『하계로 내려간 오르페우스』에 나타난 여정의 의미

Abstract

The majority of Tennessee Williams' characters are the fugitive heroes who try to escape from the real world because their purity, creativity, and vitality, and their strong yearning for freedom make them almost unable to conform to reality. They are, in some sense, the defeated, the alienated, and the rejected. However, they can be elevated to tragic heroes with Williams’ efforts to imbue his fugitive characters with mythic and symbolic images in many ways. Williams revised The Battle of Angels for seventeen years and released the new version under the name of Orpheus Descending. To know the reason why he had to struggle for such a long time with a play can be quite an interesting issue. In this essay, I want to analyze the new version of the play mainly through the paradigm of the namesake Greek myth, the Orpheus myth, and the myth of Jesus Christ, searching for the answer. In this re-written myth, Williams wanted to find a way of integrating the opposite values haunting him for life time: soul and body, art and artist, artistic world and real world, purity and corruption, and so on. His effort of seventeen years must have satisfied him more or less through the Orphic journey.