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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

The Re-invention of the Self: Performstivity
and Liberation in Selected Plays by Tennessee Williams

presented by
Usher Ben Mousse

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph-D- degree in 31.811811

   
 

Maj r professor

Date April 30, 2001

MSU is an Affirmatiw Action “Equal Opportunity Institution 0- 12771

 

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3/01 cJClRC/DateDuepes-pJS

THE RE-INVENTION OF THE SELF: PERFORMATIVITY AND LIBERATION
IN SELECTED PLAYS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

By
Maher Ben Moussa

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2001

ABSTRACT

THE RE-INVENTION OF THE SELF: PERFORMATIVITY AND LIBERATION
IN SELECTED PLAYS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

By
Maher Ben Moussa

In this study entitled: T_h§_ Beg-invention if _tl_1_e Stif: Performativity _a_n_gl_
Liberation i_n__ Selected flays by Tennessee Williams, I argue that the self is not a
fixed, stable, and coherent entity, but rather a performative self that plays
different roles, wears different masks, and presents itself in different scripts.
Most of the critics who have tackled Williams's plays have argued that his
characters are torn between such dichotomies as flesh and spirit, and body and
soul. In my study, I re-examine such claims, reassess Williams's characters'
identity, and revisit the tensions and clashes that haunt these characters. I argue
that the notion of identity Williams dramatizes is more complex and multi-
dimensional than the clear-cut binary dichotomies through which these
characters are often perceived. The alternative notion I present, in lieu of these
readings, is that the self Williams constructs is performative with a multiplicity
of faces and facets. I re—examine the self by applying different theories to come to

a fuller understanding of Williams's notion of identity.

In the opening chapter, I challenge reading the self from a single
theoretical viewpoint, and instead, present the performative as accountable for its
complex multi-dimensionality. The first chapter on A tr tcar M _De_sii;e
examines Blanche DuBois recreating a new image of herself to cope with her loss

of social status, prestige, and respect. The second chapter on Cat 93 a 11th Iii;

m explores the masks and facades by which Brick Pollitt’s identity is
constructed and argues that it is ultimately a result of negotiation between his
private desires on the one hand, and the public resistance to the legitimacy of
such desires on the other hand. The last two chapters successively entitled
"Mrs Descending: the Myth of a Liberated Self" and '"Out, Out, Human
Outcry': Theatricality as an Impasse," examine the impossibility of the self to be
liberated from this performativity. In conclusion, I argue that the self can be
captured in its totality and open-endedness only through its own performativity
which prevents the self from becoming an essentialized entity that feeds on

clearly defined stereotypes and prejudices.

Copyright by
MAHER BEN MOUSSA
2001

To Sabrine and Mariam,
Yessine and Tessnim,
For their unconditional love...
Their songs...

Their smiles...

And their love for beauty...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Several people have been of invaluable assistance in the researching and
writing of this study. I owe my deepest gratitude to Professor Arthur
Athanason, who was generous with both his time and expertise. The insightful
comments and perceptive suggestions he offered were invaluable. Without his
continuous patience, support, and above all friendship, this study would not
have been possible. I thank him for the many engaging and stimulating
conversations on Tennessee Williams we both have enjoyed as well as his
enthusiasm for this project. He expanded my horizon not only regarding drama
and literature, but also the human spirit and the life experiences that literature
invites us to ponder. He made the process of researching and writing this
dissertation a valuable, pleasant, and unique experience. I would also like to
extend my warm appreciation to the other members of my committee, Dr. Barry
Gross, Dr. James Seaton, and Dr. Randal Robinson, who responded in detail and
with penetrating suggestions to different drafts of my manuscript.

I owe a special debt to Dr. Kenneth Waltzer, Dr. Douglas Noverr, Dr.
Patricia Julius, and Dr. Kathleen Geissler for their support, guidance, and the
funding they offered me during my doctoral studies.

To Dr. Donald Rosenberg, I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay.
Since the beginning of my graduate study at Michigan State University, he made

a special effort to encourage me in the pursuit of my intellectual endeavor.

vi

My thanks to Andrew Paulson, Kristen Wiltfang, Meg McClure, and
Rachel Foreman for their assistance with their computer skills in formatting and
finalizing this manuscript.

During this endeavor, many of my friends offered a listening ear at times
when I needed relief from the stress that such a project entails. My friend Robert
Lang was always available and added some valuable contribution to this study.
My special thanks to Punit Sushi], Mamta Karani, Gita Kumar, Samia Barnat,
Lamia Ben Youssef, Carmela Garritano, Richard Manderfield, Lamis Maddur,
Bruce Stewart, Karl Reinhold, Nabil and Lamia Ben Zekri, Moez and Jouda
Bouaziz, and Mohamed and Mariam Malouche, and those whose names escaped
me now for their compassionate understanding and wholehearted and generous
support.

The greatest debt of gratitude falls to my parents, Najet and Mongi, my
brothers, Adel, Ziad, and Naoufel, my sisters Olfa and Olfa, and my very special
nephew and nieces for their comforting warmth and unconditional love helped
me to get through some difficult times during this study. It is to Sabrine,
Yessine, Mariam, and Tessnim whose love touches me deeply that I dedicate this

study.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
An Eclectic Approach for a Performative Self
The Authorial Subject: The Ultimate Performance

CHAPTER I

BLANCHE DUBOIS: PUBLIC FACES AND PRIVATE LONGINGS
Blanche DuBois: Identity as Role Play
Blanche DuBois: Williams's Private Space

CHAPTER II
THE GAY SELF: LIES THAT COME TRUE
The Gay Self: Masks and Facades
The Homosexual Performative Self
The Gay Self and the Critics
The Negotiative and Affirmative Gay Self

CHAPTER III
ORPHEUS DE$ENDINQ THE MYTH OF A LIBERATED SELF
Val's Vision of a Liberated Self
From Self-liberation to Self-mutilation
Lady Torrance: The Ambivalent Self
Carol Cutrere: Writing Her Own Self

CHAPTER IV

"OUT, OUT, HUMAN OUTCRY:" THEATRICALITY AS AN IMPASSE

The Play Within the Play and the Theatrical Self
The Theatrical Self and the Need for New Realism

The Author as Character: The Ultimate Layer of the Theatrical Self

A Self Caught between the Word and the World
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY

viii

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16

26
27
46

73
80
86

104

124
125
135
151
166

177
180
200
203

247
259

Introduction

The self that I will explore in this study is not a fixed, stable, and coherent
entity, it is rather a performative self that plays different roles, wears different
masks, and derives itself from different scripts. As I will demonstrate in four

selected plays by Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire Ca_t en _a_ I-I_9_t

 

 

fin BQQL ngheus Descending, and fie Two-Charager P_lay, the characters
Williams dramatizes on the stage are amalgamations of a multiplicity of faces
and a plethora of facets. They act and perform not only for the audience but also
for each other. Most of Williams's plays can be perceived as plays within plays
where the characters subscribe to many roles and seem to have more than one
true identity. When we meet Blanche DuBois early in Strgtcar, we see her in her
white suit performing the role of the Southern belle, it is only later in the play we
discover that she is performing this role to cover and hide her troubled past in
Laurel after what happened to her with the loss of Belle Reve and the suicide of
her homosexual husband. The closing lines of get, marking Brick's willingness to
make Maggie's lie about her pregnancy true, illustrate how the world of reality is
but a transformation of lies and pretenses. m Descending presents a
variation of the same theme. Val Xavier faces his own doom not only because of
the destructive conservative forces of Iabe Torrance and Two-River County
community, but also because he has locked himself into the role which such
conservative forces have cast him. In The Twegharaeter P_lay, the theater
becomes a central metaphor through which Williams demonstrates how the self

is performative and theatrical in its very nature and essence.

