Romantizovanje odsustva u Staklenoj menažeriji Tenesija Vilijamsa
Romanticization absence in the Tennessee Williams's Glass menagerie

Summary/Abstract: Throughout our analysis of motives of absence in Tennessee Williams’s play Glass Menagerie, we pointed out the two main influences on Williams’s poetics: the Calvinist, Puritan heritage of religiosity in American South and American romanticism. In this paper we described how the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election found its expression in a secular world of Glass Menagerie, and even beyond, in contemporary American secular mythology. Moreover, tracing the Calvinistic heritage in Williams’s drama, we explored the dynamics of gender relations in the Glass menagerie. Williams exploits tradition of American romanticism (in more detail: fetishization of death, war and unadjusted characters) as a counterweight to Calvinistic notion of human nature as ‘totally deprived’. Williams’s play embodies the conflict of Calvinistic heritage and romantic tradition and thus brings to prominence one of the central tensions of American experience. Furthermore, this paper aims to trace the way in which some of the philosophical preoccupations of European 18th and 19th century, the period marked by the birth of Romanticism, found artistic expression in American literary imagination

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