild nature while she is endeavoring to assimilate into English society.I suppose it is safe to say that Charlie is merfolk, and even all humans are, too.In the story, Charlie later described the history of human evolution to Leslie and Sarah, stating that they all developed from the fish in the ocean (Albee, 1975, pp. 120-121).If all humans throughout history are regarded as a whole, then experience in the sea constitutes the childhood of humankind.Charlie felt awkward and mortified to discuss his youth spent in the water, thinking "it was enough for a twelve-year-old," but "it wasn't real" (p.115).In the same manner, people are racked with shame and denial of the sea and their human-fish lineage, and they pretend that the past is not real and does not exist in order to promote human uniqueness.Thus, the sea, the birthplace of most species on the planet, was forgotten, denied, and rejected as a distant existence by her unduly pompous and haughty offspringhumans.

Monster: Queers Anthropocentric Superiority
Charlie's lack of friendliness for Leslie may also be ascribed to his suppressed longing for life at sea.Ultimately, Charlie admitted his envy for Leslie's ability to go "down there with the beasts" (Albee, 1975, p. 128).In the human imagination, the sea breeds monsters and lurks sirens, and humans, while disdaining these monstrous creatures, are nevertheless captivated by them.Nonhumans appeal to humans as much as the voices of sirens, which tell humanity the truth about itself, a truth that is subversive to anthropocentric supremacy.As a result, humans, like their legendary progenitor Odysseus, seal their ears and refuse to listen to the voice of the sea.Albee, on the other hand, bestows a unique utterance to undersea monstrous creatures in Seascape.
In many cases, the presence of monsters in works of art, such as Leslie and Sarah in this play, exposes the insufficiency of human understanding and proves that humans are only one of the innumerable conceivable species.Monster imagery is frequently highlighted in Posthumanist discussions, as the peculiar characteristics of monsters demolish or deconstruct stereotyped and preconceived human identities.Monsters "lure us into less anthropocentric, less 'grounded' modes of knowledge, politics, and ethics" (Haraway, 2016, p. 56) and make us understand that "human form is simply one composition among many, not the measure of the world" (Cohen & Duckert, 2015, p. 12).The emergence of Leslie and Sarah, a monster couple who have departed from the established sphere of human knowledge, enormously blows the anthropocentrism founded on terra firma hegemony.
The conversation between the human pair Charlie and Nancy and the non-human couple Leslie and Sarah is intriguing.It encompasses all aspects of society, morality, and marital institutions, demonstrating that the human standard is not the procrustean bed feasible in all circumstances.When the two parties first met, they were terrified, believing that the other was going to devour them.However, although Leslie was driven by instinctual self-preservation, Charlie was motivated by an excessive pride in human civilization and a blind and entrenched prejudice against alien customs: "It'd be perfectly normal to assume you [Leslie and Sarah] ate whatever…you ran into" (Albee, 1975, p. 65).The hostile and tense atmosphere between Charlie and Leslie is primarily attributable to Charlie's lack of understanding, or even disdain, towards non-humans, in stark contrast to the pleasant and amicable relationship between Nancy and Sarah.Charlie instantly assumed an aggressive stance upon seeing Leslie and Sarah, expecting Nancy to grab him a wooden stick with which he could fight and defend himself against Leslie and Sarah.Nancy, on the other hand, "smiles broadly; with her feet facing Leslie and Sarah, she slowly rolls over on her back, her legs drawn up, her hands by her face, fingers curved, like paws" (p.51).
Nancy emulated the animal submission gesture in the hope that Leslie and Sarah would perceive them as a similar kind.This proved an effective strategy, as Leslie gradually relaxed his guard, and the tension subsided.Nancy's approach is incredibly instructive, reminding us of the significance of studying and understanding animal customs and lifestyles, which may be a matter critical for the survival of humanity on this physically ravaged and spiritually vacuumed planet.
Humans pride themselves on being the sole intellectual, moral, and deserving subject of ethical care among all living things.All of these self-righteous blind superiorities, however, are refuted by Albee's depiction of nonhuman monsters.Leslie and Sarah's species, we learn in Seascape, are inherently loyal to their mates.This, however, does not prove that nonhumans are superior to humans.We know that many animals have no sense of fidelity; thus, whether group marriage or monogamy is in their nature, there is no need to apply human moral standards to determine if they are noble or promiscuous.What makes Leslie seem as dignified as humans, if not more so, is his refusal to glance at Nancy's breasts.Clearly, Leslie and Sarah do not need to wear clothing to conceal what humans consider "private parts," nor do they share the human ethic that males should not look at nonpartner women's breasts.Even without the constraints of human morality, Leslie, despite his curiosity, still opted not to look at Nancy's breasts due to Charlie's resistance and reluctance.By simply refraining from doing anything due to the reluctance of others rather than due to moral or legal restraints, Leslie has become more virtuous than most people.The non-human couple's words and deeds in the story demonstrate that humans and non-humans are merely different, and as Leslie argues, "there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about [being different]" (p.98).
But what exactly are Leslie and Sarah, the strange couple who emerged from the ocean?Charlie initially assumed they were hallucinations after dying from dietary poisoning -"We ate the liver paste, and we died" (p.50) -but later described them as "great green lizards" (p.102).Charlie's perceptions of Leslie and Sarah reflect two divergent human attitudes or treatments toward non-humans.The first is to reject their existence and treat non-human beings as death, nothingness, non-existence, or void.The other approach is to subsume the odd and unusual into the known and familiar system.There is no indication in the script that Leslie and Sarah are lizards.Nonetheless, Charlie refers to them as lizards because, by incorporating the nonhuman into the human system, they would be less likely to unsettle that very system.My point is that Leslie and Sarah are cross-species human-animals.They have peculiar appearances, exhibit both human and nonhuman habits, and communicate in human language.They are, therefore, a combination of human and non-human; meanwhile, with Leslie and Sarah being amphibious, they also unite sea and land.They dwell on the borderline between human and animal, soil and water, signifiable being and ignoble nonbeing.Human-animal hybrid imagery frequently draws attention from queer ecology.In queer ecology, human-animal images stress the reciprocity of people and animals, which unsettles the anthropocentric view of nature as a sphere isolated from human civilization and an inert object for monopolization.As both Self and Other, human and animal, and meaning and emptiness, they traverse the awkward limbo between human and nonhuman.The liminal reality of human-animal hybrids undermines colonial hegemonic epistemologies that strive to govern women, nature, and all underprivileged cultures categorized as Others.This queer ecological imagination allows us to pay more attention to the uncommon, vital dynamism of human and more-than-human connections and, maybe, promote more robust monster kinships and nonnormative futures.By creating such human-animal images, Albee dismantles the barrier between humans and non-humans with a very bizarre and shocking effect, portraying humanity with multiplicity and diversity.