Even though some theorists have recently begun to approach the self from
this perspective, many literary figures have already explored the performative
nature of the self in their own works. W.H. Auden comments: "Human beings
are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first
pretended to be it."1 The relationship of the role to the self is not that of the copy
to the original, it is rather "as copy is to copy," to borrow Judith Butler's image,
and every self becomes "an imitation without origin."2 Butler's observation that
"genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original
nor derived"3 is pertinent not only to gender, but also to the self in more general
terms. Appearance and being become interchangeable, if not totally identical,
and the demarcation line between false self and true self is subsequently
removed. As Roy Schafer affirms, "we must also allow falseness a quantitative
aspect--a position on a continuum rather than a fixed, absolute, and even
discontinuous position.“ The mendacity that Big Daddy speaks about in Ce; is
part of the truth, performativity part of who we are, and falsehood is enclosed
within the matrix of our identity. Therefore, we can have access only to the
image i.e. the performance. Stephen Frosh remarks: "It is the image which is the
most vibrant metaphor for modern reality: the image as on a television screen,
with no substance behind it, creating, playing, disappearing, all in an instant
gone. This image is subversive because it is fluid and provocative, but it is
anarchistic because it offers no roots and no sources of value."5

The gap between illusion and reality, masks and faces, and role and self is
diminished in this perspective. The mask becomes so close to the face that it can
hardly be dropped. If it does drop, we may discover that there is nothing behind

the mask. The game of the performance is all there is to Williams's characters.

The mask is the very skin of the face, and only in the mask do we see the face. In
a similar manner, the self and the role are not antithetical as much as they are
inter-changeable. The image of Peer Gynt in Henrik Ibsen's play sitting in the
forest and peeling an onion while talking to himself is a dramatization of the idea
that the self is a multitude of faces and roles. As the layers of an onion, Peer Gynt
sees himself as a collage of roles and faces. He is "the drowning man hanging on
the wreck," "the archaeologist," "the prophet," and "the man who lived for
gaiety." The many faces collide, and Peer asks Gynt the ultimate question:
"There's quite a multitude of layers. When am I going to get to the heart?" He
poses the question only to discover in disappointment and regret that there is no
heart to an onion. He screams: "God, it hasn't got one! Right to the middle, it's
layers and layers, each getting smaller."6 At the end of this scene, Peer is left
talking to Gynt as if they were two different characters or two reflections of the
.same entity. There is nothing to the self but one layer after another, and nothing
to the face but one mask after another, and nothing to identity but one persona
after another. The layers are endless, and so are the faces; one face reflects
another, and one voice echoes another; and what lies behind the appearance is
not reality, but another appearance.

"7 is also applicable to our

Butler's conclusion that "gender is an act
understanding of a performative self. The self "requires a performance that is
repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and a re-experiencing of a set of
meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form
of their legitimization."8 Williams's characters are caught within this circle of

en[act]ment. Tom Wingfield, for example, has fallen in love with long distances

as his father did, and Blanche DuBois has fallen victim to the same deliberate

cruelty she claims she herself has never been guilty of. Brick Pollitt's closing line
in {at "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" not only draws a parallel between
son and father, but also demonstrates how the son is following in the father's
footsteps. Felice and Clare are afraid of re-enacting their father's suicide, and in
holding each other at play's end, it seems that they have found the ultimate
alternative as well as the escape from the cycle of death and destruction, even
though such escape remains temporary. In Qrp_h_eg§ Descending Val and Lady
refuse at a certain point to reenact the values and "meanings already socially
established," and decide to act against the "mundane" forms of these values by
refusing to act as the agents of "legitimization" of such values. When Lady's and
Val's desire is exposed and perceived as subversive, as it is, then they have to
face their destruction and mutilation. Williams's characters are always caught
within the image that the others have designed and tailored for them.

As a consequence, the self I am discussing in this study is not a site of
synthesis, for such a terminology reveals a state of harmony, serenity, and
cohesion not pertinent to the state in which Tennessee Williams's characters find
themselves. Blanche DuBois whom we meet in Streetcar is torn between her past
and her present; and her attempt to reinvent herself through her theatricality
does not prove to be conducive to the longings that she deemed for herself.
Similarly, Val Xavier and Lady Torrance, the protagonists of Ms, are torn
between their longings and the expectations that others impose upon them. They
fail to live up to their desires and thus fall victims to the images and the molds
that their Two-River County community has imposed on them. Brick Pollitt's fate
in get m e 11th T_in_ m is less tragic than Val‘s, but that does not take away

from the play the dramatic tension and the different voices between which Brick

is torn. T_‘he live-Character m does not offer a relief to a performative self from
its performativity and theatricality. On the contrary, Williams demonstrates that
this tension between the past and the present, between who we are and the
image others project upon us, are ultimately the very conditions with which we
have to live. In shaping their identities, Williams's characters cut and paste, write
and edit, and select what to remember and what not to as if they were the master
creators of their own script. But their task is not that easy. They are always
crushed by the forces others manipulate and the images and the expectations
that others are asking them to live up to. Blanche does not escape the brutality of
Stanley Kowalski; neither do Lady and Val escape the aggression and the
violence of the Two-River County community. Brick has accepted his wife
Maggie's manipulation into his own design, and her lie has become the very lie
with which he has chosen to live for the rest of his life. The ending of Lhe Im-
Qharacter flex is ambiguous. Whether Felice and Clare will follow in the
footsteps of their parents remains a question. Obviously, Williams's characters'
identity is not a site of synthesis and harmony, but rather that of collage,
fragmentation, and tension between private longings and public expectations.
Alma Winemiller of Sme; egg Smlge speaks perhaps most eloquently
for this doubleness, multiplicity, and complexity: "I've thought many times of
something you told me last summer, that I have a doppelganger. I looked that up
and I found that it means another person inside of me, another self, and I don't
know whether to thank you or not for making me conscious of it!"9 Alma,
Blanche, Brick, Val, Lady and others of Williams's characters do not present the
audience with a coherent and unified self; they are broken pieces and incomplete

entities. They are a collage of images from their past, images of who they deem

themselves to be, and images of who the others expect them to be. Within their
voices, they embody the voices of the others, and in their own reflection they
disclose reflections of the others. The tension in Williams's plays is about who is
to occupy the center around which this self is constructed. On the one hand, the
desires and the longings of the individual are pushing their way towards this
center against the social forces which, on the other hand, present themselves as
the most legitimate occupants of this center.

The performative self is disunited; it has a multiplicity of faces and facets
and an infinity of voices and images, and masks and roles to play that reflect the
polymorphousness and the complexity of human identity. The American
novelist Paul Auster has explored this multiplicity in his autobiographical work,
he Invention ef filitude:

I felt as though I were looking down to the bottom of

myself, and what I found there was more than just

myself-J found the world. That's why that book is

filled with so many references and quotations, in

order to pay homage to all the others inside me. On

the one hand, it's a work about being alone; on the

other hand, it's about community. That book has

dozens of authors, and I wanted them all to speak

through me.”
This multiplicity does not necessarily entail contradictions, schiZOphrenia, and
discontinuity; there can be continuity within the roles that the self plays. As
Irving Howe observes: "Once perceived or imagined, the self implies doubleness,
multiplicity."ll Schizophrenia is no longer the clinical term for a psychologically
deficient state of being, it is rather the very nature and the very condition within
which the self can exist. Otherwise, the complexity of the self can be aborted, and

our understanding of the human machine remains partial. If the self Williams

dramatizes is incomplete, disfigured, and mutilated, this incompletion,
disfigurement, and mutilation are part of who / what this self is. Our view of the
self has to separate itself from any understanding of the self in clinical terms, for
these terms have proven to be twisted and manipulated by the normative and
oppressive powers against the individual. I shall steer away from terms like
continuity and coherence in my discussion of the self, because I accept
"'coherence' and 'continuity' of the 'person' are not logical or analytic features of
personhood, but rather socially instituted and maintained norms of
intelligibility," as Judith Butler informs us.12 The view that the self is a
"coherence" and "continuity" is not without an exclusionist political agenda. It
sets a norm for what types of behavior and ways of thinking we deem acceptable
or not. Under such normalizing views, desire, sex, sexuality, and gender become
matters of prescriptions, and those who do not behave according to such
prescriptive and normative manner can not fit. Kim Worthington poses the
rhetorical question "But why should I seek to know myself as a fixed, permanent
presence?" And she continues to explore the ideological implications of these
views that attempt to fix the self: "This is surely to look for the wrong thing
entirely. The discovery of a transcendental self is hardly desirable, even if it were
possible, for this must limit me to the given contours of the unchanging,
permanent form I discover."13

