Psyche and Its Todays' Representation In Tennessee Williams’ Selected Plays and Yukio Mishima’s the Lady Aoi

By Seyedmohsen Mousavifard, Sepideh Hashemi and Ali Akbar Pooyan

The aim of this book is to analyze Tennessee Williams’ Selected Plays and Yukio Mishima’s The Lady Aoi from a Lacanian point of view.What the book has scrutinized represents the Lacan’s theory in all social and cultural contexts, is correct and appropriate. Analyzing the mentioned plays and focusing on the characters reveals a deep and destructive effect of fixing in sense of lack in imaginary order and resisting entering the symbolic order on everyone’s inward and outward course of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359279234

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Psyche and Its Todays' Representation In Tennessee Williams’ Selected Plays and Yukio Mishima’s the Lady Aoi

Psyche and Its Todays' Representation in Tennessee Williams’ Selected Plays and Yukio Mishima’s The Lady Aoi

Seyedmohsen Mousavifard

Sepideh Hashemi

Ali Akbar Pooyan

Copyright

PUBLISHED BY LULU PUBLISHING PLATFORM

Lulu Press, Inc.

Morrisville, North Carolina, United States

Copyright © 2018   Copyright © 2018  Seyedmohsen Mousavifard, Sepideh Hashemi and Ali Akbar Pooyan

All rights reserved. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements; no part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover design and edition by Day System Research Center Experts;   Tel: [phone]

Publication Date: 2018

ISBN: 978-0-359-27923-4

All rights reserved.

To My Beloved ONES

Preface

The unconscious of human is the most mysterious part of psyche. But how this part works and based on what elements and features leads the human in such destined way, is the matter of significance. The aim of this book is to analyze Tennessee Williams’ Selected Plays and Yukio Mishima’s The Lady Aoi from a Lacanian point of view. A Streetcar Named Desire portrays a common ordinary life versus a gentle aristocratic one which has been doomed to decay. Williams skilfully shows the brutality and violence of modern world. Mishima has portrayed stream of consciousness in The Lady Aoi. Jacques Lacan (1901-81), a controversial French psychoanalyst, has analysed the unconscious psyche. He presents the psyche as consisting of three orders: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. By applying Lacan’s perspectives on the plays this book presents the scrutiny of the concepts of Imaginary order, mirror stage, symbolic order, lack, loss and the other through two totally different points of view in case of play contexts. What the book has scrutinized represents the Lacan’s theory in all social and cultural contexts, is correct and appropriate. Analyzing the mentioned plays and focusing on the characters reveals a deep and destructive effect of fixing in sense of lack in imaginary order and resisting entering the symbolic order on everyone’s inward and outward course of life.

Mousavifard 2018

Chapter One

Introduction

General Overview

The unconscious is the most mysterious part of the human mind which, after ages, is still working, and it destines human’s path of life. But how this part works and based on what elements and features it leads human beings into their destined ways is a matter of significance. What this research scrutinizes is the impact of context, or the two different cultural attitudes from an Eastern and a Western country on man’s unconsciousness and its consequences. Tennessee Williams’ selected plays The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Yukio Mishima’s The Lady Aoi are chosen as the cases of study for this research to scrutinize the context of the plays and the content of the playwrights' minds, and also the formation of the works mentioned under the influence of both context and psychological content.

To this aim, the characters of the plays are studied from a Lacanian point of view to observe how and according to what different principles, the symbolic order, or the dominant cultural context, rides the chariot of the unconscious of a Western and an Eastern man, by which whip tortures it, and to which end leads it!

And to observe how the three orders of the unconscious, as presented by Lacan, regarding all the discrepancies of the two contexts, writes the same doomed destiny for all their fictional characters.     

A gifted writer and recipient of many literary awards, Williams is now recognized as an innovator of the new American drama after the end of World War II.  His family was poor and shamed by the sex scandal Williams' father was involved in (Tischler 128).

Later in life, Thomas Williams changed his first name to a more recognizable one, Tennessee. The themes of his plays are violence, sexuality, alcoholism, rape, homosexuality, and fetishism in terms that were never before seen on the American stage and have shocked his audiences.

His pervasive theme is the inescapable loneliness of human condition. His characters are faded men and women, consumed by time and decay, which have become memorable.

The summer of 1934 was a significant period for Williams. It was during this summer that his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! was produced.

This experience initiated Williams into the world of theatre, and it becomes something that would follow him for the rest of his life (Roudane 213).

His works consist of twenty four full-length plays, twenty five short plays, four short story collections, a book of poetry, and two novels. Three of his plays received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Night of the Iguana. Finally, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams received high honors in the form of a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 (Tischler 102).

The remainder of his life only reinforced his impression of the brief bloom and long decay of things. Consequently, his plays are both elegiac and confessional. Like his most important predecessor in the American theatre, Eugene O'Neill, Williams told his own story again and again, in a lifelong effort to come to terms with his family (Boxill 92).

A Streetcar Named Desire, an autobiographical work describes a triangle, the apex of which is Stella