Searching For Parler-Femme:Tragic Images Of Southern Gentlewomen In The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams, one of the major American postwar playwrights, is a very prolific and versatile writer with publications of29full plays, more than20one-act plays and other novels and poems. In most of his works, he pays attention to women, especially to American Southern gentlewomen. Southern culture and traditions impact the creations of his works tremendously.Williams depicts many unforgettable female images, among which Southern gentlewomen in The Glass Menagerie impress the audience most, perfectly embodying his female characters’delicacy and fragileness. Amanda’s aggression contrasts with Laura’s delicacy in The Glass Menagerie.Parler-femme is coined by the French feminist Luce Irigaray. Her call for a Parler-femme, which "speaks (as) woman" and uses terms like the Sensible Transcendental, is the necessary first step to a more ethical distribution between the sexes of the power to create and transform lived experience. It is also a call that demands re-thinking and re-doing our lived reality in ways we cannot yet begin to understand. Parler-femme woman speaking as a woman becomes a prime technique for asserting her subjectivity. By systematically analyzing two Southern gentlewomen characters Amanda and Laura in The Glass Menagerie from Luce Irigaray’s perspective of Parler-femme, this thesis tries to figure out Williams’s attitudes towards women and arouse people’s sympathy to those tragic women in patriarchal society. Women’s searching for Parler-femme seems so hopeless that their rights and desires could not become reality. Their fates are in men’s hands and they are doomed to be tragic. This thesis also explores the causes of their tragedy, holding that the causes are social milieu, financial dependence and personal defects.