| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 90 === In this thesis, I want to compare Yang Xian-zhi’s Rain on the Xiao Xiang (Xiao Xiang Ye Yu), a Yuan za-ju, and Euripides’ Medea, a Greek tragedy. The themes of these two plays are about how their ungrateful husbands desert their wives. Do Yang Xian-zhi and Euripides write such plays on purpose? Do they just express their complaints or worries towards the problems of their societies? These issues will be covered in this thesis.
The thesis is divided into five parts: introduction, three chapters, and conclusion. To know why these two plays share the same theme─deserted wife, I try to unearth the causes by detecting the historical contexts, the genres, the texts of the two plays, together with information on the playwrights. There, I expect to analyze Yang Xian-zhi’s and Euripides’ attitudes towards their societies and theatres.
In chapter one, I discuss the influence of historical contexts on the genres Yuan za-ju and Greek tragedy, the texts and the playwrights. There, I expect to know if the social conditions of the Yuan and ancient Greece were reflected in these two plays. And chapter two serves a comparison of the women in fiction and in the real world. To reconstruct the figures of the Yuan and ancient Greek women, I want to see if Zhang Cui-luan and Medea are exceptional or typical of women facing marital problems just as they do in the real world. There, I expect to unearth the messages that the playwrights want to reveal through their plays. In chapter three, there are two issues─one is that the roles the male characters play in these two theatres, and the other is the playwrights’ attitudes towards their theatres and societies. On the one hand, to know how the male characters help their female characters with their marital problems or force them to surrender their claim to the justice, I try to analyze their personalities through the plays. There, I want to discuss the massages that the playwrights want to reveal through these male characters. On the other hand, considering the playwrights as political transvestites, I want to explain how the playwrights take the female characters as their mouthpieces and express their complains or worries towards the problems of their societies. In conclusion, I present what I found through the research in these three chapters. As a result, I found that there are not two but four “deserted wives” in these two plays. To present the problems of the Yuan regime, such as racism, social discrimination, the problem of corrupt officials and expectation for the return of the justice, Yang Xian-zhi took Zhang Cui-luan as his mouthpiece to show his complaints to the Yuan’s desertion. Euripides also took Medea as his mouthpiece to express how he worries about Athens’ future, just like Aegeus’, Jason and Medea’s bareness. In end of the play, Euripides also decides what he wants to do at last and shows his passive attitudes towards Athens: exiling himself. To express their complaints or worries towards the problems of tier societies, both Yang Xiang-zhi and Euripides in the plays act as political transvestites ascribing the problems of the yuan and the Athenian societies to “desertion.”
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