University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The Major Plays Of Tennessee Williams, 1940 To 1960

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The Major Plays Of Tennessee Williams, 1940 To 1960

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Content This dissertation has been 62-3750
microfilmed exactly as received
VON DORNUM, Jack Howard, 1925-
THE MAJOR PLAYS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
1940 TO 1960.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1962
Language and Literature, modem
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, M ichigan
I
Copyright
by
Jack Howard von Do mum
1962
THE MAJOR PLAYS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
19 40 TO 1960
by
Jack Howard von Dornum
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 19 62
UNIVERSITY OF SO U TH ERN CALIFORNIA
GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES 7, CALIFORNIA
This dissertation, written by
Jack Howard von Dornum
under the direction of hlS....Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
ChaitVan
/„>: hf-x t
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. THE BACKGROUND ....................... 1
11 * BATTLE OF ANGELS
YOU TOUCHED HE! .............................. 15
III. THE GLASS MENAGERIE
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
SUMMER AND SMOKE.............................. 34
IV* THE ROSE TATTOO
CAMINO R E A L .................................. 81
v* CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
ORPHEUS DESCENDING ............................ 108
VI* SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
SWEET BIRD OF Y O U T H ............. 138
VII. CONCLUSION..................................... 162
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................... 185
ii
CHAPTER I
THE BACKGROUND
On March 31, 1945, The Glass Menagerie, a play by an
unknown writer, opened in the Playhouse Theater on New
York's Broadway. Within three months this writer had
received the Critics' Circle Award and had been acclaimed
an important new talent in the theatre. Within three years
this no longer unknown writer had had three more plays,
(You Touched Mel, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and
Smoke) produced in New York, had received the Pulitzer
Prize, the Donaldson Award, and a second Critics' Circle
Award for one of them (A Streetcar Named Desire), and had
been acknowledged by prominent drama critics not only as a
major playwright but also as one of the leaders in the
American theatre. Subsequently, the now famous and remark
ably successful Tennessee Williams had seven New York pro
ductions of his major plays, untold productions of both
full-length and one-act plays throughout the country,
several television productions of one-acters, and six
feature film productions of his plays. Most of these.pro
ductions were well, even enthusiastically, received by
1
audiences and, consequently, were financially successful.
Frequently, the critics were less receptive than audiences;
they did, however, vote Mr. Williams a second Pulitzer
Prize and a third Critics' Circle Award (for Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof, 1955), In 1960 critics were less in accord
about the worth of his plays and about the significance of
his contribution to American drama than they were in 194 8.
But despite the dissent of many critics, Tennessee Williams
continued to be widely regarded as one of the two leading
American playwrights (along with Arthur Miller), and he
continued to be perhaps the most popular.
The remarkable rapidity of Williams' rise in the
American theatre, his continued success--financial if not
esthetic--are indisputable, if not entirely accounted for.
The worth of his plays, his contribution to American drama,
his position in the theatre remain in dispute. Of course,
without the added perspective of time, one cannot possibly
make a truly accurate assessment of Williams' position in,
or contribution to, the theatre, nor can one offer a com
pletely satisfying explanation of his rapid and continued
success. Furthermore, the worth of his plays and their
success cannot be altogether separated. Despite these
difficulties, I feel one can arrive at a useful, if neces
sarily limited, assessment by analyzing and evaluating the
major plays, and by examining the relationship of Williams'
plays to contemporary American society and to the rest of
contemporary American drama.
A brief survey of the American theatre during the ten
years preceding Williams' Broadway debut offers a partial
explanation for the rapidity of his subsequent acceptance
by critics and audiences.
The decade of the thirties is usually described as a
period in American drama during which prominent dramatists
of the twenties continued their success; a period in which
new important playwrights, such as Odets, Heilman, Wilder,
and Saroyan appeared; and as a period in which powerful
social protest plays dominated the theatre. At least one
prominent critic insists that these elements added up to
drama "equal in quality to the work of the preceding
decade."^ Such descriptions and estimates, along with the
anthologies that isolate the "best" plays, tend to obscure
and distort the actual state of American drama in the
thirties. These descriptions and evaluations are not in
themselves inaccurate; yet they are nearly all incomplete
and, consequently, misleading. Moreover, they tend to
apply to the first half of the thirties but not to the
second half. It is certainly true that several of the
leading dramatists of the twenties created plays of endur
ing value in the thirties. Such plays, for example, as
■^■John Gassner, Twenty Best Plays of the Modern Ameri
can Theatre (New York, 193§), p. viii.
O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Anderson's
Winterset (1935), and Howard's Yellow Jack (1934) have a
permanent place in American drama. But all of these plays
were written and produced in the first half of the decade.
After 1936 none of these writers offered anything compar
able to their earlier work. This same pattern is apparent
in the careers of such outstanding writers of the twenties
as Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, John Howard Lawson, George
Kelly, and S. N. Behrman.
This falling off of the established writers seemed,
at the time, to be at least partially offset by the emer
gence of such dramatists as Clifford Odets, in the mid
thirties, and by Thornton Wilder and William Saroyan toward
the end of the decade. Odets' first Broadway production,
Waiting for Lefty, was sponsored by the Group Theatre, of
which he was a member, in 19 35. Before the year was out,
he was a famous playwright with the remarkable record of
four Broadway productions (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and
Sing, Till the Day I Die, Paradise Lost) within one year.
Unfortunately, the brilliant future augured by this record
did not materialize. After 19 35 Odets offered only one play
of value (Golden Boy, 19 37) and that play was more a popular
success than an artistic one.
The Broadway productions of Thornton Wilder's Our
Town in 1938, and of William Saroyan's My Heart's in the
Highlands and Time of Your Life in 1939 revived the hopes
for a new, vital drama that had been disappointed by
Odets. Saroyan and Wilder, superficially at least, had
much in common as dramatists, though the work of the latter
was to prove more profound and enduring. Both writers com
bined realism of content with imaginative treatment; both
sought to replace the photographic realism that prevailed
with suggestion, fable, and symbolism. Each of them
excited critics and audiences with crisp dialogue; each
appealed to the emotions of their audiences by stressing
the goodness, kindliness, and gentleness of ordinary peo
ple. And each created the impression that a novel dramatic
form had emerged by abandoning nearly all the usual conven
tions of the theatre.
At the end of the decade, many theatre-goers, includ
ing Saroyan himself,^ were hopeful that the plays of Wilder
and Saroyan marked the end of the drama of particularized
realism--sometimes amusing, sometimes dreary, but nearly
always banal--that dominated the Broadway stage at the time,
and the beginning of a fresh, imaginative drama. But the
plays of neither writer have much altered the course of
American drama, nor has either writer had much direct in
fluence on other American dramatists. Looking back, one
2"In 1939 Saroyan expressed his belief that My
Heart's in the Highlands was a classic and would Have a
profound influence on the new American theatre." Edward
M. Gagey, Revolution in American Drama (New York, 1947),
p. 114.
can understand the excitement engendered by Time of Your
Life only by contrasting it with typical plays of the time.
Seen in retrospect, Saroyan's plays of the thirties seem
formless and oversentimentalized; they are isolated, dead
end phenomena, neither typical of their time nor glorious
beginnings of a new era in drama. Wilder's plays today
are clearly superior to Saroyan's and to most American
plays of the time. But despite their excellence these
plays have had relatively little direct influence in Amer
ican drama, though they did help prepare audiences for the
changes that came into the American theatre in the late
forties and the fifties. Ironically, Wilder's plays have
been far better received and much more influential in
Europe than in America,
If the plays of Wilder and Saroyan did little to effect
a marked change in American drama, the social protest plays
that seemed so significant at the time did perhaps less.
These plays, which appeared early in the thirties and per
sisted well beyond 1935, were frequently powerful and mov
ing, occasionally artistic successes. But they failed to
alter the course of American drama because they seldom
reached the Broadway stage. Few if any plays that have not
received Broadway productions have had a significant impact
on American drama. The Broadway stage has been and for
many critics and theatre-goers continues to be— regardless
of the excellence of theatre elsewhere in the United
States— the American theatre. The criterion of success in
this theatre is a well-received Broadway production. And
this Broadway theatre, despite its reputation for crass
commercialism, has introduced many of the experiments and
innovations in stage effects, direction, and playwriting
3
that have enriched American drama m the past forty years.
Furthermore, almost without exception, as Arthur Miller has
pointed out,1 * the new plays, the plays that have signifi
cantly affected American drama, have originated on Broad
way. The social protest plays of the thirties did not
permanently affect the drama because they were produced
off-Broadway by such groups as the Theatre Union, The Labor
Stage, the New Theatre League, the Theatre of Action, and
the Worker's Laboratory Theatre;^ or outside New York al
together by such agencies as the Federal Theatre.
There were, of course, several plays that could be
labeled social protest plays on the Broadway stage in this
period. Nor was this kind of play completely new to
Broadway, for several such plays— including Elmer Rice's
Adding Machine (1923), and John Howard Lawson's Roger
Bloomer (1923), and his Processional (1927)— had appeared
3
George Jean Nathan, The Theatre Book of the Year
1944-45 (New York, 1945), pp. xiv-xv.
^"The American Theatre," in The Passionate Playgoer,
ed. George Oppenheimer (New York, 1953) , p. 13.
5Gagey, p. 158,
8
in the twenties. Most such plays, however, focused on
exposing social evils rather than on presenting a strong
demand for specific reform, and most of them appeared on
Broadway in the first half of the thirties. After 1935--by
which time such social protest plays as Lawson's Success
Story (1932), Anderson's Both Your Houses (1933), Rice's
We, the People (1933), Kingsley's Dead End (1935), and
Odets' Waiting for Lefty(1935) and Awake and Sing (1935)
had appeared on Broadway--the social protest play seemed to
lose its vitality as an art form.® Thereafter, both pro
ducers and playwrights tended to concentrate on plays that
dealt with individual rather than group problems. This
tendency is apparent most strikingly in the work of Clifford
Odets, who in 19 35 seemed to be the leading social protest
dramatist. Both of his plays— Golden Boy (1937) and
Rocket to the Moon (19 38)— that appeared on Broadway in the
late thirties, moved away from direct social protest to
focus on the personal situations of his vivid characters.
The reasons for the rapid decline of the social pro
test play after 1936 are not entirely clear. Undoubtedly,
changing social conditions--the general improvement in
standard of living, the achievement of many goals by social
reformers— were influential in bringing on this decline.
^Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles (New York,
1956), p. 68.
I
The original urgency that gave the social protest play its
powerful appeal was waning. The middle-class audiences
that attended Broadway productions had lost their fear of
revolutionary social change and with it much of their in
terest in social protest plays. In the last years of the
thirties, audiences in increasing numbers entered Broadway
theatres seeking innocuous diversion from both the old ten
sions and the new threats to well-being created by inter
national events. Producers did their best to provide these
audiences with the diversion they sought lest the relative
prosperity that audiences had brought to Broadway after the
uncertain years of the early depression be diminished. To
safeguard their investments producers offered a steadily
increasing number of spectacles and musicals. The typical
play of the time was designed for immediate popular appeal.
With few exceptions--such as Lillian Heilman's The Little
Foxes (19 39)— these plays offer little of value. So far had
the quality of American drama declined that for the season
1938-39 the New York Critics' Circle was unable to select
a play worthy of its annual award.
It is not surprising that in this period the work of
such a dramatist as Saroyan struck spectators not only as
fresh and vital but also as experimental. But the plays of
this writer cannot be considered experimental in the same
sense that plays which introduce new forms and new concepts
into the drama are considered experimental. Truly experi
10
mental plays, that are also valid art, often seem formless
when they are first performed because the viewer has not
yet educated himself to see the form that is inevitably
there. Eventually, however, the viewer does learn to see
this form; then both he and the writer are free to use it
and to appreciate it in a variety of ways. A play such as
Saroyan's Time of Your Life could offer no new form to the
drama, for it is essentially a collection of vaudeville
acts. The play is, as Mary McCarthy has said,
. . . full of vaudeville; indeed, almost every incident
and character in it can be translated back into one of
the old time acts.7
While the plays of Wilder and Saroyan ultimately were
not directly influential in the American theatre, they did
inspire some hope that the drama of the next decade would
improve. The drama of the early forties, however, rarely
if ever rose above the commonplace level established in the
late thirties. World War II brought larger and less dis
criminating audiences into Broadway theatres; it also
brought about rapidly spiraling costs® that caused producers
to seek plays that would be instantly popular and that would
attract capacity audiences for longer periods. Under such
conditions the quality of the drama, not surprisingly, con-
7McCarthy, p. 50.
^Bernard Hewitt, Theatre U S A 1665-1957 (New York,
1959), p. 42 5.
11
tinued to decline. The sorry state of the theatre in the
early forties is perhaps most tellingly revealed in the
comments of prominent critics who had regular access to
New York theatres during that period.
For example, Mary McCarthy, critic for the Partisan
Review, described the wartime theatre by saying that it had
been
. . , commandeered by the War, , . . the theatre
became a great barracks and entertained the boys from
Arkansas and Minnesota with imitation movies (Winged
Victory, Lady in the Dark, The Eve of St. Mark),"pasted
up magazine stories (Junior~Hiss, Hy Sister Eileen,
Life with Father), and high-salaried burlesque shows.^
A second critic, Harold Clurman, in his book The
Fervent Years, called the early forties
. . . the Billy Rose and Michael Todd period on
Broadway. It combines the feeling of the World's Fair
with a rather garish night club, a library of nicely
flavored "culture" with Coney Island.10
And a third critic,'Louis Kronenberger, writing for
Commentary, offers a more penetrating and comprehensive
view of the theatre of the time:
In its trappings and devices the theatre of the
moment is often lively, but very little of it is alive.
In its workmanship it is often skillful enough, but
barely anything in it passes beyond skill into art. And
as we have almost no art on Broadway, so (much more
depressingly) we have almost no real seriousness and
almost no commerce in ideas.
^McCarthy, p. 90.
10(New York, 1945), p. 293.
12
In a time of crisis, we may partly excuse a lack of
art . . . The trouble is not simply that Broadway is so
"commercial," but that it is so backward and banal in its
commercialism. Even Hollywood, however vulgar and
flatulent its aspirations to culture, really aspires.
But the theatre does not aspire.H
As the testimony of these critics and others indicates,
the drama of the period had fallen into a state of confu
sion and disintegration. For three or four years prior to
the war and particularly from 1940—to— 45 the drama had
grown increasingly puerile, ineffective, and vapid. Nor was
there much hope for improvement since producers consistently
refused new plays that did not have an obviously popular
appeal. The playwright with an unusual play found great
difficulty persuading producers to accept his work.
Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth, for instance, was
rejected by nearly every producer in New York, including
1 9
the Theatre Guild, before it reached the stage. When
Tennessee Williams, then completely unknown, offered his
The Glass Menagerie in 1944 for production, no New York
producer showed any interest. Paradoxically, once The
Glass Menagerie did reach Broadway, after a Chicago produc
tion by Eddie Dowling, the same qualities that once kept it
off Broadway helped it to win enthusiastic acceptance.
H"Decline of the Theatre," Commentary, 1:47-49,
November 1945.
12Hewitt,p. 433.
13
The play gained such immediate acceptance principally
because it displayed or hinted at several valuable dramatic
qualities that had been conspicuously absent from the
Broadway stage for some time past. Certain positive quali
ties in The Glass Menagerie--the imaginative, even poetic,
treatment of essentially realistic material, for example,
and the presence of vital memorable characters whose actions
provoked powerful yet tender emotions without obvious
sentimentality and whose language was the speech of real
human beings— understandably moved both audiences and
critics. These spectators, with some notable exceptions
among the critics, were also moved by other, less valuable
qualities in the play. They responded well, for instance,
to the superficially novel construction that placed the
play out of the ordinary without making it too remote or
bizarre for conservative Broadway audiences. And they
responded strongly to the hint at Chekov in mood and move
ment and the hint at Pirandello in theme, both of which
suggested subtly that the Broadway theatre did, after all,
have cultural aspirations.
The Glass Menagerie did not, of course, transform
American drama or even the Broadway stage when it became a
hit in 19 4 5; it had, in fact, relatively little immediate
influence. It did, however, create strong hopes, even
among blase critics, that a salutary change was forthcoming
in the drama. And these hopes were raised even higher two
14
years later when the promises tendered by The Glass
Menagerie seemed to be fully redeemed by A Streetcar Named
Desire.
CHAPTER II
BATTLE OF ANGELS
YOU TOUCHED ME!
Though The Glass Menagerie first brought Tennessee
Williams to prominence, it was neither the first play he
had written nor the first he had had produced profession
ally. Prior to 1940 , he had written four long plays
(Spring Storm, Not about Nightingales, Candles to the Sun,
and Fugitive Kind)^ and several one-acters. In 19 40, the
Theatre Guild produced his fifth long play, Battle of
Angels, which opened in Boston in December, 1940, and
closed after one week's run. During the interim between
this failure and the success of The Glass Menagerie, Wil
liams wrote another full-length play, this one in collab
oration with Donald Windham. This play, You Touched Me!,
was completed in 1943 but was not produced until 1946, when
it appeared on Broadway briefly.
Neither Battle of Angels nor You Touched Me! has in
itself much of lasting value or interest. The two plays
■^Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending with Battle
of Angels (New York, 1958), p. vi.
15
16
are both valuable and interesting, however, for what they
reveal about Williams' practice as a dramatist. Each of
these early plays offers an instructive contrast to later
plays that shows how much Williams' talent has developed.
And each contains, though frequently in an embryonic state,
certain of the devices, concepts, characters, and themes
that are the distinguishing features of the later plays.
For the earlier of these plays, Battle of Angels,
Williams employed the ancient story idea of introducing
an unusual stranger into a group of people whose lives are
in delicate equilibrium and then tracing his influence on
them. This device apparently became a favorite with Wil
liams, for he later used it again with slight variations in
five plays (You Touched Mel, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rose
Tattoo, Camino Real, and Sweet Bird of Youth),
The stranger that Williams uses in Battle of Angels is
an itinerant Southern poet possessed of a powerful primitive
sexual appeal. The group that he influences are the lead
ing citizens of a small, rural town in the South. The
impact that Val Xavier, the poet stranger, has on this
group is enormous and rapid. Within a short time he has
enchanted several of the ladies--for example, within a few
weeks a young, decadent aristocrat, Sandra, has seduced him;
a religious mystic, Vee, who is also the Sheriff's wife,
has mistaken him for the Christ; and the proprietress of
the mercantile store, Myra, whose husband is a bedridden
17
cancer patient, has been impregnated by him. During the
same period, he has antagonized most of the rest of the
townspeople, and particularly the Sheriff, by wearing a
snake skin jacket, by his sexual activities, and by defend
ing a vagrant Negro. The hostility between Val and the
townspeople is both real and symbolic, for Val represents
the primitive and instinctual in life, while the townspeople
represent the unnatural and the artificial. In the inevi
table conflict between the two elements the primitive force
is defeated; Val and Myra, who has allied herself with him,
are killed. At the play's end Sandra has committed suicide,
Vera is insane, Myra has been killed by her bedridden hus
band, and Val has been lynched and burned.
The play has several serious defects, the chief and
most apparent of which is the faulty construction. Wil
liams utilized several potentially dramatic elements— the
problems of the decadent Southern aristocracy, the link
between sexual frustration and religious mysticism, racial
discrimination, and the antagonism between the natural and.
the artificial— but he did not unify these disparate ele
ments. The first three are so slightly integrated into
what appears to be the main action that they could be
eliminated without loss. The playwright's failure to build
these separate actions and situations to an inevitable
climax weakens the play. Williams chose to employ three
lines of action. But the two subordinate lines (one
involving Val and Sandra, and one involving Val and Vee)
have no relation to the main climax, for they serve only to
illustrate Val's sexual attractiveness. And the principal
line of action, one involving Val and Myra, depends nearly
as much on coincidence as it does on related causal events
for its climax. Williams was aware of the structural de
fects in the play, for he afterwards acknowledged that his
lack of experience in dramaturgy was partially responsible
for the failure of Battle of Angels.^ When he prepared the
play for publication, he reworked the script in an effort
to strengthen the weak construction. He changed the origi
nal ending by eliminating the final scene, in which the
mercantile store burned and thereby immolated all the
principal characters in a fiery purgation, and he added a
prologue and an epilogue to frame the main action. These
changes, though they do help clarify the meaning, are lit
tle more than makeshift devices substituted for sound con
struction .
The lack of unity that weakens Battle of Angels is a
recurrent flaw in Williams' plays. He can write a unified,
tightly constructed play, as A Streetcar Named Desire
shows, but later plays, such as Camino Real (195 3) and
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) written many years after Battle
of Angels, are badly marred by this same defect.
^Pharos, 1:110, Spring 1945.
19
Williams’ failure to unify the action of his first
professionally produced play is a serious flaw, for it con
fuses the meaning of the play. He compensates, partially
at least, for this fault by skillful characterization.
Much of his reputation as a dramatist rests upon his abil
ity to create vital characters. This ability has developed
considerably in the course of his career, but it is already
apparent in Battle of Angels. In this play, Myra offers
the best evidence of Williams’ skill at characterization.
At the beginning of the play Myra is an embittered woman
who is resigned to the burden of an unloved, bedridden hus
band, Her resentment is increased by emotional frustration,
a frustration that began in her youth when her aristocrat
lover left her to marry into a banking family to save his
land. Myra's acceptance of Val brings to her a sense of
release and fulfillment that creates a definite change in
her. Her suspicion and cynicism fade and she becomes a
charming, sensitive woman full of joy. During the course
of the play, Myra emerges as a character of considerable
vitality, and she is the only character that shows any
development.
Williams treats the two other principal female charac
ters somewhat cursorily. Vee, the religious mystic is
little more than a brief, Freudian case study of a woman
with an obsession for painting the apostles, one of whom
appears to her each year on Good Friday. She ultimately
20
loses her mental balance completely when the village ladies,
after pointing out that her newly finished portrait of
Christ has a remarkable likeness to Val, accuse her of in
terests other than spiritual. The corrupt aristocrat,
Sandra Whiteside, is as slight a character as Vee. She is
interesting chiefly because she appears to be a preliminary
sketch for Williams' later Southern heroines, particularly
Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Blanche, she is
an aristocrat who is conscious of the decay of her outmoded
society but who cannot adjust to the harsh reality of con
temporary society. Like Blanche, she seeks escape in sex
and alcohol; and like Blanche she is strongly attracted to
a primitive male. But these resemblances to Blanche cannot
make her a viable character. Her actions and her decisions,
like those of Vee, do not affect the play measurably. Both
characters could, indeed, be eliminated from the play with
out changing its course or its meaning.
These two characters are linked to the play's central
action chiefly by their mutual interest in the hero. Their
attitude towards Val helps to emphasize his principal trait,
a powerful and primitive sex appeal. The play suggests
that Val is a poet, a truth-seeker struggling for freedom
and expression. But he is a strange sort of poet, for he
is, on the whole, both insensitive and inarticulate, ex
pressing himself through physical action rather than in
words. At the play's end, Val, whose experiences have
21
wrought no change in him, is essentially what he was at the
beginning, a flamboyant egoist whose main concern is phys
ical satisfaction. Val is a largely unrealized character,
who is interesting more for the resemblances he bears to
later Williams' heroes, such as Stan in A Streetcar Named
Desire, and John in Summer and Smoke, than for anything
else.
The other characters in Battle of Angels are not much
individualized. They all have, however, as do the principal
characters, speech that has the unmistakable quality of real
life. Williams has an extraordinary talent for reproducing
accurately contemporary speech patterns. His characters,
major and minor, except when they are made to deliver set
lyrical pieces, nearly always speak as if they were living
people. The playwright's ear for Southern speech is par
ticularly acute, and the sound and rhythm of his Southern
dialogue contributes greatly to the authenticity of both
characters and atmosphere. In Battle of Angels Williams
displayed both his gift for incorporating authentic speech
patterns into his dialogue and a penchant for rhapsodical
set pieces. An exchange between two minor characters, who
have overheard Sandra entice Val into her.car, clearly
demonstrates Williams' ear for speech and hints at a vein
of humor that he is to exploit successfully in later plays:
Dolly: Did you evuh see such a puh-fawm-ance!
Never in all my . . ' .
22
Beulah: Bawn days? Neither did I! You see how she
looked at the boy? An' the tone of huh
voice. Corrupt? Absolutely— de-grad-ed!
Dolly: Hanks says her father got drunk one time at
the Elks an' told him that she was kicked out
of both these girls' schools. Had to send her
out East where morals don't matter. She's
got two degrees or something in lit-er-chure.
Beulah: Six degrees of fever if you ask me! (I, p. 140)
And Williams' tendency to supply his characters with
an occasional elevated speech, frequently one that is not
well-integrated into the action of the play, can be seen in
Myra's announcement of her pregnancy:
. . . we had a fig tree in the back of our yard that
never bore any fruit. We thought it never would. I'd
always pitied it so because they said it was barren.
But it surprised us one spring. I was the one that
discovered the first little fig. Oh, my God, I was
so excited. I ran into the house; I was screaming!
"Daddy, daddy, it isn't barren, it isn't barren,
daddy! The little fig tree ..." I told him, "it's
going to have figs this year!" It seemed such a mar
velous thing, it needed a big celebration, so I took out
the Christmas ornaments. Yes, little colored glass
bells and tinsel and artificial snow! And I put them
all over the fig tree, there in the middle of April,
because it was going to bear fruit . . . .Oh, darling,
haven't we any Christmas ornaments to hang on me?
(Ill, p. 223)
While such speeches are obtrusive, Williams has tried
to make them suitable to his characters by the use of
fresh simile and concrete imagery. In later plays, he is
eminently successful in this attempt. Here, the images Val
uses to describe the disappearance of his parents:
I don't know where they went. They were loose feath
ers blown around by the wind. (II, p. 70)
and the appearance of his first love:
23
An' she came out on the dogtrot an' stood there a
while with the daylight burnin' around her as bright as
heaven as far as I could see! Oh God, I remember a
bird flown out of the moss and its wings made a shadow
on her! (II, 15 P. 169)
indicate that Williams' talent for image-making was already
considerable.
Williams' excellent dialogue and his occasionally
provocative imagery enhance Battle of Angels. Unfortunate
ly, the faulty construction, the static characters, and the
confused meaning keep it from being a play of much value.
