Later Plays Of Tennessee Williams example essay topic

Tennessee Williams and the South, by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. vu, 184 pp. $30.00; Magical Muse: Millennial Essay's on Tennessee Williams, edited by Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. xii, 251 pp. $39.95; The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams, edited by Philip C. Kolin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.240 pp.

$32.95. IT is "OUT OF REGRET FOR A SOUTH that no longer exists that I write of the forces that have destroyed it", Tennessee Williams explained. This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South'2 Holditch and Leavitt's book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists: a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic imagination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity. According to the authors, this paradise lost was crucial to the dramatic imagination of Williams, but above all it seems to have inspired their own. Besides establishing Williams's intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writer's fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies. The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams, who was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nothing less than "a southern idyll", regardless of the father's evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sister's fragile health.

However, these fundamental problems erupted suddenly and violently, so the authors insist, only with the family's move north to St. Louis. Notably, it is not the innate family situation that clouds Tom's otherwise sunny childhood, but his displacement to the North. And since "southerners... have deep roots in their own native soil and do not tend to forget the land that gave them birth", the young Tom could never feel at home in "the cold North". Rehearsing such cliches of a long-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts. The alienation and conflicts of the North, in turn, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting myth: "His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality". That this myth had little to do with the concrete reality of the South stands beyond question.

But one wonders for whom the magical conversion of the past took place. After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring gentility and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very concrete and often cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts. Some of his best-known characters are outsiders, who struggle bitterly (and often in vain) against the xenophobia, racism, and homophobia of Southern communities: Val Xavier and Lady of Orpheus Descending, Mr. Va carro of 2 7 Wagons Full of Cotton, and even Stanley Kowalski of Streetcar. It is the photographs that point to the story the text leaves untold: a picture of Bessie Smith, "murdered by John Barleycorn and Jim Crow" as VaI reminds us, of cotton gins and black workers, of the Delta floods.

Two other pictures show little Tom and Rose with their black nurse Ozzie, who stayed with the family for some five years. From her, we read, Tom learned "an aspect of southern life totally different from that they knew from their family". A discussion of these other aspects exhausts itself, however, in an en passant reference to the large black labor force, whose "life were markedly different from those of the Delta planters". Thus it is left to the reader / beholder to imagine what sort of stories Ozzie might have told.

Gathering from her distant gaze in the photographs, deliberately avoiding the camera, they probably had little to do with the charming, romantic, and cavalier South that Holditch and Leavitt sketch out. Tennessee Williams and the South is comprised of three chapters. The first follows Williams through his early childhood years in Columbus, Nashville, and Canton, Mississippi. It also establishes in great detail his family genealogy, identifying such illustrious Southern ancestors as poet Sidney Lanier and Governor John Sevier. The second chapter portrays Williams's life in the Mississippi Delta of Clarksdale-a place of happy childhood memories, signs of which would find their way into a number of his plays (e. g., Moon Lake Casino, the Cutter Mansion, the angel of the Grange Cemetery). The blissful days of the Delta were cut short with the "fateful move" to St. Louis, here described as "a new expulsion from Eden into a cold northern world lacking the benefits, virtue, and social decorum he remembered".

In the final and largest chapter, Holditch and Leavitt first briefly discuss the "harsh reality" of St. Louis, marked by Tom's increasing alienation from his father and the rapid deterioration of Rose's mental state. Then the book quickly moves on to Williams's life in New Orleans and Key West, "One of the Last Frontiers of Bohemia", as the chapter's tide suggests. New Orleans is identified as the place of Williams's creative and sexual awakening. With detailed eloquence, the authors show how tightly Williams's fiction is connected to the Big Easy.

Their discussion of the playwright's personal life, however, reveals considerable unease, if not awkwardness. Thus promiscuity is politely paraphrased as the introduction to "all aspects of life in the Quarter, both the surface and the underground". William's formative relationships with other men, significantly with Frank Merl o, is reduced to being part of Williams's flamboyant bohemian existence, "a functional blend of persistent, almost obsessive labor and pleasure in a new lifestyle to which he adapted completely". In short, where the book falls short is precisely in its careful dodging of concrete personal and social realities and its euphemistic evocation of a mythological counter reality. Between the lines one distinctly hears Blanche's invocation: "I don't want realism, I want magic!" What then does the book accomplish?

Without doubt, its greatest strength consists in its extensive and detailed portrayal of Williams's intimate ties to the American South (which in the authors' definition also includes such incongruous "Southern" places as New Orleans and Key West). Holditch and Leavitt also succeed in illuminating how tightly Williams's writing is interwoven with his life by repeatedly identifying the biographical material behind the fiction. One wonders, however, about the point of such extensive labor. As the authors themselves admit, If Blanche DuBois should return to New Orleans from whatever haven has sheltered her for the last half century and attempt to follow those directions today, she would be perplexed indeed... Of course, even if she had in reality followed those directions in 1947, taking the appropriate streetcars as she had been instructed, she would not have reached her destination, since the playwright rearranged the topography of reality to accommodate his expressionistic vision. For students of Williams's life and oeuvre, Holditch and Leavitt's biographical al burn is certainly dispensable.

