1. Drama, southern Gothic and Tennessee Williams

2. What is Drama?
Genre of literature that focuses on one or more major characters: their successes, failures, challenges and involvement with other characters
How is drama separate from fiction and poetry?
Text includes:
Dialogue
Monologue
Stage Directions
Immediate audience

3. Tragedy
Tragedy: genre displaying conflict between protagonists and superior forces
Classical:
Always ends with the fall of main character(s), a person or persons typically of noble status
plot unfolds based on an inevitable truth usually controlled by a superior presence
Oedipus Rex
Antigone
Modern:
Ordinary people in tragic situations
Tragedy based largely on character actions and not spiritual forces
All the King’s Men
A Streetcar Named Desire

4. Realism and Modern Playwriting
Plot contains secrets known to audience, but withheld from characters
Revelation of secret is climax.
Antagonist is revealed.
Protagonist has dignity restored, and receives reward
careful attention to exposition, usually the entire first act at minimum
Remainder of plot uses contrived entrances, exits, and props to increase suspense

5. Realism and Modern Playwriting, cont.
Expected and logical reversals, often between hero and antagonist
Discovery scenes provide antagonist with knowledge that can hurt the protagonist
Misunderstanding is known to the audience, but not to the characters. This increases suspense
Denouement is believable and logical.
Individual acts repeat the general action pattern of the entire play

6. Southern Gothic An subcategory of the Gothic Revival Movement
Relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot
The grotesque
Popular in the 1700’s
Applied to the American South
Writers tried to show a more realistic South by breaking Southern stereotypes

7. Southern Gothic Characters
Stock Characters:
Content/oblivious slave
Chivalrous gentlemen
Southern Belle
Righteous preacher
Replaced by modern and realistic versions of classic Gothic stereotypes
Spiteful and reclusive spinster
Self-righteous politician
White-suited lawyer
Morally skewed protagonist

8. Themes in Southern Gothic Literature
Good verses Evil
Joy vs. Sorrow
Light vs. Darkness
Moral/ethical justification
Grotesque
Imprisonment
Literal and Figurative
Violence
Character differences often provoke violence
Racial, cultural, social, class differences
Clearly presented Southern setting
Old, worn-down buildings
Writer uses ‘gloomy’ diction

9. Tennessee Williams March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983
Famous Works include:
A Streetcar Named Desire,
The Glass Menagerie,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Night of the Iguana
1947 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Large number of his dramas portray:
Struggling/conflicting family
Southern Gothic elements

10. Director Elia Kazan said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life. He was so naked in his plays.“
Popular critical opinion is that Blanche is primarily a representation of Williams himself
he often claimed that he always had, in fact, depended on the kindness of strangers
Williams and Blanche were both quite sexually promiscuous
constant fear of the imminence of death.
Mental instability
Addictions
Kazan went so far as to say that "Blanche DuBois, the woman, is Williams an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity around him at the same time that he fears it, because it threatens his life."

11. A Streetcar Named Desire