Its chief significance unquestionably lies in its relation-
ship to the later plays This first professional play pro
vides, often in rudimentary form, several of Williams'
trademarks. There is, for example, the highly theatrical
presentation--revolvers are fired haphazardly, dying men
knock rhythmically for attention, Conjure men give chilling
Choctaw cries, and the chief characters are consumed by a
fiery holocaust. There are the excesses in sex--nympho-
mania, rape,seduction--and in violence--beatings, murder,
lynching, burning, suicide. There are the familiar,
recurrent characters--the sex-ridden, escapist, Southern
lady and the primitive, sexually irresistible man. And
there are the multiple symbols, many of which have no
dramatic function. In Battle of Angels both the Conjure
^Battle of Angels was rewritten and produced again
in 1957 under a new title, Orpheus Descending.
24
man, who appears briefly as a harbinger of death, and
Val’s snakeskin jacket, a symbol of primitive sexual
energy and of the persistence of that energy, are typical
of the obtrusive symbols that mar such later plays as
Summer and Smoke and Camino Real. And finally, there are
two of Williams' favorite themes. One is a minor theme--
the need for understanding, tenderness, and fortitude
among individuals trapped by circumstance--that recurs in
nearly all of the later plays. The other--the inevitable,
destructive clash between the primitive, physical needs of
man and his modern, spiritual demands— appears again as a
major theme in A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke,
and Rose Tattoo.
This latter theme is one for which Williams borrowed
from D. H. Lawrence. Williams' debt to Lawrence, frankly
admitted, is large. In Battle of Angels, the playwright
has drawn on the novelist not only for his major theme, but
also for certain of the traits of his hero. A Williams'
poem, "Cried the Fox," dedicated to Lawrence, reveals, as
K. M. Sagar has pointed out, that it is the
. . . quality of the rebel, the outcast, the destroyer
in Lawrence which most appeals to him--a quality of
restless nervous energy devoted to making vicious, but
relatively ineffectual attacks upon society and its
4"What Mr. Williams has made of D. H. Lawrence,"
Twentieth Century, 168:143, August 1960.
25
conventions. The fox is "desperate," "frantic," "lonely,"
and "fugitive" ....
Val has most of these qualities. Williams hoped that
such traits, along with his primitive sexual force, would
make him a suitable representative of the natural man, an
ally of Lawrence's dark angel of blood-consciousness.
This allegiance makes Val the obvious target for the hos
tility of the townspeople, who by leading artificial
existences and by denying life are joined with the angel of
mental or spiritual consciousness. Some of the towns-
peoples' hostility is directed toward Sandra, who like Val
is a restless seeker after freedom, desperate, lonely,
untamed. Apparently, Williams intended to keep the pas
sions symbolized by these two characters distinct, since
Sandra's behavior is corrupt, neurotic, self-destructive,
while Val's is natural and vital. But Williams could not
maintain the distinction "between reductive, sensationalist
sexuality and true passionate desire"^ that Lawrence always
insisted upon. Sandra's unhealthy sexuality is frequently
connected with life images. The taciturn dead in Cyprus
Hill Cemetery tell her to "live!" And the more garrulous
birds, whose secret language she knows as a worshipper of
Apollo, advise her to lead an extravagant, sensual life.
Nothing in the play condemns Sandra's brand of sexuality,
5Sagar, p. 144.
26
for the only criticism she received is from the artificial,
lifeless ladies of the town.
But the other kind of sexuality, the true Laurentian
holy sexuality represented by Val, is rejected. When
Myra, whose passion appears to be genuine, offers her love
to Val, he rejects it because he sees Myra, and all women,
as a threat to his freedom. Instead of welcoming this
genuine passion, that for a Laurentian hero invariably
leads to a glorious new life, Val wants to run away. He
plans a romantic escape into the New Mexico desert where he
can evade the world of struggle, flesh, and corruption.
Thus Val, the most deliberately Laurentian of Williams1
heroes, proves a very strange sort of Laurentian man, since
he rejects life for sterile purity.
For his next play, You Touched Me!, written in 194 3 in
collaboration with Donald Windham, Williams not only took
his theme and hero from Lawrence but also borrowed his
story. Williams and Windham tried consciously to adjust
the Lawrence short story to the war-time standards of the
Broadway stage in order to achieve commercial success. The
result was an adulterate mixture that distorted the Lauren
tian concepts it contained without achieving the desired
commercial aim. You Touched Mel, completed in 1943, did
not find a producer until 1946, after the success of the
"non-commercial" The Glass Menagerie, and then, though it
27
survived for a hundred performances, it was not well-re
ceived .
The play follows the general scheme of Lawrence's
short story of the same name, but changes the time from
World War I to World War II. It retains the original con
flict between the forces of spiritual consciousness and
those of blood consciousness: the former represented by
Emmie Rockwood, a professional spinster; the latter by her
brother, a lusty, alcoholic ex-sea captain, and his son,
Hadrian, a bomber pilot. Williams and his co-author some
what obscured these Laurentian elements, however, by con
verting Hadrian into the traditional romantic hero shyly
pursuing his first love, and by stressing the farcical
aspects of the captain's alcoholism and lasciviousness.
When Hadrian comes home on leave, he strongly affects
the entire Rockwood household, which has been dominated by
the aggressive feminism of Emmie, The captain is delighted
to see his son, for whom he has a deep affection, since he
knows Hadrian will be an ally in the eternal struggle
against the puritanical Emmie. Matilda, the Captain's
daughter, is attracted to Hadrian but frightened by his
abundant vitality. And Emmie is distressed, for she senses
that Hadrian is a danger to the sterile but secure exist
ence she has created for herself and her niece. Emmie's
feeling is verified when she overhears Hadrian tell the
Captain he wants to marry Matilda, and she realizes at once
28
that she must get rid of him. She begins by trying to
bribe him into leaving, shifts to threatening the Captain
with confinement in an institute for alcoholics if he does
not send his son away, and finally locks Hadrian in a bed
room and asks the police to arrest him as an intruder.
Meanwhile, Hadrian, unmindful that he is a fearless, frank
Laurentian hero, avoids an open clash with Emmie, but in
trigues with the Captain to defeat Emmie and pleads with
Matilda for love and understanding. In the end, he does,
with the Captain's help, foil all of Emmie's schemes and
persuades Matilda to go with him to a life of fulfillment.
The melange of farce, romance, and Lawrence was
served up as a well-made play after the Scribean recipe.
Williams and Windham carefully followed the formula by
building the action within an act to a climactic point and
then dropping the curtains (though "strong curtain" hardly
applies to a play that generates so little emotion).
Moreover, they borrowed the tired devices of the "plant"—
here a garter that figures in a farcical scene involving the
Captain, the maid, and the parson--and the inner room--the
Captain's simulated ship's cabin off the living room, out
side of which Matilda and Emmie overhear Hadrian declare
his intention to marry the Captain's daughter. But despite
the use of the well-made play formula, You Touched Me! is
not well constructed. Its chief weakness, like that of its
predecessor, Battle of Angels, and certain of its successors,
29
is lack of unity. Individual scenes, frequently excel
lently constructed, do not build to an inevitable climax;
as a result, the significance of the climax is not clear.
This confusion is abetted by the failure of the authors to
fuse into a dramatic whole the diverse elements they used
to give the play wider appeal.
The authors sought to supplement plot and theme by a
set that reflected the conflict presented in the action— a
device that Williams depends upon extensively in such later
plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and
Camino Real. In You Touched Me! the set represents a prim
English living room that is intended, with proper lighting,
to suggest an atmosphere of pleasant stagnation and slow
decay. On a raised platform in one corner is the simulated
Captain's cabin that, patently, is symbolic of the outside
world of freedom and vitality that eternally struggles
against the sterility represented by the rest of the room.
The conflict symbolized by the set is also represented in
other symbols, borrowed chiefly from the original short
story. A fox and a flute, two of Lawrence's sexual symbols,
are used as contrasts to the shut-down pottery house, the
locale of the play, that stands for stagnation and repres
sion. Such symbols, suitable in themselves, appear both
incongruous1 and obtrusive because of the plot emphasis on
the romantic and the farcical.
The contrast between the natural and the artificial
suggested by the symbols is repeated in the characters,
Emmie and the parson represent sterility and artificiality;
Hadrian and the Captain stand for natural vitality and
fulfillment. All of these characters are appropriate
symbolically but almost none of them is convincing as a
person. They do not seem to be real people faced with real
problems; instead, they appear to be carefully contrived
figures designed to illustrate their authors' ideas.
The two principal female characters— Emmie and Matil-
da— are perhaps even less effective than the two chief male
characters— Hadrian and the Captain. The production notes
suggest that Emmie is to be as diverse and complex as the
mother in Sidney Howard’s The Silver Cord, but there is not
much in her speech or behavior that manifests this diver
sity. Her typical actions--battling a marauding fox, en
couraging her female spaniel to attack all males, trying to
drive off Hadrian— cannot result in a convincing character
ization, for they merely establish and then repeat traits
that make her little more than an appropriate symbol.
Matilda is both more pleasant and more passive than her
aunt. She drifts through the play without taking definite
action or making a decision until the climax. Then the lack
of preparation for her sudden decision to accompany Hadrian
makes it seem more a necessary plot change than an indica
tion of growth in character.
31
Hadrian's character is somewhat better drawn, but his
portrait is an inconsistent one. The reaction of all
women to him, and portions of his speech, suggest he is an
energetic, virile man. Yet these traits, which make him an
apt symbol of the natural force, are contradicted by many
of his actions. Neither his coy courtship of Matilda nor
his fortuitous victory over Emmie is in keeping with his
reputed energetic virility or forthright manliness. Hadrian
is partly a traditional romantic hero, partly Lawrence's
blood-conscious man, and partly a mouthpiece for the
authors' boring preachments on war and the future; the
combination produces more confusion than character.
The last major character, Captain Rockwood, is the
most successful character in the play, for he is a blend of
human traits rather than a collection of ideal qualities.
The remnants of a personality once vigorous and independent
are still apparent even though he no longer has either the
strength or the initiative to assert himself effectively.
He can, for example, promise with much salty bluster and
bravado to aid Hadrian against Emmie, but when he is face
to face with his sister his courage evaporates. These
weaknesses, however, do most to create the impression that
the Captain is a real-life person.
The Captain's characterization is enhanced by slightly
risque, ungrammatical language that is suited to his per
sonality, and expresses well his individuality. Neither
32
his speech nor the speech of the other characters, however,
is much like the language Williams used for Battle of
Angels and developed fully for later plays. Only two
things in the dialogue of You Touched Me! are reminiscent of
the language of Williams' other plays: one is the touch of
humor in the Captain's talk of a porpoise that fell in love
with him while he was adrift in a raft in mid-ocean; the
other is the use of ornate set pieces that are not well-
integrated with the play.
While-the language of You Touched Me! does not have
Williams' characteristic style, certain elements in the
play are reminiscent of his other plays. It uses, for
example, at least one character, Hadrian, who is related to
such Williams' heroes as Val Xavier, Stanley Kowalsky, and
John Buchanan. And it employs two themes--the need to
break through the barrier that separates one human from
another, and the conflict between the natural and the arti-
ficial--that appeared in Williams' first play and that
recur in several later plays. You Touched He! is perhaps
more reminiscent of Williams' other work in its defects
than in anything else. Like Battle of Angels, Camino Real,
and Sweet Bird of Youth, it is marred by structural flaws,
thematic obscurity, and confused characterization. The
play lacks unity because the authors failed to fuse the
elements of farce, melodrama, and romance that they em
ployed in hope of gaining commercial acceptance. And it
33
lacks clarity because the mixture of a boy-meets-girl for
mula plot with the symbolic conflict taken from D. H.
Lawrence's story results in confusion, both in theme and
character.
The production of You Touched He! in 19H6 was a dis
appointment to those who had seen The Glass Menagerie a
year earlier. Williams' second play as a professional
dramatist did nothing to enhance his reputation. It gave
no indication that his talent or skill was developing. And
it revealed little new about his methods, techniques, or
aims except a willingness to adjust his work to any standard
that promised commercial success.
CHAPTER III
THE GLASS MENAGERIE
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
SUMMER AND SMOKE
Just over four years after his first professional
production ran less than a week in Boston, Williams' second
production began a long, popular run on Broadway. The new
play, The Glass Menagerie, was a critical success, as well
as a popular one, for most of the critics gave it highly
laudatory notices. They described it, for example, as
"the best play in a decade" and as "a new advance in the
American theatre." In the interim between the production
of Battle of Angels and that of The Glass Menagerie, Wil
liams had worked hard under difficult circumstances to
develop his talent. In addition to the two full-length
plays--You Touched Me! and The Glass Menagerie--he had
written several one-act plays, most of them published in
late 1945 in a collection titled 2 7 Wagons Full of Cotton.
With The Glass Menagerie, Williams' career as a dram
atist of importance in the American theatre began. This
play marked another sort of beginning, too, for it appears
34
35
in retrospect to be the first of a related series of three
plays. The plays in this trilogy, which includes A Street
car Named Desire, and Summer Smoke, though superficially
quite different, all use the same major theme and all focus
on a neurotic Southern belle whose devotion to the past
keeps her from adjusting to the twentieth century world.
The heroines of these plays--Amanda, Blanche, and Alma--have
much in common; so much, indeed, that they, along with
Cassandra of Battle of Angels, have been taken as the same
person at different stages of life.^ But whether they are
regarded as one woman at different periods or as several
women representative of a familiar type--and the evidence
is as good one way as the other--these ladies, particularly
Amanda and Blanche, are perhaps Williams’ best realized
characters, and they rank among the most successful hero
ines created for American drama.
Their portraits demonstrate not only Williams’ skill
at characterization but also his insight into one of the
persistent problems of the South. All of these women are
products of the artificial society created by Southern
aristocrats after the Civil War— a society of false values
and double standards, the pernicious influence of which
still persists. All of these women have been raised to
believe that they are ladies of rare gentility and purity,
■^-Robert E. Jones, ’’Tennessee Williams' Early Hero
ines,” Modern Drama, 1:212, December 1959.
destined to be cherished and protected by an adoring,
romantic husband. When the society that fostered and
shielded such women fell into decay, they continued to
adhere to its outmoded standards. They cling to the image
of themselves as exalted ladies no matter how sordid their
experiences or squalid their circumstances. All of them
insist, as virtuous ladies should according to the code,
that the physical side of life is repulsive, but they all,
with the exception of Amanda, have strong, even nymphomanic
sexual desires to which they eventually surrender. This
surrender is an indication of both emotional immaturity and
desperate loneliness, for through promiscuous sexual en
counters these women strive for acceptance from a world to
which they cannot belong and escape from the death and
decay with which their own declining society has surrounded
them. But since promiscuity inevitably fails to win them
acceptance or to give them more than momentary escape, they
are forced to try to ignore both the harsh present and the
frightening aspects of the past by retreating into an
imaginary romantic past, a past filled with courtly gentle
men callers, moonlit lakes, and poignant beauty.
The trilogy that so vividly exposes the real-life
dilemmas of Southern aristocratic womanhood begins with a
non-realistic play, The Glass Menagerie, that depends heav
ily on atmosphere, music, and mood for its effectiveness.
Williams stressed the non-realistic quality by employing
one of drama’s oldest conventions— the narrator. This
device has a dual function here, for the narrator becomes a
principal character in the play as he relives in memory the
role he once played in certain crucial episodes in the life
of his family during the depression of the thirties. These
memory episodes focus on the efforts of his mother, Amanda
Wingfield, to secure the future of his sister, Laura.
Amanda's task is difficult for several reasons. For one,
she has neither a husband nor money to help her. The hus-
band--"a telephone man who fell in love with long dis-
o
tances" --has long ago deserted her, and the family sub
sists on the tiny salary that Tom, the narrator-son, earns
in a shoe factory. For another, Laura is an abnormally
shy, crippled girl who continually takes refuge from the
world in her collection of glass animals and in the old
phonograph records left behind by her father. Finally,
Amanda's own adjustment to the realities of her life is too
unstable to ever permit her to solve her daughter's prob
lems effectively. Because she was raised in the artificial
society of the aristocratic South, Amanda is ill-equipped
to cope with the facts of her poverty-ridden life in a St.
Louis slum. She compensates herself for the unpleasantness
of the present by retreating into the illusory world of her
^The Glass Menagerie (New Haven, Connecticut, 1945),
p. 5.
38
romantic youth--a world in which she attended cotillion
balls, carried armfuls of yellow jonquils, and "received
seventeen gentleman callers on a Sunday afternoon" (Part I,
1, p. 8) .
Her final plan for Laura's future— to procure a gentle
man caller who will be induced to marry the girl--accords
with Amanda's outmoded social code but it is not, in the
circumstances, feasible. When Tom does produce a gentleman
caller for Laura, as a final gesture before he runs away
from the family, the results are disastrous. At the climax,
the gentleman caller, whose affability and kindness have
temporarily brought Laura out of herself, announces that he
is engaged. His announcement confirms Laura's spinsterhood
and dashes Amanda's unrealistic but ardent hopes.
These are minor disasters, but by wry wit, vivid
characterization, and clever construction, Williams not
only keeps them from being mawkish but gives them some
human significance. The improvement in Williams' technical
skill since Battle of Angels is most evident in his con
struction. For The Glass Menagerie, he departs from the
conventional three-act form he had used earlier and develops
an episodic structure of seven scenes, joined and framed by
*
a narrator. The narrator is used to establish mood rather
than to present exposition, for the principal exposition
emerges in the first two scenes of the play proper. And
this narrator serves, too, as an obvious and undisguised
39
transitional device for linking episodes.
Williams makes his important transitions more subtly,
however, by cutting scenes at the point of maximum tension,
and then projecting another action, thus holding in abey
ance for the moment the principal action while subordinate
lines of action are introduced. At the end of scene two,
for example, when Amanda makes the all-important decision
to find a husband for Laura, Williams cuts this major line
of action just after the decision and shifts to an emotional
quarrel between Tom and Amanda. This shift in the action
introduces new elements; the subplot of Tom's efforts to
break with his present life, and the subsequent conflict of
wills between Tom and his mother. This subordinate action
is linked directly to the principal action because it
results in Tom's promise to produce a gentleman caller be
fore he runs off.
The Glass Menagerie is unified--a quality noticeably
lacking in the earlier plays--by concentration on the
conscious aim of getting a husband for Laura. The develop
ment of the action leads inevitably to the moment when this
aim has the greatest opportunity for success because the
desires and conflicts of all the characters are made sub
ordinate to the major goal. Despite the evidence of Wil
liams' skill in dramaturgy, the soundness of the play's
construction was questioned by critics who objected to the
abruptness of the ending.
But this sudden ending is not a flaw. Williams has
carefully led his audience to anticipate a scene in which
the success or failure of his characters' plans will be
faced. The arrival of the gentleman caller satisfies this
anticipation and Amanda's plan appears to be on the verge of
success. This apparent success is short-lived, however,
because at the end of the scene the caller reveals that he
is already engaged. This revelation, as well as the reac
tion of Amanda and Laura to it, form the climax. Williams
chose to bring the play to a quick end by telescoping the
obligatory scene and the climax. The audience can accept
without difficulty the apparent incongruity of joining
climax to obligatory scene, however, for it has been care
fully prepared for the results of the visit. Because of
such preparation, the audience knows that another test of
the possibilities in the play would lead inevitably to an
equally disastrous conclusion. The truncated ending is not
a flaw, but a deliberate and feasible part of Williams'
design.
Williams planned for his construction to be supported
directly by a realistic set, for he relied on the visual
data conveyed by a shabby apartment and by the squalid
alleyway adjacent to help establish the social and economic
position of the Wingfield family. The oppressive, dingy
realism of the set created by Jo Meilziner, who has de
signed the sets for all of Williams' prize-winning plays,
41
not only presented part of the desired exposition but also
made plausible the necessity for the illusions by which
Amanda and Laura sustain themselves. In contrast to the
realistic set was the lighting, also by Meilziner, intended
to create a non-realistic atmosphere. The stage was kept
dim with shafts of light focused on selected areas of
action, frequently in contradiction to what is the apparent
center of interest. The atmosphere suggested by the light
ing was enhanced by a single, recurring tune that gave
emotional stress to certain scenes, particularly those in
which Laura figures. This tune, played by violins in the
wings, is described by Williams as:
. . . circus music, not when you are on the grounds
or in the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when
you are at some distance and very likely thinking of
something else . . . it is the lightest, most deli
cate music in the world and perhaps the saddest.3
Originally, Williams intended to supplement the set,
lighting, and music with a series of images or titles to
be projected on a portion of a wall of the set by magic-
lantern slides. He proposed by this device to accent
important points or values in each scene. Thus, in the
opening scene when Amanda glowingly recalls the glories of
her faded youth, the screen legend would read "ou sont les
neiges!" And when Laura describes her one-sided romance in
high school, the image of the high school hero bearing a
^The Glass Menagerie, p. xi.
42
silver cup would appear. Fortunately, these slides were
omitted from the play, which requires the utmost simplicity
to be effective, in its stage version.
While Williams reluctantly agreed to eliminate the
magic lantern slides, he insisted, justifiably, on retain
ing the elaborate symbolism of his original script. The
multiple symbols he used are obvious but not, as in the
earlier plays, obtrusive. Here, each of the characters is
symbolic. Laura, for instance, represents those excessively
sensitive persons in modern society who can never adjust to
the hard demands of contemporary life. Amanda is, of
course, the Southern aristocrat alienated from twentieth
century society by adherence to the artificial standards of
the moribund Southern society. And Tom stands for the
artist-adventurer, vaguely related to Lawrence's natural
man, who seeks freedom from artificial restraints in order
to search for truth. The symbolism of each of these char
acters is clarified and supported by other suitable sym
bols. Thus, Tom's desire for escape and adventure is sug
gested by his speeches on the hunting and fighting instinct
in man, by his incessant movie-going, his heavy drinking,
and by his acquisition of a seaman's union card. His sis
ter's crippled leg symbolizes the inevitable maiming any
sensitive person must suffer by exposure to a world unwill
ing to allow for sensitivity. And Laura's remoteness from
reality is emphasized by the imaginary blue roses she is
43
likened to, as well as by the glass unicorn that is her
favorite in the glass menagerie, itself a symbol of delicacy
and fragility. The mother's role is associated with candle
light, silver moons, and colored paper lanterns--all symbols
of romantic illusion and escape from reality, and all sym
bols that recur frequently in Williams' plays.
The symbolic function of the characters, though it is
important, does not diminish their plausibility as human
beings. Williams was aware that the effectiveness of the
play depended largely on the audience's acceptance of his
characters as real, if ordinary, people. And his talent
for characterization enabled him to make them, particularly
Amanda and Tom, seem living persons. The least vital and
interesting of the characters is the Gentleman Caller, Jim
O'Connor, He is essential in the play since he is the un
witting instrument of defeat for Amanda, but his character
ization is superficial; he is a type, described in the
production notes as "a nice, ordinary, young man," not an
individual.
Laura, who has secretly admired Jim since her high
school days, is both more individualized and more appealing
than her Gentleman Caller. She is not, however, a vital
character because she is almost entirely removed from
reality. She drifts in a dream world bound by the music
from her father's phonograph records and by her beloved
glass collections. She makes few decisions, engages in
44
little action, expresses no opinion. She can have no clash
of wills with others because she has no will to exert,
Laura is stirred to action only when she is forced into
direct contact with the outside world, and then her action
is the negative one of retreat deeper into her dream world.
She is, at best, a static and undeveloped character, who
for one brief poignant moment is charmed out of her shyness
into being a normal, eager girl. The pathos in the plight
of a crippled girl whose one opportunity for a normal life
is lost appeals strongly to the sentimental. But because
her character is nebulous, her fate cannot provoke either
serious interest.or profound emotions.
Tom Wingfield is a far better realized character than
his sister. Unlike Laura, he is capable of decision, of
taking action, of making a conscious effort to alter his
circumstances. Tom is plausible as a person not only be
cause he exerts his will but also because the reasons for
his behavior are easily accepted by the audience. His
desires to be a poet, to live a full, adventurous life, to
be free of the dead weight of the family are all motives
that are convincing to most audiences. Tom's actions and
speech establish him as a living person, but they do not
suggest any internal growth or change. His attitudes and
his behavior toward his family and job are unchanged through
out the play. At the end he is what he was at the begin- "
ning--a discontented young man who, despite a sentimental
i+5
attachment to his family, is waiting for an opportune
moment to run away,
Tom is sufficiently attractive to rival Amanda as the
center of interest, but basically he is not as appealing
or as complete a character as she is. Amanda is, of course,
Williams' first full portrait of his aristocratic Southern
lady. Like her counterparts, she cannot adjust to the
often unpleasant realities of twentieth century life and
she seeks refuge in her illusions of the mythically cavalier
South. Despite this dependence on illusion, however,
Amanda is capable, by far the most capable of Williams'
Southern heroines, of effective, concrete action. She
knows that she is in conflict with a hostile environment
and she struggles valiantly to control it. The unrealistic
thinking that presages her ultimate defeat does not keep
her from being aware of changes in her surroundings nor
does it keep her from altering her plans to meet such
changes. Indeed, all of the elements which make up
Amanda's character, particularly her speech and manners,
tend to promote the impression that she is a real person
born out of a human tradition rather than a fictional
character created in the author's imagination,4 This im
pression gives Amanda a three-dimensional quality that is
4Stark Young, "The Glass Menagerie," New Republic,
April 16, 1945, p, 505,
46
somewhat lacking in the other characters. The sympathy of
the audience centers on her because it can feel that she is
a real person fighting courageously against overwhelming
odds.
The vitality of Amanda, and that of the other charac
ters in the play, stems largely from Williams' ability to
reproduce accurately the speech of real life. His use of
the rhythms, the phrasing, and frequently the cliches of
ordinary speech to heighten the illusion of reality in his
characters may prove to be one of his chief contributions
to American drama. He is very much aware, however, that
language in the drama should do more than help delineate
character. And he tries to use his language to give greater
profundity and scope to the experiences presented by his
people and his situations. Unfortunately, he frequently,
particularly in the early plays, uses his most intense
language undramatically.
