Anxiety And Defense Mechanisms:

William Inge was one of the major American playwrights of the 1950s.He enjoyed the same fame with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller at that time.The four Broadway hits Come Back,Little Sheba(1950),Picnic(1953),Bus Stop(1955),and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs(1957)were critically acclaimed and won a string of important awards for drama such as Pulitzer Prize,New York Drama Critics Circle Award,Donaldson Award and Outer Circle Award,etc.Inge is considered as the first playwright to have depicted,with his insight,the life of common people in the American Midwest in the 1950s.In his four major plays,Inge depicted a series of imresspive felame characters as protangnists and presented the life of people in the small Midwestern cities from the perspective of these female characters.As a result,most scholars have focused on the study of female characters in William Inge's plays while neglecting male characters' depression,despair and loneliness.Based on Sigmund Freud's theories oncerning psychoanalysis,this thesis explores the anxious inner world of men in the four plays by William Inge.By analyzing the manifestations,the causes,and the defense mechanisms of anxieties,the thesis aims to reveal the predicaments and psychological dynamism of male characters in Inge's plays.In addition to Introduction and Conclusion,this thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter One introduces some relative psychoanalytic concepts of Sigmund Freud,such as tripartite personality theory,theory of anxiety and theory of defense mechanisms.Chapter Two explores manifestations of male characters' anxieties according to the anxious emotions and peculiar behaviors of the sons,the husbands and the fathers in the four plays.Chapter Three examines the causes of male characters' anxieties.The restricted libido from id,threats from the real world,together with the lack of parental love and the confined social network lead to their anxieties.Chapter Four discusses tactics male characters utilized to cope with anxieties in terms of repression or denial,displacement,as well as identification or sublimation.In conclusion,this thesis holds that,for various reasons,men in William Inge's plays suffer severe anxieties and most of them fail to take proper and effective defense mechanisms to get rid of anxieties while only a few male characters manage to utilize constructive defense mechanisms and achieve identification and sublimation to a certain degree and thus alleviate their anxieties successfully.That is to say,William Inge exhibits predicaments faced by people in the small Midwestern cities by uncovering the repressed sexuality and alienated family bonds in the seemingly normal and calm life.However,with a note of hope and fulfillment before the fall of curtain in his plays,William Inge still shows a glimmer of hope for the tragic protagonists in the desperate plight.