Tennessee Williams is one of the famous and greatest American playwrights who earned fame for his masterpieces incorporating the American dream. His two famous plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire placed him with the two leading twentieth-century playwrights Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill. Williams can be called an innovator in American drama who went against the tradition and refused to be part of sterile playwriting.
He was a poetic innovator and expressed this skill in his plays. He didn’t follow the sterile patterns in plays and instead brought freshness through his deviations. Through his works, he stretched the limits of play and became one of the founders of ‘New Drama.’
It was Williams’ works that gave theatre the distinction of being a literary medium in the twentieth century. According to a New York Times review, if Williams hadn’t brought this change, things wouldn’t have changed as they are now.
His works both carry his personal, individual traits as well as the collective features of the society in which he had spent his childhood. Though he loathed and fled the unruly childhood, there are recurrent motifs of his then family life in almost all his works. He has portrayed a world of frustration in his works where violence and sex are presented in a gentle manner.
Along with plays, he also wrote short stories. The majority of these short stories served as the backdrop for his dramas. From these short stories, he took the characters of plays and extended them. The success of his dramas can be seen from their transition from stage to TV and film. They have also influenced the intellectuals along with popular influence.
Williams took the experiences of his persona and crafted them into the drama through the finely chiseled characters. An overt aim of his plays, which he expressed in an interview, was to preserve the Old South attitude. This attitude promoted love, elegance, and a romantic approach to life.
His characters are seen as in strife of the ideal, which is an expression of the desires that remained suppressed in his life. Some critics refer to his ideas as abnormal. He promotes the belief that life is a prison where a person is imprisoned for his whole life in solitary confinement. Williams believed that he was writing about human conditions and experiences.
He portrayed the ambiguities, uncertainties, doubts, and mysteries. He presents reality, but it is a different version of reality, i.e., the reality in the spirit. His works also analyze how time and place influence individuals and either these influences are positive or negative.
His works won several distinctions. His play A Streetcar Named Desire was the first work that won both the New York Drama Critic Circle Award (four times), the Pulitzer Prize (two times), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He received several posthumous recognitions as well.
Along with distinctions and recognitions, he was derided by some circles. Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman accused him of indecency and against the Christian values.
A Short Biography of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Missouri, on March 26th, 1911. He was of Welsh and Huguenot ancestry. He was born to Cornelius Coffin Williams and Edwina Dawkins and was their second child. His mother belonged to a religious family; her father was an Episcopal priest. Tennessee’s father was a sales manager and remained away from home.
He was a heavy alcoholic, and this greatly affected Tennessee’s life when, after quitting his job, he came to live with them. He spent his childhood with his grandparents and had a close relationship with them. Tennessee had two siblings, Rose and Walter Dakin. Walter died at a young age.
Tennessee’s father was a man of violent temper and didn’t like Tennessee because of his ‘effeminate behavior.’ His mother wasn’t happy with this marriage and spent much of her time caring for her frail child. He was initially admitted to Soldan High School and then to University City High School. His first short story was published in 1928 in a magazine, Weird Tales.
This short story didn’t have any significant impact on his career, and success came to his works a decade later. This year he visited Europe with his maternal grandfather. He enrolled at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and took journalism as majors in 1929.
Due to unrequited love and his no interest in his subject, he was taken out by his father from the university. He started writing as a career during his university life and used it to earn money. He was placed in a shoe company, and this place was exposure for him out of his comfort zone. He was unhappy with this job because of the tough schedule.
He utilized this time and worked after coming home from the job and on weekends. During this time, he suffered from a nervous breakdown for a lack of success. His mother separated in the mid-1930s from his father due to his abusive behavior and hot temper. Though they separated, they never divorced.
He enrolled in Washington University, St. Louis, in 1936. There he wrote the play Me, Vashya (1937). He transferred to the University of Iowa, and there he graduated with B.A. In those days, he wrote many plays in collaboration with other writers. He changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to Tennessee Williams in 1939.
