Seeking For Salvation-the Religious Culture Interpretation Of Tennessee Williams' Medium-term Plays

Tennessee Williams(1911-1983),as one of the greatest playwrights in American history,creates more than 70 plays in his lifetime and his writing career reaches a length of 50 years.He won the immortal reputation in the sphere of drama not only in America but also the whole world with the distinguished awards,such as New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for 4 times,Pulitzer Prize for 2 times.The research on Williams at home and abroad mainly focuses on biography of playwright,subjects and ideology etc.and gains gratifying achievement with many innovative perspectives.Meanwhile,however,there still exist a lot of blanks among those studies,for example,the spatial theoretic analysis of Williams' salvation thought systematically.Given this situation,this thesis explores Williams' mid plays through the method of textual reading to present the normal space and heterogeneous space,furthermore,attempts to analyze the salvation road in Williams plays via the space diversity.After World War II,American society suffered the double oppression of war and economy.Stretching from the Enlightenment,through Darwinian evolution and beyond,indeed until Nietzsche's “God is dead”,step by step,the western society in 20 century was pushed into a crisis of faith.Williams's plays are epitomes of American society and his major mid plays,namely Orpheus Descending,Suddenly Last Summer and The Night of the Iguana,with which Williams tries to seek for a salvation road for people in spiritual wasteland,fill the void,to some extent,of the hollow belief.As for the purpose of this thesis,the author of this thesis intends to make a comprehensive and systematic study of Williams' salvation road from the perspective of religion.Taking Orpheus Descending,Suddenly Last Summer and The Night of the Iguana as the carriers,religious thoughts as the starting point and Michel Foucault,Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory as the backbone,through multiple spaces and personas construction,this thesis vividly outlines the salvation road in the plays for people who sink in the gloomy spiritual world.The content of the paper is divided into five parts:The first part consists of three portions: the first portion makes an introduction of Williams' biographic sketch and his mid plays;the second portion is the literary review;the last portion presents the method of application.The second part roundly elaborates multiple salvations of idealized spiritual spaces in Orpheus Descending and systematically analyzes the connotative salvation thoughts in the play through protagonist's triplicate divinities.The third part explores the salvation of cruel God in Suddenly Last Summer.It centers on the modernistic scenes of repetitively modal intertexture and the special deal manipulated by economic laws to expound the failure of cruel God's salvation.The fourth part minutely discusses the modernistic all-loving salvation in The Night of the Iguana.It unfolds the success of salvation through the descriptions of the heterogeneous space and the discipline of mainstream society space.The last part concludes the selected topic,the theory application,the new discovery and the inadequacy of this thesis,in addition,it also briefly narrates the enlightenments my paper brings for the research of Williams.