Death and the Maiden Reflective StatementBy: Cheng Teck Lee, 11PR

June 12, 2014

After reading the play Death and the Maiden, and the interactive oral, I have developed a deep understanding regarding philosophy. I believe the play is a message from Arial Dorfman himself to the reader experiencing dark situations, that they are not alone, that there are other people in this world having experiences similar to them.

Paulina Sala, being raped prior to the events of the play, gave her a psychological scar, and makes her tied up into the past, while her husband, Gerado Escobar, thinks more rationally about moving forward, and these two’s opinions have been clashing throughout the play, which becomes a theme out of it. Anyone can relate this theme to an obstacle we all go through in our respective lives. The question is: will you deal with it, or are you going to let it deal with you? The obvious, rational answer is to deal with it, but the real question is: how are you going to deal with it? This question gives every single one of us a respective answer that is neither right nor wrong, regardless, despite or in spite of other people’s opinions on your answer(s). Similar to Paulina being tied up into the past – it is eating her up, slowly destroying her, making her insane. It is hinted when Paulina tortures Dr. Roberto Miranda, who she believes is the perpetrator who tortured and raped her before the recent restoration of democracy in Chile, with his body odor, his voice, and the tape of the song Death and the Maiden he owns, are all evident to her.

This play also lets me relate to perception in the Theory Of Knowledge. When Paulina was raped blindfolded, she remembers the song Death and the Maiden being played during the crime, the voice of the perpetrator, and his body odor, to which Paulina strongly believes that Dr. Miranda is the perpetrator himself. These factors that convince Paulina are not solid evidence due to that your five senses are not reliable in certain situations. Furthermore, Dr. Miranda owning the Death and the Maiden cassette tape, was not close to anything, other than he happens to own the tape. Moreover, scientifically, genetic variation is infinite, as if it’s as big as a universe, and because of genetic variation, there can be two different people, whose voices and body odors are similar, could be close to being exactly the same.