>>Tennessee Williams
Something that absolutely delighted me was finding out
Tennessee Williams was gay. In all my years reading his plays, I never really
got a chance to look at him as a playwright and as a person, so it was pretty
great to find this out. Being gay myself, it was nice to have that kind of
connection to one of my favorite playwrights. Hearing about his tumultuous and largely
unfortunate love life helped hammer home a few things I’ve noticed in his
writing; the focus on this idea of disillusionment, the driving force of sex
behind several characters across many of his plays, and most notably in Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof, the struggle with homosexuality in the Deep South. I’ll get to
a few of those points later, though.
It was also interesting to learn about his sister, Rose. She
was schizophrenic and subjected to a lobotomy in 1941 that severely disabled
her. She was the only other person besides Williams’ late-life lover Robert
Carroll to get anything from his will. Once he made enough money from his work,
he had her moved to a private hospice facility, where she was well taken care
of. He may have had a largely dysfunctional family, but he cared for Rose very
much and made sure she had all she needed. What a kind brother.
Moving on to the research and reading. One of the most
interesting topics I turned up was the criticism of Williams’ constant use of
sexual undertones in his plays. It was a theme I didn’t realize connected all
of them until I really looked at it. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is
depicted as demure yet sexually open, if for the right man. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the fact that
Maggie and Brick haven’t slept together in quite a long time is an underlying
plot. You can also add in the homosexual undertones with Brick and Skipper,
something that wasn’t really seen a lot at the time. It’s a little less obvious
but still there in The Glass Menagerie, manifested in the
fact that Amanda keeps trying to set her daughter up with gentleman callers. It
shows her innate drive to push her daughter towards marriage and eventual
children, because in a way she’s trying to live vicariously through her
daughter, controlling her every action as she sees fit. And what better way to
show overwhelming control than over a person’s romantic and sexual lives?
Coming back to Streetcar,
there’s a very strong case to be made for this subject between Blanche and Mitch.
“Mitch’s ‘love’ for Blanche is subverted through her attempts to fornicate her.”
(Panda, 2). Blanche is used to it from her experiences with the soldiers in the
army camp, but as soon as Mitch rolls around, it seems more fitting for her to
withhold herself to a certain degree. This fits more into the demure display we
would expect, and what’s become typical of Tennessee. Many attribute his
closeness with his mother to this writing dichotomy that seems to be present in
every one of his works. It’s especially true here. He tries to strike that perfect
balance between innocence and sexuality with Blanche, something ideal. Which
leans me to my second point on this subject; He always seems to be chasing this
ideal, this perfect vision of just about everything he can get his hands on.
When you look at where Blanche and Stella came from, Belle Reve, its’
especially true. Belle Reve is portrayed as this wonderful place, where they
had the perfect upbringing, as opposed to New Orleans, which only proves to
turn Blanche away Her ideals are very much in line with Williams’, and it
almost feels like sometimes he’s trying to project that want for perfection
through her.
“I thought you would never come back to this horrible place!
… I meant to be nice about it and say- Oh, what a convenient location and such-
Ha-a-ha!” (Norton Anthology, 1119)
She’s clearly displeased with the entire thing. It’s nothing
compared to Belle Reve. But Stella thinks it’s perfect. This is the second side
of the Williams coin; as much as he strives for that perfect ideal, he also
loathes the places he came from. He found solace in New Orleans, in the way it
stood out so differently from everything he had grown up with Stella and Blanche
are two sides of Williams that he tries to keep in harmony through the play. It’s
a kind of self-expression, veiled cleverly into a play we can all relate to in
some ways. We all want the perfect place to lay our heads without sacrificing
everything we love and hold dear to us. Blanche and Stella are the epitome of
that idea.
Moving on, we have one of my personal favorite passages and
one of my personal favorite theories- That Blanche was based off of Williams’
beloved sister, Rose. If you recall, I mentioned in the very beginning that
Rose was schizophrenic, and had several disturbing episodes before her
lobotomy. Schizophrenia commonly involves auditory hallucinations, something we
see quite a bit with Blanche. Her ears are always ringing with the sounds of
the gunshot that killed her beloved poet. She hears inhuman voices calling out
and taunting her whenever her emotions crash in one way or another. Towards the
very end when the doctor and the Matron come to get her, the exchange goes as
follows
MATRON:
Now, Blanche!
ECHOES
[rising and falling]: Now, Blanche- Now, Blanche- Now, Blanche!
(Norton
Anthology, 1175)
This sounds a lot like a schizophrenic episode, doesn’t it?
And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard the echoes, They also appear in Scene
Ten; “The night is filled with inhuman voices
like cries of the jungle, The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously s flames
along the wall spaces.” (Norton Anthology, 1170). This is also hallmark of
a schizophrenic episode. Blanche becomes panicked and frantic, wanting to get
away from Stanley any way she can. She even breaks a bottle to try and fend him
off.
When you add in the ending, it all makes more sense. Blanche
is suddenly very calm with the idea of leaving with the doctor and the matron. Where
she was once combative and frightened, she now has a sudden sense of peace. As
she leaves with serenity, Stella is left broken in her wake. This seems to me
like a strong metaphor for Rose’s lobotomy. When it happened, her schizophrenia
was tempered, her personality calmed at the expense of her mind. When Stella
mourns, so does Williams. He mourns for her and what should have been a better
life for her. There was nothing that could be done, but that doesn’t make the
fact any easier to swallow. Stanley is unsupportive in the worst kind of way,
almost patronizing as he tries to calm Stella. Williams’ family didn’t care
much for Rose after she was hospitalized, and it seemed like Tennessee was the
only one that remembered her, as shown by the way he took care of her through the
rest of his life, even as she outlived him. And so with that, I can say, with
confidence, that Blanche is at least partially based on Rose as well as
Williams himself, and the ending of Streetcar
was Williams’ way of coping with the lobotomy and subsequent “loss” of his
sister Rose. Just as Stella lose Blanche in the end.
Works Cited
Holder, Rebecca. "Making the Lie True: Tennessee
Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Truth as a Performance." Southern
Quarterly, 1 Jan. 2016. Web. 21 Mar. 2017.
Holder, Rebecca. "Making the Lie True: Tennessee
Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Truth as a Performance." Southern
Quarterly, 1 Jan. 2016. Web. 21 Mar. 2017.
"Tennessee Williams." Poetry Foundation.
N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2017
Wiliams, Tennessee. "A Streetcar Named Desire."
1947. The Norton Anthology: American Literature. Shorter 8th Edition ed.
Vol. 2. New York City: Norton, 2013. 1116-177. Print. 1865 to the Present.
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