Women In Tennessee Williams Dramas

“The broken, cruel and denied” –The representation of women in Tennessee Williams dramas.

I. Introduction

The alterations which occur in the culture, society, and literature have an immense power on the nation. In the middle of the twentieth century, American people experienced this massive turning point both in their culture, their society, and literature, especially in dramas. By the beginning of the 1940s, a great amount of American people lived in the east part of the Mississippi River. According to the census of 1940, almost 90 percent of Americans had a European ancestry. [Moreover, a huge number of new European foreigners looked for fresh beginnings in America. Yet the new wave from claiming immigrants, an increasing number of them

At an early stage, women were just “housewives”, they were not allowed to express themselves openly, to compete for academic positions and even more they did not have the right to vote. Still, the start of the twentieth century caused changes in nearly every area of women’s everyday life, from the domestic to the public field. An unprecedented amount of women had begun to work in government from the 1930s. However, these political achievements may additionally have had an important effect on the world’s population, but they had little impact on the enormous majority of American women, who sustained to be the conventional parts as partners of men and mothers. The widespread assumption was that the women have to be at home. The minority of women in the 1930s did not grab the opportunity to marry young or to endure children, but neither American men nor even the majority of American women themselves were prepared to leave their traditional perspectives about the established position of ladies behind.] The unexampled women's associations and movements supported the idea of equal rights and the growth in importance of innovative contemporaries of female writers, artists, and professionals. These groups of people tried to achieve the transformation of the outdated patriarchal social structure all around America. “As women became active in

Throughout the century, realism, naturalism, and symbolism, expressionism (and various combinations of these) extended to inform essential plays. American theatre during this century concentrated primarily only on realism. The dramatic, highly romanticized plays from the 19th century were no longer the focus of society. Realism was now exercised frequently in hopes that it would make theater more advantageous for society. It describes real-life situations, through fictional plays often dealing with economic hardship, and social tension. Moreover, it generates more believable characters, represents everyday reality, and illuminates the rough or steamy side of life, such as loss of connection, self-deception, loneliness, and sexual hedonism. Expressionism illustrates exceedingly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expressionistic literature style that was widely used in modern American drama. It goes beyond the reality of the scene and reveals the psychological side to theatre. Although, the twentieth century drama is the product of the individual writer’s ideas and experience, it often contains some general features in common. Writers share some beliefs and concerns for their work. They try to show some parts of the realistic picture of the daily lives of common people on stage. In this period women struggled for autonomy in a male- dominated society.