Suddenly Last Summer에 나타난 신화적 특징

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTIC IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER

Poet Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer has a characteristic seeking after the configurations of gods. Sebastian is Adonis living a life under the protection of Aphrodite, and consanguineous-incest-like love with Mrs. Venable led him to an abnormal relation with others. He found a picture of himself through the cruelty of gods detected in Encantadas Island. Sebastian, seeking some ways of atonement, let his body be torn by the boys who he had given maltreatment; which had some tint of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. In Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian in Christian myth is expressed to be related to Adonis in Greek myth. Although Sebastian, raised under his mother's overprotection, was absorbed in everything he tried, he was described as an individual of duplicity, a sexual pervert with internal conflict. This is a plot like a three-concerned relation with Aphrodite and Fersephone; and he, later captured by malice, made himself its sacrifice by transferring the concept of malice to that of gods. Mrs. Venable' s trial to have Catherine undergo lobotomy' is considered to be dismemberment, and Mrs. Venable's violent conciliation could be presumed to be an indication for the victory of Catherine's conscience to be granted. Mrs. Venable, Sebastian's mother, regarded her son's death such as in cannibalism, in which starving natives ate his flesh, as the martyrdom, figured the relation with her son as the life of the Goddess and Priestess, and took a metaphorical description on Attis-Cybele, plantation god, blessing the repetition of resuscitation and regeneration. Williams, through Christian and Greek myth, showed a roundabout description of the human' s basic problems so called solitude, violence, justice, hypocrisy, and consciousness. He himself did not so much endeavor to find some clues of the problems the society at that time bore, as let his readers or audience find solutions themselves. Since Williams for this purposes took the mythological writing technique in his works, he ought to be estimated such a playwriter as made an unexhausted effort to set up the triangular-positioned human nature escaping from decayed and corrupted materialism prevailing the society those days.