Perceiving the self as performative allows us to accept it as a multiplicity
of versions and editions. Through the notion of performativity the contradictions
embodied in one's identity are not resolved by means of nullification, but rather
by accepting them as integral and crucial components to our understanding of

the self. As Schafer claims: "identity... is always at risk... [and] implies acceptance

of there being no final resting place and a great need to tolerate ambiguity,
tension, and deferral of closure."14 Through this performativity, the self never
allows itself to be defined as object by others; it rather defies categories,
limitations, and definitions in the face of its beholders, and becomes an entity or
a concept that can elude definitions and the boundaries that such definitions
might impose upon its fluidity and switching circumference. Through its
performativity, the self usurps the power to formulate categories "to control the
moral currency, to define the nature of 'nature'"15 from the hands of the
normative forces and places that power within the realms of the self. Moreover,
the different roles that the self plays make it not a singular entity, but an entity
that has to be always in the plural, an entity of assemblage of selves and
accumulative roles. Through these roles, the self reinvents itself into different
faces and facets and multiple performances.

From this perspective, the self is an open-ended question. It refuses
conclusions, resists closures, and acts against all readings that might
intentionally or unintentionally reduce it to formulaic interpretations. The self
expands beyond categories. It is private, yet undeniably social. The self is
"socially formed even as it can be quickly turned against the very social
formations that have brought it into birth."16 The self is in a state of homelessness;
its roots and origins are far remote because the self refuses to live with its ties to
different institutions such as society and family. It is everywhere yet nowhere; it
is here and there; it partially resides within the individual, and partially within
the social and political institutions that the individual is part of. The
apprehension of the self remains a longing that is yet to be achieved. Paul

Ricoeur concludes that "there is no direct apprehension of the self by the self, no

internal apperception or appropriation of the self's desire to exist through the
short-cut of consciousness, but only by taking the long road of the interpretation
of signs.” Therefore, the self is not a matter of fact and truth. The meaning of the
self is not in definitions but, rather, in the state of chaos and conflict within
which the self exists. As Colin Eisler succinctly observes, "If we think we are in
'control of the subject' we are demeaning it and ourselves, assuming a superiority
unworthy of the privilege of scholarship."18
Ricoeur's assertion not only refers to the impossibility of defining the self

but also to the fragmented and discursive characteristic of the self that has made
such definition impossible. The self is never in possession of itself. "The self that
we are," as Hans—Georg Gadamer reminds us, "does not possess itself: one could
say that it 'happens.""9. The self is a process of becoming that is never complete
and finalized to fit in the boundaries and limitations of definitions. It can be
observed only in motion and progress, and any attempt to define the self is an
attempt to stop this process of becoming and abort the self while it is in its
creation. Stephen Frosh has commented on the fragmented self in his book
um (miss:

People are not really structured in stable, integrated

ways but are by nature, full of fluidity, contradiction,

impulse and frustration, psychological processes

brought together only to make coherence within the

domains of rationality seem attainable.20
Defining the self is only an attempt to impose "an ideological fiction... upon the

irrationalities of psychological reality" and new ways of "constraining desire" to

the limitations of definitions, and thus misses the complexity and fluidity of the

self.21 This study, therefore, will attempt to capture the self in flux, in its process
of becoming, revision, and re-signification.

If the self is discursive, performative, and multiple, one starts to wonder
about the value of studying, examining, and writing about the self. Howe
answers this question when he concludes at the end of his essay that "the idea of
the self has been a liberating and revolutionary step, perhaps the most liberating
and revolutionary, toward the goal of a communal self-humanizationfm The
notion of the self as constructed and performative, as it is, is a mark of freedom.
It allows individuals to sort out answers to the eternal question "Who am I?" and
to perform an exercise of self-interrogation that might be thorny in its nature, but
(dis)comforting in its outcome. Only in this introspective and retrospective leap
can the self meet itself on a more or less familiar and recognizable ground.

The self has a value of resistance and moral advancement as well. The self-
examination that leads towards self-realization allows individuals to distance
themselves from the conventionally accepted moral values, and to draw them
more and more towards values springing from themselves rather than from
established conventions. In the exercise of self-realization, the self turns its own
gaze upon itself to make out of this gaze a journey of self-understanding and
self-affirmation. In this exercise, the self can contemplate the truths and the lies
with which it is surrounded, and the conventionally accepted social values
imposed upon it in an oppressive and controlling manner. With the absence or
the annihilation of the self, resistance and change would have no place in our
lives any more. Though discursive, ambiguous, and even enigmatic, the self has
always played the role of catalyst in the process of change, and has always been

the motor for this change. The self is the product of specific actuality and

10

historical circumstances, but it is an entity that goes beyond its historicity, and
sometimes defies this defining actuality to motivate change and movement.
From this perspective, the self becomes an affirmation of the possibility for
creative life. As Frosh states: "The self, then, is an affirmation of what is humanly
worthy and creative."23 Moreover, no matter how deeply entrapped we are in the
social normative forces, be they moral, religious, or even linguistic, the self
provides us with a possibility of a better option within them. Identity triggers the
dynamics of change and resistance. By erasing and annihilating the self, the
individual is left at a loss and falls prey to the deterministic aspects of these
normative powers. With the erasure of the self, the individual is turned into a
docile entity created by the normalizing forces of the disciplinary regimes, and a
victim of the homogenizing mechanism of culture.

Our belief in the self places the individuals' agency in the hands of the
individuals themselves without necessarily nullifying the dialectical relationship
or tension between the dictations of the social organizations and the will of the
individuals to be who they deem themselves to be. As Frosh claims, the self
becomes like a creative work of art. Bits and pieces, memories, and incidents are
selected to be included-in the narrative of the self so that we can read ourselves
and make ourselves accessible to others. This narrative is the image of ourselves
that we want to present to the world, to our friends, and to our relatives, and in
which we exercise our freedom to reinvent ourselves. George Levine affirms:
"The 'self' of contemporary social debate, even transmuted into 'subject,’ remains
an agitator for individual action and agency!“ However, one should also bear in
mind that much of the self is also internalization of the forces of culture, history,

and ideology that have produced this self. Therefore, the separation between

11

who the individuals are and the image the others project upon them becomes
totally irrelevant if not impossible.

Examples from Williams's plays make the point in the case clear. The
homophobic discourse, for example, that Brick resorts to to describe himself, as
well as Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, is largely socially constructed. His fear is
not of homosexuality itself, but more of the pejorative tags with which this
society labels homosexuality. Brick himself, as I will clarify in the chapter on 93;,
who may be a latent homosexual, has himself become the very agent to
perpetuate the homophobic discourse which ultimately seeks to destroy the
homosexual figure. Val Xavier is another example that supports this point. Even
though Val has some feelings and desires for Lady, he has chosen not to reveal
them. He has also sacrificed his vision and ideal of freedom for the desire to fit in
with the Two-River County community. I suggest that long before he is
destroyed by Jabe and the rest of the community, Val is destroyed by himself. He
has shut off the voice of his own desire and the dream of his own free will to gain
rite of passage in a community which has never ceased to see him as an intruder.

Val in Qthegs Degending, like Brick in get m a Hot T_in_ Roof, has internalized

 

many of the social and moral conventions. Both characters carry within
themselves the seeds of their own destruction and demise. The two examples
state clearly that the question of agency is not always clear-cut and often more
complex and murky than we might think. The individuals' agency is a matter of
dispute and conflict between the individuals themselves and the ideologies that
codify and dictate much of . their behavior. Williams's characters exemplify this
conflict and depict its tragic outcome on the individual. Williams does not

eliminate the self, but instead portrays it as de-centered, broken, and scattered;

12

simultaneously he also retains it as a participant in the construction of its own
image. Thus, Williams preserves the intrinsic relationship and dynamics between
the desires of the individuals and the powers to which their society wants to
subdue them. He is not willing to deny the emancipative possibilities available to
individuals even though such possibilities can prove to be unattainable and

meager at times

An Eclectic Approach for a Performative Self.

