This thesis is a study of a select group of women characters who appear prominently in several twentieth-century plays. It analyses the driving force which motivates the power-seeking woman, the methods by which she achieves her power, the type of power she acquires, and the effect it has on the other characters; it also attempts to clarify the specific concern of each playwright, ranging from exploitation of social questions to psychological analyses of role-playing. The characters examined

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... : Nora and Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (l879) and Ghosts (l88l), Candida in Bernard Shaw's Candida (l895), Bernarda in Frederico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), the three maids in Jean Genet's The Maids (1947), Claire Zachanassian in Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Visit (1956), Mommy in Edward Albee's The American Dream (1959), and Flora and Ruth respectively in Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache (1959) , and The Homecoming (1965). The study centres on this specific group of plays because a pattern emerges from them vhich reveals a basic change in the authors' attitude to the women characters: in the earlier plays they are used as instruments for social criticism; in the later ones they appear in. less concrete and more symbolic or archetypal roles. The pattern also reveals the nature of the society which molds the women into positions of power, and the weak personalities of their partners which in turn forces them to adopt particularly aggressive roles. A clear-cut development emerges when the plays are examined chronologically. Initially, the playwrights are concerned with criticism of social issues: the hypocrisy of moral values perpetuated in middle class communities such as the one inhabited by Mrs. Alving, the shallowness of the so-called sanctity of late Victorian marriage, the stagnating effect of a claustrophobic society such as Spain's where rigid tradition functions as a repressing force which prevents individuals from developing their human potential. By the mid-twentieth century, [...]