Introduction

Four days before the opening of  A Streetcar Named Desire at the end of 1947, Tennessee Williams wrote an essay for The New York Times describing his adjustment to fame, following the success of The Glass Menagerie two years earlier. What saved him from growing cynicism and depression was to work on a play originally called “The Poker Night,” which brought him even more acclaim when it opened as A Streetcar Named Desire. Although not necessarily his “best play” nor even the one most performed, it is probably the one most closely identified with Williams and it is likely the one that has produced the most critical commentary. Indeed, the thirty-two cent stamp issued in 1996 celebrating the playwright features a portrait of him in a white linen suit against a twilight sky and, in the background, a streetcar.

Those who write about Williams, including Williams himself, note that his work explores the same themes over and over. In presenting Streetcar along with two other lesser known plays, we see clearly the evidence of this. The one-act Portrait of a Madonna was written in 1944. It is regarded as a preparatory sketch of Blanche Du Bois in the person of Lucretia Collins - the neurotic and faded Southern belle, brought up in a succession of southern rectories under the shadow of the church, which left her unprepared for life and prey to her delusions. Jessica Tandy played the role in a 1947 revival which landed her the role of Blanche when Streetcar opened a few months later.

Suddenly Last Summer opened on Broadway in Jan., 1958, as part of a double bill with another of Williams plays, Something Unspoken, together under general title Garden District. It tells the story of Catherine, a young woman who seems to go insane after her cousin Sebastian dies on a European trip under mysterious circumstances. Threatening Catherine with lobotomy, his mother tries to cloud the truth about her son’s homosexuality as she wants him to be remembered as a great artist.

In a letter written to director Elia Kazan during the planning stages for Streetcar, Williams writes that his intention in that play was to represent “its authenticity or its fidelity to life.” According to Williams, people are neither wholly good or bad, but driven by their circumstances and desires. Indeed Williams depicts his characters in conflict between the civilized and savage, Apollonian/Dionysian, or as he says himself, the Cavalier and the Puritan. This conflict is present in all three of these works in a number of ways, realistically and symbolically.

In an interview with Studs Terkel in 1961, Williams says: “The whole meaning of all my work is that there is no such thing as complete right and complete wrong, complete black, complete white. That we’re all in the same boat and really the boat is the world, you might even say it’s the universe. All creation is the boat, not just one nation, not just one ideology, not just one system...The world is incomplete, it’s like an unfinished poem…But it’s for all of us to try to complete this poem and the way to complete it is through understanding and patience and tolerance among ourselves.”

New Orleans

All three of these plays are set in or are about New Orleans. Williams lived in a number of places during his life, and New Orleans held a special significance for him as the place where he discovered his sexuality and acquired an inexhaustible source of experience for his writing. The glamorous city embodied both sides of the perennial conflict of humanity – the seamy and the refined. The places named in Streetcar are real locations in New Orleans, but have clearly symbolic aspects in the drama. The Garden District of Suddenly Last Summer is a residential area of New Orleans which was developed between 1840-1900. The area was once a plantation, sold off in parcels to the wealthy who did not want to live in the French Quarter with the Creoles. The atmosphere of Mrs. Venable’s gothic mansion and garden in emphasizes the sense of depravity revealed in the story. In Portrait of a Madonna, Lucretia Collins is “in exile” in a northern city but carries her life and experience in New Orleans with her.

Realism and American drama

Tennessee Williams was one of the playwrights who defined American theatre in the 1940s and 50s. The others included Arthur Miller, but also Rodgers and Hammerstein and other authors of an emerging and dominant musical theatre. All grew out of a general trend both reacting to and incorporating aspects of realism. It is instructive to take a look at Williams in the context of “realism,” which was an important reference point for 20^th century American drama. An innovation of late 19^th century Europe, American dramatists in the next several decades used realism as a point of departure in a variety of ways. Williams has been described as a “poetic realist,” who is interested in presenting the inner life of his characters, using symbols and staging which help to reveal their interior psychological state. Although conversational, the dialogue is greatly stylized and the plots, although coherent, have an otherworldly and allegorical nature.

In the preface to the first published edition of The Glass Menagerie, Williams writes:

“The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance. These remarks…have to do with a conception of a new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.”

The American South

The arts and culture of mid 20^th century in the American South were tied to the past. The

elite southern culture is said to have been trapped in Victorianism, which assumed that the world was divided between civilized and the savage. The educated upper class or cultural aristocracy presided over this bipolar world and controlled what they saw as the lower orders.

