The Outcast Characters In Tennessee Williams's Plays

Tennessee Williams is one of the most outstanding playwrights after World War Two, and many of his works become classics on the American stage.One major theme in Williams's works is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual. While depicting the outcasts, the mentally crippled, and the non-conformists, he builds a recognizable but isolated world. Williams seems stagnant within this theme, yet he becomes a master of the characterization of these outcast characters. In this thesis, I probe into this theme in his three most classical plays: A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.In the Introduction, I briefly introduce the study of scholars home and abroad on Williams's works, the theme, the motive and the structure of the thesis.In the main body, I deal with the subject in terms of the sexual outcast, the religious outcasts, and the fugitive outcasts. The last chapter is about Tennessee Williams: an outcast himself.â…  The Sexual outcastI dissect Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire from three stages of her life. In stage one, she loses the family plantation, her family members as well as her beloved homosexual husband. Plus, her ancestors' "epic fornications" determine her fate. In stage two, she is a seducer to many strangers. Stanley's rape of Blanche is focused here. In stage three, as a misfit, Blanche cannot escape her fate in struggling against the conventional morality, and she is sent into an asylum.â…¡ The Religious outcastsWilliams's outcast characters are not the heroes in Greek mythology, nor are they the saints in Christianity, but a group of "sinners". They embody an odyssey during which these outsiders pursue truth and seek salvation. In this chapter, Jung's Archetypal Theory is employed, conjugated with mythology and religion, to explore the inner world of the main characters in The Glass Menagerie.â…¢ The Fugitive outcastsFugitive outcasts cover Williams's three plays. They are fugitive for different reasons as Williams is, as they may portray a single facet of his personality or suffer through one experience or another similar to Williams's. That's why there is a close biographical connection between Williams and his fugitive outcasts. â…£ The Real-life OutcastI dissect Williams as an outcast in this chapter. Williams's three plays more or less are autobiographical. Like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams is a pervert; in The Glass Menagerie, referring to his own family, Williams portrays Tom's family. But Williams seems to be a sinner, which can be embodied from his "incest" love with his sister; like the homosexual characters in the plays, Williams is a fugitive. ConclusionThe three plays, in a large scale, mirror Williams's life, as he himself is a social...