A Study Of Masculinities In Tennessee Wiliams' Major Plays

The American playwright,Tennessee Williams,famous for his plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie,is regarded one of the three greatest playwrights of 20th-century America,alongside Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller.His plays depict the life of people in the post-World War? America,thus exposing the predicaments Americans were facing during that period under the seemingly peaceful lifeThis thesis aims to analyze three different kinds of masculinities in Williams'major plays by employing critic R.W.Connell's theory of masculinities,attempting to make contribution to a deeper understanding of Williams' works.The three types of masculinities summarized by Connell also appear in Williams works:hegemonic masculinity,represented by Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,complicit masculinity,epitomized by Brick Pollitt in Cat on the Hot Tin Roof and Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire;subordinated masculinity,with Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie,Reverend Shannon in The Night of the Iguana,Allan Grey in A Streetcar Named Desire,and Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof belonging to this kind.Through analyzing the three types of masculinity,this thesis argues that Williams not only reveals the struggles and predicaments of American women,which is the focus of many critics,but also those of men facing the stiffening social norm,and thus,gives a more comprehensive criticism towards the American society.