抄録
In Where I Live (1978), Tennessee Williams (1911-83) says his full-length play, The Rose Tattoo (1950), celebrates “the Dionysian element in human life, its beauty, its significance”; and most critics have been involved in these points. However, it seems that they have not taken much interest in Serafina's mentality and humanity.
The aim of this paper is to investigate Serafina's mental wavering; conflict between cultivation and wildness from the psychoanalytical point of view. She identifies herself with a Madonna but she strongly becomes obsessed with Madonna after Rosario, her husband, dies. It takes her three years to overcome the obsession and she finally recognizes and accepts wildness in her. This is what Williams suggests by “Dionysian element in human life” in The Rose Tattoo.