The approach I am undertaking in this study is eclectic and constructivist
whereby the self is a creation and a construction of the imagination. This
approach does not necessarily annihilate the self; on the contrary, it tries to
explore its complexity and rediscover the pieces of a puzzle, which ultimately
remains incomplete. The' self is a fiction not in the sense that it is a fallacious and
artificial entity, but in the sense that it is the creation of an accumulation of
memories and experiences which are constantly remaking themselves. As
Patricia Waugh affirms, the "self is an endless gathering and interpretation of
fragments of experience."25 The self inhabits what Brian McHale calls pluralistic
"ontological landscapes.“5 Williams does not seem to be embracing the "death of
the subject." He seems to be embracing the "reinvention of the subject" with all
the affirmation and assertions that this reinvention may entail. Williams still has
faith in the individual and the important place the individual deserves to occupy
in a democratic society. The odds against which the individual is operating can
be massive, oppressive, and defeating, but Williams never lost faith in the
individual's resilience and capacity to cope with these odds. Thus, even though

one can opt for a constructivist approach to the self that Williams stages for us, it

13

is not necessary that the individual's agency should be dislocated and [re] placed
within the hands of the normative powers. The subjective agency never becomes
an impossibility in Williams's understanding of the subject. We observe his
characters in their private longings, and in their private seclusion, but we never
lose sight of the forces which are trying to invade the privacy or the intimacy of
these moments. In my constructivist approach, I do not intend to trace an origin
of the self, I am rather arguing for a multiplicity of origins, desires, and longings
that come together to shape and re-shape the self- such factors are public in the
same way as they are private. I do not intend to ground the self in one center
rather than the other, it is an entity with no center; and even if that center does
exist, it is far and beyond our capacity to trace it back to an origin. All the
attempts to claim that the self has a definite origin are attempts to control the
uncontrollable and to fix the unfixed. As Derrida warns us, the idea of a center
offers us "a reassuring certitude... and on the basis of this certitude anxiety can
be mastered."27 Establishing an origin of the self offers us some certitude, but this
certitude is erroneous and fallacious. The self is more of a floating sign where the
signifier and the signified do not necessarily correlate, and therefore the sign
itself escapes any kind of deterministic relationship. The self is a site of
ambiguity where types and stereotypes are inapplicable.

Studying the self cuts across different fields of discipline, including
sociology, language, and politics. In recent years, discussions about the meaning
of selfliood have even made their way into pop culture; a magazine entitled Elf
sells now in the news stands, and some Hollywood movies have started to
explore the dividedness and the multiplicity of the self along with its

representational and performative nature. Movies like fie M Shew, BALE,

l4

The Talented m. My, and the Australian film, 13, awe—If, _a_r;d__i all explore
the self from this perspective, and demonstrate how the reality of the self can be
turned into a fiction of our own and the other's creation. In these movies, the
protagonists live their lives on the screen; and in the roles they act, and the way
they turn their world into a stage, they reinvent themselves and create characters
not out of their imaginations but out of themselves, and who they are. Bruce
Willis's movie _Qis_ney me Kid portrays a protagonist whose life turns upside
down when he meets himself as an eight—year-old child. In this movie, the past
and the present collide with each other on the screen to show the audience that
the demarcation line between both is not as defined as we may have thought.

If the self is multiple and discursive, so should the discourse we adopt to
examine and understand this highly complex entity. George Levine avers: "No
discussion of the self can any longer confine itself to psychology, or to the
'intemal' conditions of 'mind'... Language and history and social context in fact
become psychology, as psychology and anthropology and sociology become
language and history."28 Arnold Modell agrees with Levine's claim: "...for in our
contemporary world human life is irreducibly multi-leveled. We are both
paradoxically merged with the other and separate from the other. This represents
an intrinsic dialectic, which I believe should also be reflected in our theories that
conceptualize the relation between private meanings and our interaction with
others."29 In an eclectic approach to the self, one can avoid the risk of
essentializing the self and reducing it to a homogenized entity. Through an
interdisciplinary dialogue, the self can be examined and understood without
necessarily fixing or pinning it down to a single dominator. The self is a site of

different impulses, forces, and urges which, contradictory as they seem,

15

collectively constitute the texture of the self. These internal contradictory
impulses of the self are the foundations of the self. Perhaps the self is so broad in
its scope that "it spills through and over disciplines and out of the academy into
the life of our times."30 We can not afford to think about the self any more
without taking into consideration the lack of uniformity and consistency inherent

in the very nature of this entity.

The Authorial Subject: The Ultimate Performance
When the topic is about the performative self in the plays of Tennessee
Williams, the playwright himself can not be excluded from this discussion, for
Williams himself, throughout his career, has become a character of his own
creation. The name Tennessee Williams, for example, is both the name of the
actor who is playing the role of Tom Lanier Williams and the name of the writer
who wrote the script for that role. As is the case in m Twe-Qharacter Play, the
actor is the writer of his own role. Lyle Leverich comments on the
fictionality/performativity inherent in the name of Tennessee Williams: "Now
there was Thomas Lanier Williams of St. Louis, born 1911, and Tennessee
Williams of New Orleans, born 1914. And, henceforth the man and the personae
would ever be at odds."” Leverich describes Williams the performer:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, very much on
stage, as he was... has been described anonymously as
'his own greatest work of fiction' and 'a tragicomic
genius on and off stage, a lyric poet whose wry, sad
protagonists lived life through each sweaty nuance, in
much the same way as he chose to live! He was often
impossibly demanding, purposefully irrational,

egocentric, vulnerably generous, and hilariously
funny, «all within 60 seconds.32

16

Tennessee Williams is an actor of different roles among which he moves with
subtlety and versatility. By adopting the name of Tennessee, Williams is trying to
reinvent himself in a new role, and leave behind him the "Tom" of his childhood.
But again and again, the role of Tom still imposes itself on Tennessee, and
ultimately, it becomes another facet and dimension that Tennessee has to
portray. As Lyle Leverich observes, in the 1960's Williams "became acutely aware
that he was in competition with himself--the self he had created as Tennessee
Williams."33 Tennessee Williams is no less of a theatrical performer than the other
characters of his creation such as Blanche, Brick, or Felice and Clare. Williams
does not seem to be unaware of the performative nature of his identity when he
avers to Rex Reed in a 1971 interview that his "public self" is an "artifice of
mirrors/'34 implying that it is a collage of different images, facets, roles, and
personae. The point I would like to highlight here is that the playwright himself
can not be separated from his own work. Gore Vidal notes in his introduction to
Williams's collected stories that Williams's biography may be found not so much
in his Memegs' as in his fictional writing.35

In his interviews and comments Williams portrays himself as a dramatic
persona who shares with his characters not only their stage, but also their
feelings, their conflicts, and their pain. "A writer's view," he told Don Ross in
1957, "is always affected by his own state of being. I am an anxious, troubled
person. I can't write about anything I don't feels!“ In his foreword to meet 11rd
ef 19%, Williams writes: "I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless
I know it through having it myself. I have exposed a good many human
weaknesses and brutalities and consequently I have them."37 In his characters,

Williams writes himself, in his heroes and heroines he explores his sensitivity,

17

and his "drama derives its force from the depth of feeling that prevailed in the
heart of the playwright..."38 Williams's characters are shattered fragments of him,

and constant reworking of his divided entity. In his Memoirs he claims: "What is

 

my profession but living and putting it all down in stories and plays and now in
this book?"39 In Laura and Tom Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, Brick Pollitt, Val
Xavier, and many others, Williams has found the opportunity and the material to
refashion and redesign himself. The act of writing, for Williams, is an act of
reinvention and becoming. "Writing is a question of becoming," Deleuze argues,
"always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed... Writing is inseparable
from becoming: in writing, one becomes..."0 In writing, the author himself,
according to Deleuze, undertakes some metamorphosis and transformation, and
hopes for the attainment of self-completion.

