抄録
Tennessee Williams (1911-83) made his debut as a dramatist with The Glass Menagerie (1944). His next drama, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won several prizes including Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Award. His third drama, Summer and Smoke (1948), made its debut on Broadway, but was not so well received, and Williams had to rewrite it. In 1952, however, Summer and Smoke was warmly received by audiences and critics off-Broadway.
Most of the protagonists who appear in his dramas and short stories are women. This is presumably related to the facts that he is a homosexual and that he plays the role of a female. Reading his autobiography, Memoirs, helps us to understand why he came to describe women' s mentality. Memoirs was written by using the method of “free-association”. When Williams confessed in Memoirs that when he made love with a man as a homosexual, “I would always go into my shaking leaf bit..” In Conversations with Tennessee Williams, Williams says that “women have always been my deepest emotional root”. This remark suggests that Williams discovered women's mentality in him. Williams admits that his writings are forms of psychotherapy, and as such they bring to light much of his tormented personality. Most of his themes grew emotionally, as well as organically, from his own experiences.
The aim of this paper is to study the psychological development of William's protagonists by using psychoanalytical methods on several of his works: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke. Signi Lenea Falk treated these plays as a series, and Laura Wingfield, Blanche Dubois, and Alma Winemiller were defined as “portraits of southern gentlewomen.” Falk pointed out community among these characters, but didn't study in detail the mentalities of the protagonists. This paper investigates the process of the shifting of three female protagonists' libidos that are fixed either to “a spiritual bond, ” or “a material bond, ” or to both. They all want to attain the ideal love. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was developed into Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Blanche DuBois in turn into Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke. This paper also tries to clarify a pattern of causal relation between protagonists' libidos and their morals about love.
