Character Analysis: On The Tennessee Williams Drama Trilogy

As one of the greatest American playwrights after WWⅡ, Tennessee Williams has made great contributions to the reform and progress of the twentieth-century American theater. With his unique theatrical techniques, Williams has created countless broken yet poetic worlds, thus expressing the profoundest humanistic theme: the destructive impact of society upon the sensitive and fragile marginalized individuals. The greatest contribution he has ever made to the American theater is his concern and depiction of the characters that are outside of the main-stream society. These romantic misfits include the escapists, the victimized, the outcasts, the utopians and poets. There're also such characters as contemptible and disgusting realistic purists. This dissertation intends to categorize the important characters in his Big Three into the following three groups—the escapists, the opposing and the invisible characters. In addition, careful and detailed analyses are also contributed in order to explain how Williams's dramatic theme is addressed through them and by extension to better understand the great determination and courage Williams demonstrates in his defense for the dignity of these marginalized characters.Chapter One briefly discusses Williams'familial and social backgrounds and explores his growing-up to a playwright. In the meantime, it also points out the autobiographical nature reflected in some of his plays.Chapter Two mainly traces the origin, representation and significance of the escapist characters. First, it briefly confirms the central place of the"common men"in modern American drama and discusses its consequent influence on Williams's dramatic creation. The second part deals respectively with the female and male escapists. It holds that as representatives of the female escapists, Amanda, Laura and Blanche falls respectively the victims of"time","fate"and"character flaws". In a greater sense, however, they are also the victims of a dramatically changing society. Tom and Brick are dealt with as representatives of the male escapists and they are engaged in a search for the way out due to the hopelessness of the reality. Williams also expresses his own grief and pain for these typical escapist characters.Chapter Three focuses on the confrontation and conflict between Blanche and Stanley who are considered respectively as the representatives of the romanticists and realists. The first part explains the importance of this categorization to Williams's dramatic creation because it best reflects his theatrical motif. The next part consists of two sections involved in specific interpretation and analysis of the above characters. The first section divides the romanticists into professional poets and poetically-tempered characters who find their exact counterparts in Tom and Blanche. The second section reveals Stanley's realistic characteristics and regards him as the spokesman of his time and reality. However, it also points out his destructiveness to the...