His tendency to use set pieces that are not well-
integrated into the action of the play is less apparent in
The Glass Menagerie than it is in either of the earlier
plays. It has not, however, entirely disappeared, for it
can still be seen in certain of Tom's speeches— at one
point his simple statement that he is tired of the movies
is expanded into a long commentary on the American way of
life (II, 1, p. 76). And it appears in such speeches of
47
the narrator as the one with which he prefaces the fifth
episode:
Adventure and change were imminent in this year.
They were waiting around the corner for all these
skids. Suspended in the mist over Berchtesgaden,
caught in the folds of Chamberlain's umbrella--In
Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only
hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and
movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chan
delier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive
rainbows . . . All the world was waiting for bom
bardments! (II, 4, p. 47)
The narrator device provided Williams with a legitimate
opportunity to employ his set pieces to give his play
greater significance, to universalize its meaning. But the
pretentious, inflated language of such speeches fails to
achieve these aims because it calls attention to itself and
to its author.
In the play proper Williams uses language far more
effectively. In the speeches assigned to the Gentleman
Caller, for example, Williams displays a talent for manipu
lating the cliche's of contemporary speech for both revela
tion of character and for humor. The cliche-studded speech
of the Gentleman Caller not only reveals him, as does the
speech of his real-life counterparts, but also comes close
to making him a burlesque of the "nice, ordinary young
man."
Williams' skill at creating dialogue that both reveals
and individualizes his characters is most fully evinced in
the speech of Amanda. Her conversation has the extravagant
48
flavor that characterizes the Southern dialect, but her
expression is individual. The illusion that she is not a
Southern type but a Southern woman, full of life and charm,
is suggested by what she says as much as by the way she
says it. She is at her best when she overwhelms the Gentle
man Caller with her Southern vivacity:
. . .we're having a very light supper. I think
light things are better fo' this time of year. The
same as light clothes are. Light clothes an' light
food are what warm weather calls for'. You know our
blood gets so thick during the winter— it takes a
while fo' us to adjust ou-selves— when the season
changes— .
It come so quick this year. I wasn't prepared.
All of a sudden--heavens! Already summer!— I ran to
the trunk an' pulled out this light dress--terribly
old!— Historical almost! But feels so— so good an'
co-ol, y'know . . . (II, 6, p. 79)
The fresh, living speech that Williams created for
Amanda contributes much to the vitality of her character,
and thereby to the effectiveness of the play. Unless the
audience accepts Amanda as a living person the play loses
both impact and meaning. The play's structure, which by
its forward movement and concentration on a single aim
builds up the impression that disaster is inevitable, does
strongly support the theme. But this theme is made meaning
ful chiefly by the vitality of Amanda’s character. Her
courageous struggle against a harsh environment elicits the
audience's sympathy even though her unrealistic attitudes,
her almost total dependence on illusion, directly cause her
pathetic defeat.
49
The play's major theme— that dependence on illusion
to make life bearable inevitably leads to disaster--is thus
made concrete in Amanda's struggle and defeat. This domi
nant theme is linked to two secondary themes:man's inability
to escape the past; and the eternal frustration-producing
conflict between the natural, primitive needs of man and the
artificial, civilized demands of modern society. The first
of these minor themes is stressed in the speech with which
Tom, as narrator, concludes the play; here he reveals that
he cannot find what he seeks in life because he is forever
haunted by the memory of his sister. And this theme is im
plicit in Amanda's constant substitution of a romanticized
past for the present. The second minor theme is the
Laurentian concept that Williams adapted as a major theme
in his two earlier plays and used again in some form for
most of his later plays. In The Glass Menagerie this motif
emerges principally in the conflict between Tom and Amanda
over the proper behavior and legitimate needs of man.
The second subordinate theme is necessarily not much
developed or emphasized, for if it were it would tend to
contradict the first two themes, which stress the inevita
bility of disaster for the Amandas of the world. But
though the play does insist on the certain defeat of these
people, it does not suggest that they are without value.
Amanda is frequently foolish and garrulous, yet she has
inner dignity, and considerable courage and endurance in the
50
face of difficulty. Moreover, she has genuine compassion
and tender concern for others. These qualities are valuable
in human life and The Glass Menagerie has a greater claim to
universality because it presents them effectively.
The effectiveness of this presentation depends heavily
on the mood of sympathy that Amanda's plight evokes in the
audience. This mood, in company with the portrait of rela
tively unimportant people engaged in essentially trivial
events, led some critics to see a strong resemblance be
tween Williams' work and that of Chekov. Williams has
publicly acknowledged that he is indebted to Chekov.^ And
there are superficial likenesses in the work of the two
playwrights. Williams' method for creating mood, however,
is not Chekov's. He relies on the impact of the obvious
suffering of his characters and on his own patent compas
sion for them to arouse a mood of tenderness and sympathy
in his audiences. And he plays upon the sensibilities of
his audiences with theatrical effects— special sets, light
ing, and music. The mood thus evoked may be effective,
but it is not the mood of Chekov's plays. The Russian,
working more subtly, depended on a combination of the hap
less efforts of his characters to control their environment
and their awareness of the futility of their efforts to
provoke his special mood. Through the sad insights of
^Life, February 16, 1948, p. 118.
51
these characters, Chekov's audiences are able to perceive
for a brief moment the reality of the world outside the
theatre. Williams' characters, who have an excess of feel
ing but little insight, can rarely suggest more than the
particular.
The Glass Menagerie is not a truly Chekovian play but
it has enough of the flavor of one to make the Broadway
producers to whom it was first offered sceptical about its
chances for commercial success. The reception it received
apparently surprised everyone concerned in its production.
Since Williams was an unknown writer, much of the credit
for the play's success was given to its director and de-
C
signer. Undoubtedly, these two deserve considerable
credit for an excellent production. The success of the
play depended, however, less upon production than it did on
skillful construction, fresh, living speech, and excellent
characterization. Unfortunately, the arresting effects
produced by those elements are somewhat vitiated by senti
mentality and pretense. The play remains one of Williams'
best, however, and is still highly effective in the theatre.
Its popularity during its long Broadway run can be ex
plained partly by its intrinsic merit and partly by the
state of American drama for nearly a decade prior to the
appearance of The Glass Menagerie. The play captured the
^Nathan, p. 326,
52
interest of many theatre-goers because it seemed to offer,
as I have pointed out earlier, many desirable qualities so
conspicuously absent from the drama in the late thirties
and early forties. Not least among these qualities is the
theatricality suggested by Williams' concern with music,
color, lighting, and special stage effects. He is a play
wright who thinks and writes in theatrical terms. Much of
the credit for the excellence of many of his productions
belongs to him because he provides unusual opportunities
for directors and designers to display their talents to
advantage. Williams' bent for theatrical ingenuity and
stylization can, when it is controlled, as it was in The
Glass Menagerie and in A Streetcar Named Desire--produce
remarkably imaginative and valuable dramatic effects.
When it is not controlled, as in Camino Real and Sweet
Bird of Youth, it becomes mere virtuosity, sometimes excit
ing, rarely meaningful.
The second play in Williams' Southern trilogy— A
Streetcar Named Desire--proved to be far more theatrical
and far more successful than the first one. This triple
prize winner played to SRO houses for two seasons on
Broadway and then was taken abroad, where it was equally
well received.
In this p la y , the Southern belle is Blanche Dubois,
one of the last of a prominent Delta family that has long
since, along with its once impressive plantation, Belle
Reve, declined into obscurity. Like Amanda, Blanche is a
victim of the aristocratic Southern society whose educa
tion in a tradition remote from reality did not equip her
to carry the burdens life thrusts upon her. The shock of
having her marriage shattered by her husband's perversion
and suicide, and the strain of trying to maintain the dis
integrating family plantation by herself causes Blanche to
seek refuge from reality in romantic illusions and escape
from loneliness in alcohol and promiscuity. When these
activities cause her ouster from the teaching post she has
taken to preserve a shabby gentility, and from her home
town, she goes to her sister, Stella, for protection. But
she cannot find shelter in Stella's New Orleans home, for
there her airs of superiority and refinement immediately
antagonize Stanley, her sister's brutal, virile husband.
Stanley, sensing a threat to his marriage in Blanche, un
consciously determines to destroy her. Under the pressures
exerted by Stanley and by the gross realities of life in her
sister's squalid two-room French Quarter flat, Blanche's
mind steadily disintegrates. She tries to save herself by
persuading Mitch, the gentlest of Stanley's friends, to
marry her. Stanley thwarts this effort, however, then com
pletes Blanche's demoralization, first by relentlessly
exposing all of her illusions, lies, and petty conceits, and
then by raping her. This experience culminates a disastrous
54
combination of previous experiences. Blanche's mental
deterioration seems complete; she declines into a psychotic
state in which she cannot distinguish reality from illu
sion. When she is finally led away by the doctor summoned
by Stella, who chooses to commit her to an asylum rather
than believe her story of the rape, Blanche delicately
flirts with him imagining that he is a gentleman caller
come to her rescue.
This study of a mind in the process of disintegration
needed a form that would permit the rapid presentation of
a variety of activities and emotions to be effective on
stage. To meet this requirement, Williams worked out a
well-constructed episodic structure consisting of eleven
scenes. Streetcar, with its rapid progression, strong sus
pense, and excellent unity, is probably the best constructed
of Williams' plays. His treatment of the exposition is
especially skillful, for he has made it one of the chief
instruments in the destruction of the heroine. It is
Stanley's discovery, and subsequent revelation, of the truth
about Blanche's lurid past that strips her of the practical
illusions she had created, and at the same time destroys
her hope for the future.
The deftness with which Williams unified the divided
elements in the play demonstrates convincingly his steadily
increasing skill as a dramatist. Each of the eleven
scenes contributes directly to the heroine's disintegration,
55
and this concentration on a central aim helps to unify the
play. As the episodes unfold, two lines of action become
apparent. These actions--Stanley's scheme to get rid of
Blanche, and Blanche’s plan to save herself by marrying
Mitch— develop separately, but they are linked by their
subordination to the central aim. Though some of the sus
pense is created by the efforts of the characters to real
ize these plans, its primary source is the conflict between
Stanley and Blanche, for anticipation of a decisive clash
between these two sustains audience interest at high pitch.
When this clash between Blanche and Stanley does come, its
violent emotional impact makes it appear to be the climax.
This rape scene, which shows only the immediate results of
the conflict, is not the climax; however, it is the obliga
tory scene. The true climax is in Blanche's scene with the
doctor, for here the final result of all the actions, past
and present, in the heroine's life, is presented.
Williams complemented his excellent construction with
a variety of stage devices that show his theatricalness
at it most effective. To establish the nervous tempo and
spirit of life in the French Quarter, he asked for train
whistles, street cries, cat screeches, and the sensual
rhythm of blues piano and hot trumpets. And he used another
sort of music, the polka tune, "Varsouviana," which is
heard only by Blanche, and by her with recurring frequency
as she retreats from reality, to suggest the progressive
deterioration of the heroine's mind. In addition to these
sound devices, Williams sought to increase the tensions and
emotional impact through special lighting and color ef
fects. In the rape scene, for example, lurid shadows and
reflections that magnify Blanche’s fears appear on the
walls around her. And in the poker-party scene, Stanley
and his friends, dressed in bright blues, purples, reds,
and greens, play their game under a strong white light on
a brilliant yellow cloth. The juxtaposition of these raw
colors with the delicate pinks and blues that the heroine
affects stresses the difference between Blanche and the
others. All of these devices have a dual function. They
help create the morbid, febrile atmosphere that makes
Blanche's rapid disintegration plausible, and they symbol
ize the external pressures in her life that are partially
responsible for her collapse.
The setting that Williams visualized for his play--
one that Jo Meilziner's design realized brilliantly— makes
a similar contribution. The ugliness of the interior of
Kowalski's dilapidated flat and the crude realism of the
exterior surroundings are important in Blanche's decline.
The pressures of close-packed humanity are emphasized by
the transparent walls, which permit the simultaneous pre
sentation of actions peculiar to the play and actions
typical of life in the French Quarter. In this environment
Blanche can fulfill her desire for beauty and refinement
57
only by self-generated illusions, and as the tensions pro
duced by the environment increase she gradually retreats
into a world that is completely illusory. As theatrically
effective as the set and stage devices are, Williams did
not intend them to be mere claptraps, for he hoped through
them to enlarge the meaning of his play.
With the same aim in mind, he enveloped the action and
characters of Streetcar with numerous symbols. As in The
Glass Menagerie, all of the characters are symbolic, and
each of them is surrounded by additional, suitable symbols.
The symbolism is clearest and most appropriate in the two
central characters: Blanche, who represents both the
decadent, illusion-haunted aristocrat and the spiritual
and intellectual values in civilization; and Stanley, who
stands for both the primitive, natural man and the vulgar
destructiveness of modern materialism. Blanche's deca
dence and her evasion of reality are suggested by her over-
indulgence in sex and alcohol, by her extravagant lies, and
by her covering the light bulb with a colored paper lan
tern. And Stanley's virility and destructiveness are
apparent in his poker games, in his tossing a package of
bloody meat to Stella, and in his smashing of radios and
dishes. Almost every action and object--from the colored
lights that symbolize sexual satisfaction to the bathroom
that serves Blanche as a retreat while it reflects the
vulgarity and earthiness of Stanley— has a symbolic func-
58
tion. Most of these symbols are so completely absorbed
into the action that the audience need not be aware of
their significance to experience the full impact of the
play. And most of them serve a dual purpose, since they
not only illustrate the themes but also help to reveal
character.
The latter function of the symbols is perhaps more
important than the former because the theme of the play is
made concrete principally through the characters. These
characters, especially Blanche, must unmistakably be real
persons if the audience is to understand and accept the
play, Williams did not attempt to individualize his minor
characters since he intended them to be simply types,
realistic representatives of the French Quarter, whose
lustiness and vulgarity emphasize the opposite elements in
Blanche. He did, however, strive to create the illusion
that his four major characters— Stella, Mitch, Stanley, and
Blanche--were living people.
Among the principal players, Stella is the least in
teresting. She is important, for her only decisions—
letting Blanche stay in the flat, at the outset; and send
ing her to a mental institution at the end--obviously affect
the movement of the play. But Stella does not so much make
these decisions as merely accept them, for she is far too
passive to reach such decisions on her own. She leads a
contented existence, full of physical pleasure, free of
59
frustration, a life in which she feels no need to exert her
will to overcome difficulties because she is not aware of
any. The portrait of the second major character, Mitch, is
both more interesting and more convincing. As a person he
is no more attractive than Stella, for he seems to be sim
ply a nice, naive, young man with a mother fixation. But
he can arouse the audience's interest, as Stella cannot,
because he tries to alter the conditions of his life. Like
Stella, he is important in the play for two cecisions--his
decision to marry Blanche, and his refusal to go through with
the marriage plan. Unlike Stella, however, Mitch, who is
neither content or passive, actively makes those decisions.
He is plausible as a person because he tries to work out
his conflicts and because he is capable of action and
decision. Mitch's character does not develop, but it is
sufficiently revealed to establish him as a real life ver
sion of Williams' usual "nice young man."
The third of the principals, Stanley, is a far more
vivid and impelling person than either Mitch or Stella.
His character is a provocative composite of objectionable
traits and attitudes. He is overtly and nastily mascu
line; "he sizes women up in a glance, with sexual classi
fications, crude images flashing into his mind ..."
(Sc. 1, p. 28). He is aggressive and selfish; his speech
is crude and his manners vulgar. He curses his friends,
smashes the furniture, beats his wife. His apparently
60
unlimited capacity for destructive action and ruthless de
cisions is extremely important in the play, for it not only
helps explain Blanche's rapid disintegration but also gives
the play much of its emotional impact. Stanley's actions
and decisions do not, however, lead to a growth in him. His
character remains the same from beginning to end. Yet this
lack of development does not keep Stanley from being a
powerful, arresting character. He cannot evoke the sym
pathy of audiences as Blanche can, but he can stir them
profoundly by arousing their hostilities. The tremendous
antagonism that Stanley provokes in audiences is a tribute
to Williams' talent for incorporating accurately observed
details into his characterizations. Stanley comes to life
for audiences because he is someone they know, and usually
detest, outside the theatre.
The remaining character, Blanche, is the central and
most important figure in the play. Her character determines
the sequence of events that makes up her story, and this
story has significance beyond the immediate only to the
extent that her character is an accurate reflection of
life. If the play is to be effective, Blanche, even more
than the other characters, must be accepted as a real per
son by the audience. And Williams succeeded brilliantly
in. creating the illusion that she is alive. She is able
to move audiences, just as a living woman might, to both
sympathy and animosity. She is plausible as a person
61
because her speech, her manner, and her attitudes suggest
that she has been born of a human tradition. Blanche is,
in fact, perhaps the most vital character Williams has
created. She is, of course, reminiscent of Williams' other
Southern heroines. None of the others, however, is as well
drawn as Blanche. Their characterizations are largely ex
ternal. Despite experiences that invariably result in
defeat or death, they show little internal change. Blanche,
on the other hand, changes radically as a result of her
experiences. This change, the steady deterioration of her
mind constitutes the core of Streetcar. Indeed, the play
might be considered a record of Blanche's interior life,
an accurate and moving depiction of the process of her men
tal decline.
In Streetcar, as in his previous plays, Williams used
contemporary speech patterns to enhance his characteriza
tion. Such speech patterns had become, in fact, one of the
dominant characteristics of his dialogue. In Streetcar
Williams used them even more effectively than he had pre
viously, for he managed to create out of these patterns
distinctive speech for each of his characters, speech that
reveals background and personality, speech that makes each
of them individual. The differences in the characters are
stressed by the contrasts in their language. The disparity
between the attitudes and values of Blanche and Stanley
show in their speech. Blanche's speech is careful, her
62
vocabulary extensive, her expression fresh; while Stanley's
speech is careless, limited, dependent on cliche'". The
latter is not, however, entirely inarticulate. In Stan
ley's speeches, Williams frequently displayed his talent
for using cliche^ and slang forcefully and humorously:
, . . I've got the dope on your big sister, Stella.
You know she's been feeding us a pack of lies here?
, . . But now the cat's out of the bag! . , . Sister
Blanche is no lily! Ha-ha! Some lily she is . , ,
Everybody in the town of Laurel knows all about her.
She is as famous in Laurel as if she was the President
of the United States, only she is not respected by any
party! , , . She didn't resign temporarily from the
high school because of her nerves! No, siree, Bob!
She didn't. They kicked her out of that high school
before the spring term ended— I'd like to have seen
her trying to squirm out of that one! But they had
her on the hook good and proper that time and she knew
the jig was all up! They told her she better move on
to some fresh territory. Yep, it was practickiy a
town ordinance passed against her! (Scene 7, p. 113 ff)
A second characteristic that marked the language of
all of Williams' earlier long plays--the set piece that is
not well integrated--disappears in Streetcar. In Blanche,
Williams had created a character whose personality and
background enable her to use high-flown language congruous
ly, a person who can deliver the intense and lyrical
speeches Williams is fond of. The playwright provides one
such speech for Blanche when she describes Stanley to
Stella (4, p. 81-82) and another when she tells Stella of
the loss of Belle Reve:
. . , I took the blows in my face and my body!
All of those deaths! The long parade to the grave
yard! Father, mother, Margaret, that dreadful way!
So big with it, it couldn't be put in a coffin! But
63
had to be burned like rubbish! You just came home
in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are
pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but
deaths— not always. Sometimes their breathing is
hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they
even cry out to you, "Don't let me go!" Even the
old sometimes say, "Don't let me go!" as if you were
able to stop them' But funerals are quiet, with
pretty flowers. And, oh, what gorgeous boxes they
pack them away in . . . . (Scene 1, p. 25)
Such speeches are not only appropriate to the speaker
but also fully integrated into the play.
Williams altered his language for Streetcar, but the
themes which this language helps to develop are much the
same as those of earlier plays. The major theme of The
Glass Menagerie— those who must depend on illusion to miti
gate the ugly truth of reality are inevitably betrayed into
disaster by such dependence--reappears and is made concrete
in Blanche's character and experiences. In Streetcar, how
ever, this theme becomes a minor one, related and subordi
nate to another of Williams' favorite themes--the frustra
tions of modern life result from a destructive conflict
between the natural mode of life and the artificial, be
tween flesh and spirit. Williams does more than simply
dramatize these conflicts, He tries, as did D. II. Law
rence, from whom he borrowed the theme, to organize his
material so as to offer a resolution, a reassurance that
there exists a way of life, a set of values consonant with
health and humanity. Despite the multiplicity of Freudian
elements in the play, Williams was not so much concerned
with abnormal psychology as with morality. He was not con
64
tent to offer a drama of case histories, though some crit-
n
ics insisted the play was simply a Freudian melodrama,
but wanted to deal with basic moral issues. Moreover, he
does raise these issues in the play, suggests conflicts in
such issues, and then presents two resolutions.
One is to accept Blanche as a symbol of civilized man
adrift in a society that no longer acknowledges the old
p
traditions, the true values. She is the lonely seeker
after beauty, who succumbs to brutality and evil only after
a violent struggle. Cut off from the traditions that sus
tained her, she is driven by circumstance beyond her con
trol into promiscuity and into withdrawal from reality. But
her innate dignity and her aspirations make her vastly
superior to the brutal Stanley, who compulsively seeks to
destroy Blanche and the world she represents, Blanche's
pathetic career is a warning; the play demonstrates, as
Williams is reported to have said, "that if you don't watch
out the apes will take over."
The second resolution is to accept Stanley as a repre
sentative of the life force whose victory over the sterile,
escapist Blanche insures the survival of the race, Blanche
must be defeated, for she is pernicious and corrupt. She
7
Kappo Phelan, "The Stage," Commonweal, December 19,
19^7, p. 25 4.
8
J. W. Krutch, "Modernism" in Modern Drama (Ithaca,
New York, 1953), p. TTT,
65
is not destroyed by a calculating villain, however, for
Stanley is simply the instrument which the life force uses
to perpetuate itself. Stanley is D. H. Lawrence's natural
man, a man whose virility prevails even against decadence.
Stella, presumably a member of the decayed aristocracy, is
rejuvenated when she accepts Stanley. Despite Stellats
response to Stanley, he is far from a pure Laurentian
natural man. The crudity of his sexual appetites and his
behavior sets him apart from Lawrence's heroes, who respect
the sex act as "an act of homage to the religious mystery
Q
of sex ..." Stanley is an impure mixture of splendid
virility and destructive evil. But impurities notwith
standing, Stanley is life-sustaining. Through him, life,
however gross and barbarous, does go on. The final scene
in which the focus is on Stella enfolding her baby in a
pale blue blanket, suggests that the proper resolution to
the problems raised in the play— despite the sympathy and
compassion evoked for Blanche— is the acceptance of Stanley.
The simultaneous presentation of these contradictory
resolutions has been interpreted as a deliberate and pro
vocative ambiguity, worthy of careful study.A closer
look at Blanche's character may suggest, however, that the
^Sagar, p. 150,
■^John Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times (New York,
1954), p. 350.
66
ambivalence is more like simple confusion than it is like
complex, Empsonian ambiguity. The claim of the first
resolution rests entirely on Blanche being accepted as a
symbol of the truly civilized’ man. But Blanche can more
adequately represent the man of pseudo-refinement and spur
ious culture--a nearly dominant type in modern society--
than she can the truly civilized man. She displays the
fake delicacy and affectation of the former type in her
reaction to the Kowalski apartment and to the behavior and
language of Stanley and his friends. And she demonstrates
in several ways that she has the second-rate values charac
teristic of this type. Her idea of beauty is mere pretti
ness. Her notion of a satisfying life is a Caribbean
cruise on a Texas millionaire’s yacht. And her notion of
fitting death is to die at sea with a young, handsome
ship’s doctor holding her hand. She is, in fact, inter
ested, by her own admission, only in appearances.
I don’t want realism. [Blanche tells Mitch] I
want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that
to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't
tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth, (Sc. 9,
p. 135)
The defeat of such a person may warrant compassion,
but it is scarcely tragic. Nor can her story serve as a
warning that civilization is in danger, for if she repre
sents the best in civilization, it is already too late.
Since she cannot reasonably be such a symbol, the "provoca
tive ambiguity," if one was seriously intended, is reduced
67
to little more than the author's confusion about the proper
values of civilization.
Despite this confusion, Streetcar is an extremely
effective play, particularly in the theatre where audiences,
caught up in the tense emotions engendered, by the expres-
sionistic stage devices and maintained by the anticipated
clash between Blanche and Stanley, tend to overlook any
shortcomings. The play is Williams' most successful, both
commercially and artistically.
Most of this success is due to Williams' control of
his medium. The elements of the drama--construction, lan
guage, characterization— are handled with a mature skill
that indicates that the playwright had finally achieved a
mastery over his dramatic methods. The play is an intricate
structure of delicate balances: form with content, pathos
with humor, objective reality with illusion. Working with
material that included rape, suicide, perversion, and
lunacy, Williams was able to lift his story well above the
level of the merely vulgar. It is true that the mood and
atmosphere are morbid, but the play is always more subtle
than it is sensational.
The final play in the trilogy, Summer and Smoke, is
a slighter play than either of its predecessors. It opened
in New York, after an initial production in 19 47 by Margo
Jones in her Dallas Arena theatre, in October 1947, and
6 8
closed three months later without having impressed either
critics or audiences favorably.
The central characters in Summer and Smoke are much
like those in Streetcar. The heroine, Alma, is a younger
Blanche, a sensitive, virginal girl whose out-of-date code
of genteel behavior prevents her from making a healthy ad
justment to the world in which she lives. The hero, John,
is a somewhat refined and more intelligent version of
Stanley. Whenever Miss Alma, the minister's daughter, and
Dr. John, the physician's son, meet, each tries to convert
the other to his way of life. At first, however, John can
not accept Alma's belief in spiritual values, and she
totally rejects, though she is attracted by them, both his
propositions and his insistence that life has no meaning
beyond physical satisfaction. But after the murder of
John's father by one of the young man's associates in
debauchery, both John and Alma undergo a'remarkable change.
