00517--The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

                              

   The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

Plays	Summary
A Street Car Named Desire	Is concerned with the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and abnormality.  Blanche the protagonist of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America.  Sex takes the form of perversion.
The Summer and Smoke	Deals with unsuccessful love affair.  Alma is the central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form, John on the other hand is a sex profligate.  The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken.  The play stresses that love and sex are inseparable.
The Rose Tattoo	Is concerned with a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her husband.  The play points out that false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of sexual passion.  Sexuality suppressed reawakens with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak.  Here force of sexual passion gains domination.
Kingdom of Earth	Presents a true picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than anything else.  Spiritual satisfaction alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.  Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment.  To him sex  is the possible path, it is everything.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Dramatizes the feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception.  It portrays the deterioration of a young aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the oblivion that will bring peace.  The characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
Sweet Bird of Youth	Is concerned with the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life.  Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the central characters of the play.  Boss Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their happiness.  But the only way through which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making.  Love making is the only “dependable distraction”.
The Milk Train Does not Stop Here	Depicts the pain and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections.
Period of Adjustment	Williams pursues his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money.  Williams sincerely desires to help people rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so much in his own tormented history.

00514--The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw

          The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a very well-constructed play.  It has:

 exposition,

complication, and,

conclusion. 

Act-1 works as exposition.  Main characters are introduced.  Prof.Higgins, the hero of the play claims that he can train ignorant and ill-educated flower girl, Eliza Doolitle in such a way that after six months people will accept her as a Duchess. 

 In Act-II and Act-III, the complication takes place.  Eliza’s training has started.  She begins to change in her speaking, dressing and manners after the training.  Now she is presented at the Ambassador’s party.  This event works as the climax.  It comes between Act-III and Act-IV, the complication sets in Higgins behaves in callous manners and Eliza did not have soft feelings of love for him.  She resents her treatment as an experiment.  Act-IV and Act-V function with spirited discussion of the consequences of Eliza’s education.  Higgins becomes totally dependent upon Eliza.  There takes place a verbal sword play between them.  Finally, Eliza accepts Freddy as husband and leaves Higgins, and Prof.Higgins laughs out the whole affairs. 

Thus the play progresses from ignorance to knowledge, the myth fades into the reality the didacticism turns from Phonetics to life and Eliza’s spirit evolves from darkness to light.  Thus the construction of the play is logical, artistic and elegant. 

00246-- Eliza Doolittle/Character Sketch/Pygmalion/Bernard Shaw [English literature free notes]

                                                     

                                             
                                             Eliza Doolittle

In the beginning Eliza Doolittle is a flower girl from the slums of London.  She is ignorant, dirty and full of terrible Cockney dialect which even the taxi driver can't understand.  After six months this same girl becomes a young beautiful Duchess who charms everyone at the Ambassador's garden party. 

Even in the first scene on the portico of St.Paul's church, on that rainy night we get the impression that Eliza is not just an ordinary flower girl.  She is bold, confident and even a little impudent.  There she confronts Freddy, the people standing there.  She calls Higgins a man stuffed with nails.  When Pickering and Higgins sing a song with various rhyming names she asks them not to be silly.  Prof.Higgins develops her this self confidence and transforms her into a lady.  But even then she can lose her temper and even throw his slippers at Higgins' face. 

The girl who walked into the Wimpole Street was a poor nervous girl, but at the same time one who had determined to become a lady or at least an assistant in a flower shop.  The fact that she was prepared to pay Higgins the fee for this work shows her individuality.  In a short time Eliza becomes so indispensable that when she threatens to leave, Higgins complains that he can't find anything and can't remember his appointments.  She becomes an efficient personal assistant to Higgins and Pickering. 

Higgins training turns out to be a bitter battle for Eliza.  Higgins was a severe master he bullied and hectored her.  He threatened to drag her around the room three times by her hair if she made a mistake twice.  Eliza was a keen intelligent student. She absorbed everything and was very sharp.  She learned easily and made rapid progress.  In fact for both Higgins and Eliza the process of teaching and learning was a hard task.  Later on she confesses that while Higgins taught her how to speak it was Pickering who unknowingly taught her good manners. At Mrs.Higgins' house both the gentlemen are lavish in their praise of Eliza.

Happiness is an elusive thing for Eliza.  as soon as she is big enough to earn her own living she is sent out of her home.  As a flower girl she struggles to make a living.  She lives in a dingy room in a dirty locality.  Even after she becomes a lady she is far from being happy.    She expected Higgins to like her and propose to her.  But for Higgins she was only an object of an experiment.  

