테네시 윌리엄즈 영화에서의 여성의 위기와 가족 멜로드라마의 쇠퇴

The Crisis of Women in Tennessee Williams Films and the Decline of Family Melodramas: A Study on Baby Doll and The Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams is not only a prestigious name in the twentieth century American literature but also in the history of 1950s Hollywood cinema. More than fifteen films were made based on his plays to date, and seven among them were produced in the 1950s. His films are thought to have contributed a lot to the development of filmic melodramas and to have challenged the limitations of the genre at the same time. Especially the episodes that the censors frequently had problems with his films illustrate how daringly his stories tested the ethical boundaries of the era. This paper pays special attention to the historical trajectory in which the 1950s industrial conventions and conservatism in Hollywood drastically shifted its directions in the mid-1960s, and tries to find the early symptoms of such changes in the films adapting Williams’s works released in the late 1950s. The films Baby Doll (Dir. Elia Kazan, 1956) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Dir. Richard Brooks, 1958) follow the genre conventions of family melodramas of the period but simultaneously demonstrate the irony of the family ideal and its repressive aspects especially to women. Analysing the precarious status of women characters in patriarchal families shown in both films, this paper discusses the way in which these two films defy the traditional melodramatic norm of happy family, exposing the problems of the patriarchal family ideal, and ultimately foreboding the decline of the genre of family melodramas in the following years.