From Margin To Center: A Study Of Women's Private Space In Crimes Of The Heart

Beth Henley (1952- ) is one of the eminent playwrights in contemporary American theatre. Most of her plays focus on women and their lives in the south of America. Crimes of the Heart is the representative work of Beth Henley, which has won a great number of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and so on.This play depicts the struggle of the Margaret sisters moving from the margin to the center in the patriarchal society. However, because they are not aware of the importance of having a room of their own, they finally fall victim again in the patriarchal system.Based on the space theories from Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, this thesis discusses and interprets the women's space in Crimes of the Heart in the way of close reading of the text. It chooses the three sisters as the main research object to reveal the subordinate status of women in the family space in the southern America and meanwhile explores their efforts to expand their private space.The thesis consists of five parts. In the introductory one, it provides the background information of the playwright, and briefly reviews her representative drama, Crimes of the Heart. Then a survey has been made on the scholarly research work done so far on Henley and her works both at home and abroad. In the body of the thesis, it firstly analyzes the extremely uneven spatial relationships in the family, pointing out that the major causes of women's marginalized conditions lie not only in the powerful male pressure, but also in the surveillance of patriarchal system, which makes them silenced in their own private space.Secondly, the thesis explores the reason for the unbalanced state and the way of playwright's representation of women's living status, revealing that even in their own space; women sometimes choose to marginalize themselves unconsciously in different ways when they face a series of difficulties, which consequently turns themselves to be slaves of the patriarchal society. However, the thesis further discovers in the third chapter that with the weakening of men's control in the family, women have gradually gained their consciousness of their marginalized position and struggle with an attempt to move to the center. Unfortunately, they fail finally. Therefore, the last part reveals that due to the sisters'weakness in their struggle, they finally return to the margin of the family space, which shows the difficulty of their fighting, the perplexity of the playwright and her contradictory feminist view.The significance of the study lies in two aspects. For one thing, it enlarges the scope of Beth Henley's studies. With the careful analysis and interpretation from the perspective of space, the meaning of women's space in Crimes of the Heart is enriched, which will be of great help for the further study of the play as well as the playwright. For another, the revelation of the Margarth sisters' failed journey in struggling to move from the margin to the center even in their own private space showcases the difficulties that women have in gaining their independent space, and meanwhile exhibits the playwright's ambivalent attitude towards the needs of independence of the southern women. The thesis holds the view that even in women's own private space in the family, there exist some ideological features, having a split force of control and anti-control, and margin and center.