The Symptoms Of Abnormality And Their Metaphorical Meanings In Pinter's Political Plays

British dramatist Harold Pinter(1930-2008)was the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.The political undertone in The Hothouse(1958)is most obvious in Pinter's early plays.His One for the Road(1984)and Mountain Language(1988)are two representative political plays.These three plays all dramatize the violence,totalitarian system and gender discrimination.One of the common features of these three plays lies in the abnormal performance of the main characters.This thesis is to analyze abnormal symptoms in Pinter's political plays by Freud's psychodynamic theories of abnormality.Abnormal psychology is the science studying the causes of human abnormalities,the development and changes of abnormal behaviors.And Freud thinks that many diseases are not caused by organic problems,but psychological ones.Abnormal psychology can be considered as a morbid embodiment of individual anxiety caused by the unsatisfied libido in one's unconsciousness.Based on the existing researches of Pinter at home and abroad,this thesis is to analyze main characters' abnormal symptoms in Pinter's three political plays with Freud's psychodynamic theory of abnormality and intensive reading.After a specific analysis of main characters: Nicolas in One for the Road,Miss Cutts and Root in The Hothouse,the elderly woman in Mountain Language,this thesis finds Nicolas' s symptoms of psychosexual disorder,Miss Cutts' s symptoms of dependent personality disorder,the elderly woman's symptoms of conversion disorder and Root's symptoms of paranoid personality disorder.The common morbid characters in the plays reveal people's mental predicament in the post-war Britain.Pinter accused gender discrimination,racial persecution and bureaucratic corruption in the Western society in a metaphorical way,which reveals his moral conscience and humanitarian feelings as a writer.And this thesis concludes that the characters' abnormal behaviors in Pinter's political plays are not personal,but more like a microcosm of the society.Through the characterization of abnormal characters,Pinter accused the indifference and political darkness of post-war Western society.