The girl comes around to John's way of thinking and tries
to give herself to him. Unfortunately John has not only
decided that life does offer spiritual as well as physical
satisfaction, but also has decided to seek them both by
marrying a younger and prettier girl, Alma's loss is com
plete, for she had given up the solace of her ideals for
the hope of physical fulfillment, a hope denied her by the
change in John. Defeated and demoralized she surrenders
herself to a passing travelling salesman, a surrender that
69
promises to be merely the first of many.
For this tenuous version of the defeat of his Southern
heroine, Williams worked out an episodic structure consist
ing of a prologue and eleven scenes. He chose this form
because its flexibility permitted him to achieve the free
dom of movement and the rapid change of mood necessary to
create the "unbroken fluid quality" he wanted the play to
have.He used quick changes in space and mood to carry
the action easily from scene to scene, to help establish an
atmosphere of subsurface tension and feverishness and to
aid in the revelation of character. For example, the rapid
shift from an event that shows Alma in a typical action to
one that shows John's typical behavior emphasizes the dif
ferences in the two; and these marked differences tend to
reinforce the audience's initial impression of each charac
ter.
The contrasting of Alma and John not only points up
their characters but, since they are opposites, helps de
velop the play's primary theme of the eternal conflict
between flesh and spirit. The dramatic benefits these rapid
changes produce are, however, largely offset by flaws in
the rest of the construction.
The skillful craftsmanship that Williams displayed in
Streetcar is not apparent in Summer and Smoke. The latter's
1XSummer and Smoke, (New York, 19 48), p. x.
70
principal weakness is lack of a central controlling aim to
which the separate scenes and actions can be related and
so unified. Neither John nor Alma has a definite goal;
neither of them makes much conscious effort to bring about
a change in his situation. One result is a reduction in
dramatic conflict, with its concomitant diminution of sus
pense, for since the characters rarely exert their wills
such conflict is almost eliminated. This conflict is, of
course, implicit in the several symbols of flesh and spirit
but because it is not dramatized in the actions of the
characters the necessity of the climax, which should be an
outcome of this conflict, is not made clear. A second
result is that the events are merely illustrative of char
acter or of theme; they do not logically lead to subsequent
events and so to an inevitable climax.
Thus the climax is unconvincing, not because the events
or the changes in the characters are implausible, but be
cause the playwright failed to establish a clear relation
ship between the climax and the events that precede it. At
the climax Alma reveals that she now accepts the priority
of the flesh; John believes in the dominance of the spirit.
These changes seem to stem from the death of John's father.
Yet the reasons for the change in viewpoints do not neces
sarily grow out of their reactions to the murder, which
itself is not the necessary product of previous events, nor
out of the other events in the play. The necessity for the
71
change that brings about the climax is not shown. The
play's meaning is, as a result, obscure.
The faulty construction of Summer and Smoke reduces
its dramatic impact considerably. This reduction is partly
compensated for by the theatrically effective sets, light-
12
ing, and music Williams planned for the play. As for his
previous plays, he stressed colors and shifts in lighting.
He asked, for example, that the action take place against
an expanse of intense blue sky, and that the players wear
colors that would contrast strongly with this blue. He
asked that movements from one locale to another be indi
cated by shifts in lighting. In his scheme, music was to
mark changes in tempo and mood. And the setting--a single,
open set divided into three units representing a public
square by a fountain topped with a stone angel, and the
parlor of the Rectory and the doctor's office, by frag
mentary walls--was to be arranged to permit the greatest
possible freedom of movement and change in mood. Wil
liams' design was closely followed by Jo Meilziner in the
Broadway production. And the sets, lighting, and music were
as evocative as Williams had hoped, for their combined ef
fect was largely responsible for the establishment of the
mood upon which the play depends extensively for its ef
fectiveness .
^Summer and Smoke, pp. viii-x.
72
This effectiveness, already limited by faulty con
struction, is reduced by Williams' insistent reiteration of
obvious symbols. The most obtrusive symbol is the fountain
statue, Eternity, which appears in every scene. It is
most closely associated with Alma and seems to represent
her pure ideals. It does introduce a note of irony into
the play since Alma renounces her ideals at its base, but
it is not otherwise integrated into the action. The symbols
that specifically illustrate the theme— the minister's
daughter and the doctor's son, the rectory and the doctor's
office, Alma as the Spanish for soul, the anatomy chart,
the romantic landscape painting--are blended well into the
play, though their obviousness and constant repetition make
them nearly as obtrusive as the statue. Less obtrusive,
if equally obvious, are the symbols that represent Alma's
repression, frustration, and need for escape--talk of
Gothic cathedrals, and sleeping tablets with a prescription
number that Alma calls the telephone number of God. Wil
liams ' extravagance with his symbols weakens Summer and
Smoke, for the repetition of the obvious symbolism tends to
focus attention on the symbol to the detriment of the play.
While the symbolism, which is frequently one of Wil
liams' weaknesses, mars the play by being too obtrusive,
the characterization, usually one of Williams' strengths,
mars it by being too slight. The minor characters, with
the possible exception of Nellie Ewell, John's future wife,
73
are not much individualized. Williams used them princi
pally to help reveal the two principal characters. Alma's
affectations, inflated ideals, and disdain for the physical
are mirrored in the minor characters who make up her circle
of friends. John's vitality and sensuality, his vulgarity
and restless energy are reflected in the characters who
share his debaucheries. When John is with Alma's friends,
or she with his, the contrast emphasizes their conflicting
characters and thereby points up the main theme.
Of the two principals, John is the less successful.
The events of the first half of the play establish John as
a man of great vitality, physical charm, and hearty libido—
characteristics that recall Val of Battle of Angels and
Stanley of Streetcar. Like these other heroes, John seems
to have been modeled after D. H. Lawrence's natural, blood
conscious man. But he, like Val and Stan, cannot qualify
as a true Laurentian hero because his sexuality is gross
and sensational, his virility intense, self-advertising,
and potentially destructive. In the second half of the
play John reveals himself to be a puritan who feels that he
isn't decent enough to touch the pure Alma, and who wants
to compensate for his earlier debaucheries by being cas
trated (Sc. 8, p. 96)— a most un-Laurentian wish. The sud
den revelation of John's puritanical nature vitiates almost
completely the character established in the first half of
the play. His new character makes his behavior after the
74
death of his father more plausible. But neither such be
havior nor the character that it reveals is convincing
because the preceding events do not show it to be necessary
or even probable. The audience doubts the inevitability of
John's action at the climax, just as it questions the sig
nificance of some of his earlier actions. These doubts
keep the audience from accepting John as a real person; he
remains a character fabricated by the playwright to meet
the exigencies of his play,
Alma is both more consistent and more convincing than
John. Much of her behavior creates the impression that she
is a real person capable of deep emotion and beset by con
flicting desires. She does, like John, change suddenly at
the climax. She attempts to account for this change by
explaining that she has uncovered her doppelganger, that
her old self is dead. This explanation is plausible to the
audience because it has heard John’s diagnosis of Alma's
ailments as an irritated doppelganger, and has seen the
girl’s reaction to John. The change is not entirely con
vincing, however, because though it is possible nothing in
the events or the character leads inevitably to Alma's
transformation. Chiefly because of this unconvincing
change, Alma is not as viable a character as her counter
parts in the trilogy— Amanda and Blanche. She is always
more a type than individual, though Williams did manage,
by giving authentic speech, gestures, and behavior to Alma,
75
to portray this special type of woman vividly.
The vividness of Alma's portrait is more the result
of her speech than of her actions. Her choice of word or
image and the complicated sentences she uses stress her
chief qualities— affectation, refinement, and idealism.
These qualities are suggested by such expressions as
"pyrotechnical display"; "^-wheeled phenomenon"; and
"Footprints of God." And her romantic idealism, as well as
the repressed desires that underly it, are apparent in her
description of Gothic cathedrals (Sc. 6, p. 73) and in her
homily on sacred love (Sc. 6, p. 77) with which she fends
off John's feeble attempt at seduction.
While Alma's speech is always appropriate, it is not
as vital as the speech of Williams' previous Southern
belles. Nor is the dialogue of Summer and Smoke as a whole
as effective as that of the two major plays that immedi
ately preceded it, particularly that of Streetcar. But
even though the dialogue of Summer and Smoke lacks the
dramatic impact of that of Streetcar, Williams handled it
skillfully. He avoided the set pieces that marred certain
of the earlier plays. None of the characters is a mere
mouthpiece for his ideas. Alma is given several lengthy
speeches in which she discusses romantic ideals, but the
ideals are clearly her own, and fully appropriate to her
character. Furthermore, they are part of the action.
Indeed, nearly all of the speeches of all the characters
76
are well integrated into the action. They are part of the
exposition; they illumine character; they contribute to the
forward movement. In fact, the dialogue, though it is not
up to the standard established by Williams in the best of
his previous plays, is perhaps the chief virtue of Summer
and Smoke and what vitality the play has stems largely from
its language.
In Summer and Smoke Williams turned again to the moral
issues he raised in Streetcar. The principal conflict in
the play seems initially to be, as it is in Streetcar,
between the natural and the artificial. In the course of
the play Williams shifts, however, from this Laurentian
conflict to the traditional one between the flesh and the
spirit. The resolution that he seems to offer for this
conflict is presented in John's sudden transformation,
John has managed to reconcile the demands of flesh and
spirit. The doctor has learned that his anatomy chart does
not convey all the important truth about man. But Alma
cannot balance the demands--she swings from one extreme to
the other— and falters into disintegration. John and his
bride-to-be, who exemplifies the reconciliation of flesh
and spirit, more convincingly than John, offer some assur
ance that life will not only go on but will also be happy.
But while this resolution is implicit in the play, it is
not made explicit, as it should be, by the characterization
and the structure. The unconvincing changes in the
77
principal characters and the dubious climax confuse and
obscure the meaning of the play.
This confusion and the technical flaws„ in combina
tion with the obtrusive symbolism, were largely responsible
for the failure of Summer and Smoke on Broadway. Despite
its flaws the play has some worth. It has a special the
atrical appeal— which probably accounts for the frequency
with which it is replayed--for it provides, as do most of
Williams’ plays, an excellent opportunity for actors,
directors, and designers to exercise their talents. And
though it is somewhat sentimental because its characters
are too slight to sustain the intense emotions thrust upon
them, it has a definite, if limited, artistic value. It
manages to create an evocative mood that causes audiences
to suspend their disbelief for a brief moment so that they
accept Alma as a person and feel the pathos of her final
degradation. This sense of deep pathos gives the play some
significance beyond the immediate story.
Summer and Smoke did not add much to Williams’ reputa
tion as a new leader in American drama. On the contrary,
its close and obvious relation to the two plays that imme
diately preceded it gave rise to charges that Williams was
a playwright of limited talent, whose initially appealing
13
work showed little development. The difference m quality
13
John Mason Brown, "People versus Characters,"
Saturday Review of Literature, October 30, 1948, p. 32.
78
between Streetcar and Summer and Smoke seemed to confirm
these charges. But this difference is partially misleading,
for there is abundant evidence that Williams had, in fact,
developed his talent considerably since his first play.
His most obvious improvement is in construction. Battle of
Angels, his first play, failed chiefly because of faulty
construction. When Streetcar, his fourth play, opened, he
was able to show that he had mastered the techniques of
play construction. He made a similar, if less pronounced,
improvement in his handling of characterization and dialogue.
For Battle of Angels he created characters whose speech
and manner suggest that they have been born out of the
author's imagination. For Streetcar he created at least one
character, Blanche, who is among the most memorable in
American drama. And in Streetcar he demonstrated, too,
that he had learned to exploit the contemporary American
speech patterns he had so consistently reproduced with
amazing fidelity for both humorous and dramatic effects.
Morever, he had at last managed to integrate into the action
the lyric set pieces he was fond of using to heighten the
intensity of his plays.
A marked improvement in Williams' use of another im
portant element in his plays further attested to his devel
opment. His concern with stage devices of all kinds for
strengthening the dramatic impact of his plays is only too
apparent in Battle of Angels. By the time he had completed
79
Streetcar, however, he had learned to use such devices, and
particularly the non-realistic ones he favors, to good ad
vantage. Much of the fascination of this play comes from
the delicately balanced contrast between the realism of
character and environment and the non-realism of his highly
theatrical stage devices. The effects Williams produces
with such contrasts have caused him to be labeled a "poetic"
realist. His improved skill with stage devices is less
important, however, for the evidence it provides of his
development than for the change it helped create in the
drama of the time. Williams' successful exploration of
legitimate dramatic effects by the organic use of stage
devices, sets, lighting, and music is largely responsible
for what John Gassner has called "re-theatricalizing"^1 * a
drama that had been sadly "de-theatricalized" by the drab,
limited realism that dominated the American stage during
the late thirties and early forties. Williams' part in
bringing about this change has not been much acknowledged
outside of the theatre. Elia Kazan, who directed Streetcar
and later other of Williams' plays, once insisted:
No one appreciates how much A Street Car Named Desire
did to open the avenue to a less literal approach
toward the theatre. Because of A Street Car Named
Desire we had Death of a Salesman
1 M -
Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times, p. viii.
-^Quoted by Henry Hewes, "Broadway Postscript," Satur-
day Review, March 28, 1953, p. 25.
Paradoxically, the theatricalism for which Williams
has frequently been condemned may prove to be one of his
significant contributions to American drama.
CHAPTER IV
THE ROSE TATTOO
CAMINO REAL
Much of the unfavorable criticism Summer and Smoke
provoked during its short run was directed at its repeti
tion of the themes and characters of earlier plays and its
reiteration of the defeat and degradation of neurotic,
decadent aristocrats. From these repetitions some critics
predictably drew inferences that Williams' idiom was becom-
m g worn. The playwright replied to his critics with two
new plays, both works in which he deliberately sought to
demonstrate that he could write another kind of play, cre
ate other characters, develop new and less pessimistic
themes. The first of these two plays, The Rose Tattoo,
which opened in New York in February, 1951, is unlike any
of Williams' previous plays in its zestiness and buoyant
good humor. And the presence of these qualities lends cre
dence to his claim that he had become "more hopeful about
human nature as a result of being exposed to the Italians
^Kappo Phelan, "The Stage," Commonweal, 49:68, October
29, 1948.
81
82
and to "the vitality, humanity, and love of life expressed
by the Italian people.The play was not, despite its
humor, and its author’s new attitudes, totally unlike the
previous plays. In fact, Williams utilized for The Rose
Tattoo precisely the same basic situation that he employed
for the plays in his trilogy. The central figure is again
one of his obsessed women who live on illusion. The theme
that runs through the earlier plays is implicit in the con
flict between the heroine’s artificial values and her natur
al desires. There is even a Gentleman Caller whose visit
becomes a turning point in the life of the heroine. But in
The Rose Tattoo the development of the situation, which
invariably led to defeat in other plays, now leads to a
triumphant justification of sexual love.
The story that embodies the author's apparently altered
viewpoint takes place on the Gulf coast somewhere near New
Orleans. The heroine is a Sicilian-American, Serafina
delle Rose, whose virile husband, a truck-driving smuggler,
has been killed by the police. Serafina's loss is more
profound than the usual widow's grief, for she had had an
almost religious faith in the physical love she shared with
her husband. For three years after his death, Serafina is
a recluse, sustained only by her memory of the glorious and
full love she knew with her husband--a memory kept fresh by
O
*Quoted by John Mason Brown in As They Appear (New
York, 1952) , pp. 162,194.
83
a marble urn of his ashes enshrined in the living room
with the Madonna— and by her concern for her teenage
daughter, Rosa. The normal life Serafina is trying to deny
comes rushing into her closed world when she befriends a
Sicilian truck-driver, who is physically much like her hus
band, and who is injured in a fight in front of her house.
Through Alvaro, the truck-driver, Serafina confirms the
rumors of her husband’s unfaithfulness that she had pre
viously tried to dismiss as gossip. Such confirmation
leads her to break the urn containing her husband’s ashes.
This symbolic act frees Serafina from her illusions, a
freedom she immediately celebrates by accepting joyously
the love of Alvaro.
Williams sought to give his essentially simple story
wider appeal and greater significance by embellishing it
with symbols, music, various stage devices, and consider
able farcical humor. The playwright's fondness for theat-
ricalism, patent in previous plays, is indulged excessively
in Rose Tattoo. The frequent outbursts of hysterical emo
tions in the play do require an exotic setting to help make
them plausible. But Williams has overdone his exoticism,
Serafina's cottage, the scene of all the action, is sur
rounded with tropical growths of palm, cane, and pampas>
grass and it contains, among other things, a large brass
parrot's cage, bowls of goldfish, gilt and ruby religious
articles and pictures, and a shrine consisting of a prie-
84
dieu and a blue and gold Madonna before which a vigil light
burns. The walls of the cottage are covered with rose-
patterned paper and the floor with a rose carpet.
These rose-colored objects do more than merely lend
atmosphere, for they are part of the play's elaborate rose
symbolism. Roses appear in bewildering profusion. Two
characters— Serafina's husband and daughter— are named after
the rose. Other characters wear roses in their hair, dress
in rose silks, and carry bouquets of roses. Both the hus
band and Alvaro use rose hair oil and both, along with the
husband's mistress, have roses tattooed on their chests.
The precise meaning of these rose symbols is not made
clear by the action or dialogue. Some of them, such as
the rose that appears on Serafina's breast at the moment of
conception, seem to be mystic signs, some proofs of passion,
some symbols of devotion. Most of them, however, appear to
be related to the sex act in marriage. This act out of
wedlock, and both sorts figure in the play, is represented
by a goat that breaks loose at apposite moments. The tedi
ous repetition of the rose, and other symbols— Williams
made sure, as he had in Summer and Smoke, that his audiences
are aware of the presence of the symbols--tends to reduce
their effectiveness.
Williams used other stage devices more convincingly
and more effectively. He used music, for example, to help
establish atmosphere, to link the major divisions of the
8S
play, and to give emphasis to significant events. And he
employed two groups of characters whose movements could be
arranged in rhythmic ballet-like patterns to lend a touch
of fantasy to the play. One group consists of children who
play about Serafina's cottage during most of the action.
Their rapid, varied movements and their shrill cries are
important in creating the hectic atmosphere essential to
the play. The other group is made up of the neighbor women
who descend on Serafina several times. They serve as a rud
imentary chorus: they help establish the tone, and they
offer some comment on the action. In the New York produc
tion, their function was somewhat obscured by an emphasis
on their wild gesticulations and their broken speech that
q
tended to make them stereotyped, stage-Italian comics.
This comic behavior of the neighbor women introduces an
element of farce that is subsequently developed, particu
larly in Alvaro’s action, until it nearly sets the dominant
tone of the play.
The pervasiveness of the farcical elements tends to
distort any serious meaning Williams intended to convey
through the symbols and stage devices. And such meaning
is further obscured by a lack of unity and by confusion in
the play's construction. The dramatic action that is the
q
Harold Clurman, "Tennessee's Rose," New Republic,
124:22, February 19, 1951,
raison-d'etre of the play does not begin until the fifth
scene, at which point the play, consisting of ten scenes,
is half way over. The first three scenes are actually an
unlabeled prologue that does little more than offer exposi
tion that is repeated in the fourth scene. And Williams
strengthened the impression of loose construction thus cre
ated by introducing a subplot— a troubled love affair
between Serafina's daughter and a young sailor— none of the
events of which are related to the climax.
The events of the main action--Serafina's efforts to
discover the truth about her husband--are more directly
related to the climax, though even they do not lead neces
sarily to that point. These events, as well as those of
the subplot, illustrate character and theme, but they are
not part of a consistent, unified action that leads to the
climax. Though this climax realizes the theme--life must
continue and must renew itself--concretely, its dramatic
impact is diminished because it seems to be the result of a
series of coincidences rather than of the logical develop
ment of the action. The numerous coincidences— Alvaro,
for example, not only looks like Serafina's dead husband,
but also drives, like the husband, a banana truck, and
happens to know the telephone number of the husband's mis
tress— reduce the impact of the climax without much de
tracting from its plausibility.
87
This plausibility depends largely on the audiences'
acceptance of Serafina as a real person. They may reject
the view of life that is offered in the climax, but if
they find Serafina credible they will accept, at least
while they are in the theatre, without much difficulty a
plot that might otherwise strike them as ridiculous. And
Williams succeeded in creating the illusion that Serafina
is a live person by furnishing his audiences with persuasive
details of her background, her habits, and her attitudes.
These audiences can believe in Serafina's withdrawal from
life after her husband's death, and in the intensity of the
conflict it causes, because they know something of her
Sicilian peasant environment, of her great pride in her
Baron husband, of her superstitions, and of her primitive
religiosity that is a mixture of joy in physical well-being
and an emotional faith in God. And they can believe in
Serafina as a person because they see she is capable of a
wide range of human emotions. The vitality of Serafina is
amply demonstrated in scenes that reveal her anger and her
kindness, her fear and her humor. But she comes to life
with special force in the scenes with Alvaro in which the
intensity of her passions is revealed,
Serafina seems human, too, because she tries to evade
the truth that will destroy her illusion. She unconsciously
seeks to resolve her conflict by avoiding it, a reaction
that will be recognized by the audience as distinctly
88
human. Serafina’s efforts to avoid the truth result
ultimately in a definite growth in her character. She
comes to understand that she cannot cling to her memories
of her husband, "A man, when he burns, leaves only a hand
ful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow
him away," (III, 3, P. 143), and therefore more readily
accepts her return to normal life.
At the play's end, Serafina emerges as a complex woman
capable of great emotion and of growth. There is, however,
a curious deficiency in her portrait. This complex person
is almost mindless. Her aims are rational, but her methods
of achieving them are largely irrational. Serafina moves
by impulse rather than by intellect. And while this pat
tern of behavior is appropriate to her primitive nature, it
is not appropriate to a truly complex character. Notwith
standing her mindlessness, Serafina is the only character
in The Rose Tattoo that Williams intended to be taken seri
ously, for all the others are the relatively simple types
suitable to low comedy.
The hero, Alvaro, appeals to the audience's sympathy
because of his direct, childlike attitudes and actions.
And yet he never quite comes to life. The revelation of his
desires, frustrations, and history that could make him seem
human are all turned into farce. This farcical element in
Alvaro's character provides much of the play's humor, but
it inevitably reduces him to little more than an attractive,
89
sexually efficient buffoon. Fortunately, there is no need
for Alvaro to be a complex character since he is not
directly concerned in the main conflict. He is merely
the instrument that life uses to force Serafina to discard
her illusion, and the means whereby she can return to
normal life.
Of the remaining characters only two--Rosa, Serafina1s
daughter, and Jack, her sailor sweetheart— are revealed in
any detail, and they are sketched even more superficially
than Alvaro. Despite the slightness of their character
ization, these two make a definite contribution to the
play. Their final scene, one of the most effective in the
play, has a tender and evocative quality that not only adds
considerably to the appeal of the play, but also provides
an interesting parallel to the awkward courtship scene
between Serafina and Alvaro as well. The rest of the char
acters, there are nineteen others, all have definite func
tions to perform--they reveal necessary information, illus
trate theme, establish atmosphere— but for the most part
they are not individualized.
Williams' failure to individualize the minor charac
ters is a departure from his usual practice, for in previ
ous plays he consistently attempted to give most of his
minor characters some individuality, usually by distin
guishing speech. The reason for his failure here--apart
from the great number of minor characters--may be that he
90
is dealing with characters who are not Southerners. Cer
tainly, the speech of the major characters is not the
astonishingly accurate and instantly recognizable speech of
real life that marked the dialogue of earlier plays.
In The Rose Tattoo, Williams did not attempt to give
his characters either the Southern speech that might be
appropriate to the play's locale, or an Italian dialect
that might be appropriate to the background of the charac
ters. He did, however, provide his major characters with
language that creates the impression that it is vivacious
human speech even though it cannot be identified with any
given milieu. He created a rapid-fire slangy speech that
is particularly suitable to his emotional characters. And
he manages to give this speech an Italianate flavor without
resorting to the usual stage dialect,
Williams creates this flavor in two ways. The most
obvious method is the frequent insertion of Italian phrases,
especially at moments of emotional stress. More subtle is
the use of grammatical constructions that parallel Italian
usage. One such construction, for example, substitutes the
definite article for the possessive pronoun in referring to
the body. When Serafina sees Alvaro without his shirt, she
says, "The light on the body was like a man that lived
here. ..." Another construction inverts the word order:
"I pay in advance five dollars and get no dress," and uses
present tense where English calls for past.
91
In addition to creating this Italianate flavor, Wil
liams used a great many colloquialisms and cliches to make
his language suitable to his characters. Frequently, he
manipulates the cliches for humorous effect. He employs a
form of word play that depends on two things. One is
double meaning:
Rosa: . . . his name is Jack Hunter.
Serafina: What are you hunting? — Jack? (I, 6, p. 54)
Serafina: . . . how high is this high school? (I, 4, p.
28)
And the other is the repetition of key phrases picked out
of earlier speeches:
Rosa: I'm ready for Diamond Key!
Serafina: Go out on the porch. Diamond Key! (I, 6, p. 5 8)
Alvaro: They--got a cover charge there , . .
Serafina: I will charge them a cover! . . . (Ill, 1, p.
119)
This sort of word play is not original, for it is in
common use by many Americans. Williams' use of it here,
however, is persuasive evidence not only of the acuteness
of his ear for American speech but also of his virtuosity
in recreating it for his plays.
The kind of humor Williams created with this wordplay,
in combination with the farcical elements, tends to dominate
the play and thereby obscure the serious suggestions about
human experience that he wanted to convey. His seriousness
92
is suggested by the presence of a motif that appeared in
all the previous plays--the conflict between the artificial
and the natural. This motif is most apparent in the col
lision between Serafina's false values--the illusion that
causes her to deny life--and her passionate, primitive
nature, and it is implicit in her clash with her daughter.
In the earlier plays the obsessed women torn by this con
flict were invariably defeated or destroyed so that life,
however gross or dismal, could go on. In The Rose Tattoo,
however, the heroine not only resolves this conflict with
out being destroyed but also demonstrates that life, if it
is based on sexual fulfillment, can be joyous.
This resolution tends to confirm Williams' claim that
he had revised his earlier pessimistic views, but the ex
pression of this new attitude in The Rose Tattoo is at once
over-simplified and too sentimental to be taken seriously
by any but the most desperately romantic. This sentimental
ity about sex is not new in Williams' work. In Battle of
Angels, one of the major characters delivers a long lyrical
speech about the wonders of sex. Stanley, in A Streetcar
Named Desire, talks about the sex act as ". . , getting
them colored lights going." Here it is Serafina who knows
about the ". . . love which is glory . . . to me the big
bed was beautiful like a religion."
