Ezel Poslu
7 December 2005
A World Elsewhere
FORMATION OF AN IDENTITY THROUGH ESCAPING
Every one of us needs exits for escaping from our own identities for a while to be relieved and we create these exits by forming new identities. Philips presents the idea of escape by forming a new identity through using body language in Houdini’s box. “Every modern person has their own repertoire of elsewhere…to make their lived lives more than bearable” states Philips. As humans our aim in life is to live in a more peaceful way, to create bearable lives for ourselves. The ones who choose to escape can obtain better lives escaping from identity or changing the identity by imagining the self elsewhere. People can create new worlds for themselves by denying their background or forming new identities. As a result a person can transform into someone different than the original self , which can result being saved from unwanted situations and creating a more bearable life for the individuals.
Houdini transformed into a different person each time he hid himself to escape from his situation. Houdini was a foreigner who came to United States to live and he faced identity problems during the adjusting process like every foreigner does. Adjusting to a different culture and becoming distant to own culture slowly are difficult for a person to deal with. As a result, person ends up escaping from his difficult situation rather than try to deal with it. What Houdini used for escaping is confinement. He used his body “language” to grab people’s attention, to make them curious about him. He could achieve having people’s attention to his ability rather than to his real identity by making them curious about himself. He did not want people to comment on his identity as a foreigner. That is why he found a way to prevent people from judging his identity related to his culture. He confines himself in different ways since he needs escape forever to relieve his suffering. His suffering is his old identity, being a child of a rabbi and being a foreigner in a new country. New country means adaptation to a different culture. During this adaptation process, the person feels like he loses his own culture which makes him feel pain. Dealing with the people in the new country and feeling that he has to adapt their style to survive in society make people feel under pressure since it is not what they want to do. They try to adapt to the new circumstances just to find a place in society. For this reason, people find escaping methods from their own identity not to pain for adaptation to the new circumstances. What Houdini did was to find different ways not to pain and to keep himself confined as Philips states “If someone is defined by what he can escape from then he might need forever to seek out situations to release himself from” (492). He creates different worlds according to his needs in real life, he imagines himself in different places that complete his needs, which make him escape from the moment and from his identity. As Philips said, his worlds were “the impossible dreams of the greatest escapologist, the miracles, the fantasies that he was unable to translate into reality” (497). His job was based on the idea of escaping so escaping became a life style for him. When he was in another world or in another identity, the people around wonder him, try to learn how he did it or what is going to happen next. Philips states, “As he becomes Houdini, his metamorphosis was into a man who made his audience wonders what he could do with his body” (493). He needed attention, the feeling of being cared for by the people whom he does not belong to. He needed to feel that the people in the society he is trying to fit in are ready to accept him. He needed to feel that he belonged to the society in which he has to adapt. As a result, people’s attention towards his ability and his job satisfied his needs as a human.