Higgins' bullying reaches a point where Eliza in desperation hits back.  This happens only after she suffers enough.  Only Pickering's gentle attitude helps her to carry on.  Even after she marries Freddy she depends on Pickering's financial support.

Eliza's relationship with Higgins seems unnatural.  But Shaw made it intentionally so.  After she becomes Higgin's pupil she comes to know that her master is too strong to be involved emotionally with her as a woman,as he told Pickering a pupil was only a block of wood for him.  When she discovers that Higgins can never be a husband she is much chagrined.  But she becomes strong enough to find love in Freddy who needed her more than she needed him.  In the end Eliza earns the appreciation or even the admiration of Higgins himself.  He had made a flower girl a duchess and then changed a duchess into a real woman.

                                                               END

00213--Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House -The Theme of Emancipation of a Woman [English Literature free notes]

  In reading Ibsen's A Doll's House today, one may find it hard to imagine how daring it seemed at the time it was written one hundred years ago.  Its theme, the emancipation of a woman, makes it seem almost contemporary and without doubt a play relevant for all time.

     

 In Act I, there are many clues that hint at the kind of marriage Nora and Torvald have.  It seems that Nora is a doll controlled by Torvald.  She relies on him for everything, from movements to thoughts, much like a puppet who is dependent on its puppet master for all of its actions.  The most obvious example of Torvald's physical control over Nora is his teaching her the tarantella.  Nora pretends that she needs Torvald to teach her every move in order to relearn the dance.  The reader knows this is an act, and it shows her submissiveness to Torvald.  After he teaches her the dance, he proclaims "When I saw you turn and sway in the tarantella--my blood was pounding till I couldn't stand it" showing how he is more interested in Nora physically than emotionally.  When Nora responds by saying, "Go away, Torvald!  Leave me alone.  I don't want all this", Torvald asks "Aren't I your husband?"  By saying this, he is implying that one of Nora's duties as his wife is to give  him physical pleasure at his command.   Torvald also does not trust Nora with money, which exemplifies Torvald's treating Nora as a child.  On a rare occasion when Torvald gives Nora some money, he is concerned that she will waste it on candy and pastry. Nora's  duties, in general, are restricted to caring for the children, doing housework, and working on her needlepoint.  A problem with her responsibilities is that her most important obligation is to please Torvald, making her role similar to that of a slave.  She too becomes a prey to the existing norms of a patriarchal society.

      
 Many of Ibsen's works are problem plays in which he leaves the conclusion up to the reader.  The problem in A Doll's House lies not only with Torvald, but with the entire Victorian society.  Females were confined in every way imaginable.  When Torvald does not immediately offer to help Nora after Krogstad threatens to expose her, Nora realizes that there is a problem.  By waiting until after he discovers that his social status will suffer no harm, Torvald reveals his true feelings which put appearance, both social and physical, ahead of the wife whom he says he loves.  This revelation is what prompts Nora to walk out on Torvald.  When Torvald tries to reconcile with Nora, she explains to him how she had been treated like a child all her life; her father had treated her much the same way Torvald does.  Both male superiority figures not only denied her the right to think and act the way she wished, but limited her happiness.  Nora describes her feelings as "always merry, never happy."  When Nora finally slams the door and leaves, she is not only slamming it on Torvald, but also on everything else that has happened in her past which curtailed her growth into a mature woman.

       In today's society, many women are in a situation similar to that of Nora.  Although many people have accepted women as being equal, there are still people in modern society who are doing their best to suppress the feminist revolution.  People ranging from conservative radio-show hosts who complain about "flaming femi-nazis," to women who use their "feminine charm" to accomplish what they want are the ones who hold the female gender back.  Both of these mindsets are expressed in A Doll's House.  Torvald is an example of today's stereotypical man, who is only interested in his appearance and the amount of control he has over a person, and does not care about the feelings of others.  Nora, on the other hand, is a typical example of the woman who plays to a man's desires.  She makes Torvald think he is much smarter and stronger than he actually is.  However, when Nora slams the door, and Torvald is no longer exposed to her manipulative nature, he realizes what true love and equality are, and that they cannot be achieved with people like Nora and himself together.  If everyone in the modern world were to view males and females as completely equal, and if neither men nor women used the power that society gives them based on their sex, then, and only then, could true equality exist in our world.