This over-simplification of the complex problems and
the obtrusive sentimentality about sex make most of his
93
audience feel that his views have no application in their
own lives. Yet Williams strove for just the opposite
effect. He tried to give his play some extension, some
significance beyond the immediate. For this purpose he
created a powerful central character, provided her with
living speech, enveloped her activities in symbolism, and
embellished the action of the play with imaginative stage
devices--a combination that produced excellent results in
Streetcar. But in The Rose Tattoo, Williams failed to
achieve the delicate balance between theatrical, non-real-
istic stage devices and realistic characters and environment
that is so important in Streetcar. Weaknesses in construc
tion and characterization contribute to this failure, but
the principal cause is the dominantly farcical tone.
The many faults of The Rose Tattoo keep it from being
an artistic success. They do not, however, keep it from
being good entertainment. On stage, the play— like many
of Williams' plays, it does not stand up under analysis--
has for most viewers a vitality and emotional intensity that
compensate largely for its weaknesses. The charm of the
dialogue and the sensitivity with which certain scenes are
developed keep most of the audience enthralled while the
play is in progress, though they will likely have forgotten
what it was about before they leave the theatre.
The second of the two plays with which Williams sought
to demonstrate his versatility was the product of his
enduring discontent with the limitations of the realistic
theatre. In the production notes to his first major suc
cess, The Glass Menagerie, he declared, ", . .a new
plastic theatre . . . must take the place of the exhausted
theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to re
sume vitality as part of our culture." And most of his
major plays offer evidence of his efforts to realize this
new theatre. In none of these plays, however, did he
achieve the freedom of form or the directness of communica
tion that his conception of the "new plastic theatre" seemed
to demand. With this new play, Camino Real, which opened
in New York on March 19, 1953, he not only departed from
most of his previous work, but also broke almost entirely
with the conventions of the realistic theatre.
The new play was a masque-like fantasy that dispensed
with ordinary time, mingling historical and literary fig
ures with contemporary characters; abandoned the fourth
wall pretense, permitting the characters to speak directly
to the audience and to chase each other through the aisle of
the theatre; and discarded, for the most part, logic, expo
sition, and story line. The resultant freedom and mobility
of form enabled Williams to create a phantasmagorical world
that exists outside of time and in no special place. This
world, which Williams admitted was his conception of the
time and world he lives in, is a malign and degenerate
95
world in which the officials are cruel and the citizenry
corrupt and treacherous.^
Into this microcosm of modern life, set in a mythical
Central American coastal town, Williams introduced his
hero, Kilroy, a young American sailor whose heart, which is
"big as the head of a baby," caused him to abandon a boxing
career just when he had become a Golden Gloves champion.
Kilroy is an ignorant, innocent, and kind young man, who
soon discovers that none of these qualities is of much
value on the camino real. Shortly after his arrival he is
robben, beated by the police, and forced to become a public
clown with a nose that lights up. When he tries to escape,
he learns, as have all the travelers who preceded him--
among them Lord Byron, Don Quixote, Camille, Casanova, and
Baron de Charlas— that the only avenue of escape is a
stairway that leads to Terra Incognita, a barren desert.
And only two of the travelers— Don Quixote and Lord Byron--
have sufficient courage to use the stairway.
Kilroy decides he, too, has the courage to climb the
stairway but before he can escape, Esmeralda, the gypsy's
daughter, entices him into participating in the local
fiesta organized and advertised by her mother. Kilroy's
part in a parodied fertility ritual that restores Esmer
alda's virginity annually is too much for his bad heart.
^Foreword to Camino Real (Norfolk, 1953), p. viii.
96
After his death, he tries to give his heart, which an
autopsy has shown to be not only as big as the head of a
baby but also solid gold, to Esmeralda, When he fails in
this attempt, he ascends the stairway to Terra Incognita
accompanied by Don Quixote,
This elaborate fantasy of romantic rebellion and
despair in a cruel and greedy world was condemned by New
York critics and by the few theatre-goers who saw it--the
play closed after sixty performances— for being obscure and
formless, Williams, on the basis of his experience with
potential backers, and with out-of-New York tryouts, had
anticipated at least part of this criticism. And he tried
to forestall it by declaring, in a New York Times article^
that appeared before the play's Broadway premiere, that the
play was not at all obscure to those "who were willing to
meet it halfway," and that the freedom of the form was the
"result of painstaking design, and of giving more conscious
attention to form and construction than I have in any work
before."
After the play closed, Williams apparently had second
thoughts on this matter for he made several changes in the
play before it was published.6 He added the scene in which
Kilroy steals his gold heart; introduced three new charac-
5March 15, 1953, II, 1:6.
6Editor's note to Camino Real, p. xiv.
97
ters— Sancho Panza, squire to Don Quixote, and Prudence
Duvernoy and Olympe, former friends of Camille’s; and
altered some of the dialogue, particularly a prayer by
Esmeralda that sums up the play’s theme. In addition, he
created a frame for the play by providing a prologue that
sets out the basic circumstances of the play.7 This pro
logue reveals that the episodes that are to follow are the
dreams of Don Quixote, and that each of these episodes is
to be announced by a Master of Ceremonies who is also a
character, Mr. Gutman, in the play. It also points to the
two main situations in the play, for it establishes both
Casanova’s interest in Camille and Don Quixote’s promise to
select a new companion to accompany him on his adventures.
This prologue, in combination with the other changes and
additions, helps give the published text a unity apparently
sadly lacking in the acting script.
Apart from these revisions, however, the structure of
the play in the published version is almost identical with
that of the original script. ; This structure offers some
evidence to support Williams' claim that he had given much
conscious attention to the play's construction. In his
original version of Camino Real--a one-acter, Ten Blocks on
the Camino Real, published in 1948— the episodes or "blocks"
were related principally by theme. He connected the sixteen
7William Hawkins, "Camino Real," Theatre Arts, 34:26,
October, 1953.
98
episodes of the reworked version, however, with two addi
tional devices. They are related by a Master of Ceremonies,
who announces each episode and occasionally offers comment
on the actions; and by two dramatic situations— the emer
gence of a tender permanent understanding between Camille
and Casanova, and the erratic career of Kilroy.
The playwright's handling of these two situations pro
vides further evidence of his concern with construction.
He arranged the events that depict the relationship of
Camille and Casanova to illumine one of his recurrent
themes--the need for tender understanding between sensitive
people who are trapped by circumstance and their own weak
nesses, And through Kilroy's adventures he contrived to
show that the innocent and truly generous with a spark of
anarchy in their souls are soon destroyed by modern American
society. In both situations he avoided the usual dramatic
development because he feared his audience would concen
trate on story to the detriment of what the play is trying
to say. He wanted his play to speak directly to the audi
ence, to establish a directness of communication with them
that he felt was not possible in a play that employs
straight realistic construction and stage techniques.
In an effort to establish this direct communication,
Williams supplemented his carefully planned structure with
a variety of non-realistic techniques. He placed his ac
tion in a dream world filled with illusion, guilt, suffer
ing, and death. He mixed fantasy with reality. He juxta
posed crude farce with potentially tragic material. He
extended the usual playing area of the stage to include
the aisles and boxes of the theatre and he permitted his
characters to address the audience directly. These tech
niques are not, of course, original with Williams. Certain
of them were long ago utilized by Strindberg and by Wede
kind; others are techniques usually associated with sur
realistic and expressionistic drama. Camino Real is, in
fact, a strange mixture of dramatic modes and techniques
that includes, in addition to those already cited, the
expressionistic technique of treating the characters pri
marily as symbols.
Into his desire to reveal and to communicate the mean
ing of his play, Williams endowed not only all the charac
ters but also every object and action with some symbolic
significance. Each part of the elaborate set— the Skid
Row, with its flophouse hotel, its Loan Shark, and its
Gypsy; the luxury hotel; the dry fountain; the stairway to
Terra Incognita--is intended to be interpreted symbolic
ally. And the various actions that take place--Kilroy's
adventures, from his being robbed to his departure with Den
Quixote; the removal of the dead by Street Cleaners; the
crowning of Casanova as King of Cuckolds; the departure of
the airplane, Fugitivo— are all symbolic. The meaning of
many of these symbols is limited by their triteness.
10 0
Airplanes called Fugitivo, dried-up springs of humanity,
street cleaners who represent death, and large hearts of
gold are appropriate to the theme of the play but they
cannot add much to its meaning.
Not all of the symbols, however, are so obvious. The
image of the violets in the mountains that break rocks,
which is used to symbolize the power of tenderness in human
affairs, is typical of the more subtle symbols. This sub
tlety occasionally borders on obscurity in such symbols as
the ghost of Kilroy. Its association with Don Quixote
seems to suggest that Kiroy's innocent and rebellious spirit
is an eternal one that cannot be destroyed by death, but
neither this nor any other meaning is made precise by the
action.
Williams' symbolism tends, in fact, to distort and
limit rather than extend and clarify his serious meaning.
The extravagance, the triteness, and the tedious reitera
tion of the symbols frequently suggest the play is basically
a farce or a light fantasy with little significance. This
suggestion of the farcical and the fantastic is enlarged
by Williams' unrestrained use of dance, pantomime, music,
and special lighting. The effectiveness of these latter
elements, which are used with such frequency that much of
the play seems to be a ballet, depends largely, of course,
on the quality of the production the play receives. In
deed, many of the effects that Williams was striving for in
101
the play he deliberately left to the talent and discretion
of the director and actors. These latter, at least in the
New York production directed by Elia Kazan, exercised
their talents so effectively that the production nearly
overwhelmed the play. The most memorable scenes that
emerged from the production— the departure of the airplane,
Fugitivo, and the Fiesta--were scenes that depended least
O
on the talent of the playwright. And Kilroy, intended by
the author to be a symbol rather than an individual, was
brought to life by the skilled acting of Eli Wallach.^
That Kilroy or any of the characters emerged as live
individuals is a tribute to the talents of the actors, for
Williams did not attempt to create fully rounded characters,
but contented himself with demonstrating the qualities that
make each character an appropriate symbol. He arranged the
play to reveal that the characters who represent the oppres
sive and ubiquitous authority of modern society--Mr. Gutman
and the police officers--are brutal, cynical, and heart
less. It also shows that the characters who represent
evil, loathsome dissipation, and chicanery--the Gypsy, the
Loan Shark, the gigolo— are treacherous, cruel and vicious.
The characters representing the romantic spirits who are
almost invariably defeated by a hostile environment and by
®Eric Bentley, The Dramatic Event (New York, 1954),
p. 107.
^Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 29, 19 53, 11,1:1
10 2
their own weaknesses, such as Casanova and Camille--are
slightly more complex. Their essential characteristics,
however, are the ones— kindness, sensitivity, pride, rebel
liousness, cowardice— that serve to make them fitting sym
bols of the romantic spirit. Kilroy, as a representative of
the modern American with a spark of anarchy in his soul, is
the most complex character in the play. He has the quali
ties that make him a suitable symbol--innocence, honesty,
bewilderment, inarticulate idealism, generosity. In addi
tion, his reactions to various aspects of his environment
are effectively dramatized. This dramatization of his
failures and frustrations, as well as his short-lived tri
umphs, helps to make him seem human.
While Williams chose not to make much use of his
considerable gift for characterization in Camino Real, he
did demonstrate once more, and with greater virtuosity
than in any previous plays, his talent for writing fresh,
lively dialogue. His ability to reproduce and refine for
his dramatic purposes the living language of Americans is
apparent in the speech he created for Kilroy and certain of
the other characters. This speech, characterized by vivid
slang, frequent clich/s, and erratic grammar is the con
temporary "tough" speech of many Americans.
Kilroy*s description of the money he received just
before entering the world of Camino-Real— "In the States
that pile of lettuce would make you a plutocrat!--But I bet
10 3
you this stuff don't add up to fifty dollars American
coin" (Block III, p. 26)— suggests its flavor. Williams
varies this speech to suit his characters and situations.
When the absurd Gypsy, for example, explains why she ac
cepted Kilroy as the chosen hero for her daughter, she
says :
Look, Nursie, I'm operating a legitimate joint!
This joker'll get the same treatment he'd get if he
breezed down the Camino in a blizzard of G-notes!
Trot, girl! Lubricate your means of locomotion!
(Block IX, p. 108)
Her speech is a parody on the more typical speech of Kilroy.
And Williams combined this "tough" speech with the more
formal speech he provided for his literary characters to
help produce the fantasy or masque quality of the play.
He enhanced this quality by using two other devices.
One is the rhythmic antiphonal pattern of questions and
responses that repeats key words that he used in certain of
the conversations between Camille and Casanova:
Jacques: Are you tired? Are you tired, Marguerite?
You know you should have rested this after
noon .
Marguerite: I looked at silver and rested.
Jacques: You looked at silver at Ahmed's?
Marguerite: No, I rested at Ahmed's, and had mint-tea.
Jacques: You had mint-tea downstairs?
Marguerite: No, upstairs.
Jacques: Upstairs, where they burn the poppy?
10 4
Marguerite: Upstairs where it's cool and there’s music
and the haggling of the bazaar is soft as
the murmur of pigeons.
The other is a rhythmic device reminiscent of Ger
trude Stein’s impressionistic technique of monotonously
repeating certain significant words that Williams utilized
for the wryly sentimental love scene between Kilroy and the
Gypsy's daughter:
Esmeralda: Everyone says he's sincere, but everyone
isn't sincere. If everyone was sincere who
says he's sincere there wouldn't be half so
many insincere ones in the world and there
would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere
onos • • *
Kilroy: I am sincere.
Esmeralda: I am sincere.
Kilroy: I am sincere.
Esmeralda: I am sincere . . . (Block XII, p. 133)
Despite the remarkable skill and control patent in
Williams' handling of these devices, and indeed, in much
of his dialogue, he could not resist the inflated passages,
marked by fine phrases and aureate diction, that had so
frequently marred his previous plays. Such passages are
perhaps more acceptable in the bizarre, overheated atmos
phere generated by Camino Real than they were in earlier
plays. And certainly they are usually appropriate for such
characters as Lord Byron and Casanova. Too often, however,
Williams assigned them to characters like the Gypsy, who
once declared, "We're all of us guinea pigs in the labora
tory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress." (Block
10 5
XII, p. 113) and like Mr. Gutman, the corrupt owner of the
luxury hotel, who can talk of ". • , petty vendors in a
bazaar where the human heart is part of the bargains"
(Block II, p. 22).
These passages, and most of his other inflated ones,
have a pseudo-poetic ring that tends to dominate, and so
distort, his otherwise superb dialogue. Moreover, since
they inevitably call attention to themselves, they fre
quently obscure the themes that they are intended to con
vey and clarify. Certainly, Williams' theme in Camino
Real did not need such assistance to give it greater clarity
since he reiterated its meaning at every turn. This theme
of the untenable position of the romantic in modern society
is not a new one for Williams. In an early one-acter,
Stairs to the Roof,^ he employed the same theme. And in
his several portraits of defeated women he touched upon it.
In Camino Real he has attempted to give this theme some
universal significance by illustrating it through charac
ters who do not belong in contemporary society. He en
hances it, too, by presenting it on two levels. On one
level, the play depicts the plight of the romantic spirit
in a world in which he is the inevitable victim of his own
weaknesses and of a hostile environment. On another level,
the play represents the secret prison of each individual.
-^Unpublished play (Pasadena Playhouse, 1941).
106
Every man would like to make a heroic escape, but inevitably
his own corruption and treachery and the stringent pat
terns of behavior that he applies to others keep him
shackled.
Williams made his view of society and of man’s rela
tion to it clearer in Camino Real than in any previous
play. For Williams, the play indicated that man either
conforms and is corrupted or rebels and is destroyed. The
rebels, Williams seemed to suggest, are always worthy of
compassion, of tender understanding and occasionally even
worthy of admiration, as is Lord Byron, who departs into
the unknown desert with the ringing cry: "Make voyages I —
attempt them--there*s nothing else!" But the playwright
did not suggest these romantics will prevail. There is
perhaps a forlorn warning in Camino Real and even a faint
hope implicit in the final scene, in which the ghost of
Kilroy and Don Quixote bravely begin their voyage into
Terra Incognita.
This hope is not, obviously, the hope that Williams
held out in Rose Tattoo and Summer and Smoke. The emphasis
in Camino Real is not on an acceptance of life and a
healthy adjustment to the demands of society but on a re
jection of life and a refusal to adjust to society. In
this stress on the romantics who defy convention, who in
sist on their singularity at any cost, Williams returned
107
to the despair and decadence of Battle of Angels, a return
to what has been called the "cult of alienation. While
Williams may be, as John Gassner has charged, too much
devoted to this kind of bohemianism or estheticism, he has
usually avoided overromanticizing or sentimentalizing his
naive or singular hero.
One of the consistent virtues of his plays, and cer
tainly the chief virtue of Camino Real, is the championing
of the downtrodden, the inarticulate innocent, and the
doomed idealists. Unfortunately, this virtue was totally
obscured for many in Camino Real by the seemingly formless
structure and by the frequently pretentious language. In
this play Williams tried to break through the rigid conven
tions of the realistic theatre, to create a new, freer
dramatic form by which he could speak directly to his audi
ence without the usual genteel evasions. But he failed in
this latter aim because the combination of techniques,
styles, and characters by which he sought to establish
direct communication was so self-assertive, so extrava
gantly dissonant, that his message was garbled in trans
mission.
■^Gassner, Theatre in Our Times, p. 349.
CHAPTER V
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
ORPHEUS DESCENDING
Williams had tried with The Rose Tattoo and Camino
Real to convince his critics that he could write plays
with new subjects and new themes. These two plays did not,
however, offer altogether convincing evidence of his versa
tility, since they used situations and themes directly
reminiscent of those in earlier plays. Nor did they do
much to extend his reputation as a serious dramatist,
though they did reveal a rich capacity for humor that had
only been hinted at previously. In his next two plays—
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Orpheus Descending— he turned
again, apparently without concern for critical opinion, to
Southern milieux, to aristocratic decadence, to his special
brand of desperation.
In the first of these new plays Williams attempted
once more to transcend what he regards as the exhausted
formulas of the realistic drama. He wanted his play "to
109
catch the true quality of experience ,"■*■ rather than to solve
dramatic or psychological problems, and he wanted it to
communicate its meaning directly and freely. And Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof, while it proved to be far more conventional
than Camino Real, apparently did communicate effectively,
for it not only enjoyed a long run but also received both
the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics' Circle Award for 1953.
The play, appropriately, dramatizes the results of
failure in human communication, and of the mendacity and
hypocrisy that such failures give rise to. These patterns
of behavior determine the attitudes and actions of all the
members of a wealthy Mississippi Delta family when they
gather to celebrate the birthday of the head of the family,
Big Daddy. Since everyone except Big Daddy knows that he
is dying of cancer, the birthday party is actually a kind
of premature wake at which most of the relatives quarrel
over the inheritance. The elder son, Gooper, and his wife,
Mae, plot to discredit the younger and favorite son, Brick.
Maggie, Brick's wife, schemes to thwart Gooper and to regain
the affections of her husband, who has rejected her because
he feels that she destroyed his best friend by suggesting
that their relationship had a homosexual basis. Only Brick,
safe behind a screen of alcohol, is uninterested in his
father's money. Before the party is over, Big Daddy and
•*~New York Times, May 3 , 19 55 , 1:3,
Brick have exchanged some ugly truths in a final effort to
establish communication. As a result of this exchange,
the old man learns he has terminal cancer, the son admits
that he caused the death of his best friend by refusing to
face with him the truth about their relationship. And
Maggie has pleased Big Daddy, and so secured the inheri
tance, by announcing that she is going to have a baby. Her
announcement is a lie, but when Gooper, Mae, and Big Mama
rush out in response to Big Daddy's cries of pain, she
tries to turn her desperate lie into truth by forcing
Brick— who accedes to her demands only after she has deprived
him of his liquor--to go to bed with her.
In his original version of the play, Williams kept
his most impressive character, Big Daddy, offstage during
the third act, and he kept Brick unchanged by his recogni
tion of the truth about himself. Elia Kazan, whom Williams
wanted to direct the Broadway production, was not content,
however, with the final act. He felt, as Williams explains
?
in his notes to the published version,
. . . that Big Daddy was too vivid and important a
character to disappear from the play except as an off
stage cry after the second act curtain, . . . and that
the character of Brick should undergo some apparent
mutation as a result of the virtual vivisection that
he undergoes in his interview with his father in Act
Two.
To keep Kazan's interest, Williams rewrote the third act in
2Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.(New York, 1955), p. 98.
Ill
accord with the director's suggestions.
This new third act modified the whole play in the
direction of the traditional realistic drama. The change
prompted by Kazan's suggestions are intended to demonstrate
the consequences of the play's principal climax, which oc
curs at the end of Act Two. But the new version failed to
achieve this aim for two reasons. In the first place, Big
Daddy's reappearance serves no significant dramatic func
tion. His return does provide an opportunity for a the
atrically effective scene (Maggie kneels before Big Daddy
to announce her pregnancy), and it does permit him to hint
at his choice of heirs, but neither of these events is a
necessary consequence of the climax. Secondly, the sudden
change in Brick is not convincing. At the end of Act Two,
after his revelatory talk with Big Daddy, he is, by his own
admission "almost not alive" and totally unable to care
about anything but more liquor. Yet, in Act Three, with no
lapse of time, he insists that he is very much alive, ac
tively supports Maggie's fake claim, and yields easily to
her demands that he sleep with her. The rapidity of the
change in Brick is not, of course, logically impossible, but
in view of the total circumstances it seems highly improb
able. The alterations that Williams made in the play's
third act at Kazan's request fail to establish a convincing
causal link between the climax and subsequent events. They
do, however, create— in accord with the conventions of
112
traditional drama— the possibility of a conclusion that
suggests Maggie and Brick, with Big Daddy’s blessing, have
solved their individual problems and achieved a permanent
reconciliation.
This edifying conclusion, which was emphasized on the
stage by soft lights and kneeling figures with outstretched
hands, did not accord with Williams' stated aims for the
play. His intention was to present directly the experi
ences of human beings in a time of common crisis; he did
not want to work out happy solutions to individual prob
lems. And in the published version which follows the
original script of the play, he came close to realizing his
intentions. In this version, Williams frequently ignored
the demands of traditional dramaturgy. He did not, for
example, attempt to arrange the events of the third act so
as to show the consequences of the play's principal climax,
which occurs at the end of the second act. As a result,
Brick's surrender to Maggie at the end of the play carries
with it no intimations of permanent reconciliation and
future happiness. Instead, it suggests that even if Mag
gie's lie about her pregnancy becomes truth, the mendacity
of her relationship with her husband will never change.
This final scene not only emphasizes the play's main
theme— the mendacity of daily living--but creates vividly
the impression that it is a moment of actual human experi
ence. ---
113
Williams produced this conclusion by ignoring the
traditional precepts of dramaturgy, but he did not ignore
entirely such precepts in his construction of the play. He
did, in fact, use many conventional techniques, and used
them with skill. He utilized a conventional structure of
three acts. He observed the unities of time and place. And
he employed a realistic plot to develop two important lines
of action: the fight for the family estate, and Maggie's
struggle to regain her husband's affections. Both lines of
action are initiated in Act One, developed slightly and
then suspended and a third line of action (one that first
appears at the beginning of Act Two, and one that is not
directly related to the actions that culminate in Maggie's
triumph) is introduced. This action, which is the encounter
between Big Daddy and Brick that produces the play's prin
cipal climax, is slightly foreshadowed in Act One. Basic
ally, however, this encouter is the result of events that
have taken place before the play begins.
In this principal climax, and to a lesser extent in
the action that immediately precedes it, Williams came
closest to realizing his principal aim in the play--the
presentation of the true quality of human experience. Such
a climax, which is the result of events anterior to the
play, is much like the highly emotional moments of revela
tion in real life that most often have little discernible
relationship to the events that immediately precede them.
114
Audiences can accept this climax, despite its tenuous con
nection to the other events in the play, because they
recognize in it "the true quality of human experience,"
And they comprehend its significance directly and vividly
because they have been made aware, through the exposition,
of the basic causes of this climax. The immediacy with
which the meaning of the climax is conveyed accords with
another of Williams’ dramatic aims--direct communication
with his audiences.
His efforts to realize this aim in the play depended,
however, more on special staging and an unusual set than
on any other element. The stage directions that accompany
the published version of the play indicate that Williams
wanted the actors to appear to be addressing the audience
more than each other. Toward the end of Act Two, for exam
ple, at a point where Brick is being forced to admit the
real reasons for his drinking, Williams provided the fol
lowing direction:
He [Brick] moves downstage with the shuffle and
clop of a cripple on a crutch. As Margaret did when
her speech became "recitative," (I, p. 33), he looks
out into the house, commanding its attention by his
direct concentrated gaze , . . (Ill, p. 106).
In the New York production, the director, Elia Kazan,
apparently not only followed Williams’ suggestions but en
larged upon their intent by using formal groupings to
create the impression of the classical chorus that directed
115
its speeches to the audience. Kazan reinforced the impres
sion that the actors were delivering their lines directly to
the audience by having the designer slant and extend the
floor of the set, which suggested a bed-sitting-room in a
Mississippi Delata plantation house, toward the audience.
The result was that the actors seemed to be addressing the
audience from an elevated pedestal.^
The raked floor--a diamond-shaped platform with one
corner extended over the orchestra pit— was only one of the
unusual features incorporated into the set by the designer,
Joe Meilziner. He also included a gallery, simulated by
using the stage space on the two upstage sides of the
raked bedroom floor, and transparent walls with suggestions
of white columns traced on them. This open, non-realistic
set enabled the director to underscore the changing moods
in the play by projecting fireworks and stormclouds against
the rear wall of the stage. It also permitted him to move
his actors about freely so that their restless movements
could emphasize the atmosphere of tension and frustration
engendered by the action. In addition, the set subtly
stressed— since it represented not only the bedroom of a
married couple but also the bedroom shared for many years
by a pair of old bachelors--the sexual motifs that tend to
^Eric Bentley, New Republic, 132:22, April 4, 1955.
^Henry Hewes, Saturday Review, 38 :33 , April 3 , 1955,
116
dominate the play. And it provided, at Williams' suggestion,
a symbol appropriate to one of the play's main themes in
the form of a huge console combination of radio-phonograph,
television set, and fully equipped bar, that is intended as
". . .a very complete and compact shrine to virtually all
the comforts and illusions behind which we hide. . . ,
Williams utilized, in addition to the console, a vari
ety of other symbols. His symbolism here was less extrava
gant, less obvious, and far better integrated into the
action than the symbolism of most of his previous plays.
Some of the symbols in the present play have a specific and
limited significance. Brick's crutch, as well as the
plaster case on his broken ankle, that stands for his moral
paralysis, is one such symbol. Another is Maggie's Diana
Trophy bow that suggests— abetted by her description of her
plans to use the bow,
We're going deerhunting . . . I love to run , . .
through the chilly woods, run, run, leap over
obstacles . . . (I, p. 20)
--her determination to win despite all difficulties. Still
other symbols have a wider application and so serve to en
hance the meaning of the play. In the stage version, Kazan
used a thunderstorm to symbolize the overt family fight
over the inheritance, and the approaching death of Big
Daddy. But neither this storm nor the moon, that represents
^Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, stage direction, p. 98.
117
the cool detachment that some of the characters admire, but
that none of them can achieve, is used in the published
version.
Both versions included, of course, the cat motif that
is the source of the title. This recurrent motif is used
as a symbol of the frustrations and anxieties, sexual and
otherwise, that beset people who continually resort to
mendacity for protection from the painful truth about them
selves. And both versions included the incident in which a
.fragile bedside lamp is shattered by Brick when he strikes
at Maggie with his crutch in an attempt to shut off her
revelation about the truth of his relationship with Skipper.
The breaking of the lamp suggests the shattering effect of
truth on protective illusions and thus symbolically empha
sizes one aspect of the play's main theme.
Williams did not restrict his symbolism to objects or
actions. As usual, most of his characters are also sym
bols. But these characters, unlike those of Camino Real,
are always more important as people than as symbols. The
most interesting and the most thoroughly revealed of the
characters is Big Daddy. He is more fully revealed than
any of the other characters partly because the action shows
him in a greater variety of relationships, both to the
other characters and to society, and partly because the
exposition reveals more of his background. He is more in
teresting than the other characters because he expresses
118
his attitudes toward his diverse familial and social rela
tionships with blunt honesty and ribald humor. The audience
sees Big Daddy as a respected Delta planter, as a tyrannical
husband, as a bullying father-in-law, and as a sympathetic
and loving father. They hear him assert, with scatalogical
emphasis, his disgust for most of his family, for church,
for fraternal organizations, and for human degradation
caused by poverty and the fear of death. And they have
some insight into the causes of his actions and attitudes
because they have considerable information about his back
ground.
The extensive knowledge of Big Daddy that Williams
provides for his audiences enables them to recognize him as
a person they know outside of the theatre— the familiar
self-made American male, who is contemptuous of everything
that he does not understand. But though Big Daddy is a
familiar type, he is also an individual. He is individual
ized by his confession of fears and desires and by his per
ception of certain basic human truths. And he is most
individual, and most appealing in his clumsy and tender
efforts to comfort Brick when the latter is suddenly faced
with the truth about himself.
Big Daddy's favorite son, Brick, is the center of at
tention in the play, but he is far less interesting than
Big Daddy. He is, in fact, scarcely a character at all in
the usual dramatic sense, for he is almost totally passive
119
throughout the play. In Act One, he drinks and inatten
tively listens to Maggie talk. In Act Two, he drinks and
listens, this time more attentively, while Big Daddy talks.
And in Act Three, he simply drinks, though he is jolted out
of his apathy twice: once when Maggie tries to analyze his
relationship with Skipper, and again when Big Daddy forces
him to see the truth about that relationship. On both of
these occasions, which are the emotional high points in the
play, Brick’s reactions suggest that his moral paralysis
stems not only from the inadmissible fact of his repressed
homosexuality but also from the destruction of his youthful
ideals.
Brick, like certain characters in Williams’ previous
plays, is a defeated idealist. Like Blanche in A Street
Car Named Desire, and Alma in Summer and Smoke, he had been
possessed of a shallow and puerile idealism that was
destroyed by the reality of the world in which he lived.
And he is shattered morally, as they were, by the loss of
his ideals. But Brick is not as compelling a character as
either Blanche or Alma because he makes no effort to solve
his difficulties. He cannot engage the interest or the
sympathy of the audience because he seems totally indiv-
ferent to the outcome of the events depicted in the play.
Maggie, Brick’s unloved wife, is nearly everything he
is not. She is as active as he is passive; as talkative as
he is taciturn. She rouses the interest and sympathy of the
120
audience, as he does not, because she has definite aims,
and because she makes a determined effort to achieve them.
Maggie creates the impression that she is a real person
because she is capable of decision and of struggle. Her
decisions are important in revealing her character and in
helping to give movement and suspense to the play. Her
announcement in the first act that she intends to regain her
husband’s attentions and to win the inheritance causes the
audience to look forward to the clash with the other char
acters that will produce victory or defeat for Maggie. The
struggle to carry out her decisions reveals Maggie more
fully. In her efforts to recapture the affections of Brick
she displays both courage and honesty. And in the fight
for the family estate she demonstrates that she can be ruth
less and cunning. The audience cannot altogether approve
her behavior, but they can accept it as the behavior of a
complex human being who is driven by powerful and understand
able motives.
Williams used eleven minor characters to support his
three principals. He did not, however, attempt to individ
ualize most of these characters. Certain of them— the
Negro servants--merely add to the plantation atmosphere
while carrying on necessary stage business. Others--
Gooper’s five irritating children, the doctor and the
minister— serve to emphasize conflicting elements in the
plot and in the themes. Three of them— Gooper, his wife,
I
121
Mae, and Big Mama--are more individualized than the others.
Big Mama is portrayed as an over-fed, over-emotional
Southerner with a desire to preserve the social amenities,
and a fondness for inelegant horseplay. She is useful in
the play chiefly because her attitudes , and her relation
ship with Big Daddy, help to emphasize the principal themes.
The remaining two characters, Gooper and Mae, are not much
more than stock types. Mae is a shrewish, catty, and con
niving ex-Queen of Cotton with ambitious social plans that
require Big Daddy's money to bring them to fruition. And
Gooper is a caricature of the competent but boring young
attorney.
What individuality any of the minor characters have is
created chiefly by their distinctive speech. Williams has
provided all of his characters with swift, slangy language
that has the ring of genuine American speech with Southern
overtones. This speech is often amusing— especially when
Maggie uses it--and it is sometimes bawdy--particularly in
Big Daddy's mouth--but it always has the force and vigor of
real life conversation without being simply reproduction of
actual speech. Here, as in all of his plays, Williams has
used real life speech as the basic ingredient in the highly
stylized language that he creates for his characters. This
language has, unlike the ordinary speech it is intended to
suggest, well-defined rhythms that enable Williams to in
crease or diminish the emotional intensity of his dialogue
122
to meet the demands of any dramatic situation.
The principal device Williams uses to obtain and
control these rhythms--the repetition and contrast of key
phrases--is one that he experimented with in The Rose
Tattoo and in Camino.Real. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Wil
liams demonstrated again that he had learned to use this
device effectively. The device and its effects are most
apparent in the speech of the principal characters. Both
can be seen in Maggie's analysis of the relation of money
to age:
You can be young without money but you can't be
old without it. You've got to be old with money
because to be old without it is just too awful,
you've got to be one of the other, either young or
with money, you can't be old and without it— that's
the truth, Brick . . . (I, p. 38)
And both appear in Big Daddy's discussion of the limited
value of money:
But a man can't buy his life with it, he can't
buy back his life with it when his life has been
spent, that's one thing not offered in the Europe
fire-sale or in the American markets or any markets
on earth, a man can't buy his life with it, he
can't buy back his -life when his life is finished . . .
(ii, p. 70) .
The device of repeating key phrases enables Williams
to create dialogue that sounds like the speech of living
people but that has a controlled intensity and momentum
that such speech rarely has.
Because of the unorthodox construction and minimum
action, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof depends almost entirely on
123
dialogue for its dramatic effects. Fortunately, the quality
of that dialogue is such that it makes the play one of
Williams' best. The play is further enhanced by its char
acters and its theme. Its characters do not suggest, as
those of earlier plays frequently do, a file of case his
tories. One of them, Big Daddy, is Williams' best male
character to date, and another, Maggie, is certainly one of
his best women. The theme is both more profound and more
clearly affirmative than themes in previous plays. Cat
condemns as disgusting mendacity the illusions that most
people create to escape the frightening loneliness that is
the basic fact of human existence. At the same time, it
suggests that such mendacity is inescapable because the
communication between people that could dispel the need for
illusion is impossible.
Maggie and Big Daddy, who like everyone else fail in
their efforts to communicate, recognize the inescapability
of mendacity, but insist that life must continue despite
such defects. Brick, whose failure to communicate has
betrayed him into alcoholism, demands absolute purity and
when he cannot attain it--even his ideal friendship proves
to have a sexual basis— he rejects life totally, But
Brick's purity, however admirable, is sterile. Only by com
ing to terms with life, whatever its flaws, as Maggie and
Big Daddy do, can the survival of the race be ensured. The
play, on the evidence of the ending, is definitely on the
124
side of Maggie and Big Daddy. Brick's denial of life is
not, however, explicitly condemned, nor is it justified.
Instead Williams asks for Brick, as he has for all his
defeated idealists, compassion and understanding.
The interpretation of this theme depends, of course,
on which third act--Kazan's or Williams'--is presented.
Many critics who have been exposed to both versions not
only prefer Williams' but feel that with it Cat is his
finest play. But whether it is superior to A Streetcar
Named Desire is debatable. The peculiarities of its con
struction— the use of two climaxes only slightly related--
keep it from attaining the drive, the emotional tension,
the sense of inevitability that made Streetcar so successful.
Though not as effective on stage as this latter play, Cat
is truer to its author's goals and truer to life. Williams'
aim of
. . . trying to catch the true quality of experience
in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent
— fiercely charged.'--interplay of live human beings in
the thundercloud of a common crisis^
is very nearly realized by the play. But while the exper
iences of the characters are true to human experience,
they do not necessarily result in good drama. The experi
ences of life, however interesting, do not add up to drama
because they lack discernible order. A dramatist may
C
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, stage direction, p. 98.
125
legitimately undertake to portray the vagueness and dis
order of real life on the stage, but he ’ ’cannot show chaos
n
to others if he himself is lost in it. The essence of the
drama, like the essence of all art, is order. And it is
Williams' failure to impose such significant order on the
experiences depicted in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that keeps
it from being a truly distinguished play.
In the play that followed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Wil
liams returned not only to the South he had made familiar
in earlier plays but to the starting point of his profes
sional career. This play, Orpheus Descending, was the old
play, Battle of Angels, with refurbished dialogue, symbol
ism, and characterization. While there was considerable
fresh material in Orpheus Descending--Williams has said
that it is seventy-five per cent new writing8— much of the
original play remained. The basic situations, the princi
pal actions, and the main characters of Battle of Angels
reappeared in the new play. The hero in both is an itiner
ant Southern artist--a poet in Battle of Angels, a folk-
singer in Orpheus--who possesses a powerful determination
to be free and a primitive sex appeal that frequently
threatens his freedom.
7Eric Bentley, In Search of Theatre (New York, 1953),
p. 127.
O
Orpheus Descending, p. x.
126
In each play, this hero, Val Xavier, wanders into a
backward community of the rural South where he attracts all
the women, antagonizes most of the men, and becomes deeply,
though variously involved with three of the community's
most prominent ladies. During the course of each play, one
of these ladies, the sheriff's wife, who is also a visionary
painter of mystic religious subjects, sees Val as the
Christ. The second lady, a young decadent aristocrat,
whose behavior is particularly offensive to the towns
people, tries not only to seduce the hero but to get him to
leave town. The third woman, proprietress of the mercan
tile store, whose husband is dying of cancer, hires Val as
a clerk and takes him as a lover. At the climax of both
plays, this proprietress, now pregnant, is killed by her
jealous husband and Val is captured by a mob bent on lynch
ing and burning.
In addition to repeating the principal actions and
characters of Battle of Angels, Williams retained both its
three act form and its sequence of events. In Act One of
each play, first the sheriff's wife and then the aristocrat
capture the hero's attention, and the act ends with the
proprietress hiring Val. In Act Two, the aristocrat pre
cedes the Sheriff's wife in accosting the hero, and the
act ends with the proprietress taking Val as a lover. And
in Act Three, the Sheriff's wife and then the aristocrat
have a last try at Val, and the act ends with the death of
127
the proprietress and the hero.
Williams did modify his original structure in several
ways. He eliminated the prologue and epilogue he had used
to frame the main action in his published version of Battle
of Angels. He wrote another prologue that provides more
detailed exposition and that creates interest by its care
ful preparation for the entrance of some of the main char
acters. He accelerated the pace of the new version by
deleting several slow talky exchanges among minor charac
ters and by incorporating necessary data originally pre
sented in such exchanges into direct dramatic action. The
relationship of Carol, the decadent aristocrat, to the
community, for example, is established not by the gossip of
townswomen but by the confrontation of Carol and the gos
sips. And he provided more theatrically effective entrances
for his major characters. On two occasions, for instance,
Val's entrance is immediately preceded by a Choctaw cry
delivered by a Conjure man.
But perhaps the most significant changes Williams made
in his original structure were those introduced in an effort
to unify the two subordinate lines of action with the main
plot action, all three borrowed from Battle of Angels. He
sought to integrate one of these subordinate lines, that
involving Val and Vee Talbott, the Sheriff's wife, by making
Vee's interest in the hero a motive for the Sheriff's per
secution of Val and for the brutality of his death. And he
tried to tie the second line of action, that involving Val
and Carol, to the main plot action partly by establishing a
prior acquaintance between the two, chiefly by having Carol
warn Val he is in danger, a warning that foreshadows the
climax. These changes did not, however, create the unity
the play needed. They help, as does the focus on a common
conflict— that between primitive, instinctual values and
civilized, neurotic values— to link the three lines of
action. But since neither of the subordinate actions has
any necessary connection with the climax, the structure
remains without unity. Moreover, the main action itself,
like that of the original play, does not progress through a
series of causally related events to an inevitable climax.
The climax is not convincing because the necessity for the
death of Val and Lady has not been established by preceding
events.
Despite these weaknesses, the construction of Orpheus
Descending is a decided improvement on that of Battle of
Angels. VJilliams’ skill at dramaturgy had, not surprising
ly, developed considerably in eighteen years. But the
set and stage devices he planned for the new play give
still better evidence not only of the extent of his develop
ment as a dramatist but also of its direction. His fondness
for theatrical effects, as well as his talent for choosing
the devices that produce such effects, show in the non-
realistic set, with its bare suggestion of the interior of
129
a mercantile store and its multiple playing areas. They
show too in the music that underscores the principal ac
tions; in the variety of sounds, including Choctaw cries,
baying of bloodhounds, and blowing of toy horns; and in the
lighting, particularly the flashing of pocket torches and
the ignition of a blow torch in darkness. Williams used
these devices in combination with his set, to help evoke
the tense atmosphere and feverish emotions he wanted for
the play. More important, he sought, through the strong
contrast between this highly theatrical combination and the
realism of the action, to give the play some meaning beyond
the particular.
To give Orpheus added significance, 'Williams, in ac
cord with his usual practice, employed several symbols. He
carried over from the original play two symbols: the Con
jure Man, who is a symbol both of death and of the wild or
primitive quality in man; and the hero’s snake skin jacket,
which is another representation of the untamed spirit.
Both are obvious, but both symbols are far better inte
grated with the action than they were in Battle of Angels.
And Williams added two less obvious symbols, incorporating
them equally well into the play. One of these latter is
Val’s guitar, inscribed with the names of famous jazz
musicians, to which he attributes the power of keeping
him untouched by the corruption that has surrounded his
life (I, 2, p. 36). Since this guitar is carefully linked
130
with the paintings done by Vee, it seems to represent an
immunity to corruption, a special sort of purity or inno
cence that art confers on its practitioners. The second
symbol is a bird, described by Val, that has no legs and
lives all its life on the wing, completely free from the
corrupting earth. This bird is Williams1 symbol for the
absolute purity and the perfect freedom his hero seeks.
Nor did Williams confine his symbolism to objects,
for he also employed his hero as a symbol. Val represents,
as he did in Battle of Angels, the untamed, primitive
spirit. But here he also is the mythical musician of the
title, who descends into hell to effect a rescue. And at
the same time he is a Christ figure, whose devotion to his
pure ideals leads him to destruction. Williams did, of
course, intend Val to be more than a complex symbol. He
supplied his hero with a detailed background, with definite
attitudes, with a specific, if impossible, aim, all of
which help to establish him as an individual. As a result
Val is a far more provocative and far better realized
character than his prototype, though he is, like the first
Val, an almost completely static character. This lack of
development makes Val less convincing as a person, but it
does not diminish his effectiveness as a symbol.
The other major character, Lady, has, like Val, a
prototype in Battle of Angels. Lady has many of the quali
ties and much of the behavior that made Myra, her predeces-
131
sor, seem a real person. Williams tried to render these
qualities--intensely passionate emotions, nervous volubility,
kindness--more appropriate to his character by turning
her into an Italian. And he strengthened the motivation
for her behavior toward her husband and toward Val by mak
ing her husband responsible for the burning of her father
and his property. These changes make Lady even more con
vincing and attractive than Myra, But her main appeal still
has the same sources. She can provoke as did Myra, the
interest of audiences because she has a definite aim that
she struggles hard to achieve. And like Myra, she elicits
sympathy because she undergoes a significant change as a
result of her experiences. When Lady discovers she is
pregnant, she feels her long struggle against defeat by the
forces of disaster and death is over, that she and life are
triumphant. Her experience transforms her from a half-
alive, cynical hating woman to a fully alive, joyous, lov
ing one. Lady is the only character in Orpheus who is not
static. She is, indeed, one of the rare few of Williams'
characters who do develop. And she is one of the better
portraits in his gallery of women.
Of the remaining characters only two, Vee and Carol,
are portrayed in any detail. Vee remains what she was in
Battle of Angels, more a case study than a person. Her
role in Orpheus is better integrated into the main action
since her attraction for Val becomes a motive for his
132
subsequent persecution. And she contributes to a new
theme--art alone can give meaning to existence--that Wil
liams introduced. Carol, the decadent aristocrat, is more
fully sketched than she was in the earlier play, Williams
added details of background and behavior that help to re
veal her character more completely. And he changed the root
cause of her corruption. She is no longer one of Williams'
Southern ladies who seek escape in alcohol and sex from the
loneliness and alienation that adherence to an outmoded,
artificial social code has forced upon them. Instead, she
revenges herself upon an evil society that violently re
jects her ideals of equality for all men by flaunting her
deliberately corrupt behavior. This change in Carol's
motivation, and subsequently in her behavior, helps to
illustrate the play's main theme, for it focuses attention
on the social forces that destroy ideals and promote cor
ruption.
The rest of the minor characters are representative
types rather than individuals. Williams used the gossipy
townswomen as a sort of chorus that comments on the actions
of the principals. And he supplied both the men and the
women with attitudes and behavior that strongly suggest the
forces of repression and darkness that Carol, Val, and
Lady struggle against. In Battle of Angels Williams pro
vided these minor characters with distinctive speech pat
terned after the contemporary speech of the American South.
133
In rewriting the play, he retained most of this Southern
speech, modifying it chiefly by bringing the slang up to
date. This modification was not an altogether happy one,
however, for Williams permitted certain unlikely and inap
propriate phrases--such as, "Cut out," "the deep six," and
"haul in the loot"--to creep into the speech of small,
rural town women.
Apart from this slight incongruity,,the dialogue is
up to Williams1 usual standard. It does not consist of
real life speech adopted to the stage, as that of the
earliest plays seems to, but it is instead the special
speech that Williams had created for, and used so effective
ly in, his later plays. This speech utilizes the phrasing
and diction of the most vivid, contemporary American speech,
presenting them in rapid-paced, highly rhythmic patterns.
Such speech is appropriate to the intense emotions and
frequently bizarre experiences of his characters. The dia
logue of Orpheus has all the characteristics of Williams'
special language. His exploitation of current slang,
clichd', and phrasing, for example, is obvious in Lady's
response to Val's request for his salary before he moves
on:
Y'r living expenses. I can give you the figures to
a dime. Eighty-five bucks, no ninety! Chicken-feed,
mister! Y'know how much you got coming? IF you
get it? I don't need paper to figure, I got it all in
my head. You got five hundred and eighty-six bucks
coming to you, not, not chicken-feed, that. But,
13 4
mister— if you try to walk out on me, now tonight,
without notice!--You’re going to get just nothing!
A great big zero . . . (Ill, 3, p. 107)
And his use of repetition and contrast to establish rhythm
is apparent in Val.'s description of night work in the city:
. . . I always worked nights in cities and if you
work nights in cities you live in a different city
from those that work days. The ones that work days
in cities and the ones that work nights in cities,
they live in different cities. The cities have the
same name but they are different cities. As different
as night and day . . . (II, 3, p. 73)
The set pieces that marred Battle of Angels and other
early plays are gone. Williams did use certain of these
pieces again— Lady’s elaborate simile of the barren fig
tree, for example--but because they are now fully incor
porated into the action and rendered in his special language
they are no longer obtrusive. The excellence of the dia
logue of Orpheus does more than anything else to make the
play superior to Battle of Angels. At the same time, the
difference in the dialogue of the two plays attests to
Williams' development as a playwright.
Orpheus is superior to Battle of Angels not only in
its dialogue but in its construction and characterization.
Williams reused much of his first play but he reorganized
its materials to extend and modify its themes. In Battle
of Angels the major themes emerge from the conflict between
the primitive, instinctual forces represented by Val and
the civilized, repressive forces, represented by the towns
people. At first, Val seemed to be one of Lawrence's
135
primitive, blood-conscious heroes, whose career will demon
strate the superiority of the natural to the artificial.
Ultimately, Val proves he is no Laurentian, for he rejects
love as a threat to his freedom and seeks a sterile purity
that is to be attained by isolation in the New Mexico
desert.
In Orpheus, Val also represents the primitive force and
he also rejects love— now because it is a "make-believe
answer." And he seeks purity, but this time it is the kind
of fruitful purity associated with Christ. In the earlier
play Val's failure to achieve purity and his death seem
merely fortuitous. In the new play Val achieves purity
through his death. Only death can bestow and preserve such
purity, for life is almost inevitably corrupting. The main
theme in Orpheus thus suggests that the pure and innocent
cannot survive in the corruption and evil of society. Wil
liams illustrates this theme in several ways. He makes Val
a representative of the innocent, primitive spirit that is
destroyed by the dark forces in civilization. And he not
only identifies Val with Christ but hints at a resurrec-
tion--Vee sees Val as Christ and the final events of the
play take place during Easter. The symbol of this resur
rection, the snakeskin jacket that remains after Val's
death, links Christian and fertility ritual, as well as the
Christian and primitive motifs in the play.
136
To these two illustrative motifs, Williams added a
third: the .Orpheus myth indicated in the title. • This
motif is related to the Christian-fertility ritual motif
by the superficial parallel seen in Orpheus' descent under
ground and his reappearance. More important, it serves to
illustrate the theme, for Orpheus, in one version of the
myth, is sacrificed for preaching purity. Williams also
used this myth to imply that society is a kind of hell, its
values evil, its inhabitants corrupt. Moreover, he. utilizes
it to introduce a minor theme. This theme, a new one in
Williams' plays, emphasizes the power of art to give mean
ing to existence and to transcend human corruption. It is
demonstrated specifically in Val's declaration that his
music has made him immune to corruption and in his insist
ence that Vee's painting makes sense of existence. Unlike
the major theme, this minor one offers some hope for man.
There is, of course, a suggestion in the final scene that
life will reassert itself when Carol, wearing the snake-
skin jacket, defies the Sheriff:
— Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave
clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them,
and these are tokens passed from one to another, so
that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind
. . . (I, 3, p. 117)
But Carol, already totally corrupted, is an unlikely symbol
for light and hope.
The themes and motifs that Williams developed in
Orpheus are related to each other and to the action of the
137
play. But the connections are frequently vague, the rela
tionships over-ingenious. The ingenuity and complexity of
the themes overburden a story that is too slight to sustain
such a burden. And Williams has not worked out a structure
that supports his themes. The inevitable destruction of
purity that is suggested by the main theme has no equivalent
in the play's structure.
Orpheus Descending is unquestionably better than the
play on which it is based. It is not, however, one of
Williams' best plays. Its heavy-handed symbolism, its lack
of unity, its insistence that life can be measured by easy
absolutes of corruption or purity keep it from being a play
of much merit. It is valuable for the evidence it provides
of the increase in Williams' dramatic skills, and of his
continuing concern for reworking and improving his plays.
Its chief value may lie in its introduction of new themes,
the modification of old themes, and its emphasis on vio
lence, all of which are more fully exploited in later
plays.
CHAPTER VI
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH
In his next two major plays, Williams explored further
the themes of Orpheus Descending in situations even more
bizarre. Both of these new plays proved more pessimistic,
more violent, and more remote from human relevance than any
of the playwright’s earlier plays.
The first of these new plays, Suddenly Last Summer,
was originally presented in January, 19 58, together with a
short one-acter^- under the collective title, Garden Dis
trict . This play offers one of Williams' most horrific
tales, a story that includes not only his usual features of
hovering disease, guilty sex, and the swindle of love, but
also obsessive mother love, a threatened lobotomy, overt
homosexuality, and cannibalism. The playwright did soften
somewhat the shock of this combination by presenting the
more grisly details in narrative form. The play is, in
fact, little more than a long, fevered recital. Catherine,
•^Something Unspoken, in 2 7 Wagons Full of Cotton and
Other Elays (New York, T953), pp. 221-238.
