[摘  要]

玛莎·诺曼是二战后美国最成功的女剧作家之一，已经荣获普利策奖、托尼奖、苏珊•史密斯•布莱克本奖、剧评人奖等多个戏剧奖项。其中，她最成功的作品《晚安，妈妈》已经被翻译成二十多种语言，并先后两次登上中国舞台。然而尽管国内学术界对玛莎·诺曼及其作品有相关的评论和研究，然而对这部作品的探讨仍然局限在几部以女性主义为主题的作品，对其其它作品的研究依然很少。本文拟通过剧本的研究，用文本分析法和综述法，从现实主义角度探讨《黑夜中的旅人》中主人公的信仰冲突与融合，并结合作者的生平，分析探究这种冲突产生的原因，进而论述现实与理想、科学与宗教的相互关系，分析其融合的原因，探究作者使用象征的手法通过隐含的意象和象征因素，表现信仰冲突与融合这一主题。

[关键词] 玛莎·诺曼；冲突；融合；信仰

Abstract:

Marsha Norman is one of the most famous female playwrights after the Second World War. She has won many prizes including Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and Drama Desk Awards and so on. Her most famous play ’night Mother has been translated into 20 or more languages and has been acted in China twice. However, domestic researches on Marsha Norman and her works are limited, which mainly focus on her few plays. This study aims to investigate the conflict and integration of belief in Traveler in the Dark, Marsha Norman’s 6th play by content analysis and documentation researching method from the realistic view. Considering the author’s life, why the conflict occurs and how Marsha Norman expresses her central thought by using symbolic objects will also be discussed.

Key words: Marsha Norman; conflicts; integration; belief

1.    Introduction
Marsha Norman is a well-known contemporary American female playwright and she won the Pulitzer Prize for her famous play night mother in 1983, which made her to be the 7th woman playwright who won this prize. Marsha Norman was born and grew up in Louisville, the daughter of a Methodist fundamentalist, who kept her daughter from playing with other children out of her religious views. Television and movies was also prohibited from little Marsha’s childhood. Nevertheless, books and theatre was allowed that time, so she recalls, in particular, seeing children’s plays at the Actors Theatre as well as a production of The Glass Menagerie. She owes a lot to her solitary childhood of becoming a writer. Marsha Norman majored in philosophy at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and then went back to Louisville and got a master degree. Her first job was in a mental hospital helping the disturbed adolescents. Finally, at the behest of Jon Jory, who inspired her to write her first play Getting Out, she turned to drama. She also wrote three more plays before she moved to New York, where she composed the famous ’night Mother (1983). It was translated into 20 or more languages, adapted for film with a screenplay and won many prizes for her. Many other plays such as Traveler in the Dark (1984) then followed. Among all of these, Getting Out (1977), Third and Oak (1978), The Hold-up (1980), ’night Mother (1983), Traveler in the Dark (1984) are most famous. Jean Brown, a critic, said that she was the most successful one who wrote solemn feminism in modern American writers.