On The Fugitive Sons In Tennessee Williams’ Plays

Tennessee Williams is one of the distinguished playwrights of America in the Twentieth century. He is the 1948 and 1954 Pulitzer Prize winner for his play The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Thus, Williams and his plays remain the hot topics for scholarship. However, critics at home and abroad have largely concentrated on the study of female characters and the influence of the antebellum Southern culture on Williams as well as on his writing, paying less attention to the virile characters. Based on the prior studies, this thesis concentrates on the sons in The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer and on the formation and disintegration of their ego with the help of Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory.This thesis includes the following five parts:The introduction is the first part of this thesis. This past briefly introduces Tennessee Williams’ plays, offers the literature review on The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer, and provides a general introduction to Mirror Stage Theory.Chapter One analyzes how the sons Tom, Brick, Sebastian respectively from The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer form their ideal ego under the influence of their parents.In Chapter Two the sons gradually realize that their ideal ego is an illusion in the mirror, so they turn to mother and father for completing their ego; however they figure out that they are unable to satisfy mothers’ desire and fathers are absent, which means the journey of find their ego is going to be failed.With an in-depth analysis of the symbols given by Tennessee Williams in the three plays respectively, Chapter Three reveals that Williams has already given hints that the sons are destined to be fugitives:the sons fail to complete their ego and lose themselves between imaginary and symbolic which force them to become fugitives.The last part is Conclusion, which sheds lights upon Tennessee Williams’ understanding of family and family conflicts through analyzing The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer...