A Comparison Of Women's Marriage Views In O'Neill's And Cao Yu's Tragic Works

Cao Yu and Eugene O'Neill were famous dramatists in China and the United States respectively.Women's marriage and love was one of the important themes that both dramatists paid close attention to.Under the influence of ancient Greek tragedies,Cao Yu inherited and carried forward Eugene O'Neill's dramatic ideas and means of expression,which prompted their plays,especially those involving female marriage tragedies,to have outstanding commonness and individuality.From Cao Yu's "Sunrise","Thunderstorm","Fields" and O'Neill's "Beyond The Horizon","Desire Under the Elms","Mourning" and other dramas about women's marriage and love,we can see that the women in their dramas were tragedies of marriage from hope,loss,struggle to compromise.The differences of their marital status were mainly analyzed from three aspects in this paper: the purpose of the struggle,the way of the struggle and the degree of destruction in the struggle.The same points were analyzed from three aspects: the outcome,the tortuous marriage process and the complex marriage relationship.So we get the similarities and differences of their characters in terms of marital status.The differences and similarities of marriage view in China and the West were analyzed first.The two playwrights respectively take the semi-feudal and semi-colonial period and the capitalist monopoly period as the background,and the male and female characters in the play stand on the irreconcilable opposites,thus arousing the contradictions and conflicts of the characters.This is also the embodiment of Cao Yu and O'Neill 's aesthetic concepts,techniques of expression and thoughts of the times.Their works carry the marriage view of "husband guides wife" with their own cultural characteristics.the main reason is that the playwrights,influenced by traditional feudal thoughts and life experiences,integrate what they have experienced into the tragicfemale characters.From the plays of O'Neill and Cao Yu,we can clearly understand the differences between Chinese and western women's views on marriage in the 20 th century,as well as the historical and cultural background and social roots of these differences.From the comparative study of the tragic female marriage views of the two playwrights,we can also see that China's local drama creation was deeply influenced by western culture,western drama and western playwright at the beginning.Cao Yu's drama creation is deeply influenced by O'Neill from its techniques of expression and stage display.The image,plot setting and techniques of expression of the protagonists in Cao Yu's plays are significantly different from those of traditional Chinese opera,which is closely related to his success in integrating western cultural thoughts and artistic techniques into the telling of Chinese stories.