Williams's claims about his identification with his characters are
numerous. Repeatedly, he claimed that Alma is his favorite character: "I think the
character I like most is Miss Alma... She is my favorite because I came out so late
and so did Alma... Miss Alma grew up in the shadow of the rectory, and so did
I!"n Moreover, in 1973, he called his play, T_he Im-Charaeter flex "a history of
what I went through in the Sixties transmuted into the predicament of a brother
and a sister."42 Even though these claims of identification are valuable in
enriching our understanding of Williams's plays, they can not be taken at face
value. The correlation between Williams and his characters is never total or
complete. This correspondence is based on selected memories, imaginary ties,
and omissions. This correspondence involves "defacement," it involves putting
on faces and removing others; it entails exaggerations, justifications, and

rationalizations in order to turn this self into a subject of monumental status as

18

Paul de Man argues.43 Stories after stories are woven in front of our eyes by
Tennessee Williams in his Memoire, plays, poetry, and interviews. They are all
stories which come from a man who has rehearsed how to live on the screen and
on the stage even when he seems to be mostly absorbed in his real life.

If Williams's plays are the narratives of his own self reinvention, then we
should be alert that this narrative of reinvention is troubled, confused, mixed,
and reflexive. It is a narrative of collision where the narrator and the central
figure in the narrative are the same; however, the two never become identical.
Between the narrative and the self depicted remains a gap and an omission.
There is a gap between the self that recalls and the one that is recalled, between
the reflecting subject and the reflected object. Williams comments on the
evasiveness of writing in his Memoirs: "1 think writing is continually a pursuit of
a very evasive quarry, and you never quite catch it!"4 The pursuit is endless and
what writing communicates is never complete, accurate, or precise. The dilemma
of a self trying to reinvent itself is a dilemma of déchirure between its past and its
present, between the future into which this new self is trying to cast itself and the
examining retrospective perspective from which this self seems incapable of
liberating itself. Williams, along with his characters, does not escape this
déchirure. Crites Stephen comments on this state of being and describes this
déchirure in terms of hiatus between the recollecting and the recollected selves:

What I own as myself is always present as the
character in the story from whose perspective its
episodes are recalled, claimed as its own self by this 'I'
who recalls. By telling the story from the perspective
of this self, as in a first person narrative, usually told
in the past tense, I distance this self from the
intersubjective matrix of experience in order to claim

it as my own, as that personal past with which I claim
identity. Still there is always some hiatus between the

 

l9

'I' who recollects and the self who appears as a

character in a succession of episodes, a hiatus that I

artfully bridge by owning this self, claiming it as my

own.‘15

When Williams claims "I am Blanche DuBois," the correlation between
himself and this heroine is rather metaphorical, imagined, and thus fictional.
Williams's reinvention of himself in his characters can not be read and
understood only within the realms of fiction where the reality itself becomes
imagined and the lines between reality and fiction are rendered blurred if not
totally tangent. In Williams's texts "every word is autobiographical and no word
is autobiographical!“ Norman K. Denzin observes: "if an author can make up
facts about his or her own life, who is to know what is true and what is false?”
Similar to his characters, the only Tennessee Williams we can have access to is
the representational Williams. He is an artifice of one mask after the other, and a
mirror of endless reflections. Donald Windham comments: "Curtain after curtain
of ambivalence has descended in his life. Self-portrait after self-portrait has
intervened in his plays. And the same qualities that make Tennessee a good
dramatist make him an impossible documenter."“8 Williams is a role player as
Windham observes. He "assumed surrogate personalities, surrogate biographies,
trying them on like suits of other peoples' clothes and substituting them for his
own when they fitted the part he was playing, sometimes briefly, sometimes
more or less permanently!"9
Like Alma Winemiller who comments upon her split and divided identity,

Williams also talks frequently about his fragmented self and the multiplicity of

voices he embodies: "If only I could realize I am not 2 persons. I am only one.

There is no sense in this division. An enemy inside myself!”0 Williams's claim

20

echoes Alma's in Summer _a_n_c_l_ Smeke. If one could peek inside Williams's
personality, one would realize that he is a character with a multiplicity of selves.
Analyzing the relationship between Williams and his characters in his book A
Look a_t Tennessee Williams, Mike Steen comments:

All of [his] characters are a bit of him. It' s astounding

that when you really get to know him you recognize

all these different characters inside him, summed up

into the one severely complex character of his actual

being. It's amazing, I think, to see the aspects of

Stanley Kowalski in him as well as those of Blanche

DuBois and Alma Winemiller, Valentine Xavier, or

Alexandra Del Lago, or Flora Goforth... You'd think,

'How can a person have that many selves?‘51
Williams's fear is of "his own shadow." His fears are internalized, and the "crazy
blue devil" would never let him go. In his journal Williams wrote: "A little crazy
blue devil has been with me all day. I wish I could shake him off and walk alone
and free in the sunlight once more. There is one part of me that could always be
very happy and brave and even good if the other part was not so damned
'pixilated!"52 Williams's identity is a site of division, fragmentation, and broken
texture. The "enemy inside [him]self," as Leverich argues, is "an essential division
in [Williams's] personality that would plague him and manifest itself in patterns
of contradictory behavior throughout the years to come. It would divide him not
only against himself but often against those closest to him, leading him to
characterize himself as 'half mad!"S3 In his description of he Glass Menagerie,
Williams describes his perception of the truth, the reality, and himself in terms of
contradictions and paradoxes. Williams wrote: "My next play will be simple,

direct, and terrible--a picture of my own heart. There will be no artifice in it. I

will speak the truth as I see it-distort as I see distortion--be wild as I am wild--

21

tender as I am tender--mad as I am mad-passionate as I am passionate!”

Williams himself is a personality woven of passion, madness, distortion,
truthfulness, evasion, and wildness. He is an artifice of contradictions and an
edifice of masks and distortions. The theme of the reinvented self with all its
masks and role-plays is not an unfamiliar theme to Tennessee Williams, the man
and the artist. It is a theme that hits very close to Williams, and too close at times.

Attributing some space to the author in my interpretive framework sets
me, seemingly, against the postmodern skepticism of the authorial intention, or
at least the way we understand this skepticism. With Roland Barthes's influential
essay of 1968 "The Death of the Author," our understanding of the link between
authors and their works has undergone some drastic revisions. The author is no
longer seen as the ultimate origin of his work; instead, these works are perceived
in the light of different cultural texts whereby the author is only one of them. In
Rethinking gem Biography, Nicholas Pagan highlights this new
understanding: "Instead of examining the author or the author's psyche, then, as
source / origin/ father of the author's texts, these thinkers claim that the author's
life is itself a text." Pagan continues to explain that "Postmodern thinkers like
Barthes, however, replace the flesh and blood author with 'a paper author!"55
Consequently, the authorial self can not exist only on paper and in writing; it is
always told in the form of narratives, stories, and tales. These postmodern
thinkers have blurred the line between author and character. Barthes explains: "If
[the author] is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters...
no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He
becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions

but a fiction contributing to his work, there is a reversion of the work on to the

22

life... The I which writes the text... is never more than a paper-I."56 It is from this
perspective that I intend to see the link between Williams and his work.

Critics who have neglected this view have ended up by making claims
which are not only intellectually arrogant but also presumptuous, for most of
them have read Williams's plays as faithful photocopies of his own life. Spoto,
Tischler, Bigsby, and Leverich have fallen victims to the tendencies of earlier
criticism to let biographical information stand as explanation for Williams's
drama. Tischler, for example, writes that "the mother Williams had chosen to
write about in The ghee Menagerie was, naturally, his own."57 Almost forty
years later, Leverich echoes Tischler's claim: "I have, for example, come to a
conclusion forced by events documented in Tom's home life and in his writings
that it was his 'hated' father who most influenced him personally!“3 Spoto's
understanding of the authorial identity is no different from Tischler's or
Leverich's. Even though he recognizes that Williams is the creator of his own
image, he has accepted unquestionably Williams's claims and interviews as facts
to support his interpretation of Williams's fiction, and has raised little doubt
about these claims and interviews. Marlon B. Ross asks: "How can self-
commentary be any more or less reliable than the commentary of others? How
can the inside, that abode of self-woven images, be any more or less truthful than
the outside, itself an image?" The answer Ross offers is no less unsettling:
"Williams pondered a lot about how the external image is only an image of an
internal image that is invented to make the external image real. No wonder he
flirted with insanity."59 The difference between Tischler's and Leverich's claims in
the sense that one has attributed Williams's source of his inspiration to his

mother and the other to his father points out that the autobiographical reading is

23

more complex and slippery than we tend to think. Therefore, if we are looking
for clear-cut correspondences between Williams's life and his work, most likely
our effort will go astray.

