The Tragic Heroines In Tennessee Williams's Plays

Tennessee Williams, a great American postwar playwright, shows his great concern about women in his plays. Studying the representative works of Tennessee Williams in a feminist perspective, the author of this thesis has discovered that women may never escape patriarchy and win what they are fighting for in a man-dominated society.Most studies conducted upon Tennessee Williams at home and abroad focus on his dramatic techniques, especially the visual elements such as symbolism and expressionism. Those interested in his characters mostly probe into their inability to communicate with reality, or examine the distinctive regional features steeped in the Southern tradition, which are bound to the playwright's own experience. This thesis is a systematic one, if not the first, to explore Tennessee Williams's representation of female characters in his three famous plays, and elaborate his outlook on women about their awakening, agony and frustration associated with gender identities and gender roles with a feminist point of view.Through an extensive reading of Williams's plays, the author of the present thesis has found that Williams's women are not, as generally assumed by the critics, passive victims who receive the ill-treatment as the inferiors without any struggle and thus are imperfect or even anti-heroic, but rather tragic heroines who strive hard for self-realization in a man-oriented society. Three plays of his early stage, namely The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, depict such characters who, despite the limitation of their own personality, display their heroic nature against the stereotyped roles of women.The three characters under discussion are all memorable women on American stage. Living in a subtly different environment, Amanda of The Glass Menagerie maintains her awareness of the reality under the pleasant disguise of illusion; Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire, attempts to escape male oppression and pursues her love and dignity in her special way; Maggie, the aggressive "cat" in Cat on a Hot TinRoof, tries to transform herself from being a victim of male domination to a victor over patriarchy. However, predetermined societal roles restrict what they can do and can be, and their efforts seem all but impossible under the patriarchal culture.This thesis also gives a critical comment on the causes of the inevitable fate of Williams's women characters, which are closely related with the patriarchal society. Regardless of their different experiences, three reasons may account for their frustration: First, the patriarchal tradition serves as a trap on their journey of quest for the liberation; Second, they fail to break the familial entrapment; Thirdly, a variety of escape-mechanism and their born dependence result in the fruitless effort in their search for the meaning of life.One point that has to be made clear here is that the choice of the works is made upon the consideration of Williams's major literary achievements since the three are generally regarded as his best plays. The use of feminist literary criticism as well as sociology will be illustrative rather than theoretical and it will be subordinate to the textual analysis.Although regarded as second only to Eugene O'Neill among the handful genius artists of American theater, Williams has met slight critical approbation and the study on him is much less than that of O'Neill, thus there is much room for further study.