Construction And Reconciliation Of Gender Binary Opposition In Tennessee Williams' Plays

Tennessee Williams is one of the distinguished playwrights of America in the twentieth century.He won New York Drama Critics Award four times and the Pulitzer Prize twice.All kinds of male and female roles he built in his plays have always been the focus of the research.Criticism on Williams' plays at home and abroad mainly focuses on four aspects: female character,homosexual theme,character prototype,and comparative studies,and among which involve gender issues mostly from the perspective of feminism denouncing male authority and safeguarding women's rights by analyzing women's tragic experience.On the basis of the theory of binary opposition and standing on the perspective of bisexual equality between men and women,this thesis tries to research the gender issues of Williams' plays,which also provides a relatively new perspective for the study of Tennessee plays.This thesis takes Tennessee's three prize-winning plays: The Glass Menagerie,A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as research targets,intending to study the gender issues in his plays with binary opposition theory.Through the interpretation of the typical male and female characters in his three classic plays,this thesis will analyze the embodiment of construction of gender binary opposition from males' superiority over females in physiology,character,career and marriage,and discuss the tragedy effect and text tension brought by the construction.Next,this thesis will analyze the embodiment of reconciliation of gender binary opposition from the disappearance of heroism and traditional southern belles,and then discuss thematic significance of dissolving gender difference and awakening gender consciousness brought by the reconciliation.The study tries to enrich the research on Williams' plays to some degree and hopes to deepen the interpretation on Williams' plays to a certain degree at the same time.In addition,the study is an action of binary opposition theory being applied to analysis of literary works.Through the exploration of these three classic plays,this study also calls people to treat gender issues in a right and comprehensive way,ultimately achieving the real harmony and friendship between men and women.