SOURCE: "Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett," in Comparative Drama, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 18-34.

In the following essay, Morrison studies the prevalent motifs of sterility, abortion, sexual disability, deprivation, and futility in Beckett's dramas and novels.

"I summoned up my remaining strength and said, Abort, abort. . . ."¹ This cry of the reluctant father in the short novel First Love suggests an element which is prevalent throughout Samuel Beckett's work: concern with the physical details of reproduction, its success or lack of success, and specifically the impotence, sterility, and decay of the sexual organs, repulsive copulation and the destruction of progeny. The earlier novels abound with scenes of grotesque and defeated sexual activity (e.g., Watt's laborious and futile fondling of Mrs. Gorman²) but in the plays such lengthy scenes are usually replaced by a single word, phrase, or allusion, often oblique and obscure but...