As an alternative, I suggest in this study that we should reconsider the
confidence and the assertiveness with which we make any biographical claims.
We, as scholars, should accept that the life -or lives- of Williams, do indeed have
an influence on his writing, but his works themselves also have a life of their
own, and do reflexively influence his life. The relationship is more than
dialectical; it is intertextual. Williams's works, including his plays, short stories,
poems, and interviews, all influence each other. His poems are often
predecessors to his drama, and his plays are often reworkings of his short stories
and other plays. Williams's life is a part of this network of stories and fiction.
When Williams states "I am Blanche DuBois," Williams, the artist is comparing
himself to a fiction of his own creation. The metaphor has no reference outside
itself. It is only within the frames of fiction the artist himself establishes that he
can exist and operate. Instead of looking into the life of Williams to find the
origin of his works, we should accept the fact that the origin of these works is
untraceable in its multiplicity, or the traces of the origin of these works do not
move from reality to fiction into which the reality is translated, but from fiction
to fiction whereby the world of the real is not much different from the world of
fiction. This approach does not imply that the author is disposable because he is
"a paper author." On the contrary, as Derrida claims: "the subject is absolutely
indispensable. I don't destroy the subject; (the author). I situate it." Derrida
continues: "one cannot get along without the notion of subject!"0 The authorial

identity is made into a narrative and a fiction in our current thinking, but it is

24

never made a non-existing elusive mirage. The subject is well and alive. It might
be scattered, dispersed, broken, and de-centered, but never annihilated and

disposed

25

Chapter I

Blanche DuBois: Public Faces and Private Longings

Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar _N_ar_ne_d _I£§i_re deals with the divided
and scattered identity of Blanche DuBois, who is forced to resort to role play to
be able to co-exist with her new coercive reality in the Kowalskis' apartment. The
play depicts Blanche’s subsequent downfall as a result of her failure not only to
be herself, but also to be the miniature image that others expect her to be. In this
chapter, I will analyze Blanche's identity and argue how she has turned into a
public artifact who is engaged in performing the image that others project on her.
I will also shed more light on Blanche’s divided personality, focus on her
"irreconcilable split" between reality and appearance,1 and analyze the clash
between her public and private personas. I will conclude that the faces and the
masks that Blanche wears are all parts of her identity that can be known and
revealed only in these facades and facets. In the second section of this chapter, I
will focus on the metaphorical connection between the creator, Williams, and his
creation, Blanche. I will argue how this creation has turned out to be the private
space where Williams can create his own identity and reveal what he is usually
uncomfortable revealing outside the theatrical space. Such a reading bridges the
gap between Williams's artistic vision and his personal reality-a space that the
playwright himself wants to narrow down when he states: "What is my
profession but living and putting it all down in stories and plays..."2 It is not my
intention, however, to reduce the play to a gay subtext. Reading the play as a
private space where Williams asserts what he has kept as a private identity does
not reduce the play to an exclusively homosexual subtext. Indeed, to read

Streetear exclusively as a heterosexual play is reductive, abortive, incomplete,

26

and conducive to a polarized view of the play, and to read it as a homosexual

text is even more so.

Blanche DuBois: Identity as Role Play

Upon her entrance, Williams invites his audience to witness the last
episode of Blanche’s disintegration. The tone of Blanche’s dilemma is set in the
first scene. Her internal conflict between the past and the present, illusion and
reality, her genteel upbringing and sensual desire, her virtuousness and
physicality are manifested right at the beginning of the play. Her physical
appearance reflects her disintegration and suggests that she belongs to a world
much different from the world where she finds herself in New Orleans. Blanche
enters carrying a valise and a look of ”shock and disbelief.” She is ”daintly
dressed” in a ”white suit with a fluffy bodice...white gloves and hat, looking as if
she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district”[15]3.
She is ”incongruous” in this New Orleans setting, confused, and unable to match
the number of the building in front of which she is standing with the information
on the slip of the paper she is holding. By this time in the play, we already know
that Eunice’s question to Blanche- ”What’s the matter, honey? Are you lost?”-can
bear only a positive answer for we have noticed that Blanche comes to her sister’s
house for refuge and protection.

Blanche’s disintegration and dislocation are further developed as the
drama progresses. She seems unable to familiarize herself with her new locale.
The way Blanche is sitting in Stella’s apartment with ”her shoulders slightly
hunched and her legs pressed close together and her hands tightly clutching her
purse as if she were quite cold,” reveals Blanche’s discomfort and nervousness
[18]. She expresses her distress with her new locale when she states that ”only

Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe! could do it justice!” [20]. Blanche is terrified by

27

the shabbiness and dirt of her new environment. She supposes that ”out there...is
the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir” and Stella answers: "No, Honey, those are
the L&N tracks” [20]. Blanche finds the Kowalskis' reality cramped, foul, ugly,
and dim compared to her childhood home, Belle Reve, that Eunice describes as
”a great big place with white columns” [17].

Blanche is dislocated not only in space but also in time. She lives in the
past, and when she arrives at the Kowalskis' apartment she identifies Stella by
her maiden name. She tells Eunice: ”I’m looking for my sister, Stella DuBois, I
mean-~Mrs. Stanley Kowalski” [15]. Blanche dislocates her sister in order to
relocate her back to her old home. In Scene Four, in her plea that her sister not
hang ”back with the brutes!” [72], Blanche tries to convince Stella of the brutality
and primitivity of her present world and the actual environment where she lives.
She argues that Stella could not ”have forgotten much of [their] bringing up” in
Belle Reve with its refined lifestyle. The world that Blanche wants to cling to is a
world of ”such things as art--as poetry and music,” a world without the
”grunting,” ”swilling,” and ”gnawing and hulking” of Stanley Kowalski and his
”party of apes.” She is longing for an ideal world of purity where no "apes"
gather when ”night falls” and no ”sub-human” creatures remind her that we are
still far away from ”being made in God’s image.” In her attempt to draw her
sister to her idealized past world, Blanche reveals her feeling of insecurity.
Blanche needs Stella to share with her the idealized world she wants to live in,
and confirm her belief that the present world is so ugly and unbearable that the
only refuge left to her is the past and the lost Belle Reve that she is trying to
restore. Blanche wants to duplicate the past and relive it with all its
contradictions and dichotomies, but she needs a companion to share with her
this world for she is afraid that it might not be as beautiful as she constructed it

in her dreams and illusions. Even in her illusion, Blanche is lonely. By dragging

28

her sister into her private illusion, then, she will not only lessen her feeling of
loneliness, but also get Stella’s confirmation that her illusion can be turned to
reality and her dream can come true. Blanche reveals her fear of being alone to

Stella when she says:

...I want to be near you, got to be with somebody, I
can’t be alone! ...I’munot very well... [23].

However, Stella resists Blanche’s attempt to drag her into the past of Belle Reve,
and asks Blanche: ”Don’t you think your superior attitude is a bit out of place?”
[71]. Thus, reminding Blanche that the world she wants to live in is merely
fictitious and unreal.