In the 1930s, when he was struggling to make his career as a writer, he worked different menial jobs to earn money to fulfill his basic needs. He also worked at Hollywood as a scriptwriter. In the winter of 1944-45, his work The Glass Menagerie was featured, and it won him popular acclaim.
After this work, he gave several successful works, but depression and heavy drinking aided in failing his health. Williams didn’t get married throughout his life. He tried relationships with women but couldn’t succeed. Then he explored homosexual relationships, and this continued till his death.
In his old age, he wasn’t on good terms with his mother. He came in a relationship with a Vietnam war veteran, Robert Carroll, and he was one of the two people who were mentioned as heirs in his will. The other was Rose, Williams’ sister.
Tennessee Williams died on February 25th, 1983, at the age of 71 in New York City.
Tennessee Williams’ Writing Style
His works often deal with the human confinement that is a sentence which we bear till death. He tries to communicate, live, and love. This is often expressed in his works in the form of sex. Some critics refer to this expression as a form of obsession. Through his characters, he has shown the ambiguity of human relationships.
Social commentary is an essential part of his portraiture though he is not a propagandist. This is evident in his representation of the South in his work, A Streetcar Named Desire. This work portrays the lost culture of the South.
His works also depict the scars that are inflicted by years on individuals. His work has traces of romanticism. His skill lies in the use of the southern language, which is evident in the flowery, bombastic, and eloquent traits of his works. His characters bear the stamp of their place of origin.
The language of these characters is graphic, colorful, and humorous. These characters melodramatize and poeticize the situations in which they are. They try to protect themselves in the illusionary world which they have created.
Language and Madness
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the collective conscience of society is presented through Eunice and Stella. There are different characters who repeatedly assert that they are not mad, but still, they show mild symptoms of psychological problems. Blanche is an example of it, of whom it is not certain that what parts of her speech are lies. There is no surety whether she is all right or suffering from delusion.
There are contradictory assertions from her, and these suggest that these are symptoms of her emotional disintegration. She makes statements that are in conflict with one another. The reason behind her psychological problems is her past, and she tries to get rid of the problems by denial of her past, trying to change it.
Williams’ another play, Suddenly Last Summer, suggests characters’ madness through their speech. They face a predicament, and they try to replace one story over another. This effort to make choices is a source of tension in Williams’ plays. Though this pattern changed in Suddenly Last Summer.
In this play, the confinement and sanity are dependent on the central story that is central to the play. Through a character, Catherine, the problem of language and madness is expressed. She tells her sister that it is impossible for her to stop talking and especially when she is nervous.
In another instance, she tells the doctor that she is not mad; rather, she has witnessed something that others don’t believe.
The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female
In Williams’ three plays Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, some male characters are immolated. These characters are sacrificed because they don’t follow the proscribed roles which they are assigned in the gender system.
These plays also give the possibility of a new gender role system through the two leading female protagonists in each play. These killings are of a liberating value for women in these plays. These plays are intended to analyze the biological gender and the socially constructed concept of gender.
In contrast to the usual system, in which there are two homosexual men and a woman at the apex, Williams has used man at the apex and two women in conflict. This is seen in A Streetcar Named Desire, wherein the scenes between Blanche and Stella, this is enacted. Stella has a heterosexual view, and eventually, she wins Stanley.
This victory is only possible through the denial of Stanley’s rape of Blanche. This denial leads to sending Blanche to asylum, and it is the betrayal by another woman that has this effect. In the last tableau, we see that Stanley kneels before Stella, and this shows the triumphant figure of women in the heterosexual unit. In this unit, one woman stands triumphant while the other goes fugitive.
Romantic Textures
Williams was a romantic and lived life of the benevolent anarchy. His beliefs were radical, which included preference of artists over God, artistic control of the world, redemption through beauty, presentation of the artist’s vision of the world as a reality, etc.
