Modern Aspects of Time in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie:A Bergsonian Reading

سال انتشار: 1392
نوع سند: مقاله کنفرانسی
زبان: انگلیسی
مشاهده: 1,116

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شناسه ملی سند علمی:

TELT01_092

تاریخ نمایه سازی: 28 آذر 1392

چکیده مقاله:

Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menageries is a good example of a play where time has a modernist role. Here we face a 'memory play' highly concerned with the notion of time. Tennessee Williams once said: life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly can catch it going. Thus, Williams himself is concerned with the idea of time. Generally speaking, the concept of time has no longer the traditional one-dimensional meaning of the 19th century historical novels. Actually, it becomes more private, psychological and modern at the same time. To be more exact, time is not simply a modern subject in a modernist work; but a concept that governs its formal experiments (Banfield 48). Tennessee Williams's play is indeed a modern occupation with time divorced from history in a subjective idealist methodology. The time in this play is fluid and one is unable to see a definite point in it. Another important issue is the metafictionality of the play. The narrator, Tom, the only man in the family is totally conscious of his double role as the character and the narrator. As the introductory part suggests explicitly, the play is memory . This memory play is indeed a mixture of different points in time that are made indistinguishable through the use of present tense of the text. In this respect, the present paper tries to use a Bergsonian philosophy of time to investigate the different roles and dimensions of time in the play. The second meaning of time has been officially introduced by Henry Bergson. In fact, he is totally opposed to the traditional perception of time as a one-dimensional phenomenon; a scientific specialized concept which could be measured by clock. This paper applies a Bergsonian theory of time to find the underlying roles time plays in Williams's The Glass Menagerie and the way it determines the lives of the characters. The duration of time and its indivisible nature that is put forward by Bergson is what we can observe in this memory play. By offering this modernist thinker's ideas, we can easily differentiate between this play and other examples that although modernist, remain loyal to the historical novel-like concept of time; where a linear, one-dimensional aspect of time is focused. Taken together, what this study demonstrates is a psychological scrutiny of the characters that are haunted by time. By highlighting the roles of time and the author's skill in its management, we can achieve a better understanding of the modern individual's complicated and transformed psyche and the way time can control and manipulate them.

نویسندگان

Sarah Esmaeili

M.A. Student of English Literature University of Isfahan