《欲望号街车》精神生态冲突与平衡(2)

菜单

Chapter Three Reconstructions of Spiritual Ecology Balance 20

3.1 Balance between human and nature 20

3.2 Balance between man and society 21

3.3 Balance between material and spiritual life 22

Conclusion 24

Works Cited 26

Conflict and Balance: a Spiritual Ecological

Analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire

Introduction

Tennessee Williams is one of the three greatest American playwrights in 20th century. Meanwhile he also enjoys a worldwide fame as an outstanding dramatist. He is a productive and sufficient playwright who has won lots of prizes. Among his works, his famous drama A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) was his first play winning three prizes: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York’s Critics Circle Prize and the Donaldson Award.

Along with the performance of A Streetcar Named Desire in U.S.A., critics and scholars abroad have constantly paid attention to it. So a great number of researches can be found. They can be pided into several categories by their content as follows: symbolism and expressionism; psychological angle; social angle and feminism.

Before and in the middle of 19th century, critics mainly focused on the play’s symbolism and expressionism. They argue that Williams has tactfully employed some dramatic devices, such as background music, costume decoration, stage lighting and so on, which make characters more vivid and abundant in mental activity. And Adler, a professor of Purdue College argues “For Williams, he senses the conflicts between civilization and material […]” (8). Some critics have studied the theme of A Streetcar Named Desire from analyzing Blanche’s continuous self-struggle. They consider that Blanche is adrift and tramping between body and soul, reality and illusion, present and past, death and desire. Wieder David Sievers is the representative of this field, who studies the play according to Freud’s psychological analysis. He argues that what makes this play distinct from the others is that Williams has shaped the image of Blanche Dubois—“a female character who has been caught between the Id and the Ego” (372). In 2002, Joseph R. Silvio assists in his essay that Williams expressed his own psychic conflict in his characters and dramas (44). Other critics tend to study this play in a broad sense, to be specific, from social angle. They mainly analyze the cause of conflicts between the characters, especially between Blanche and Stanley, who respectively represent southern belles and northerners. They consider that Blanche’s final destruction can always represent the disintegration of the Old South and new bourgeois’ defeating of the traditional aristocracy. Another point of view we cannot ignore is feminism. Critics regard Blanche as a challenge to paternity and study the connection between the fate of characters and their gender difference. For instance, Philip C. Kolin takes a look at the position of Blanche, and concerns that she is an intruder and victim of that society. He argues that both Blanche and Stella are betrayed by men (22).

In China, the study of A Streetcar Named Desire starts relatively late but also enjoys a lot of commentary. In recent years, scholars have mainly focused on ethical criticism and psychological analysis. In 2010, Liu Ying, from the perspective of ethical literary criticism, analyzes the ethical problems of the society embodied in the play and figures out the real root which suppresses and destroys Blanche is the inhumane conventional ethic (42). Secondly, under the guidance of Freudian Psychoanalytical theory, domestic scholars also explore the conflicts among inpidual Id, Ego, and Superego. For instance, in 2008, Fang Yan, by analyzing the protagonist’s Split Personality, assumes that the play represents the physical agony and spiritual dilemma of modern Americans (33).