本文是一篇英语论文，本文以阿德勒的个体心理为基础，研究了劳拉的自卑心理。在自卑感的影响下，劳拉出现了神经质的症状，如自嘲、过度敏感、焦虑和口吃。同时，劳拉的自卑心理也显示出她对社会兴趣的匮乏。因此，她未能应对生活中的三大挑战：职业、友谊、爱情和婚姻。
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 The Focus of the Study
According to individual psychology, every individual is born with inferiority feelings that stimulate him to strive for goals and make achievements. Literary creation is the way by which a writer releases his psychological distress and maintains a distance from the plausibility of mental collapse caused by his inferiority feelings. After The Glass Menagerie got quick success and was performed in cities like New York and Chicago, Williams wrote an essay named “The Catastrophe of Success” in which he recounted his struggles in life before he became famous as well as his understanding of literary creation, which can be interpreted from the perspective of individual psychology. “The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface…but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created,” he said (Williams, 1999: 99-100). It shows that the distressful life experience before Williams rose to fame brought him a deep sense of inferiority, and it encouraged him to strive for excellence. He further stated that “it is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable” (ibid: 104). It can be inferred from the above words that literary creation was the way in which Williams released his feelings of inferiority, which conforms to the views of individual psychology. As a matter of fact, in The Glass Menagerie, Williams not only mediated his inner painful feelings but also showed his concern for common people’s inferiority feelings.
1.2 Literature Review
Tennessee Williams and his breakthrough work, The Glass Menagerie, have both drawn a great deal of attention from scholars and critics at home and abroad. Focuses of studies vary from the author’s life experience to the artistic techniques and themes of the play. As a major character in the play, Laura has been frequently mentioned in these studies. To study Laura’s inferiority complex from the perspective of individual psychology, a review of research on Laura and inferiority complex is necessary. In summary, studies related to Laura can be classified into four types.
The first type of study explains the author’s intention of creating the character. Tennessee Williams’ life experience and creation intention has been long discussed. Bigsby (2000: 36) indicated that “the character of Laura is much closer to a portrait of his sister Rose”, and the play was written to recall “what seem to him to have been key moments in his past life” (ibid: 37). Mcdaniel (2003) believed that Laura was fully-developed moth imagery through which Williams attempted to describe the sorrows of the artist in a cruel world. Li (2005) pointed out that Laura’s misfortune was an illusion; what the author really wanted to show was the complicated inner struggle for sexual freedom of her gay brother Tom. This thesis agrees with the opinions of Bigsby and Mcdaniel and insists that the inferiority complex of Laura parallels that of both Rose and Williams.
The second type of study goes to arts of characterization which are usually concurrent with the study of artistic technique. Laura is commonly recognized as a fragile girl who strongly longs for happiness but fails in the end. For example, Warshauer in his doctoral dissertation mentioned that “a rhetoric of victimization” and expressionism were employed to characterize Laura (Warshauer, 1997). Li (1999) put forward that Williams skillfully adopted symbolism to depict the