Conclusion: A Posthumanist Future
The author should clearly explain the important conclusions of the research, highlighting its significance and relevance.The ending of Seascape is both surprising and thought-provoking: Charlie and Nancy pleaded with Leslie and Sarah to stay on the shore and vowed to help them evolve.Then, the story ends with Leslie's anticipating response -"Begin" (Albee, 1975, p. 135).This abrupt ending opens up a bright and promising future for a Posthumanist world.Although on the surface of the story, humans Charlie and Nancy are about to assist non-humans Leslie and Sarah in their evolution, it is safe to assume that Albee is attempting to convey the idea that humans can evolve into better versions of themselves under the conditions of a friendly relationship between humans and non-humans and that a harmonious and diverse Posthumanist future is about to begin.
The abrupt open ending also allows the play's structure to be more in tune with the theme because humans are likewise dynamic systems in flux.Here, I'd like to quote from Morton's words, which I believe to be a very insightful argument: "Each species is like a river; rivers join and part without much regard for boundaries… Species and individual members of a species are like the flowing flames of flowers discovered in time-lapse animation" (2010, p. 43).
Indeed, the selfhood of man flows like an ocean, not stagnant like land, and is an ongoing process of becoming rather than a state of stasis, hence evading any tendency toward an exogenous concluding point.In this perspective, the open ending appears to be pretty fitting.
Ultimately, the finale of Seascape conveys Albee's bright expectations and optimistic outlook for humanity's future.In the exchange between Charlie, Nancy, and Leslie, Sarah, we witness how humans and non-humans begin with mutual enmity and then come to learn and understand one another, albeit with some friction, and finally put aside their disagreements and join hands.This reflects Albee's dedication to exploring alternative representations of human-nature structure and power dynamics, as well as his aspiration for humans and nonhumans to live in harmony and co-create a diversified future.Albee foresees a posthuman world in which all forms of existence are interdependent, in which binaries and established boundaries such as land and sea, civilization and nature, male and female, self and other, human and non-human, will be shattered, thereby offering us a perspective to envisage existence beyond stagnant dualistic patterns and welcoming a domain of heterogeneous plurality for all creatures.

Study Limitations and Future Research
While this research has shed light on the Posthumanist themes in Edward Albee's Seascape and their implications for our understanding of human-nonhuman relationships, it is important to acknowledge certain limitations and consider avenues for future research that can further enrich our understanding of this topic.For example, although the study has uncovered the play's Posthumanist themes, it does not extensively delve into the historical and cultural context in which Albee crafted Seascape.Future research endeavors could explore how the socio-political milieu of the time might have influenced the play's themes and messages.Besides, while this research has explored the textual aspects of the play, it does not examine how these Posthumanist themes manifest in the actual performance of the play on stage.Investigating the visual and performative elements of Seascape could unveil additional layers of meaning and provide fresh insights.Future research could investigate how different productions of Seascape interpret and convey Posthumanist themes through staging, costume design, and acting choices.Additionally, audience reception studies could explore how spectators perceive and engage with the play's Posthumanist elements during live performances.Moreover, expanding the analysis to include interdisciplinary approaches, such as examining the ecological implications of the play or its connections to contemporary debates about animal rights and environmental ethics, could also yield valuable insights.
In summary, Seascape by Edward Albee serves as a remarkable canvas upon which Posthumanist ideas are vividly painted.While this study has unveiled many facets of the play's engagement with this philosophical discourse, there remain ample opportunities for further research to enrich our comprehension of how literature navigates the intricate interplay between humanity, the environment, and non-human entities in an ever-evolving world.The limitations this research has encountered thus open doors to exciting avenues for future scholarly exploration and discourse.