A Study Of Tennessee Williams’ Ecological Awareness

In four-decade writing career, Tennessee Williams created a series of good works, which brought him the fame of the theatre in 20th century. He won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof(1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). The thesis is based on these four works to analyze Tennessee Williams’ecological awareness.Since 1970s, ecological criticism theory has been a part of literary criticism. With more and more serious ecology crisis, critics pay their attention to ecological criticism, discovering the writers’ ecological awareness. However, the ecological awareness of playwrights is rarely mentioned before. Tennessee Williams, a great figure of American drama, has hardly been discussed because of his ecological awareness. This thesis focuses on his ecological awareness based on his four New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award plays in order to make a contribution to Tennessee Williams’s ecological study.The introduction includes information about Tennessee Williams and his artistic achievements, the study of Tennessee Williams at home and abroad, eco-criticism and ecological awareness. In chapter 1, the discussion is about three origins of Tennessee Williams’ ecological awareness, the closeness to nature in the childhood, the aspiration for the nature after moving to industrial society and the influence of other ecological writers. Tennessee Williams’ ecological concern and worries show his ecological awareness. Chapter 2 illustrates Williams’ ecological concern from the perspectives of nature description and the ecological stage effect. Scenery description and animal images are elaborated in the first part of chapter 2, Tennessee’s description of nature. In the second part, the author elaborates ecological stage effect from following aspects, scene-setting, light and music. Williams’ecological awareness is also shown in his ecological worries in plays. Because of the industrialization, both people and the society are changed negatively. In this chapter, the first part takes the examples of Amanda and Blanche to illustrate distorted personality of people. In the second part, the author illustrates the negative changes of the industrial society based on the limited living space and devastated faith in plays.In the thesis, the author demonstrates Tennessee Williams’ ecological awareness based on the origins of it and Tennessee Williams’ concerns and worries in the plays, which hopes to provide a new vision for Tennessee Williams’ ecological awareness studv.