With its elegant layout and beautiful documentation it is, however, a worthwhile addition to any Southern coffee table. Two recent essay collections, Magical Muse und Undiscovered Country, reassess the playwright's life and oeuvre in light of the recent release of Williams's papers that disclosed a number of previously unknown letters, drafts, as well as several unpublished plays. Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, coming out of the 1999 Alabama Symposium on English & American Literature in Tuscaloosa, strives to infuse Williams's oeuvre with the millennial significance a turn-of-the-century retrospective inevitably entails. According to editor Ralph Voss, at the end of the twentieth century Tennessee Williams undoubtedly emerges as one of two great playwrights of the American Renaissance in drama (together with O'Neill). Although Voss commends the recent staging of previously ignored plays as well as the renewed interest of young scholars in them, he also insists that Williams's canonical greatness rests above all on a few great works written between 1945 and 1961. After all, "no one was claiming that [the] newly discovered plays were likely to join the magical company of The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, CatonaHot Tin Roof or Night of the Iguana".

Given the rather conservative presupposition that Williams's fame rests solidly on and is entirely explainable in terms of a handful of classics, it is not surprising that in the end the anthology contributes few fresh perspectives to Williams scholarship. The majority of essays pursue rather conventional scholarly goals. Thus the entire first half of the collection, summarized by Voss as bibliographical and biographical approaches, reads very much like an exercise in the humanist tradition: Williams's becomes as an explanation for Williams's oeuvre. In a meticulous study of Williams's correspondence, Albert Devlin demonstrates the pivotal role of the year 1939 in the playwright's career-the year Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams. Michael Palier maintains that Williams's relationship to his sister Rose was marked not only by feelings of tender care and brotherly protection, but also ridden with sentiments of entrapment and guilt-a strain running through Williams's entire oeuvre from Glass Menagerie and Rose Tattoo to Suddenly Last Summer and Two-Character Play. Nancy Tisch ler also uses biographical material to reveal the lengthy and exhausting struggle over the filming of the rape scene in Streetcar, which the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code essentially outlawed.

Jeffrey Loomis si discusses the creative turmoil over the writing of Cat on a hot Tin Roof and the crucial influence of Elia Kazan on his work. all of the above contributions undeniably reveal interesting details of Williams's life and writing, but the one question one is left with is: So what? What relevance do these biographical tidbits hold for our scholarly and creative encounter with Williams's works? How does it enhance or de familiarize our knowledge of Williams? In this regard, George Crandell's comprehensive overview of Williams's scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, including an extensive bibliography, is probably the most useful contribution of the first half of the collection. The critical and theoretical studies of the second part of Magical Muse prove to be more engaging and thought-provoking. Especially Philip Kolin's compelling article on " (Un) Suitable Suitors" in Williams's plays is worthy of note.

In a comparative analysis of Jim of Glass Menagerie, Mitch of Streetcar, Alvaro of Rose Tattoo, and Chicken of Kingdom of Earth, Kolin comes to the conclusion that all of them "suffer from interrupted / incomplete sexuality, branding them as representatives of a desire that is fathomable, disappointing". Moreover, in symbolically elevating this interrupted desire to the level of failed religious epiphany, Williams succeeds in turning the unsuitable suitor into a suitable metaphor for the tight nexus of sensuality and salvation in his works. Robert Siegel's essay focuses on the metaphysical strain in Williams's plays, the fundamental tension between flesh and spirit, running through all of the major plays and attaining some kind of reconciliation only in The Night of the Iguana. All ean Hale concludes the critical section with a persuasive reading of In the Ear of a Tokyo hotel as a No play. Approaching this experimental play from the perspective of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, which Williams studied at the time, Hale effectively revises the prevalent critical rejection of the play, reassessing it instead as a complex and profound statement on artistic martyrdom.

The book concludes with four essays that attempt to situate Williams within a larger cultural context. Jackson Buyer draws out thematic parallels between Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald, manifest not only in Clothes for a Summer hotel, a drama about Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, but also as early as in Streetcar and The Great Gatsby. Barbara Harris discusses Williams as an icon of twentieth-century American popular culture, il lustra ting how deeply entrenched references to his work are in everyday American culture, from sitcoms to advertisement. Holditch once more presents Williams's close connections to New Orleans, showing us where the playwright liked to wine and dine.

Last but not least, drama critic Dan Sullivan adds some brief personal reminiscence about Williams the man, who turned out to be, as Sullivan figuratively puts it, both "angel and crocodile". Once more one is left with a sense of puzzlement as to what all this is supposed to be about. Although Colby K ullman, moderator of a concluding panel discussion, insists that the conference / book offered abundance of testimony to innovative work on Williams, the majority of essays rehearse already existing approaches. In this regard, the ambitious attribute of the collection's title, Millennial Essays, signals not so much the will to profoundly reassess a body of dramatic works as to the will to pay homage to a playwright whose place in American literature is well established. By contrast, another recent essay collection, edited by Philip C. Kolin, offers a refreshingly new take on Williams. Heeding the artist's battle cry En avant! , the book explores yet uncharted territory, The Undiscovered Country of his later plays.

