摘 要

《欲望号街车》是美国 20 世纪著名的戏剧家田纳西·威廉斯最为经典的一部剧作。该戏剧讲述了堕落的南方淑女布兰奇因为遭受家庭，事业和声誉的三重打击而前往新奥尔良寻找妹妹斯黛拉，于是展开了一场自我救赎的旅程。北方工业文明给南方的种植园文化带来巨大冲击，该剧作中刻画的两位女性形象选择了不同的方式，一个逃避，一个接受。本文从女性主义的角度出发，对比分析剧中两位南方女性布兰奇和斯黛拉对男性、婚姻和生活的不同看法，以及她们不同结局的原因，揭示美国南方处于转型期时南方女性意识的觉醒。

关键词：田纳西·威廉斯；《欲望号街车》；女性主义

Contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Demonstration 2
   1. A brief introduction to feminism 2
   2. About the drama 3
   3. A contrastive analysis of the two female characters 3
      1. Different views on the male 3
      2. Different views on marriage 4
      3. Different views on life 5
      4. Different endings of the two female characters 6
3. Conclusion 7

Works Cited 8

Bibliography 9

A Contrastive Analysis of the Two Female Characters in A Streetcar

Named Desire from the Perspective of Feminism

Introduction

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is an American playwright in the twentieth century, enjoying a place second to Eugene O’Neil among the small handful drama artists in American history. In 1944, he became famous for his play The Glass Menagerie and later in 1947, his best-known A Streetcar Named Desire was published, depicting the spiritual journey of a southern woman. Since then, Williams has created a large number of plays and won a lot of awards, like Pulitzer and New York Opera Award. During his life, Williams also wrote many short stories, poetry, essays and a volume of memoirs but was remembered as a great dramatist for his abundant and wonderful works of play, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo and so on.

Influenced deeply by his family, especially by his older sister, Tennessee Williams’ works mostly focus on” mad heroine” and he chose to describe ladies in the south such as Amanda of The Glass Menagerie, Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire and Maggie of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There is no doubt that he is a genius in exploring the innermost of women and helps them speak out what they have experienced in a male-dominated society. In fact, the women he pictures live in a world fraught with alcoholism, insanity and depression and represent a group of people who go through the transition of the American South. from the old plantation to the new industry after WWII. Up to now, many critics have studied and analyzed his works from different perspectives.

A Streetcar Named Desire, definitely his most famous representative, leads us to embark on Blanch Du Bois’ journey, taking a streetcar named desire, then transferring to one called Cemeteries, finally arriving at Elysian Fields. It is a journey of self-salvation, finding back love and dignity. With its unique charm, this play inspires lots of analyses from many critics: feminism, character analysis, southern culture analysis and so on. The overseas studies are presented as follows. Harold Bloom

connects the upheaval of American society with the theme of the play and conducts in-depth studies by adopting kinds of scientific ways in his collected papers A Streetcar Named Desire: Modern Criticism and Interpretation. William Kleiber analyzes the relationship between male and female in the play from the perspective of postmodernism. While domestic studies on A Streetcar Named Desire are presented as follows: Zuoyi concentrates on the play’s literature significance of characters, themes and writing styles in Tennessee Williams’ Early Work. Remarkably, Lili has conducted a comprehensive analysis on female characters in 6 Williams’ representative works from the perspective of feminism in his work The Growth of Women: The Feminism in Tennessee Williams’ Works. However, further studies should be made on this work.