Tennessee Williams"s plays have frequently been criticized for overt use of poetic language and his constant focus on poetic devices such as alliteration and metaphor, as well as tropes like violence and feminine madness. A psychoanalytic study of his famous drama Suddenly Last Summer (1958) will enable us to explore the qualities of unresolved psychological complexes in the characters and also in the author himself, as the play is believed to draw strongly upon the playwright"s own biography. Towards this end, an intertextual interpretation serves to reflect upon the semiotic disposition of author and characters, which figures out a paradigm of the "transcendental ego" (Moi, 1986, p. 28). This analysis therefore aims at projecting the unconscious of the characters and the author through language, while examining how language can represent characters" identities and their hidden complexes through fragmentation of their identities. Through the analysis it will be shown how the interpretation of poetic language uncovers the unconscious via the effects and affects of devices such as metaphor, metonymy, replacement and condensation. Using a Kristevan interpretation of poetic language and its revelation of the semiotic, this paper therefore attempts to show that violence presented in the text is rooted in the fragmented identities of the characters and their creator and ultimately, it suggests the potential to recover one"s identity through poetic language. It may thus offer some clues to puzzling issues that have been misunderstood with regard to the recurrent poetic language and images in Suddenly Last Summer.
This paper attempts to detect Tennessee Williams's psychological development in his last successful play The Night of the Iguana (1961) in comparison with his previous plays which pronounced his fragmented identity. A comparison between Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and The Night of the Iguana detects a sudden shift of the dramatist's mind in the application of symbols and images employed. A psychoanalytical assessment and comparison of symbols, images and literary devices applied in both plays will depict the dramatist's constitution of his tenuous "I" and reconstruction of his distorted identity. Unlike the horrifying images of God, cannibalism and melancholia resulting from abjection that imposed a certain Gothic atmosphere in Suddenly Last Summer, the images and settings in The Night of the Iguana resonate with comfort and leisure which resemble the pre-symbolic. The study therefore suggests that Williams's abundant use of natural symbols and images, particularly the God image in The Night of the Iguana presents the setting as the "chora" which Kristeva defines as the place where the infant's identity is merged with his/her mother before gaining an identity after the mirror stage and the learning of language which marks subsequent entry into the symbolic order. This analysis therefore helps to bring some clarity to the play, particularly in the light of prior criticism levelled against Williams for his excessive use of symbols and natural images.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.