A Study of Tennessee Williamss South Gentlewomen

Abstract

Scholars showed great concern on Tennessee Williams’s “poetic realism”, yet there was relatively less scholarly examination of Williams’s female characters. As a matter of fact, Tennessee Williams shows his great concern about women in his plays. The representative works of Tennessee Williams in a feminist perspective provide the author of this thesis materials related to this motif. The author of this thesis will make a tentative study of the lives of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.
In the analysis of Amanda and Blanche, the author tries to relate them to the Old South. Williams’s relationship with the old South is personal as well as cultural. In his play The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, owing to Tennessee Williams’s own life experience in the South, he portrayed a group of young women of the South, who are lonely, chill, coward and abnormal state of mind, and he demonstrated that these women, called the last aristocrats, could not adapt to the changes of the regime, and he also showed us the conflict between the old South culture and the modern culture as reflected in the women characters. Both of these two protagonists cling desperately to the dying antebellum Southern culture, particularly to its code of womanhood with the frail hope of surviving in the present world.

Key Words: Tennessee Williams; the Old South; South gentlewomen; culture
 
摘  要

学术界对田纳西•威廉斯的研究多关注于其独特的“诗化现实主义”创作手法，然而对其女性人物的研究较少。田纳西•威廉斯善于表现人物，尤其对女性问题的关注是其剧作的主要特色。这为本文从女性角度挖掘其作品的主题提供了依据。本文作者试图对田纳西•威廉斯的《欲望号街车》、《玻璃动物园》中的两个典型南方淑女布兰奇、阿曼达进行探讨分析。
在人物分析中，作者把她们与南方文化背景联系起来。本文指出，威廉斯与南方的联系不仅是个人的，同时也是文化的。在他的作品《玻璃动物园》《欲望号街车》《夏天和烟》《热铁皮屋顶上的猫》等著作中，他以本人南方为背景，以细腻、委婉而有饱含同情的笔触刻画了一群孤独、失意、怯懦而心灵扭曲的女性形象，揭示了这批旧南方遗留下来的“最后贵族”在社会制度更迭时无所适从的心理。这些旧式人物，既难以忘怀种植园时带的生活方式，无力摆脱旧南方所奉行的虚伪、严格而又充满矛盾的道德理念，又无法适应工业化社会那残酷的生存竞争和赤裸裸的金钱关系。

关键词：田纳西•威廉斯、旧南方、南方淑女、文化

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