Harper Amaty Pitt

Mary Louise Parker as Harper

Harper Pitt is (Joe) Joseph Porter Pitt's wife. She is addicted to valium which causes her hallucinate. She suffers from agoraphobiaand creates an imaginary friend, Mr. Lies, to help her avoid bad situations. In one instance, Prior Walter and Harper cross over into one another's hallucinations. During this hallucination, she learns that her husband is a homosexual. Harper, appearing as a sexually frustrated and politically detached female, learns to manage these weaknesses she has and reshapes her life by leaving Joe and moving away from New York (Meisner 178). Though she appears as a weak character in the beginning of the play, she ends the play as an independent, confident woman newly in love with life and setting off to build her own life in San Francisco. According to Bloom, Kushner’s women are stronger than the men (with the exception of Roy Cohn), especially Harper (299).

Harper knows that her husband is distant and she suspects him of being a homosexual. Her solution to the painful feelings that she has is taking valium and hallucinations, which create a false sense of security and protection from the world for her. Harper’s immediate instinct when she arrives in the Antarctica is to develop her own place of security by building a city of frontier forts, which never happens. She wants nothing more than for her fantasies such as living in the Antarctica to be real. It is not until the end of the play that Harper realize her own strengths. She demands Joe’s credit card and leaves for San Francisco by plane, leaving the pain behind and dreaming ahead.

Works Cited

see Angels in America