Entrapment Of Women

In this thesis, I conduct a research of the entrapment of women represented in two of the best dramatic works of Maria Irene Fornes: Fefu and Her Friends and The Conduct of Life. Concentrating on the three forms of manifestations of entrapment of women from exterior, interface and interior aspects, I arrange my thesis in a way that underpins the pervasive power of patriarchal forces on women. In Chapter One, I study Fornes' directing technique in spatial arrangement of her sets. Both plays, in a different but supplementary way, represent her efforts to portray entrapment of women in domestic confinement. In Chapter Two, I exam Fornes' dramatization of violence on the female body, which serves as the interface connecting the exterior world and interior world of women. I focus on two types of violence: the invisible mental torture and the visible physical violence, both of which are used to maintain the hierarchal order of male dominance and female subordinance. In Chapter Three, I discuss the women characters' interior psychological development rendered by domestic confinement in the exterior world of women and the violence at the interface of the female body. I segregated women characters into groups, which exhibit differences yet share similarities among themselves, either displaying psychological disintegration in their struggles or the final internalization of patriarchal ideology. In Conclusion, I draw a timeline for the plays and parallel them with the progress and regression of the women's movement. Fifty years in between the plays are set, there seems to be little changes of women's' entrapped situation in patriarchal societies. I also point out in the conclusion that Fornes, also as a great teacher in theatre, is not intended to give out answers but to let spectators/readers find out their own answers to the entrapped situation of women.