Blanche wants to go back to her past life at Belle Reve in spite of its
deaths, ugliness, losses, and fornication, because it is only in this past that she
experienced love with Allan Grey. She was sixteen when ”she made the
discovery--love.” Stella informs us that ”Blanche didn’t just love Allan but
worshipped the ground he walked on! Adored him and thought him almost too
fine to be human!” [102]. However, this love was not reciprocated for Blanche
finds out that her ”beautiful and talented man was a degenerate” [103]. Both this
instance and the loss of Belle Reve mark the turning points in Blanche’s life,
because it was in this instance when her identity as a woman was shaken and she
began to feel the need to restore and confirm her femininity. At that time Blanche
felt defeated for not being able to give Allan what he required from her. Blanche
felt ”deluded” not only because she did not figure out that Allan was
homosexual, but also because ”he came to [her] for help” but she could not really
help. Blanche’s bitter realization is that she ”failed him in some mysterious way
and was not able to give the help he needed but could not speak of! ” Blanche is

also overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt because she could not show

29

understanding and compassion for Allan. She claims: "I'd failed him in some
mysterious way and wasn't able to give the help he needed but couldn't speak of!
He was in the quicksands and clutching at me--but I wasn't holding him out, I
was slipping in with him! I didn't know that" [95]. Instead of cherishing the man
she loved ”unendurably” and be on his side, she decides to confront him with
the unspeakable truth that he wants to hide from Blanche herself. Blanche shows
no sympathy for Allan. She removes all the fragile boundaries of the private
space he carefully constructed around himself, and decides to face him with the
very intimate and private detail of his life that he is not ready to share with her
as yet. The love that she has for him has suddenly turned to disgust. Even
though Blanche just blurts it out and shouts in Allan's face: ”I saw! I know! You
disgust me...” which might seem unintentional, the lapse of time between the
moment when she discovers the truth of Allan's sexuality and when she faces
him with that truth indicates that Blanche has already staged in her mind
different scenarios to confront Allan with the truth. Such a dramatic moment
may have been intentional, premeditated and rationalized. Blanche is guilty of
”deliberate cruelty” although she denies it. With Allan’s suicide, the
”Varsouviana” music starts. ”The music is in her mind” and Blanche ”is drinking
to escape it and the sense of disaster closing in on her and she seems to whisper
the words of the song” [113]. The ”Varsouviana” music is that very feeling of '
guilt that Blanche cannot escape because she denounced Allan at the time when
he needed her the most. It is only after his death that Allan succeeds in arousing
Blanche’s sympathy and compassion.

In the intervening years, Blanche has tried to atone for that act of guilt and
death, but in doing so herself has fallen a victim to the harsh and relentless
judgment of society and has herself become subject to its brutality,

misunderstanding and falsities. After Allan’s death, Blanche felt devoid of her

30

identity as a woman and started her long process of affirmation and self-
assertion. Blanche confesses to Mitch: ”After the death of Allan—intimacies with
strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with,” and she continues ”I
think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for
some protection-here and there in the most unlikely places.” Her promiscuity is
an expression of desperation, sadness, loneliness, and panic. We notice in all the
relationships she has that there is a similar pattern. The soldiers in the army
camp near Belle Reve, the seventeen-year-old student in one of her high school
English classes in Laurel, and the newsboy Blanche kisses are all about the same
age as her husband Allan. Blanche does not go for those young boys because she
is promiscuous, but rather because she wants to duplicate her past love story
with Allan and rewrite a happier version of it and atone for her feeling of guilt
that she has experienced after the death of Allan. She is trying to bring Allan
back to life through living a seemingly identical story with those young boys. She
is eager to succeed with the soldiers, the student, and the newsboy where she has
failed with Allan. Thomas P. Adler agrees with such a view and interprets her
promiscuity with the soldiers as a ”kind of desperate flailing about for
gratification as a compensation for powerlessness!“ Blanche’s promiscuity is a
long search for all those beautiful things lost in her relationship with Allan. It is
also a search for proof that she is still young and desirable. Through all those
relationships, Blanche is seeking that part of her identity that she suddenly lost
when she walked ”into a room that she thought was empty--which wasn’t
empty” [95]. Blanche perceives all her relationships as romantic ventures which
can give her an outlet for her romantic passions that her marriage with Allan left
unfulfilled. Blanche always weaves romantic fantasies about her conquests. The
soldiers are gathered up ”like daisies” from the lawn at Belle Reve, and the shy

newsboy is perceived as ” a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights” [84].

31

Indeed, her encounter with the young newsboy has a dream-like quality about it:
Blanche talks about New Orleans' "long rainy afternoons...when an hour isn't just
an hour - but a little piece of eternity dropped into you hands" [83]. Blanche
wants to expand this moment to a life--long encounter where she can venture
into a romantic quest. She shuts her eyes for fear a beautiful dream might escape
her once she opens them: she stands "a little dreamily" after the newsboy has
disappeared. Thus, from Blanche’s perspective, her promiscuity does not spring
”from her own nature,” ”from the uncontrollable duplicity” or ”from her

”5 as Mason Brown argues, but

selfishness and her vanity which are insatiable,
from her romanticism that the conventions of Blanche’s society and the traditions
of Belle Reve in which she was raised could not recognize and admit. Blanche
could not find the socially accepted channel through which her passion and
desire could be expressed. She is the romantic heroine who lives in a non-
romantic reality and according to a tradition where passion can only go
unfulfilled.

Blanche is forced to live the contradictory duality and the tearing
dichotomy between what she really wants and what others expect her to pretend
to want. Blanche’s dilemma is that she has to compromise between her private
and public identities and to resolve the state of polarization and conflict that
living with the two identities entail. Blanche is torn between the two extremes of
her identities: her burning desires and the puritanical tradition in which she was
raised and which taught her that gentility and respectability are the virtues
which ultimately lead one to happiness. Blanche’s Belle Reve allows no room for
the sensual and the physical. When Blanche succumbs to her desire and gives in
to her sexual ventures, the price is more guilt and self-loathing. She tends to
reject and deny this physical side in her, and when she perceives it in Stella’s and

Stanley’s relationship, she names it ”brutal desire” in an attempt to degrade her

32

physicality to an animalistic level that she can easily deny and reject. Speaking
about Blanche's unwillingness to give in to her sensual desire, Kazan argues that
she ”thinks she sins when she gives into it...yet she does give into it, out of
loneliness...but by calling it ’brutal desire’ she is able to separate it from
her...’cultured’ and refined self!”5 In doing so, Blanche contributes to her own
isolation from the people that love her and becomes also alienated from herself
for she rejects who she is and clings to what the others and her decadent, phony,
and outdated tradition want her to be. Blanche finds no compromise, falls a
victim of this duality, and finds that masking and masquerading are the only
legitimate means of survival and the only weapons available for her to avoid the
cruelty of her society, to adhere to her grand tradition with all its passé
mannerisms, airs, and pretenses; and at the same time to express her desires and
assert her femininity. Blanche has to theatricalize herself and be self-affirmative
through falsehood and pretenses. Truthfulness and genuineness do not really
pay in such a hypocritical society, and Blanche is forced to put on the airs of an
aristocratic lady and fulfill her desires even though she knows that the
discrepancy between the two behaviors is what society labels as promiscuity and
would give her the tag of a ’whore.’ Blanche is forced to live with the two
personas. Only through role-play can she display her conscious intentions to
herself and to the others. When the play's action begins, Blanche is reduced to a
public, well-constructed, and artificial persona. It is only in few fleeting,
unguarded, and flash-like moments that Blanche removes her mask to reveal
another face which is not less theatrical than the other faces.

Blanche explains to Stella her need to lie and masquerade:
I never was hard or self-sufficient enough. When
people are soft-~soft people have got to shimmer and
glow--they’ve got to put on soft colors of butterfly
wings, and put a paper lantern over light...I’m fading

33

now! I don’t know how much longer I can turn the
trick [79].

Blanche’s masquerading is a defense against the falsities and contradictions in
the society where she lives in the same way as it is a means of compromising her
private needs to the public image that the others want to see in her. It is a
desperate defense that reflects Blanche’s eagerness and willful desire to survive.
It is this weapon of deceiving and masquerading that has changed Blanche the
”moth” into a ”tiger” in Stanley Kowalski’s eyes. Her means of deceit are varied
and her strategies of masquerading complex. They range from clothes that she
wears for everyday circumstances to the man that she wants to marry for
security and protection.

