Unit 3 Drama

Question 1

Reading Drama Aspects

Answer 1

Character, plot, theme, link to audience

Question 2

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

Answer 2

a symbolic drama—a psychological study of an unbalanced human mind. It advocates change by revealing a flawed social structure that prevents people from achieving happiness.

Question 3

Henrik Ibsen

Answer 3

In these plays, Ibsen sets the rights of the individual against the repressive mores of a tyrannical middle-class society. These plays criticize double standards for men and women, economic disadvantages for women, and women’s repression in marriage. Married women, for Ibsen, became representative of all the oppressed in an unhealthy culture. And the violence of drinking

Question 4

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Answer 4

Streetcar Named Desire is mainly the story of four people whose lives become intertwined: Blanche; her younger sister, Stella; Stella’s husband, Stanley; and Stanley’s friend, Mitch. Among them, the four have much of Williams in them. They reveal a desperate hunger for love, a passion for sexual intimacy, and feelings of guilt for not keeping a loved one safe from an institution.

Question 5

Tennessee Williams

Answer 5

Thomas Lanier Williams (1911-1983) grew up with parents who were not happily matched and an older sister whom he loved deeply and lost. Edwina, Williams’s mother, assumed theatrical airs and communicated a puritanical attitude toward sexuality. Williams’s father, Cornelius, was of a much rougher character than Edwina. Cornelius drank heavily, gambled, womanized, quarreled loudly with his wife, and sometimes abused her physically. Their marriage was already unstable by the time Williams was born in 1911.