UNREALISTIC PSYCHOLOGICAL BURDEN OF MRS. STONE CAUSING HER TRAGIC LIFE IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE

Abstract

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is one of William’s novels. It was published in 1950. Mostly, this novel tells about Mrs. Stone, the main character of this novel. In this novel, Mrs. Stone is identified as a popular actress who is much praised by her admirers. Meanwhile, when she fails to perform the role for Juliet character, her popularity get dimmed. She fails because she chooses the role that it is not suitable with her age in fifties. She stops her profession as an actress and goes to Rome. She uses her husband’s illness as the reason of the journey. Actually, it is the tactic to avoid the shameful feeling after getting the failure in her performance. In Rome she does not free from problems even it leads her to new problems. It that country, she meets the young Paolo and falls in love with him. Unfortunately, Paolo does not seriously love her but he loves because of her wealth. Her unawareness to accept the reality that she is an old woman who must reduce her ambition, cause her tragic life on the progress life. There are some factors in supporting her unrealistic psychological burdens. First is the social background. It consists of the family background where she grew up. Her parents get divorced when she was a child and she spent all time of her girlhood in a dormitory. The others factors are her personality and the condition of society surrounding her life. The purpose of this thesis is to give a clear description about the tragic life which is caused by the unrealistic psychological burden of the main character namely Mrs. Stone. The other purpose is to enrich and apply the writer’s knowledge of literature especially novel that a writer has got during the study in this faculty. The last purpose is to give contribution to the readers who are interested in Tennessee William’s work. Meanwhile there are two approaches used in this thesis, those are psychological approach and formalistic approach. Besides, the method used to analyze data is inductive method. It means that the discussion of the thesis goes from the particular idea to general one. In applying this method the analysis begins with a study on Mrs. Stone’s behavior and personality. There is a conclusion that in a general idea Mrs. Stone is an old actress with unrealistic psychological burden. The data and information, which are related to the thesis are from the library research. The data and information are collected from several books and dictionaries.