Research On The Function Of The Mask In Pirandello’s Dramas

Luigi Pirandello is known as one of the most innovative and pioneering dramatists of the twentieth century. He exhibited a much more complex and profound spiritual demand of modern people through incisive and philosophical expression of real life as well as absurd and bizarre style of play writing. As a master of modernism literature with unique pursuit art and philosophies of drama, Pirandello always hold Italian national traditional drama (commedia dell’arte) in awe and veneration. He revived the dramatic techniques of numerous Italian national dramas in his plays, among which the most conspicuous is the extensive use of the mask. Pirandello creatively constructed a grotesque and gaudy world of art with masks of different forms in his plays, drawing the outline of the reality in human society and showing the concealed secrets in the innermost recesses of the heart of modern human. Thus, the mask finally shed its traditional function and became an integral part of Pirandello’s practice of the bold and deft renaissance of drama and stage arts.This paper includes three parts. The first part mainly discusses the ethnic, age and personal reasons implied behind Pirandello’s great enthusiast for mask innovation, traces the development and evolution of mask modeling styles and the symbolic meanings represented by different modeling styles, and shows Pirandello’s reconstruction of modernism colors on masks such as the realization of mask expressions and psychologization of mask implications. The second part focuses on the study of the literary aesthetic function of masks reconstructed by Pirandello to shape "grotesque" characters, promote the realization of "sudden change" and mapping of the survival dilemma of modern people. The third part tries to analyze the performance function of "Pirandello-type" masks in the stage practice of Pirandello with stage, space-time and performance perspectives as the objectives, analyzes the philosophy idea of writer relativism and the important role played by the pursuit of dramatic arts with the most speculative colors in the mask concept formation, makes clear the profound influence of Pirandello’s reform and innovation on dramatic means with Italian national characteristics and the development of modern drama.