A Psychoanalytic Critique Of Desire In Tennessee Williams's Plays

The playwriting career of Tennessee Williams spanned more than four decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, and his repertoire includes twenty-five full-length plays, numerous short plays, two volumes of poetry, five volumes of essays and short stories. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays became the most celebrated in American theatre. On the day of his death, the New York evening papers issued an impressive list of famous actors who once performed in Williams' plays, among whom were Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor. The correlation between Williams and the dramatic success of film and stage undoubtedly established the playwright as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century drama, and he is considered by most critics as the greatest playwright of America after the Second World War.Tennessee Williams dominated American theatre for nearly twenty years. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his masterpieces A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. His playwriting was also acclaimed by four New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for The Glass Menagerie in 1945, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955 and The Night of the Iguana in 1962. He was the only playwright who received the Pulitzer Prizes for drama, the Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in the same year of 1948.Compared with the other two top American playwrights, Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams stresses on the psyche of tortured people. Since his playwriting is dedicated to exploring the human psyche and the complexity of human personality and behavior, what he presents in his plays is always startling to public opinion. His controversial playwriting about unwanted dramatic subjects, together with his own morbid life experiences, has ultimately labeled him as an immoral abetter, who is divorced from the realistic tradition established by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, for they took the stage as a lecture...