Reflexive drama, coded narrative, and artistic solipsism: Metadrama in Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie', 'Suddenly Last Summer', and 'The Two-Character Play'

This dissertation analyzes the metadramatic elements in three plays by Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie (1944), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and The Two-Character Play (1975). Chapters one and two introduce the plays, discuss metadrama, and examine reflexive strategies: the play within the play, role playing, the foregrounding of extra-literary effects, and the acknowledgment of the audience.; Chapter three analyzes metadramatic elements in The Glass Menagerie, including the play within the play and the narrator's monologues. Memory in Menagerie often functions as a script which is first told and then enacted, and Laura's final action, blowing out the candles, becomes a fictional event. The Glass Menagerie emerges as a reflexive, self-conscious work which analyzes fictions and discusses its own creation.; Chapter four comments on the metadrama in Suddenly Last Summer and on the ability of narrative to function metadramatically. The play both employs and calls attention to narrative and dramatic strategies which give circumspect portrayals of gay characters, which indicate homosexuality without naming it. The chapter also examines Sebastian's public persona and death, and finds him representative of the gay character. Suddenly becomes a discussion of the homosexual on the American stage.; Chapter five analyzes The Two-Character Play and the often unseen and unacknowledged aspects of the public presentation of plays. Clare and Felice make frequent shifts between the role and the real and confront the world through art. The inner play is a mise en abyme of the outer, and Two is a metadramatic image of the Williams dramatic canon.; Chapter six concludes that Williams's characters favor aesthetic solutions to real problems, that each play explores the nature and creation of fictions, and that extremely self-conscious art can verge on the solipsistic.