138
a Southern girl, under the influence of a truth drug,
describes the events that led to the death of her cousin,
Sebastian, a homosexual poet who was killed and partially
devoured by a band of starving Spanish waifs. Catherine’s
immediate audience consists of Sebastian's mother, her own
mother, and her brother, and a young doctor--all of whom
have a strong selfish interest in the girl's story. The
poet's mother, Violet, wants to make sure that Catherine
does not tell her story again lest it tarnish her son's
reputation. The girl's mother and brother want her to stop
telling the story for fear that Violet will prevent them
from getting the money Sebastian willed them. And the doc
tor wants to determine whether Catherine's tale is truth or
the hallucination of a diseased mind that can be treated
only by a lobotomy, for Violet has offered him funds for
his research if he will perform a silencing operation on
the girl.
Williams dramatized the conflicts of the family and
of the doctor. And he made his dramatized portion of the
play, which develops three lines of action, serve several
purposes. He utilized these lines of action to reveal
character and to create suspense. And he used them to pro
vide both a framework for, and appropriate diversions in,
Catherine's recital that help to keep this latter from
appearing too patently what it is. Williams unified his
three lines of action by making two of them--the scheming
14 0
of Violet to silence Catherine and the efforts of the
girl's family to secure their inheritance— dependent on
the outcome of the third--the doctor's conflict between
his pressing need for research funds and his professional
and private ethics.
But though the dramatized portion of the play is well-
unified, it does not altogether achieve the author's pur
pose. For Williams did not reveal the characters suffici
ently for audiences to determine whether such people could
affect the outcome of the events of the play. Catherine's
mother and brother are simply Southern types, whose feeble
efforts to persuade the girl to cease telling her story are
bound to be futile since she is to have a truth drug injec
tion. The doctor's potential conflict does not emerge be
cause he is sketched as a kindly, ethical man who would not
operate if he had the slightest doubt about Catherine's
sanity. As a result, the suspense that arises from the
efforts of the characters to achieve their aims is much
reduced. And the suspense that is provoked by the doubt
about Catherine's sanity is also sharply diminished because
she too easily wins the sympathy of audiences. The brutal
ity of the Sister who tends Catherine and the hostility of
Violet inevitably elicit sympathy for the girl. Moreover,
Violet's blind possessiveness of her son casts doubt at once
on her version of Sebastian's career. The vehemence and
guile of Violet move audiences toward believing Catherine,
141
and long before the final speech in which the doctor ac
knowledges the possibility that the girl's story is true,
they are irrevocably committed. In one sense, these flaws
in construction are irrelevant, for the focus in the play
is not on the dramatized portion but on the retrospective
narrative of Sebastian's experiences. Suddenly Last Summer
is in essence a recited short story rather than a play.
Though Williams chose not to dramatize the core of
his play, he did not neglect other sorts of dramatic excite
ment. As usual he exploited the physical resources of the
theatre to good advantage. He visualized an exotic set,
featuring a suggested Victorian Gothic mansion blended into
a fantastic tropical garden, as a backdrop for his story.
All of the action takes place in this jungle-garden, which
is full of violent colors and "massive tree-flowers that
suggest organs of a body torn out, still glistening with
O
undried blood." Accompanying and underlining the action
are not only the appropriate musical motifs that Williams
ordinarily uses but also the harsh cries of jungle birds
and the sibilant hissings and thrashings of other beasts.
These sound effects and the setting serve two purposes.
They help to make the febrile emotions of the characters
and Sebastian's bizarre history more acceptable, and they
symbolize the world Williams postulates in Suddenly Last
^Suddenly Last Summer (New York, 1958), p. 13.
142
Summer.
The jungle-garden is particularly important as a sym
bol, for it embodies two of the play's main ideas in its
jungle aspect: the riotousness and savagery of the world
and society. And as garden, it symbolizes the order the
artist imposes on an otherwise chaotic existence. As usual
Williams reiterated his principal ideas in several symbols.
He was not, however, nearly as lavish nor as heavy-handed
with his symbolism here as he had been in earlier plays.
The most effective symbols in Suddenly Last Summer are
certain of the images revealed in the narrative of Sebas
tian's career. The image that Violet uses to-describe the
pattern she and Sebastian had imposed on life--
. , . we would--carve out each day of our lives
like a piece of sculpture. — Yes, we left behind us
a trail of days like a gallery of sculpture (1, p. 27)
--repeats the symbol of artistic order and discipline im
plicit in the garden aspect of the set. And in the image
of the seabirds rending and eating the flesh of the newly
hatched turtles:
Over the narrow black beach of the Encantadas as
the just hatched sea-turtles scrambled out of the
sand-pits and started their race to the sea, , , .
To escape the flesh-eating birds that made the sky
almost as black as the beach! And the sand all alive,
all alive, as the hatched sea-turtles made their dash
for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to
attack and hovered and--swooped to attack! They were
diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them
over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the
undersides open and rending and eating their flesh.
(1, p. 20)
li+3
Williams extends and sharpens the symbol of the ferocity
and rapacity of life suggested by the jungle aspect of the
set. The final images in Sebastian's story, those that
describe his death, Williams used to fuse the two ideas
represented by the previous images, for the artist is here
sacrificed, in a demonic ritual, to the voracious forces
of savage existence:
. . . The band of naked children pursued us up
the steep white street and in the sun that was like
a great white bone of a giant beast that had caught
on fire in the sky!--Sebastian started to run and
they all screamed at once and seemed to fly in the
air, they outran him so quickly, I screamed. I
heard Sebastian scream, he screamed just once before
this flock of black plucked little birds that pursued
him and overtook him halfway up the white hill. , . .
When we got to where my Cousin Sebastian had disap
peared in the flock of featherless little black
sparrows, he--was lying naked as they had been,
naked against a white wall, and . . . they had
devoured parts of him. Torn or cut parts of him away
with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin
cans they made music with , they had torn bits of him
away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce
little empty black mouths of theirs. (4, pp. 86-7)
These image-symbols express more subtly and yet more clearly
and intensely Williams' view of life than any of the sym
bols he had previously employed.
Williams did not, of course, confine his symbols in
Suddenly Last Summer to the imagery in his narrative. He
gave several objects, apart from the jungle-garden, and
certain of his characters symbolic functions. He em
ployed, for example, Sebastian's garb--white shoes, hat,
suit, tie— to represent the innocence and purity of the
144
artist. He made Sebastian’s notebook, with its notes and
reviews of previous poems and its blank pages in place of
the latest one— symbolize both the order and discipline
that sustains the artist and the emptiness and senseless
ness of existence when the artist can no longer practice
his art. Among the characters, Catherine and Sebastian
have particularly significant symbolic roles. Catherine,
on one level at least, represents the predicament of the
artist in contemDorary society, for like the artist she
suffers because she tells a truth that is inimical to the
powers that be. And Sebastian stands for the innocence of
the artist, an innocence that must inevitably be destroyed
in a hideous world dedicated to the persecution of beauty.
Both of these characters and, indeed, most of the
characters, are more important in their symbolic roles
than in their individual ones. Since his interest in the
play was elsewhere, Williams paid relatively little atten
tion to characterization. Among the principal characters,
Catherine's family are merely fatuous and faintly ridicu
lous nonentities, while the doctor is simply a useful
interlocutor. Violet and Catherine are more fully realized
but they never come fully to life. Violet is the conven
tional rapacious mother, motivated principally by selfish
pride, disguised lust, and jealousy. Catherine is somewhat
more complex. She can arouse the sympathy of audiences
because they learn of the abuses she has suffered and they
145
witness her need for tender understanding. She is not,
however, sufficiently individualized to provoke serious
concern from audiences, for she is intended primarily as
an instrument for revealing Sebastian's story. It is the
revelation of this story and to a lesser extent, Sebastian
himself, that Williams is chiefly concerned with in Suddenly
Last Summer. He chose, oddly for a playwright, not to pre
sent his central character dramatically, but to reveal him
through the narrative reports of Violet and Catherine. The
portrait that emerges from these reports is a confused one.
Sebastian is an extraordinarily fastidious and pure man, a
talented and dedicated artist who strives to give meaning
to existence. Simultaneously, he is a super esthete, a
pampered dandy, a pervert who uses his mother and his cousin
to procure for him. Williams apparently wanted audiences to
focus on the first Sebastian and forget the second, since
this play as well as earlier ones clearly suggest that
esthetes, regardless of their behavior, are sacred. But for
most audiences, Sebastian's corruption is more impressive
than his purity. As a result, the significance of Sebas
tian's exemplary role as purity martyred in an evil world
(a role that is complemented by the suggested parallel to
St. Sebastian) is distorted and diminished.
Because Williams was not much concerned with conven
tional characterization, he did not, as he frequently had
in previous plays, attempt to provide his characters with
14 6
individual speech. The speech of most of these people has
a distinctly Southern flavor, an effect produced here more
by idiom than by pronunciation, though it is not the speech
of real life Southerners. It is, rather, Williams’ special
stage language that suggests live speech, but is always
more intense, more rapid, and more rhythmic. The now fam
iliar devices by which Williams creates his effects--the
repetition of key words, the antiphonal, echoing lines—
appear most frequently in the dialogue between Violet and
the doctor. Both devices are at work in Violet's descrip
tion of Sebastian's last summer:
Violet: Doctor!--he wrote no poem last summer.
Doctor: He died last summer?
Violet: Without me he died last summer, that was his
last summer's poem. (1, p. 18)
Williams' fondness for playing with language shows
in another exchange between the doctor and Violet over
Catherine's insistence on telling her story:
Doctor: Mrs. Venable, what do you think is her rea
son?
Violet: Lunatics don't have reason!
Doctor: I mean what do you think is her--motive?
But it is not so much these devices as it is the rich
imagery that Williams used to recreate the climate of
Sebastian's death that makes the language of Suddenly Last
Summer its single most effective element. In a play that
is more narrative than drama, the language must carry most
147
of the weight and Williams created some of his finest
theatre poetry for this play.
In Suddenly Last Summer Williams developed through
his central narrative two principal themes: the certain
persecution of purity in a savage world, and the power of
art to confer innocence and to give meaning to existence.
He had used these themes separately in Orpheus Descending,
but here he sought to combine and fuse them. Sebastian
symbolizes purity; his career suggests the inevitable des
truction of innocence in a cruel world. He is also the
artist, whose life and work, shaped and blended by disci
pline and talent, make existence meaningful. The practice
of his art makes him immune to corruption, confers upon him
a special innocence. When Sebastian ceases to practice as
a poet, life loses its meaning, and he loses his immunity
to corruption; he becomes another sacrifice for an unfor
giving and terrible god. Unfortunately, this theme of the
power of art and the persecution of purity is distorted by
the dual character Williams gave Sebastian. The second
Sebastian, the weakling, the effete pervert, is acceptable
neither as a symbol of purity nor as an artist. Moreover,
the significance of the theme is diminished by an air in
the play of exposure for the sake of exposure, of shock for
the sake of shock.
This atmosphere of sensational revelation, combined
with the largely narrative form of Suddenly Last Summer,
*
148
makes the play seem abstract, a product of a general con
cept, rather than of living experience. This sense of ab
straction is, it is true, at least partially offset by the
intensity and drive of the language, for Williams' images
give momentum and emotional impact to an otherwise static
play. But language, however eloquent or impressive, can
not turn a short story into a play. Suddenly Last Summer
seems, as a result, more a narrowing-down of Williams' tal
ents than an extension. His failure to dramatize his ideas
is partially responsible, but more important is his insist
ence on easy absolutes as the basis for his drama. The
black and white world he offered in Suddenly Last Summer is
too remote from the greys of living experience for the
play to move its audiences profoundly.
In Sweet Bird of Youth, the second of the pair of
plays in which Williams concentrated on pessimism and vio
lence, the playwright repeated, with minor variations, the
themes of Suddenly Last Summer in a story that is, if not
equally bizarre, at least equally horrendous and remote
from reality. The core of Suddenly Last Summer frequently
seems a private, neurotic fantasy deliberately exposed to
relieve the psychic tensions of the author. In Sweet Bird
of Youth the fantasy has become a nightmare which Williams
unwittingly mixed with external reality.
The action of the play clearly suggests both qualities.
The hero, Chance Wayne, is a young, handsome, blond gigolo,
who has long ago been exiled from his Gulf coast home town
by the machinations of the local political boss, whose
daughter Chance had loved, seduced, and photographed in
the nude when she was fifteen. His subsequent experiences
have taken him to New York, where his special talents en
abled him to work through the social register as a paid
lover and to win a place in the chorus of Oklahoma; to
Hollywood, where he played in crowd scenes of films; and
into the Navy, from which he was discharged with a nervous
breakdown brought on by his fear of combat. When Chance
returns to St. Cloud in the company of Ariadne Del Lago--
an aging movie queen, who is trying to forget her disas
trous effort to come back as a star through a combination
of sex, hashish, benezedrine, alcohol, and pure oxygen--he
is twenty-nine and already worried about growing old.
Within a few hours after his return, he discovers that he
is regarded as a criminal degenerate by most of his old
friends. His crime, he and the audience are told repeated
ly, was his unwitting infection of Heavenly, the political
boss's daughter, with a venereal disease so virulent that
only an operation removing her procreative organs could
cure it. His punishment is to be permanently ostracized
at once or to be castrated by Boss Finley's henchmen at
the conclusion of the Boss's speech on the threat of inte
gration to the pure blood of the South. But since Chance
150
has returned home specifically to regain Heavenlyfs love,
and thus recapture his lost youth and innocence, he insists
that he will have Heavenly at any cost. At the end, his
hopes frustrated, he is faced with the alternative of flee
ing with the movie queen or remaining to be castrated. He
chooses the latter, asking only for understanding, for
recognition that he exists in every person.
Williams presented this highly improbable situation
with little regard for either the rules of dramatic con
struction or human relevance. In Suddenly Last Summer, he
has avoided the problems of construction by using a narra
tive rather than a dramatic form. In Sweet Bird he did not
evade such problems, but neither did he solve them success
fully. The chief fault, a recurrent one in Williams' plays,
is a lack of unity. To the main action--Chance's attempt
to regain Heavenly's love— he appended two subordinate
lines of action: one involving Princess Kosmonopolis, the
aging glamour girl under her alias; the other Boss Finley,
the villainous politician. The first of these subordinate
actions is linked to the principal action by Chance's plan
to get Heavenly out of St, Cloud by blackmailing the Prin
cess into sponsoring a rigged talent contest in which he
and Heavenly will be selected to go to Hollywood as future
stars. But this connection is a tenuous one, for the
Princess makes it obvious that she will not go along with
Chance's scheme. Moreover, Chance himself, especially
151
after he learns of Heavenly's infection and operation, does
not seem convinced of the feasibility of his plan. Boss
Finley's relation to the main action is equally tenuous.
Ostensibly, his purpose is to avenge his daughter's despoil
ment by gelding her seducer. But his primary concern is
with consolidating his political power, and with meeting
"the threat of desegregation to white woman's chastity in
the South" (II, 1, p. 61). What this threat has to do with
Chance and Heavenly is not made clear anywhere in the play.
The segregation motif introduced by Boss Finley makes so
little sense that one critic has speculated that Williams
3
must have originally intended Chance to be a Negro. As
it is, this motif seems to be a device for ensuring com
mercial success by playing on the conditioned responses of
audiences outside the South.
Though neither of these subordinate actions is di
rectly related to the main plot, they are both developed
in considerable detail by the long exposition, which takes
up most of the first two acts. This exposition is fre
quently both awkward and repetitious. At one point,
Williams resorted to the clumsy device of a mock screen
test in order to provide an opportunity for Chance to re
veal his history. And he informs the audience on at least
3
Robert Brustein, "Williams' Nebulous Nightmare,"
Hudson Review, 12:260, Summer 19 59.
152
four occasions that Chance infected Heavenly. Since this
information is each time accompanied with either a direct
or a thinly disguised threat of castration, the repetitions
do serve to create and maintain suspense. But the action
that is the culmination of such suspense is not the inevi
table or even probable effect of any of the preceding
events. Chance resigns himself to castration not because
his character or his circumstances force him to, but because
Williams’ theme required such action. This arbitrary
wrenching of the plot to illustrate theme points up a
fundamental and serious weakness in Williams as a drama-
tist--his inability to find a form that will complement his
ideas.
While the faulty construction considerably reduces
the dramatic effectiveness of Sweet Bird, Williams did, as
usual, manage to offset this reduction by skillful use of
sets and stage effects. As he had so often before, he em
ployed a variety of sounds— gull cries, car horns, wind
whisperings, thematic music--and an open set with a strong
ly Moorish decor--backed by a cyclorama on which were pro
jected non-realistic images of groves of palm trees, and
of sea and sky— to create an exotic background appropriate
to the often hysterical emotions and bizarre actions of the
play. The most startling and effective of his devices,
however, was the projection of an image of Boss Finley that
filled the whole back wall of the stage in a simulated
153
telecast of a racist speech. As the politician thunders
out his hatred, his thugs systematically beat a heckler who
has dared to challenge the Boss, This device not only has
an immediate and powerful emotional impact but also does
much to create the necessary climate of hatred and violence.
Williams intended his giant image of the Boss, with
its roaring voice, and the brutality to the heckler to do
more than shock his audiences. He wanted this combination
to serve as a symbol of the repressive power and cruelty of
modern society. Of course, on or off television Boss Fin
ley and his followers represent the corruption and the vio
lence in this society. Williams also used certain objects
--the hashish, benezedrine, and pure oxygen the Princess
uses— to symbolize this corruption and the desire to escape
from it. And he used the bird of the title to represent
the opposite quality. On one level this bird suggests the
fleeting purity and innocence of youth, a condition that
almost inevitably disappears when adult experiences begin.
This bird is obviously related to the legless bird of
Orpheus Descending. But the bird may also stand for the
innocent sexuality of the primitive and the young, sweetest
in the vigor of youth.
The most important and complex symbolism, however, is
reserved for the characters. The Princess, for example,
represents both the corruption that overtakes the artist
when he is no longer active in his art and the power of art
154
to give meaning to existence. Heavenly, on the other hand,
represents purity, the special purity bestowed by death or
by the cutting out of life at its sources. For while
Heavenly was once corrupt, she has been purified by the
surgeon's knife. The hero, Chance, has the most complex
and the most obscure symbolic role. Like Val and Sebastian
in earlier plays, he stands for purity, or at least the
search for it. He is shown to be singularly free from
taint as a boy. In his early sexual encounter with Heavenly,
she is the aggressor. And in one version of the play,1 1 he
is even innocent of infecting the girl. Moreover, there is
a suggestion in his being mutilated and so purified on
Easter Sunday that he is to be identified with Christ. But
he is also, again like Sebastian, a symbol of the corruption
that experience in a savage jungle world forces on every
man. He has become, as he admits, a monster of depravity,
who contaminates all he touches. His desperate effort to
regain Heavenly is a search for his lost innocence; his
submission to castration is a fitting penance for his sins.
Yet, at the same time, Chance seems to represent, like the
bird of the title, sexuality in its natural and innocent
aspect. He is blessed with a virility so extraordinary
that he regards his true vocation as love-making. His
youthful dalliance with Heavenly is shown to be natural and
^Esquire, 51:114-155., April 19 59 .
155
joyous. And even in his professional affairs, he provided
not only sexual satisfaction but understanding, affection,
and tolerance. This pagan sexual symbolism, in which
Chance seems to represent Attis, is reinforced by the
hero’s division of people into two groups— those who are
capable of great sexual pleasure and those who are not--and
by his insistence that sexual envy is behind every instance
of castration. And Chance’s comment on castration is fur
ther emphasized by the public revelation of Boss Finley's
failure as a lover. Williams has thus given his hero three
distinct and contradictory symbolic roles. Contradictions
aside, there are few characters anywhere in literature of
sufficiently heroic stature to carry the emblematic burden
Williams imposed on his hero. And Chance so far from being
of heroic proportions is too slight a character to sustain
adequately any one of the three symbolic roles.
His behavior and his history show him to be a weak
ling, a romantic dreamer, and a coward, who bungles every
opportunity given him. The feebleness of his attempt to
blackmail the Princess suggests he lacks the talent for
serious corruption. The Princess, who seems well qualified
to say, apparently regards him not as a monster of deprav
ity but as a fumbling naif who is
. , . lost in the beanstalk country, the ogre's
country at the top of the beanstalk, the country of
the flesh-hungry, blood-thirsty ogre-- (II, 2, p. 88)
The innocence the Princess thus imputes to Chance seems to
support his symbolic role as a searcher for purity. But
his meretricious values and tastes seem to indicate that
what he is really seeking is the mindless security of the
womb. Finally, even his sexual symbolism, which is the
best supported of his symbolic roles, is questionable in
the light of much of his behavior. Chance not only lies
about and exaggerates continually his abilities and suc
cesses but seeks to solve his problems with schemes so
unlikely that even he has trouble believing in them. Yet
the only evidence for his sexual prowess comes from Chance
himself. Williams tried to show some development in his
hero by giving him a brief moment of self-recognition just
before the play ends. Significantly, the playwright felt
obliged to explain in a stage direction that his charac
ter's attitude was in fact self-recognition. Certainly,
nothing in Chance's characterization leads to such a moment.
Indeed, he is incapable of such development, for he is less
a real person than a figment of Williams' imagination
tricked out with the gestures and attitudes of familiar
Hollywood and New York types.
All of the other characters in the play, with the
t
single exception of the Princess, are even less convincing
as real persons than Chance. The many minor characters--
there are at least eighteen— are simply familiar Southern
types whose chief function is to help establish the neces-
157
sary atmosphere and to help reveal the attitudes of the
hero. Among the principals, only Heavenly and Boss Finley
are portrayed in detail. Heavenly is used chiefly to
expose the past behavior and present attitudes of her
father, though she does make one decision--to accompany her
father to the political rally--that affects the main action
of the play. And Boss Finley is a one-dimensional Southern
villain, with an appropriate array of hate, greed, cruelty,
and a delusion of grandeur so fantastic that he likens him
self to Christ.^
The remaining character, the Princess, is far more
convincing than any of the others. While much of her be
havior is as grotesque as that of the hero, it is much more
credible to audiences well conditioned to believe anything
of film stars. And Williams has given the Princess a
regality and a commanding presence that makes her accept
able as a once-great movie queen. She is more, however,
than a celebrity; she is an individual animated by lively
intelligence and humor, who is, despite her experiences,
still capable of shame and of genuine concern for someone
else. She can evoke the audience's sympathy by her very
human desire to pretend--though she knows the pretense will
not last--to be young and innocent again. And she can
arouse the interest and even the respect of audiences
^Sweet Bird of Youth (New York, 1959), p. 98.
158
because her desire to escape reality has not betrayed her
into self-delusion. The Princess is one of Williams' few
characters who have genuine insight. She knows precisely
who she is and what her circumstances are. Even the
belated announcement of the success of her comeback does
not obscure her knowledge that as a woman and as an artist
there can be no future triumphs for her. The excellence of
her characterization tends to make the Princess dominate
the play. When a talented actress, such as Geraldine Page,
who played the Princess in the Broadway production, takes
the part, the center of the play is shifted from Chance to
the Princess. As a result, the principal themes Williams
sought to develop in Sweet Bird are obscured and distorted.
One reason for the Princess' superiority may be that
she alone can appropriately deliver the repetitive and
faintly hysterical speeches Williams provided for most of
the characters. He has, at any rate, given her the best
speeches, the most telling images. The best in Sweet Bird
is not, however, up to Williams' usual high standard. The
driving intensity of the language of Suddenly Last Summer
is not anywhere apparent here. Williams' special devices
are here, but the language they help produce is no longer
a fresh, poetic version of real life speech. Instead, this
language is often as strained and circumlocutory as it is
in Chance's description of the two kinds of people:
159
. . . the great difference between people in this
world is not between the rich and the poor or the
good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in
this world is between the ones that had or have pleas
ure in love and those that haven't and hadn't any
pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy,
sick envy. . . (I, 2, p. 40)
Such mannered and hollow language is a jarring contrast to
the starkly realistic action and circumstances of the play.
Williams' failure to provide suitable language for
his characters is, of course, only one of the several
weaknesses that made Sweet Bird a decidedly inferior play.
With its peculiar language, faulty structure, and flat
characters the play seems often to be an old-fashioned
melodrama refurbished for contemporary audiences with
appropriate details about coronaries, goof-balls, tape-
recorders, and integration. But perhaps the most serious
flaw in a play that so patently struggles to convey a mes
sage is the confusion in its themes. The minor theme,
which is illustrated by the experiences of the Princess,
comes through clearly. This theme--the power of art to
give meaning to life and to preserve its practitioners
against corruption--is one that Williams used in both
Orpheus Descending and Suddenly Last Summer. In Sweet Bird,
the Princess becomes corrupt when she can no longer practice
her art, but that her art still gives meaning and shape to
her life she testifies to when she says:
. . . out of the passion and torment of my exist
ence I have created a thing that I can unveil, a
sculpture, almost heroic, that I can unveil, which
160
is true. (Ill, p. 110)
The major theme, which is developed by the career of
Chance, is far more obscure. Like the minor theme, this
theme--the inevitability of the destruction of purity in
a depraved world--or a variation on it, is one Williams has
used in previous plays. In Sweet Bird, however, Williams'
hero represents both the purity that will be des'troyed and
the corruption of the destroying world. Thus, in the
Christian context that holds on one level of the play,
Chance is both good and evil, both Christ and the Devil.
This apparent contradiction may be reconciled if Chance is
regarded as a Christian sinner, corrupted by the experi
ences of the world, who seeks to return to grace. His cas
tration is both a fitting punishment for his sins of the
flesh and the means by which he attains purity.
But while this contradiction can with some strain be
resolved, the contradiction between the Christian and pagan
elements in the play cannot be so easily reconciled. For
Chance not only is the apotheosis of Christian purity and
depravity but also the pagan Priapus or perhaps Attis. As
the latter his sexuality is natural and innocent and the
violence done to him is the malignant act of a sadistic and
envious society. But clearly Chance cannot both deserve
and not deserve castration.
In view of the contradictions and confusions in theme
and of the other weaknesses in the play, it is not
161
surprising that Sweet Bird is widely regarded as one of
the feeblest plays Williams has written in twenty years as
a professional dramatist. The play suggests that Williams’
imagination is as fertile and wild as ever; certainly, no
one else could have created it. Unfortunately, it also
suggests that his ability to shape the products of his
imagination for dramatic purposes is sadly diminished.