With a pioneering spirit that needs to be commended, it seeks to come to grasp with the large body of experimental works written between Night of the Iguana (1961) and the playwright's death in 1983, work which until very recently has been either ignored or marginalized by scholarship. Although quite a few of these post-Iguana plays were staged in the U.S. or abroad, their public reception was predominantly negative, causing them to fold after only a few performances. "Even more perniciously", Kolin points out, "Williams' later canon has been superciliously ostracized by a majority of critics who continue to explore the 1945-61 canon while they extol his recently rediscovered apprentice plays of the 1930's". If discussed at all, the later plays were attacked as fragmented and tiresome imitations of previous themes and motives, or simply rejected as reflections of the playwright's deteriorating lifestyle, as booze- and drug-induced ruminations on the failed dreams of an artist. Reviews such as the following by leading drama critic C.W.E. Bigs by unfortunately set the tone for the reception of Williams's later plays: "His plays had always borne directly out of his life, but over the years the degree of refraction lessened until he began to write more and more about himself as a blighted gay poet or debilitated artist for whom writing was a way of denying his mortality". In short, rather than being read as innovative and provocative works, in which Williams was trying to develop a new kind of dramaturgy, the later plays were persistently read in light of the handful of classics that established the playwright's reputation early on.

Undiscovered Country attempts to remedy this mis recognition by approaching the later plays with an unbiased and open mind. As Kolin insists: "Essays here do not disclaim biography, but they do not substitute it for confronting Williams's scripts as highly experimental and carefully crafted for a theatre of body and mind". The fifteen contributors accomplish precisely that with their innovative and compelling readings of a fair share of the later plays, including The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo hotel, Small Craft Warnings, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Clothes for a Summer hotel, Out Cry, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, Red Devil Battery Sign, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and A House Not Meant to Stand. All essays offer strong arguments for a much-needed revision of our present understanding of Williams's work. Employing a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies, and theories-from close reading to post structuralist philosophy, from visual aesthetics to performance theory-they underscore the heterogeneity and complexity of the later plays.

Annette Sad dik, for instance, proposes to read Williams's plays as Artaudian theater of cruelty, which attempts to reach beyond reason and language in order to return the reader / spectator to primal forms of expression. Una Chaudhuri argues that Williams's abstruse surrealistic drama The Gnadiges Fraulein in many ways anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming animal"-in light of which the dominant bird imagery as well as the Fraulein's own metamorphosis into an animal represent a concerted effort of venturing into radical otherness. Terri Smith Ruck el demonstrates how the artist's vision as a painter began to shape his vision as a writer, and how visual elements such as colors, shapes, light, and space became increasingly more important for Williams, most notably in In a Bar of a Tokyo hotel. Michael Palier underscores the influence of Japanese No plays on Williams, distinguishing his later plays not only by various formal innovations but also by a distinct thematic shift from the struggle for survival to that of attaining a high degree of spirituality which will eventually enable a "graceful letting go" of life. Kolin revises the predominant reading of Small Craft Warnings as autobiographical by drawing out its profound theological implications.

Robert Gross poses the question of Williams's political commitment as a playwright, arguing that his politics, even in such overtly topical plays as The Red Battery Devil Sign, need to be located not on a concrete socio-economic level, nor on the level of erotic desire, but on a Gnostic level, i. e., the insistence of achieving liberation and transcendence through self-knowledge. In short, Undiscovered Country clearly attests to an evolution in Williams's work. The essays bear testimony to the playwright's attempt to cope with changes in American culture by incorporating such postmodern themes as the de centering of the subject and the subsequent shift from identity to. On the other hand, they are also marked by a greater interest in spirituality, which gradually begins to replace Williams's focus on physical desire (sensual and sexual) as the site of an enduring and subversive Otherness. George Crandell and Normajenckes come to similar conclusions in their analysis of Clothes for a Summer hotel Crandell interprets the dream / ghost play as Williams's most radical manipulation of time, a deliberate attempt at misrepresentation, which was to unmask the perpetual exile from wholeness experienced by the modern subject.

While in the earlier plays this fundamental dislocation could be mitigated through individual memory, it is now mitigated through performance. Despite such strong postmodern overtones, the play nevertheless holds on to a discourse of tragic humanism, Crandell argues. Jenckes describes Clothes as a mediation on the insufficiency of desire and the absolute necessity for it in a "Post-All" universe, in which all roles have been tried and discarded in order to be tried and discarded again. But like Crandell she insists that despite such pervasive Endgame mood, the fundamental romanticism running through all of Williams's plays nevertheless resurge's: the hope for love and beauty. All in all, Undiscovered Country persuasively establishes that the later plays are far from being the Abgesangof an aging and deteriorating artist, that instead they are the continuation and sublimation of his early works. The collection as a whole convinces through its innovative approach and its critical integrity-a definite must-read for Williams scholars and twentieth-century drama critics.