Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (1965)

Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911–February 25, 1983), better known by the pen name Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright and one of the prominent playwrights of the twentieth century. The name "Tennessee" was a name given to him by college friends because of his southern accent and his father's background in Tennessee. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition to those two plays, The Glass Menagerie in 1945 and The Night of the Iguana in 1961 received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his partner, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play. Genre critics maintain that Williams writes in the Southern Gothic style.

Biography

Tennessee Williams's family was a very troubled one that provided inspiration for much of his writings. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi in the home of his maternal grandfather, the local Episcopal rector. (The home is now the Mississippi Welcome Center and tourist office for the city.) His family moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi by the time he was three. At seven, Tennessee was diagnosed with diphtheria. For two years he could do almost nothing. His mother wasn't going to allow him to waste his time, so she encouraged him to use his imagination. When he was thirteen, his mother gave him a typewriter.

In 1918, the family moved again to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Cornelius Williams, was a travelling shoe salesman who became increasingly abusive as his children grew older. His mother, Edwina Williams, was a descendant of genteel southern life, and was somewhat smothering. Dakin Williams, his brother, was often favored over him by their father. In the early 1930s Williams attended the University of Missouri-Columbia where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. It was there that his fraternity brothers dubbed him Tennessee for his rich southern drawl. By 1935, Williams wrote his first publicly performed play, "Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!" at 1917 Snowden in Memphis, Tennessee. It was first performed in 1935 at 1780 Glenview, also in Memphis.

Williams lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. He first moved there in 1939 to write for the WPA and lived first at 722 Toulouse Street, which was the setting of his 1977 play, Vieux Carré (now a bed and breakfast). He wrote A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) while living at 632 St. Peter Street.

Tennessee was close to his sister, Rose, who had perhaps the greatest influence on him. She was a slim beauty who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. After various unsuccessful attempts at therapy, she became paranoid. Her parents eventually allowed a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to treat her. The operation, performed in 1943, in Washington, D.C., went badly, and Rose remained incapacitated for the rest of her life.

Rose's failed lobotomy was a hard blow to Williams, who never forgave their parents for allowing the operation. It may have been one of the factors that drove him to alcoholism. The common "mad heroine" theme that appears in many of his plays may have been influenced by his sister.

Characters in his plays are often seen to be direct representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is understood to be modelled on Rose. Some biographers say that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is based on her as well. The motif of lobotomy also arises in Suddenly, Last Summer. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie can easily be seen to represent Williams's mother. Many of his characters are considered autobiographical, including Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer. Actress Anne Meacham was a close personal friend of Tennessee Williams and played the lead in many of his plays including Suddenly, Last Summer.

In his memoirs, he claims he became sexually active as a teenager. His biographer, Lyle Leverich, maintained this actually occurred later, in his late 20s. Williams' play, "The Parade or Approaching the End of Summer," written when he was 29 and worked on throughout his life is an autobiographical depiction of an early romance in Provincetown, MA. This play was only recently produced for the first time on October 1, 2006 in Provincetown, Massachusetts by the Shakespeare on the Cape production company, as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. His relationship with his secretary, Frank Merlo, lasted from 1947 until Merlo's death from cancer in 1963, and provided stability when Williams produced his most enduring works. Merlo provided balance to many of Williams's frequent bouts with depression, especially the fear that like his sister, Rose, he would go insane. The death of his lover drove Williams into a deep, decade-long episode of depression.

Williams was the victim of a gay-bashing in January 1979 in Key West, Florida. He was beaten by five teenage boys, but was not seriously injured. The episode was part of a spate of anti-gay violence that had occurred after a local Baptist minister ran an anti-homosexuality newspaper ad. Some of his literary critics spoke ill of the "excesses" present in his work, but some believe that these were attacks on Williams's sexuality.

Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on a bottle cap. However, some (among them his brother, Dakin) believe he was murdered. Alternately, the police report from his death seems to indicate that drugs were involved; many prescription drugs were found in the room, and the lack of an adequate gag response that would have released the bottle cap from his throat is often due to drug and alcohol influence.

Williams was interred in the Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri, despite his stated desire to be buried at sea at approximately the same place as the poet Hart Crane, whom he considered one of his most significant influences. He left his literary rights to Sewanee, The University of the South in honor of his grandfather, Walter Dakin, an alumnus of the university located in Sewanee, Tennessee. The funds today support a creative writing program.

In 1989 Williams was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Template:Broadway-show A Streetcar Named Desire is a famous American play written by Tennessee Williams for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948.

The play is considered in modern society as an icon of its era, as it deals with a culture clash between two symbolic characters, Blanche DuBois—a pretentious, fading relic of the Old South—and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, inner-city immigrant class.

Streetcar came shortly after Williams's first big success, The Glass Menagerie of 1945. While Williams kept writing plays and fiction into the 1980s, none of his later works lived up to the critical reputation of his first hits.

In 1951, a movie of the play, directed by Elia Kazan, won several awards, including an Academy Award for Vivien Leigh as Best Actress in the role of Blanche. In 1995, it was made into an opera with music by Andre Previn and presented by the San Francisco Opera.

Plot

The play presents Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism. Her chastity and poise are an illusion which she presents, to shield others - and herself - from her reality. Blanche arrives at the house of her sister Stella Kowalski in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where the seamy, multicultural ambience is a shock to Blanche's nerves. Explaining that her ancestral southern plantation Belle Reve (translated from French as "Beautiful Dream") has been "lost" due to the "epic fornications" of her ancestors, Blanche is welcomed to stay by a trepidatious Stella, who fears the reaction of her husband Stanley. Blanche explains to them how her supervisor told her she could take time off from her job as an English teacher because of her upset nerves.

In contrast to both the self-effacing Stella and the charming refinement of Blanche, Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski, is a force of nature; primal, rough-hewn, brutish and sensual. He dominates Stella in every way, and she tolerates his offensive crudeness and lack of gentility largely because of her self-deceptive love for him.

The interjection of Blanche upsets her sister and brother-in-law's system of mutual dependence. Stella is swept aside as the magnetic attraction between the oppositely-charged Stanley and Blanche overwhelms the household. Stanley's friend and Blanche's would-be suitor Mitch is similarly trampled along Blanche and Stanley's collision course. Their final, inevitable confrontation results in Blanche's nervous breakdown.

Blanche and Stanley, together with Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, are among the most recognizable characters in American drama.

The reference to the streetcar (tram) called Desire is symbolic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on a streetcar named "Desire" to reach Stella's home in Elysian Fields, presenting an abiding theme in the play that desire and death are mutual aspects of the same pathos. Blanche's sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short-lived and ultimately doomed, much like her streetcar journey.

Themes and motifs

Illusion versus reality

A recurring theme found in Streetcar Named Desire is an ever-present conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. Blanche does not want, "...what's real, but what's magic." This recurring theme is read most strongly in Williams' characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized: the purple shade she employs to cover the harsh white light bulb in the living room, her chronically deceptive recounting of her last years in Belle Reve, the misleading letters she presumes to write to Shep Huntleigh, and a pronounced excess to alcohol consumption.

Notably, Blanche's deception of others and herself is not characterized by malicious intent, but rather a heart-broken and saddened retreat to a romantic time and happier moments before disaster struck her life (her previous loved one Allan Gray committed suicide during a Varsouviana Polka). In many ways, Blanche is understood to be a sympathetic and tragic figure in the play despite her deep character flaws.

There is also a strong presence of sexism within the play. Throughout the play, women are portrayed as the "weaker sex" while men are shown to be in control. The gender struggle is apparent when Stella submits to Stanley's authority rather than come to the aid of her sister. The tragedy of Blanche is representative of the struggle of women in the South.

Abandonment of chivalric codes

In most fairy tale stories, the ailing princess or the damsel in distress is often rescued by a heroic white knight. A Streetcar Named Desire is characterized by the conspicuous absence of the male protagonist imbued with heroic qualities. Indeed, the polar opposite of what a literary chivalric hero might be is represented in the leading male character of the play, Stanley Kowalski. Stanley is described by Blanche as a "survivor of the Stone Age" and is further depicted in this primitive light by numerous traits that he exhibits: uncivilized manners, demanding and forceful behavior, lack of empathy, crass selfishness, and a chauvinistic attitude towards women. The replacement of the heroic white knight by a character such as Stanley Kowalski further heightens Williams' theme of the demise of the romantic Old South in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley, it should be noted, is not a villain in the literary sense of the word. His actions do not reflect a motivation to actively pursue the destruction of an individual as the primary goal, but rather the callousness and destructiveness of his actions bear a direct result from his incapacity to empathize and his instinctive, primitive desire to own or dominate. Stanley, as a result, is a symbol for the rising new values and attributes of industrial, capitalist America that has come to replace the chivalric codes of the dashing gentleman caller of the Old South.

Plays (chronological order)

• Beauty Is the Word (1930)
• Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! (1935)
• Candles to the Sun (1936)
• The Magic Tower (1936)
• Fugitive Kind (1937)
• Spring Storm (1937)
• Summer at the Lake (1937)
• The Palooka (1937)
• The Fat Man's Wife (1938)
• Not about Nightingales (1938)
• Adam and Eve on a Ferry (1939)
• Battle of Angels (1940)
• The Parade or Approaching the End of Summer (1940)
• The Long Goodbye (1940)
• Auto Da Fé (1941)
• The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1941)
• At Liberty (1942)
• The Pink Room (1943)
• The Gentleman Callers (1944)
• The Glass Menagerie (1944)
• You Touched Me (1945)
• Moony's Kid Don't Cry (1946)
• This Property is Condemned (1946)
• Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton (1946)
• Portait of a Madonna (1946)
• The Last of My Solid Gold Watches (1947)
• Stairs to the Roof (1947)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
• Summer and Smoke (1948)
• I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1951)
• The Rose Tattoo (1951)
• Camino Real (1953)
• Hello from Bertha (1954)
• Lord Byron's Love Letter (1955) - libretto
• Three Players of a Summer Game (1955)
• Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
• The Dark Room (1956)
• The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1956)
• Baby Doll (1956) - original screenplay
• Orpheus Descending (1957)
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)
• A Perfect Anaysis Given by a Parrot (1958)
• Garden District (1958)
• Something Unspoken (1958)
• Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
• The Purification (1959)
• And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens (1959)
• Period of Adjustment (1960)
• The Night of the Iguana (1961)
• The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963)
• The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964)
• Grand (1964)
• Slapstick Tragedy (The Mutilated and The Gnädiges Fräulein) (1966)
• The Mutilated (1967)
• Kingdom of Earth / Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968)
• Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws (1969)
• In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969)
• Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969)
• I Can't Imagine Tomorrow (1970)
• The Frosted Glass Coffin (1970)
• Small Craft Warnings (1972)
• Out Cry (1973)
• The Two-Character Play (1973)
• The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975)
• Demolition Downtown (1976)
• This Is (An Entertainment) (1976)
• Vieux Carré (1977)
• Tiger Tail (1978)
• Kirche, Kŭche und Kinder (1979)
• Creve Coeur (1979)
• Lifeboat Drill (1979)
• Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
• The Chalky White Substance (1980)
• This Is Peaceable Kingdom / Good Luck God (1980)
• Steps Must be Gentle (1980)
• The Notebook of Trigorin (1980)
• Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981)
• A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
• The One Exception (1983)

Novels

• The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950)
• Moise and the World of Reason (1975)
• The Bag People

Short stories

• Hard Candy: a Book of Stories (1959)
• Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories (1960)
• The Knightly Quest: a Novella and Four Short Stories (1966)
• One Arm and Other Stories (1967)
• Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: a Book of Stories (1974)
• It Happened the day the Sun Rose, and Other Stories (1981)

Poetry

• In the Winter of Cities: Poems (1956)
• Androgyne, Mon Amour: Poems (1977)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gross, Robert F., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. Routledge (2002). ISBN 0-8153-3174-6.
• Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (1997). ISBN 0-393-31663-7.
• Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Da Capo Press (1997). ISBN 0-306-80805-6.
• Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. Doubleday (1975). ISBN 0-385-00573-3.
• Williams, Dakin. His Brother's Keeper: The Life and Murder of Tennessee Williams.

External links

• A Streetcar Named Desire: Study Guide
• Biography, summaries, and quotes from important works like Glass Menagerie and Streetcar
• Booksfactory article.
• A photograph of Tennessee Williams by Yousuf Karsh on the website of the National Gallery of Australia.
• Williams' Entry on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
• 1985 audio interview with Dotson Raider, friend and biographer of Tennessee Williams. Interview by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
• Tennesse Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival
• Tennessee Williams biography
• [2]
• Interpreting Tennessee Williams Working in the Theatre Seminar video at American Theatre Wing, April 2005

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