Dysfunctional Family In Three Plays By Tennessee Williams

American playwrights have long been exploring the disintegration of the familyand the family has remained an essential subject for the American stage. Unlike otherdramatists such as Eugene O’Neil who concerns about the relationship betweenindividual and family, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) pays attention to the relationsbetween family and society, especially how sociological changes are affecting Southernfamilies and how these families are transforming as an outcome of the historical andcultural changes. Such family plays contribute to his popular and critical acclaim.This thesis approaches the dysfunctional family in The Glass Menagerie, AStreetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof through family system theory. Itcontends that these families are Williams’ trilogy of family plays. The Wingfield familyin The Glass Menagerie is dysfunctional in the conflict between individual ideality andreality under the influence of the Great Depression and modern industrialization.Amanda’s struggling to educate their children with old Southern values is in vain whileTom is restrained and tortured by the conflict between responsibility and ideality.Although fulfilling his dreams at the expense of deserting his mother and sister, Tom isplagued by guilt. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the dysfunction of the DuBois family isthe conflict between the decaying Southern aristocratic order and brutal Northernindustrialization in post-WWII when the New South replaces the Old South. The suicideof Blanche’s poetic husband and the declining of her big family comprise the devastationof Blanche’s ideal world in Belle Reve. Confronted with Stanley, DuBois sisters fail toretain their aristocratic order in Quarter. The Pollitt family in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof isthe outcome of the internalization of capitalistic society during the McCarthy era. Themarital relationship between Brick and Maggie is on the foundation of their own interests.Brick hides his homophobia panic through marriage while Maggie utilizes it to get rid ofpoverty. The dying Big Daddy takes Brick as a thing for keeping homosociality as thepatrilineal legacy. By analyzing these dysfunctional families, this thesis investigates that the differentdysfunctions of these families are problems of society in miniature in different period ofthe twentieth century. It also examines that the changes of Southern families is amicrocosm of the transition of Southern society. As a Southerner and a marginalizedperson, Williams’ concerns about Southern values and his discontent with repression anddamage engendered by modern capitalism are displayed in this thesis.