A Comparative Study Of Laura And Emerald From Feminist Perspective

The Glass Menagerie and The Border Town are considered as the masterpiece ofgreat American playwright, Tennessee Williams, and the classic work of famousChinese literati, Shen Congwen. In spite of the great differences in nationality,cultures, time during which they lived and even the genre of their works, bothTennessee Williams and Shen Congwen express their great concerns about suchwomen in most of their works, as the characters of Southern gentlewomen byTennessee Williams, and the natural belles in the South of Hunan Province (Xiangxi)by Shen Congwen. The women characters in these two novels live inmale-dominated societies, in which women’s status is inferior to that of men andwomen are supposed to be “the other” in the patriarchal tradition.Most of the studies on The Glass Menagerie focus on the techniques and the themes.Recently, some scholars have made attempts to analyze the female characters in TheGlass Menagerie, their tragic fate, or the author’s vision of females in particular. Asregards the studies of The Border Town, scholars tend to study the writing styles andthe author’s ambivalent vision of females. The author of this thesis attempts to do acomparative study of The Glass Menagerie and The Border Town from theperspective of feminist literary criticism, an emphamatic analysis of the protagonistLaura in The Glass Menagerie, and Emerald in The Border Town. The two youngladies, as a result of the tragic love and subordination to men’s desires and emotionalneeds, become “the other” from the feminist point of view. Though they live indifferent societies and cultures, they become the weak and the victims of thepatriarchal society. When they face the decline of culture and environment that theyare familiar with, they are at a loss as to what to do, and so they are destined to be amisfit in the process of alienation and materialization. This thesis also attempts toanalyze the similarities and differences between these two protagonists living in thepatriarchal society and contributes a better understanding of those two literaryclassics.