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION
By the end of his second decade as a professional
dramatist, Tennessee Williams was patently both unusually
prolific and highly successful. In twenty years he had
more plays published or produced--eleven long and twenty
short plays--and had had more hits than any playwright of
his generation. His success was perhaps more often commer
cial than critical. Yet he had received considerable
critical acclaim— as many favorable reviews and six major
playwrighting awards well attest. The critics were not,
however, either unanimous or consistent in their appraisal
of his work. During this period they praised him as the
leader of a new poetic American theatre, and they damned
him as the leader of a cult of mystic obscenity.-*- They
declared him a unique, minor writer and then likened him to
Chekov, Strindberg, and Pirandello,
Today he seems closer to the former than to any of
the latter. All the same his work does contain numerous
^R. E. Fitch, "Mystique de la Merde," New Republic
135:18, September 3, 1956.
162
163
provocative parallels and similarities to that of these
great dramatists. Williams has acknowledged a debt to
Chekov, though he explicitly denies the influence of
Strindberg. The relationship of Williams' plays to those
2
of Strindberg has been studied in detail by Richard Vowles.
Mr. Vowles points out several striking specific resemblances
in characters, situations, and tone between Camino Real and
Strindberg's pilgrimage plays, The Great Highway, Lucky
Peter's Journey, and Keys of Heaven. And he demonstrates
more general similarities in the assumption by both play
wrights that suffering is the central fact of human exist
ence, in their fondness for focusing dramatic action on
sexual conflict, and above all in their concern with the
atrical effects. Mr. Vowles concludes, and his evidence
is persuasive, however, that there was no outright influ
ence. He insists that Williams is simply a writer in the
Strindberg tradition, a "lineal" descendent, one of several
beneficiaries of the dramatic heritage created by the
genius of Strindberg.
Williams' debt to Chekov seems far smaller than his
claim that the Russian was his dramatic mentor would indi
cate. The influence of the latter is clearest in The Glass
Menagerie, and there it is chiefly the mood^ rather chan
2"Tennessee Williams and Strindberg," Modern Drama,
1:166-171, September 1958.
^See Chapter III, p. 50.
164
method, character, or situation that recalls Chekov. There
is a strong similarity, too, in the use by both writers of
characters who rely on illusion to evade a reality that
they cannot adjust to.
It is, of course, this juxtaposition of illusion and
reality that induced some critics to see a relation between
the drama of Pirandello and that of Williams. Like Piran
dello, Williams demonstrates the shattering effects of the
brutal destruction of carefully nursed illusions, the
catastrophe of the unfortunate victim unable to face the
consequences of reality. But Williams' reality is neither
Pirandello's nor Chekov's. For the latter reality is
represented by the mysterious lake in The Sea Gull that
provides a neutral backdrop for human affairs. The inscrut
ability of the lake suggests that the reality it symbol
izes is ultimately impenetrable and that man therefore must
define himself by his own acts rather than by some absolute
theory about his relation to reality.^ Pirandello’s real
ity is the limited illusion of the individual; there are as
many truths as there are individuals. Man suffers because
he cannot accept or recognize the relativity of reality
but continues to try desperately to act out the "truth" for
his fellows in accord with an absolute but false theory of
4Alvin B. Kernan, "Truth and Dramatic Mode in the
Modern Theater," Modern Drama, 1:113, September 1958.
165
truth. But for Williams reality is absolute, not relative.
It is cruel and savage, not neutral. Sometimes Williams
uses the dark, aggressive, materialistic and masculine
forces in society-represented best by Stan in Streetcar
and Boss Finley in Sweet Bird--to symbolize his reality.
And sometimes he uses an image, such as the devouring of
the newly-hatched turtles by voracious sea-birds in Sud
denly Last Summer, as 'an appropriate symbol. But whatever
the symbol, this reality is absolute and always actively
hostile to man's aspirations. Thus the resemblances be
tween the plays of Williams and those of Chekov and
Pirandello that suggest direct influence are misleading,
for while Williams does deal with similar problems his
treatment, and his solutions, of them are distinctly his
own.
The most obvious and strongest literary influence on
Williams’ work comes not from these dramatists but from
D. H. Lawrence. The details of Williams' borrowings from
this source have already been described,^ He is most obvi
ously. indebted to Lawrence for certain characteristics of
many of his heroes, for the notion that the ideals and
attitudes of white Protestant America are stultifying to
life, and for the idea that sexuality is the proper antidote
for the poison of traditional repression. But what
^See Chapter II, pp. 24-27.
166
Williams has borrowed he has also frequently abused and
distorted. In his plays, any anti-social or unconventional
act, however ineffectual or corrupt, is worthy of praise.
The sex act itself becomes an act of defiant sensualism,
of defilement, rather than homage to the religious mystery
of sex as it is with Lawrence. For Williams, freedom from
artificial restraint is to be attained through a romantic
escape from all responsibility, not through the responsible
and passionate commitment to another person and to a natural
way of life. This evasion of responsibility is accompanied
by a curious denial of the kind of sexuality Lawrence
most valued that runs through most of Williams' plays. In
both Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending, for example,
Val rejects true passionate desire for a sterile purity.
Laura in The Glass Menagerie is simply isolated from sex.
Blanche in Streetcar uses sex as a destructive escape, and
Alma, in Summer and Smoke, first denies sex altogether and
then accepts Blanche's substitute. Sebastian in Suddenly
Last Summer accepts another kind of substitute, while Brick
in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof refuses both substitutes and true
sex. But Brick's denial is only penultimate. The ultimate
comes in Sweet Bird with Chance's castration--a final and
irrevocable denial. Concomitant with Williams' denial of
sex is another most un-Laurentian attitude--guilt over sex.
So pervasive is this attitude that one critic has seriously
suggested that most of Williams' plays are disguised
167
"Freudian melodramas embodying the classical Oedipal sit
uation: Big Daddy punishes his sensitive child for lusting
after abnormal delights.This suggestion is attractive,
for it neatly reconciles otherwise confusing contradictions
in characters and themes.
But if the plays are in fact masked Freudian fanta
sies, they are such, as they should be, unconsciously.
Consciously, Williams, like Lawrence before him, strives to
be normative, to offer assurance that there is a healthy,
human way of life. He is never as consistent as Lawrence
was, but his claim that his plays are highly moral is not
as ludicrous as it is often taken to be. Certainly in the
plays from The Glass Menagerie to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
he explored what he apparently took as the alternatives for
man--adherence to an out-dated, Puritanical code or accep
tance of life, no matter how savage or sordid. While the
resolution of the inevitable conflict between these alter
natives is not always clear, the plays are definitely on
the side of life. Man’s proper credo is in the final
speech of a minor character in Streetcar: "Life has got to
keep on going" (11, p. 154). Moreover, in the careers of
Stella in Streetcar, of John in Summer and Smoke, and of
Serafina in The Rose Tattoo, Williams suggests that there
is a pattern of life that insures more than mere survival.
C
Brustein, Hudson Review, p. 259,
In the plays after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, however,
Williams abandoned his normative mood. The later plays
still condemn the repressive forces in society, but they
no longer try to establish a set of values consistent with
health and humanity. In these plays man is a victim,
trapped in an implacable and voracious world that will
inevitably corrupt his naive dreams and innocent aspira
tions or destroy him. The modern world offers, for Wil
liams, no middle ground between innocence and corruption.
Nor does it offer much hope. Even love is discounted as a
"make-believe answer." Art' is a partial and temporary
answer for some, for it immunizes its practitioners against
corruption. But the best answer is death— a ritual purify
ing death such as the actual death suffered by Val and
Sebastian or the symbolic death by Chance. Williams’ view
of life in the later plays does not seem to be a corollary
of his view in earlier ones. It does not represent a
maturing of his ideas but a return to the view first ex
pressed in Battle of Angels. Williams has said that in
Orpheus Descending, the rewritten version of Battle of
Angels produced seventeen years after the original, he
finally managed to say what he wanted to say, and in a
very instructive metaphor he labeled the new version a
bridge to his earlier attitudes.^ His view from this
7 ,
Orpheus Descending, p. x.
169
bridge in 19 60 was patently much like the view he saw in
1940. The dark pessimism of the plays after Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof is an ingenious elaboration of the despair in
Battle of Angels.
While Williams1 ideas apparently did not develop much
in twenty years, his technical skills improved considerably.
The most obvious improvement is in his dramaturgy. His
first professionally produced play failed largely because
of faulty construction. By the time his second play, The
Glass Menagerie, opened, his skill had so increased that
he was able to conceal almost entirely--after the manner
of Chekov, whose dramaturgy he was consciously imitating--
the sound construction of the play. In Streetcar, his
fourth play, he demonstrated conclusively that he had mas
tered the techniques of play construction. His increased
skill can best be seen in his handling of the exposition
in both Streetcar and the later Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In
these plays the exposition is not merely the necessary back
ground for the action but an integral and important part of
it. After Streetcar Williams consciously avoided the usual
techniques of realistic construction in an effort to create
the free "plastic” theatre that he wanted to replace the
theatre of realistic conventions. He began to rely in
creasingly on symbolism and on dream techniques akin to
Strindberg's to produce his dramatic effects. But none of
Williams' efforts to realize his new theatre has helped him
170
to discover a form appropriate to his material. As a re
sult, the plays after Streetcar lack unity and compression;
they are all marred by an incongruous fitting of form to
content. Only in Streetcar, the most intense and compelling
of the plays, did Williams find a form that fully comple
mented his material. His failure to discover an appropri
ate form seriously damages Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, potenti
ally a better play.
The development of Williams’ skill in construction was
accompanied by an improvement in his use of the physical
resources of the theatre. His theatrical ingenuity and his
interest in the physical theatre were apparent in his first
two professional productions. His effective use of color,
lighting, music, and such expressionistic devices as dis
solving walls contributed greatly to the success of Street
car . And the visual excitement, brilliant stylization, and
vivid spectacle quality of subsequent plays testified to
the flowering of Williams' theatrical imagination. Today
he exploits the possibilities of the physical theatre with
unrivaled virtuosity. This virtuosity is not, however,
without its drawbacks. Occasionally, it seems to betray
Williams into offering his spectacular effects for their
own sakes. And too often it has encouraged him to rely on
the physical facilities of the theatre for dramatic ef
fects that should emerge from action and characterization,...
171
While Williams has sometimes slighted characteriza
tion, he has not done so out of lack of skill. From the
outset of his professional career his talent.for character-
/
ization has been apparent. His ability to create living
characters steadily improved from Battle of Angels to Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof. In the three plays that follow Cat,
the viability of his characters is somewhat reduced because
they are intended more as symbols than as people. Three
of the heroines of the plays in the first series--Amanda,
Blanche, and Maggie— are among the most memorable charac
ters in the American drama. Despite his tendency to con
centrate on the Freudian maladjustments of his people, the
best of them are vital characters whose speech and behavior
suggest that they have been born of a human tradition.
While these characters are well-realized, they are also
limited, for they rarely possess any insight into their
difficulties or show any change or development. Williams*
most successful characters to date are women--it is only in
such heroines as Blanche or Lady of Orpheus that either
insight or development is apparent— though two of his male
characters, Stan and Big Daddy, are among his best, and
among the best on the American stage in recent years. But
whether Williams portrays men or women there is a curious
sameness in his portraits from play to play. His charac
terizations have a narrow range. His principal women
characters, whether they are Southern aristocrats, Sicilian
172
immigrants, or Hollywood glamour queens, are strangely
alike. And his men seem to come in two main varieties—
the dreamer-rebel and the primitive male--that keep reap
pearing and occasionally, as in Orpheus and Sweet Bird,
blend.
Though Williams repeats his few characters with tedi
ous regularity, he can make the character appear unique
and vital in any single play. He employs a variety of de
vices to individualize his characters, but the most effec
tive one is the distinctive speech he provides for them.
The basis for such speech is the contemporary American
speech of real life which Williams can reproduce with
amazing fidelity for the stage. His ability to recreate
live speech for his characters has been a valuable and dis
tinguishing feature of his plays from the beginning of his
professional career. In the plays before Streetcar his
otherwise excellent dialogue was marred by loosely-inte
grated, pseudo-poetic set pieces he used in an effort to
heighten the intensity of his plays. But in Streetcar and
later plays he eliminated the set pieces and exploited the
speech borrowed from real life for increased dramatic and
humorous effects. The dialogue of the later plays is much
more, however, than accurately reproduced live speech.
Williams gradually modified such speech--primarily by his
repeating and echoing devices--until he produced a new,
rapid-paced, slangy speech that gives the impression of
173
real speech, but is far more intense and rhythmical. This
special stage language is most impelling and provocative in
Cat and most lyrical and intense in Suddenly Last Summer.
In Sweet Bird, this language, which has been the most dis
tinguished single feature of Williams' work, loses its
freshness and drive. It becomes shrill, excessively man
nered, tediously repetitive, and remote from human rele
vance.
The repetition that mars the dialogue of Sweet Bird
is not a new phenomenon in Williams' work. In fact, repe
tition of one kind or another is a characteristic of his
plays. The most obvious repetition is in themes, but he
also repeats characters and situations. He seems never to
forget or discard anything he has once used. Frequently,
he uses the same details in several plays. Certain place
names--Blue Mountain, Moon Lake, Glorious Hill— appear
again and again in plays with Southern milieux. Bits of
dialogue used in one play are echoed or employed without
change in a later one. In the early short play, The
Purification, one of the main characters makes the follow
ing speech as he dies:
When Peeto was born
he stood on his four legs at once, and accepted the
world.
he was wiser than I.
When Peeto was one year old, .
he was wiser than God! . . . (p. 60)
This speech is repeated verbatim by a minor character, who
is also dying, in Camino Real (Block II, p, 17).
Williams has reused, too, certain characters, with
modifications, and certain dramatic situations. The
mother in At Liberty, one of his earliest short plays, is
remarkably similar to Amanda in her speech, manners, and
aims. The daughter in the same play--a doomed girl, who
lives on illusion, who seeks escape from reality in sex and
alcohol, who falsely anticipates that former admirers will
rescue her--is much like Blanche. Some of Blanche’s
attitudes and actions are reflections of attitudes and
actions manifested by other characters in early one-act
plays. In Hello from Bertha, the principal character is a
dying, psychotic prostitute, who tries ineffectually to
communicate with an old sweetheart whom she thinks will
save her. And in Portrait of a Madonna, the central fig
ure, Hiss Collins, suffers a mental collapse as a result
of an imagined rape, and is taken away by a doctor who pre
tends to be making a social call.
Occasionally, Williams has repeated not merely bits
and pieces but entire plays. He accomplished this latter
either by expanding a short play into a longer one, as he
did with Camino Real, or by reworking an old play, as he
did with Orpheus. His fondness for reworking his plays is
not restricted to his acting scripts, for he has carefully
rewritten several of his long plays before releasing them
for publication. The special attention he devotes to the
published texts of his plays suggests that Williams is
175
concerned with literary quality, that he wants his work
to be accepted on its esthetic merits. And it suggests he
seriously respects his talent. But despite the evidence
of Williams' concern with the quality of his work, he does
not seem to be afflicted with the sort of artistic integ
rity associated with such writers as Hemingway. He has
participated, apparently willingly and certainly profitably,
in the writing of film scripts that cheapened and distorted
his plays. And occasionally, to insure production of a
play, he has made changes in a play script that were more
than the usual adjustments a playwright could be expected
to make. For one play, Cat, he wrote a new third act to
please the director, Elia Kazan. The changes that Kazan
wanted, and got, were changes that Williams did not like
and changes that considerably diminished the quality of the
play. Williams explained his willingness to alter a play
that in its original form is probably his best by saying,
"the reception of the playing script has more than justified,
in my opinion, the adjustments made to that [Kazan's] in
fluence. This attitude, as well as the behavior behind
it, has led to charges that Williams' main concern is with
commercial success. Both his plays and his public pro
nouncements on other occasions seem to refute this charge.
^Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, note, p. 152.
176
Williams has, in fact, more than once directly attacked
commercialism on Broadway. At one point in his career
(1944) he insisted:
That the most exalted of the arts should have
fallen into the receivership of businessmen and
gamblers is a situation parallel in absurdity to
the conduct of worship becoming the responsibility
of a herd of water buffaloes. It is one of those
things that a man of reason had rather not think
about until the means of redemption is more appar
ent , 9
And yet, in 19 59 when he and Kazan supplied most of the
money for the production of Sweet Bird, the play proved
to be in many ways the most commercial of Williams1 plays.
This change in attitude, if it is one, gives added weight
to the old accusation of careerism. Moreover, Williams'
continuing fondness for elaborate theatrical effects and
for an excess of the shocking and the sensational make Mary
McCarthy's theory that his talent is rooted in paydirt"^
seem less an unkind hypothesis than an objective statement
of fact,
Williams must, of course, assume the onus for the
impression his plays make on audiences, but part of the
responsibility properly belongs to designers and directors.
Certainly, some of the productions, especially Kazan's,
have fully exploited the lurid and the sensational elements
^Quoted by Kenneth Tynan, Curtains (New York, 1961),
p. 36 5.
•^Sights and Spectacles, p. 135.
177
implicit in the play scripts. Williams has apparently not
objected to such treatment of his plays, for he has will
ingly collaborated with both directors and designers,
even to the extent of making changes in his scripts that
he disapproved of. The result of this collaboration has
frequently been a hypnotic, exciting production that sadly
obscured the original play. So impressive have such pro
ductions been that Williams, along with Elia Kazan,^ has
been credited with creating a new kind of American theatre--
a theatre in which plays are the joint product of director,
designer, and dramatist. Williams’ statement that he re
gards his scripts as mere blueprints for plays that will
be completed by the production argues that he is interested
in this kind of theatre. At any rate, his close collabor
ation with designers and directors has resulted in exciting
plays that appeal to the senses and emotions of theatre
goers directly and powerfully.
Without denying the merits of such plays, some writ
ers and critics have objected to the kind of collaboration
that has created them. They fear that such a process
threatens the independence of the playwright and hence the
quality of his plays. Those who admire the collaborative
theatre insist that no dramatist can write a play single-
■^William Becker, ’’Reflections on- Three---New Plays,’’
Hudson Review, 8:268, Summer 1955.
178
handed. And they point out that so original a writer as
Bertolt Brecht eagerly sought collaboration from both
audiences and his fellow artists of all kinds.^
The success of the Brechtian theatre is now historical
fact. Yet the collaboration of director, designer, and
dramatist cannot guarantee good drama. The American thea
tre is not the German theatre, and neither Williams nor any
other American writer is a Brecht. Under the special con
ditions of the American theatre, the director is more and
more assuming ascendency over his fellow workers. Today,
even well-established writers must court approval of lead
ing directors if they want their plays produced--Williams'
experience with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is instructive. In
such circumstances, the American theatre tends to seek
"the condition of our.movies, where the script-writer is
just another employee working for expert manipulators, an
’idea-Man,' and everything is calculated to a specific
audience reaction, as in radio, group journalism, and
totalitarian political rallies.
The plays produced by such a theatre are most often
entertaining, theatrical spectacles. Their colors, move
ments , rhythms, and decor capture the eye and ear of the
•^Tynan, p. 318,
Alfred Kazin, "Broadway and American Integrity,"
Commentary, 7:340, September 1949,
179
spectator. But such plays rarely appeal to his intelli
gence or spirit. He leaves the theatre sated visually and
auditorily, but empty. The notion that a playwright should
simply contribute a script to a work of art that is largely
created by others rarely has happy results, for it minimizes
the value of a drama as the treatment of a subject and the
expression of the artist’s mind.14 The collaborative
theatre that Williams has helped create may prove to be
seriously detrimental to American drama, for art is rarely
produced by committees.
Williams’ contributions to the drama are not all of
such dubious value. For one thing, he has created charac
ters who are among the finest yet produced by American
drama. The best of these characters are his fragile,
idealistic, Southern women--particularly Blanche of Street
car— though certain of his powerful, materialistic men—
Stan and Big Daddy, for example— are nearly as impressive.
Williams’ sympathies are clearly with his idealists,
whether they are men or women. He never suggests, however,
that these searchers after purity will prevail; they are,
indeed, invariably defeated. But he does suggest that they
are worthy of sympathy and tender understanding, however
irresponsible and self-destructive they may be. In fact,
one of the chief values, and an important contribution, of
14Eric Bentley, In Search of Theatre, p. 15.
180
Williams' work is the recurrent reminder that compassion
for one's fellows is an absolute necessity in a fully human
lift;.
A perhaps more important, though quite different,
contribution is the special speech Williams has developed
for his plays. He has come closer to creating a stage
language that could attain the ideal Eliot established for
dramatic dialogue than any playwright presently writing in
English. At its best in the plays between Camino Real and
Sweet Bird, this language has an extraordinary flexibility
and richness. It easily moves from relaxed colloquial con
versation to intense, elevated speech. It meets supremely
well the test of dramatic utility, supporting actions and
character and, at the same time, evoking feelings beyond
conscious emotion and motive. Moreover, it usually
achieves its effects without audiences becoming aware that
they are hearing a special language. The dialogue based
on this language is the most distinguished single feature
of Williams' work, and in view of its acclamation as the
best in the English-speaking theatre,^ it may prove his
most important contribution to the drama.
Another, almost equally significant contribution is
Williams' share in freeing American drama from the limited,
•^Eric Bentley, What Is Theatre? (Boston, 1956),
p. 63 .
181
drab realism that prevailed in the late thirties and early
forties. He helped to speed this process partly by his
dramatic language, but more by his imaginative use of the
physical resources of the theatre. His plays have enlarged
the scope of the drama by exploiting to the full the legit
imate dramatic effects to be gained by the organic use of
stage devices, sets, lighting, and music. Williams has
helped to "re-theatricalize" American drama, and by so do
ing has had an important part in creating a richer and more
flexible medium for the drama of the future.
While Williams' theatricality has enhanced the drama,
his own plays have frequently suffered from his reliance on
the physical facilities of the theatre. Productions of his
plays have engendered powerful emotions in audiences, but
too often afterwards these audiences did not share the
playwright's conviction that the experiences of his charac
ters had any universal significance. Most of Williams'
plays are effective only on stage. In the study, the
flaws--the posturing, the obtrusive symbolism, the fre
quently faulty construction, the shallow ideas— are all too
apparent. But in the theatre the production can create a
hypnotic mood that lulls the critical faculty, and most
viewers yield themselves to largely spurious tensions and
emotions that subside completely "with the fall of the final
curtain. Williams seems primarily a man of the theatre.
His work amuses, excites, and shocks, but it rarely provokes
182
serious thought or any recognition that what happens on the
stage has any relevance to the larger world outside. In
his theatre, artifice dominates art; the dramatist is an
entertainer, not an artist,
Williams is the artist manque7chiefly for two reasons.
First, he has not found a form to accommodate his ideas, a
form that can impose order on experience. And secondly, he
has too shallow a concept of the function of the drama, A
1 f i
recent article by Williams in the New York Times indicates
that he thinks the proper function for drama is to expose
and commiserate:
I dare to suggest, from my point of view, that the
theatre has made in our time its greatest artistic
advance through the unlocking and lighting up and
ventilation of the closets, attics, and basements
of human behavior and experience. I think there
has been not a very sick but a very healthy extension
of the frontiers of theme and subject matter accept
able to our dramatic art. . . . People are humble
and guilty at heart, all of us, no matter how
desperately we try to appear otherwise. We have
very little conviction of our essential dignity
nor even of our essential decency, and consequently
we are more interested in characters on the stage
who share our hidden shames and fears and we want
the plays about us to say "I understand you."
There is a peculiar contradiction between this view
of the drama and Williams' fondness for implying a connec
tion between the classic Greek drama and his own. This
connection, if it exists, is extremely tenuous. The Greek
dramatists did use, as Williams has, the dark, hidden
l®New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1960, pp. 17, 78.
183
experiences of human life as the bases for their plays.
But the Greeks presented their material, as Williams has
not, so as to affirm man's dignity and courage. The drama
of the Greeks was in part a religious ritual that sought to
purge man's emotions and to reaffirm his secure place in the
universe. Nearly any subject matter, however shocking or
perverse in itself, was acceptable, if the structure,
action, characters, and language produced both affirmation
and purgation. Lacking this ritual element, Williams'
plays and the plays of most other contemporary dramatists
fail as great drama, though they may be exciting and accu
rate portraits of real physical and psychological states--
mere exposure is not enough.
Despite his deficiencies as an artist, Williams is
today the leading American dramatist. He is rivaled seri
ously only by Arthur Hiller. And while he is not a better
playwright than Miller, he has so far been a far more
influential one. Williams' present prominence is likely,
however, to prove transitory. Unless his future plays can
offer new insights and new forms he will not have a signif
icant place in the history of American drama. In the past
two decades his plays have recreated some of the anxiety
and some of the ugly truths of his world. But these plays
have rarely admitted any human responsibility for the con
ditions that plague man. In his plays man is isolated from
society, a victim who violently expiates sins he scarcely
184
knows he has committed. In the absence of human respon
sibility, the actions and characters of Williams' plays are
too remote from the reality of ordinary human experience to
have much meaning outside the theatre. If, in the remainder
of his career, Williams cannot learn to give his over
special characters and situations some profound human
relevance, his estimate of himself as a "minor artist who
1 * 7
has happened to write one or two major works" will also
be the estimate of history.
^7Quoted in "Morpheus Ascending," Anon, rev., Harper's,
214:76, May 1957. ---------
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
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_____ ^ _____________. At Liberty, from American Scenes, ed.
" William Kozlenko, New York, 1941,
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IT1_F_ ----
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A Streetcar Named Desire, New York,
r w r ; ------------------------------
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American Blues: Five Short Plays. New
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— — ■ —■ ■ ■ ■ — ' -■» * • ■ — 9
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---------------
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Asset Metadata

Creator Von Dornum, Jack Howard (author)

Core Title The Major Plays Of Tennessee Williams, 1940 To 1960

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lecky, Eleazer (committee chair), Butler, James H. (committee member), McElderry, Bruce R. (committee member), Pallette, Drew N. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-257324

Unique identifier UC11358658

Identifier 6203750.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-257324 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6203750.pdf

Dmrecord 257324

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Von Dornum, Jack Howard

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA