Tennessee Williams

I.Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi

  1. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a shoe salesman who spent a great deal of his time away from the family.
  2. Williams had one older sister and one younger brother. They spent much of their childhood in the home of their maternal grandfather who was an Episcopal minister.

II.Williams studied for several years at the University of Missouri, but withdrew before completing his degree and took a job in St. Louis at the International Shoe Company where his father worked.

  1. Other odd jobs with which he supported himself included waiter, elevator operator, and theater usher.
  2. He eventually returned to school and received a degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. Whether in school or working in the factory, Williams was constantly writing.
  3. In 1939, Williams moved to New Orleans and formally adopted his college nickname "Tennessee" - which was the state of his father's birth. For many years Williams lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana. He first moved there in 1939 to write for the WPA

III.The Prolific Tennessee Williams

  1. Tennessee Williams drew heavily on his family experiences in his writings.
  2. Rose Williams, who was perhaps the greatest influence on him. She was an elegant, slim beauty who was subject to severe nervous attacks and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mentally ill and emotionally disturbed, she spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. After various unsuccessful attempts at therapy, 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.
  3. Rose's failed lobotomy was a hard blow to Tennessee, who never forgave his 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.
  4. In addition to twenty-five full length plays, Williams produced dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one hundred poems, and an autobiography.
  5. His works have been translated into at least twenty-seven languages, and countless productions of his work have been staged around the world.

IV.Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New Orleans.

  1. Merlo was a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II . Together they vacationed in Italy where the writer drew inspiration from the passion for life he felt there.
  2. In 1948, Williams wrote "The Rose Tattoo" -- a passionate comedy about old love lost, and new love found in the life of a family of Sicilian immigrants.
  3. The story line follows Williams' own life experiences in meeting Merlo. It stands out as the only major play by Williams that has a happy ending.
  4. Merlo was a steadying influence in the chaotic life of the living-legend of theater. He was a confidant and artistic adviser, as well as a devoted partner.
  5. It has been said that people were drawn to Tennessee Williams as a celebrity, but those who maintained lasting friendships with him were drawn by Merlo's charm.
  6. After 14 years as a couple, tragedy struck. Frank Merlo died in 1961 of lung cancer.
  7. Williams went into a deep depression that lasted for ten years, which he later described as his "stoned age."
  8. "When your candle burns low, you've got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness" - Inscription by Tennessee Williams on a photo of Merlo
  9. Tennessee Williams was the victim of a gay-bashing in January 1979 in Key West, being 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-gay newspaper ad. Some of his literary critics spoke ill of the "excesses" present in his work, but these were, for the most part, merely attacks on Williams' sexuality.

V.The Tortured Soul of Tennessee Williams

a.Williams struggled with depression through out his life.

i.At a young age he suffered a nervous break down, and he lived with the constant fear that he would go insane as did his sister Rose.

ii.For periods of his life, Williams battled with addictions to prescription drugs and alcohol.

iii.He was also tortured by the thoughts that he had abandoned Merlo at the time of his declining health.

iv."Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all hauntedby a truly awful sense of impermanence."-- Tennessee Williams

v.Most biographers attribute his inner conflicts in part to the social strain placed on Williams as a known homosexual during a hostile period in American history.

vi.On February 24, 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap at his New York City residence at the Hotel Elysee. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri.

1.However, some (among them is Dakin Williams, his brother) believe he was murdered. Alternately, the police report from his death seems to indicate that drugs were involved, as it states that pills were found under his body.

VI.His Works

a.Genre critics maintain that Williams writes in the Southern Gothic style.

i.Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature.

ii.Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot.

iii.Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.

iv.The Southern Gothic author usually avoids perpetuating antebellum stereotypes like the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman, or the righteous Christian preacher.

v.Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a more modern and realistic manner —transforming them into, for example, spiteful or reclusive spinster, or a white-suited and fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives.

vi.One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque — a stock character who possesses some cringe-inducing qualities typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness — but enough good traits that the reader finds himself empathizing nevertheless.

vii.While often disturbing, Southern Gothic authors use deeply flawed characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects in Southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralizing.

b.He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.

c.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.

d.His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo (dedicated to his partner, Frank Merlo), received the Tony Award for best play.

VII.A Streetcar Named Desire

  1. The play presents Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Blanche and Stanley, together with Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, are among the most recognizable characters in American drama.
  8. 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.
  9. Themes and Motifs
  10. Illusion versus Reality: ever-present conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. 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 when her loved one Allan Gray committed suicide during a Varsouvian Waltz. In many ways, Blanche is understood to be a sympathetic and tragic figure in the play despite her deep character flaws.
  11. 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. conspicious abscence of the male protagonist imbued with heroic qualities, Stanley is the polar opposite of this.
  12. 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.

VIII.The First Performance

  1. The first stage version was produced with Marlon Brando starring as Stanley, Jessica Tandy as Blanche.
  2. Brando portrayed Stanley with an overt sexuality that made him, the character of Stanley, and Tennessee Williams into cultural touchstones.
  3. he play opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947. Brando's magnetic performance caused audiences to sympathize with Stanley in the opening scenes of the play, effectively implicating them in Stanley's eventual brutality towards Blanche.
  4. Tandy's performance won her a Tony Award.

Random Note: The Simpsons parodied the play with a "musical version" in the episode entitled "A Streetcar Named Marge." The musical presented by the characters in the show humorously misses Williams' point entirely, ending with a song featuring the lyrics "You can always depend on the kindness of strangers."

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