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Buried Child is one of Sam Shepard's ‘family trilogy,’ that offer surrealistic depictions of the dysfunctional American family. Shepard's central concern involves codes and their loss in modern American family. One of the most problematic aspects of Shepard's play is his viewpoint remains predominantly patriarchal. Shepard consistently does create female characters who are frequently abused, and always treated as subservient to men, and absorbed in simple activities and simplistic thoughts. Though women in Shepard's world are often victims, they are also more skilled than their oppressors in survival strategies. In Buried Child mother figure Halie's mythic-symbolic significance resists the one-sided male perspective in the play. While Shelly, the outsider, tries to violate the structure of the Dodge family which is held together by maintaining the secretㅡthe combination of infanticide and incest, all the characters of the family want their secret to remain concealed. Especially, it is one major decisive trait for Halie to keep from revealing the family's mysterious secret, for the secret of the family involves her. Throughout the play Halie abuses her husband Dodge, who is sick and helpless on the sofa, and regards the half-wit Tilden and the threatening amputee Bradley as two dysfunctional sons. On the other hand, she rewrites herself as the tragic mother, weeping for her cruelly murdered son, Ansel, by describing him in a heroic fashion to compensate for his death. After Vince, the symbolic incarnation of ‘buried child,’ enters the stage, invading the initial naturalistic setting, the play gradually reveals its ritual quality. It is clear that a kind of heroic vacuum, which paralyzes the family, will soon be filled by Vince, when he claims his inheritance after Dodge's death by the end of the play. Like the House of Oedipus, the family of Dodge is cursed by the combined acts of overrating blood relation in Tilden's incest with Halie and underrating one in Dodge's infanticide. Shepard has Vince's rebirth reconcile these antithesis, and links the mother and son with agrarian rituals as Tilden slowly climbs the stairs to deliver the skeleton of an infant wrapped in a muddy cloth to its mother at the final scene of the play. Despite the subversion of the Good Mother archetype and her contradictory nature, Halie is the figure of authority. While the patriarch is only a figure of frail but inexorable despotism, Halie, as the domineering, judgmental manipulator of all the characters in the play, asserts her motherly power. Her super-objective is to restore order in her home for a fresh start and a new beginning. Not only the mysteries and contradictions but also tantalizing allusions to death, decay, and family violence in the play seem to accumulate to form a unnerving sense of doom. Yet Buried Child does not display a tragic inevitability in the collapse of the family, for Shepard underscores the importance of rites of passage within families to reaffirm the family's continuing significance.