"Life Trilogy": Cao Yu's Psychological Catharsis And Self-confirmation

As a distinguished dramatist in the history of Chinese contemporary literature,Cao Yu devoted his whole life to the career of theatrics and drama creation.He once wrote Thunderstorm(1933),Sunrise(1935),Field(1937),Beijing Man(1941)and many other celebrated plays,and portrayed numbers of impressive characters,such as Zhou fanyi,Chen bailu,Chou Hu etc.Cao Yu's dramas were demarcated from the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China.He had previous works,such as Thunderstorm(1933),Sunrise(1935),Field(1937)etc,and possessed later writings,such as Bright Day(1952),Bravery Sword Chapter(1961),Wang Zhaojun(1978)and so on.In terms of the works' format,substance,technique of artistic creation and ideology,there are significant differences between Cao Yu's previous works and later writings.Compared with his early works,the later plays achieved quite a transformation in art and thought.Cao Yu's previous works have attracted criticism more attention than the later writings.Critics have various understandings of his early plays.What can the writer's purpose be?What's the true connotation of the opuses?It's difficult to find out the answers from the complicated relationship between the works and the times.Today,standing on the perspective of modern people,we try to decode Cao Yu,in order to approach this master,and have a kind of mental conversation with him.This paper intends to proceed from Cao Yu's psychology when he was creating,analyse the reasons for his creative work,probe into his mental processes,and seek the uniqueness of his creations.The paper argues that the creative process of Cao Yu's “Life Trilogy”is also a self-expression and self-confirmation process.and it's an urgent need to express the writer's emotions.Therefore,in chapter one,combined with the writer's creating mentality,it analyses the playwright's childhood experience and the emotional traumas of his early childhood.The first chapter is divided into three sections,including the absence of love,the confusion of ascription and the depression of spirit.They respectively expounds the causes from the aspects of mother's death,father figure,youth experiences and personal qualities to indicate thedepressions before the creations of Cao Yu,and state clearly his creating incentives.The second chapter makes a detailed analysis of the plots and characters of the dramas,and discusses the writer's psychological changes.It is also divided into three sections.The first section expounds the writer's hot temper and struggling mentality When he created Thunderstorm(1933),and it specificly contains the suffocated temperament,the burning emotions and the compassions.The second section conveys the playwright's resentful attitude when he created Sunrise(1935).It comprises the lustrous and dazzling society,the uncontrollable anger and the emerging happiness.The third section discusses the return to his hot temper and his orgiastic mood when he wrote Field(1937).It is divided into three aspects:the appearance of“weald”,the legacy of wildness and the carnival of the soul.The third chapter analyzes the writer's self-confirmation ahd the spiritual connotation of the three dramas.It consists of three parts:confirming and exceeding the writer's personality,showing the love-hate ambivalence,detecting and asking the plight of modern people's existence.The first part expounds the confirmation of the writer's affection for his mental state.The second part corroborates Cao Yu's emotions to his father.The third part describes three kinds of people's survival conditions:struggling,compromising and disengaging.At the same time,it discusses the forms of the survival dilemma and the ways to escape.