As already stated, Williams was caught in this dichotomy in a number of ways. These works are set in the South as a kind of affectionate homage to the old ways, but presented with a recognition of the inevitability of transformation. Blanche Du Bois, is the refined, hypersensitive and delicate southern gentlewoman who is pitted against her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Their confrontation can be seen as clash between cultures – Blanche standing for the old aristocratic agrarian South and Stanley representing a rising member of the industrial inner-city immigrant class. On one level, Streetcar represents the death of the old South, and the new world, represented by Stanley, is not necessarily a kind one.

Napoleonic Code

Stanley in Streetcar expresses his concern about being swindled by Blanche’s loss of her family home, Belle Reve. He appeals to the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws devised by the French and implemented when they ruled the region known now as Louisiana. The state of Louisiana continued to operate under some of the precepts of this code, such as its emphasis on inheritance law: any property belonging to a spouse prior to marriage becomes the property of both spouses once they are married. Therefore, Stanley is legally correct to claim that, by depriving Stella of her share of the family inheritance, Blanche has also deprived him.

Madness/lobotomy

A freak accident during the construction in 1848 of a railway in the Vermont mountains triggered the development of a controversial psychosurgery, the practice of which reached its peak in the 1940s in Europe and the United States. When a severe head injury left worker Phineas Gage functional but altered his personality, this sparked an interest in pursuing the practice of manipulating the frontal lobes of the brains of the mentally ill to bring about behavior modification. A few impetuous European and American doctors and scientists, some with doubtful qualifications, carried on a number of alarming experiments at the beginning of the 20^th century. By 1955, over 50,000 people in the U.S. had undergone psychosurgery, with a variety of results. Famous persons who underwent frontal lobotomy include the actress Frances Farmer, Rosemary Kennedy (sister of the president), and, in 1943, Rose Williams, Tennessee’s beloved sister. In time, this procedure was largely discredited, owing in part to the 1962 novel (and film) by Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Tennessee Williams was fascinated by mental derangement –  the perilous borderline between sanity and insanity. Many of his characters  struggle with mental illness. In Streetcar and in Portrait, the leading lady is taken off to a mental asylum, and in Suddenly Last Summer, Mrs. Venable is advocating lobotomy for Catherine in order to expunge the memories that discredit her son.

The neurosis and self delusion of Williams’ characters may reveal some of his fears about his own mental instability. Both he and his mother, as well as Rose, were institutionalized at various time. Perhaps his regrets and guilt about Rose’s treatment may also be seen in Stella’s anguished cry as Blanche is taken away: “What have I done to my sister? Oh, God, what have I done to my sister?”

Kindness of strangers

Blanche’s famous line to the doctor who takes her away to the asylum is the statement that she always depends on “the kindness of strangers.” Ironically, she perceives the doctor as her rescuer. It is ironic, because he is surely not a rescuer, but it is also the case that her dependence on strangers rather than on herself is probably what has always gotten her into trouble and her line signals her detachment from reality.

In some ways, Williams is also speaking of himself. His impression was that chance acquaintances or strangers were usually kinder to him than friends. He found it as hard to grow roots into a relationship as into a place. Only one of his lovers, Frank Merlo, was involved in a long-term relationship with him.

Questions for further study

1. Describe the themes of fantasy and reality in all three of these plays. How do they relate to Williams’ particular definition of realism in drama?
2. What is the role of music in Streetcar Named Desire?
3. Describe the role of religion in all three of the plays.
4. What is the dramatic function of all the minor characters in these plays – particularly the men?
5. Portrait of a Madonna and Suddenly Last Summer can be described as presenting  the third act of two longer plays. What do you think happened in the first two acts of each?
6. Discuss how homosexuality is presented in Streetcar and in Suddenly Last Summer. How might the depiction reflect Williams’ feelings about his own homosexuality?
7. Most of the significant female characters in Williams’ plays are based on his mother, Edwina, and his sister, Rose. Explain how this is true in the three plays discussed here and in other Williams plays. Discuss how his father and other males in Williams’ life are represented in his works.
8. Tennessee Williams was part of what is known as the “Southern Renaissance” of literature and the arts, which lasted from the 1920s to the 1940s. Who were some of the other writers of this Southern Renaissance?

 Resources

The body of criticism and biography about Tennessee Williams is enormous. The Internet abounds with study guides and references to books and articles. The following are a few titles which the student may find interesting and useful.

Boxhill, Roger. Tennessee Williams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University Press        of Mississippi, 1986.

Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. Boston: Twayne Publishers,1985.

Leverich, Lyle. Tom, the Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers,          1995.

Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.

Tennessee Williams Chronology