He has presented the romantic view of the author’s persona as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending, who are poets. It was Williams’ early readings of romantic authors like Sir Walter Scot, Coleridge, Poe, etc. which had romantic imprints on his works later. The parody of these readings can be seen in Summer and Smoke, where his changing preferences for romantic poets are described.
His one-act play, Beauty, is the Word; he reflects Shelleyan fervor. The protagonist of this work is not only a poet but attacks the persecution of the artist and puritan inhibitions by the Puritans. This play depicts the heroism of the freethinker. Williams also aligns himself with aesthetes by referring to beauty as God. This is done through a speech by the heroine.
His life became miserable when he was taken out of university by his father and forced to work in the shoe company. From this, he developed the desire to climb out of the factory to the roof and see the sky. This finds expression in his early play Stairs to the Roof, and then in his famous work The Glass Menagerie.
Romantic affiliation is further strengthened through the romantic representation of Laura Wingfield. She is not a typical romantic character and possesses features that are conflicting with romantic concepts. Still, there are strong reminiscences of romanticism in her character.
Grotesque Lyrical Exegetic Poems
Williams is called a romantic due to his use of poetic language in his works. From his plays, it is evident that he had an evolving relationship with romanticism. This is shown through his poet-protagonists Arthur Rimbaud and Val Xavier etc.
In his 1953 play Camino Real he has exhibited at once both romantic and anti-romantic traits. He has juxtaposed grotesque with the beautiful. This is done under the influence of Byron’s account of Shelley’s cremation. Some of his poetic works are exegetic and are the revision by the rejection of orphic patterns of descent. Through this, he demarcates his grotesque lyric, anti-redemptive poetry.
His poetry may be read as both metatext and intertext for his plays. He makes the grotesque beautiful by combining two different and opposing ideas like light and shadow, ugly and beautiful, etc.
In poems like Intimations, Part of a Hero, Orpheus Descending, etc. he has exegetically rejected the romantic constructions of early English romantics. Unlike Wordsworth’s Intimations, Williams’ poem begins with an alienated outcry, which shows the modernist plight of human beings.
This is a rejection of the Wordsworthian notion of intimation as a moment of vision. In these poems, he has implied the images of a modern fragmented world which can be pieced together to form a subjective narrative.
The Aesthetic and Themes in Non-Fiction
His nonfiction works have been used by critics to assess his plays, short stories, and poems. If his periodicals, introductions, and prefaces are read, they give a perceptive sense of the world after World War II. There are several themes in these personal writings, which include the problems faced by an artist in American society, struggle and endurance, materialism, the struggle over class, the devaluation of the individual, the American dream, etc.
His essay On a Streetcar Named Success, he has described the struggle which he had to become a successful writer. This essay was published before the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire. In this work, he writes that hard work in his life has been more beneficial in his life than success.
In A Writer’s Quest for Parnassus, he has addressed the curious ambivalence of an author towards his culture and place in which he is marginalized. He praises Rome in this essay and considers it the best place for art as compared to Paris or America. He expresses his belief that material quest leads to the marginalization of art and artists. At the heart of essays like this, there are attacks on McCarthyism.
It debases and devalues human beings and creates hatred towards people from other cultures. He also complains of American society’s being cold. It is intolerant of the individual and thus is against art.
His personal essays have clarity of vision and voice. The style of these essays is leisurely and inviting for the audience. In contrast to his plays, which are lyrical and even rhapsodic, his essays are precise, terse, witty, and concrete. In his essay, Tennessee Williams: The Wolf and I, he has narrated the anecdote of being bitten by his dog wolf and his treatment by an inept physician.
He describes this happening in a humorous manner. This shows that he could laugh at himself even when he was facing a hard time. In non-fictional works, Williams has made allusions to the works and people whom he most admired.
In Let Me Hang It All Out, he has described the attempts to write personal and critical essays as awkward adventures.