When Blanche arrives at Stella’s apartment, she makes sure she has
brought with her all the glamour and the make-up that she needs to put on
aristocratic airs and masks of pretense. Her wardrobe trunk is loaded with
”feathers and furs that she come here to preen herself in!” ”a solid-gold dress,”
”genuine fox-fur-pieces” and ”a fist-full of costume jewelry” [36]. Even though
these are Stanley's words about which we might be skeptical knowing his real
feelings about Blanche, Blanche removes this skepticism and confirms Stanley's
opinion about her when she informs Stella that she ”bought some nice clothes to
meet all [Stanley’s] lovely friends in” [23], and tells Stanley that she is nearly out
of her twenty-five-dollar-an ounce perfume in case he wants to remember her on
her birthday. She is also aware of wearing the right clothes on the appropriate
occasion. When she first enters Stella’s apartment, Blanche is wearing ”a white
suit” and ”white gloves and hat.” The emphasis in the description is upon the
color white. Blanche is dressed in such a color so as to convey an impression of
purity in her new surroundings, and impress them with her conventionality

through the formal suit, the gloves, and the hat she is wearing. At play's end,

34

Blanche appears in a jacket of ”della Robbia blue” that she herself describes as
”the blue of the robe in the old Madonna pictures,” another emblem of purity
and virginity. However, when Blanche wants to be seductive, she wears the
clothes that match the right occasion and help her attract the others’ attention.
For instance, in Scene Three, when she comes back with her sister to the
apartment while Stanley is still playing poker with his friends, Blanche ”takes off
the blouse and stands in her pink silk brassiere and white skirt in the light
through the portieres” [50] and when Stella warns her , she pretends that she
does not know that she is ”standing in the light”. Such an instance presents the
audience with two different Blanches and different roles they each have to play.
We are allowed to see the "virgin" Blanche in her white suit and later in her Della
Robbia blue jacket, and we are allowed to see Blanche in her silk brassiere trying
to seduce whoever of the poker players might fall into her snare. The first is the
theatrical Blanche who is bound to conventionality and to a well-determined
social role to play. She is the reduced Blanche who has defaced herself and
changed her nature so as to fit in her society and to pass in the Kowalskis'
apartment. She is the Blanche who has given in to her society’s prescription and
accepted the role that she has been assigned ever since she was born. She is the
stereotype who has effaced all the traces of her individuality and has chosen to
fit in an oversimplified model that her conventional society presents to her. This
is the Blanche who cannot stand in the light, and can survive only in the
darkness and in the dim shadows of New Orleans. Even though the second
Blanche is not less theatrical, she is the more self-assertive Blanche who tries to
eliminate any restrictions imposed on her behavior. She is the other Blanche, who
can stand under the light to seek visibility and recognition.

In her sister's apartment, Blanche has to find ways and means to hide her

past, her failures, and her loss of Belle Reve. She has to cope with her emotions

35

on her own and to hide her real face in order to cope with Stanley's eyes, which
are scrutinizing her every gesture and word. After their first confrontation about
the loss of Belle Reve, and the Napoleonic code which according to Stanley
entitles him to whatever belongs to Stella, Blanche has to mask her fears and her
anxieties. Stella apologizes: "I'm sorry he did that to you," and Blanche responds:
"We thrashed it out. I feel a bit shaky, but I think I handled it nicely. I laughed
and I treated it as a joke" [44]. It is with pretenses, masks, and masquerades that
Blanche deals with Stanley and hides from him her past failures and
disappointments. She deflates the serious matters that Stanley brings up to
discuss with her and reduces them to a joke that needs none of her attention and
care.

While she deflates what Stanley considers important and worth
discussing, she inflates what other characters and audience may seem as trivial
and irrelevant in order to add other layers of pretenses and masquerading.
Blanche uses facts to heighten what she wants the others to see in her, and to
create out of reality an illusion that can convince them that her innocence, purity,
and virginity are not just a matter of appearance and pretenses, but are virtues
deeply rooted in her character and upbringing.

Blanche uses other means of masquerading. She uses her name Blanche
DuBois to explain that her virtuousness is not a matter of appearance, but is
deeply rooted in her origins and her family. She explains to Mitch that it is a
French name, and ’Blanche’ means ’white’ while ’DuBois’ means ’woods.’ Thus
her name translates into English as the ”white woods” or the ”white orchard.”
Therefore, her name becomes an icon for her purity and virginity--a fact that
Blanche stresses when she informs Stanley that she was born ”on the fifteenth of

September...under Virgo” [77].

36

Blanche not only constructs herself as a theatrical entity, but also
constructs others out of her imagination to share with her the world of illusions
that she dwells in. She is so powerful in weaving stories and constructing facades
that not till play's end do we know whether Shep Huntleigh is a true character or
a mere construction of Blanche’s fantasy. Till the last scene, Blanche expects the
Texas millionaire to come to her rescue, but he never does. Shep Huntleigh is the
man of Blanche’s fantasies she uses to convince herself and the others around
her, including Stella, Stanley, and Mitch, that she is still young, desirable and,
above all, ’normal’ in the sense that somebody appreciates her refined taste, her
manners and airs--a person who knows that ”a cultivated woman, a woman of
intelligence and breeding, can enrich a man’s life--immeasurably!” [126]. Unlike
Stanley and Mitch, who perceive her as not being ”clean” and ”straight,” Shep
Huntleigh is the Gentleman Caller that Belle Reve tradition promises every
beautiful Southern belle like Blanche DuBois as a reward for her purity, virginity,
and chastity. Shep Huntleigh is the ”magic” who is going to bring a miracle into
her life and restore her image from a ”destitute woman” to a woman with
”treasures locked in [her] heart” [126]. The Dallas millionaire is the ’ought-to-be

truth’ that Blanche stresses when she says:
I don’t want realism. I want magic!...Yes, yes, magic! I
try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to
them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the
truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for
it! [143].

Shep Huntleigh is the Gentleman Caller who corresponds to her preconceived
specifications. He is not, for Blanche, a fantasy as much as a ’prornised reality’ or
an actual wealthy suitor that Belle Reve tradition prescribes to any woman of

Blanche’s noble upbringing.

37

Mitch could have been the concrete alternative to Shep Huntleigh. Mitch
could have offered the security and protection that Blanche is seeking. Were it
not for Blanche’s divided personality, her dichotomy between her private and
public images and her insistence upon role-play, their relationship might have
been written with a different ending. Blanche is not sincere in her relationship
with Mitch since she perceives him as a means of masquerading more than as a
loving and genuine husband. When Stella asks Blanche if she really wants Mitch,

Blanche confesses:

I want to rest! I want to breathe quietly again! Yes--I
want Mitch...very badly! Just think! If it happens! I
can leave here and not be anyone’s problem...[81].

Blanche’s feeling for Mitch is not one of love and care but, rather, she sees him as
a means to avoid Stanley’s brutality, escape the hostile environment of New
Orleans, and especially erase all her past of ’promiscuity,’ guilt, and rejection.
After all her intimacies with strangers, after the suicide of her husband, Allan
Grey, after her affair with the seventeen-year-old student and the ”town
ordinance passed against her,” Blanche needs Mitch as a refuge from the world.
Blanche is looking for the seal of conformity that would allow her back into the
mainstream. She wants a place where she can bury all her past and hide herself

from all the accusing eyes. She admits to Mitch:

...I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be
gentle--a cleft in the rock of the world that I could
hide in! But I guess I was asking, hopingutoo much!
[118].

38

Blanche looks to Mitch as a refuge that can offer her the social respectability of
marriage, restore her self-esteem and her battered faith in her attractiveness to
men.

Blanche’s relationship with Mitch is, however, doomed to failure because
of her duality. She wants ”to deceive him enough to make him-~want [her].” She
has to pretend to be ”prirn and proper” with Mitch. As Leonard Berkman argues,
”fearful that her satisfying him would lead to his loss of regard for her, Blanche
repulses Mitch’s sexual advances and creates a constant impediment to their
being fully easy with one another!” The result is that Blanche is never herself
with Mitch. She tries to put up a facade to face Mitch and wears her public
persona to convince him of her purity and sincerity, without knowing that while
she is playing such an artificial role, she is driving him away from her and
preventing the opportunity for any moment of genuineness and truthfulness.
Even though Blanche might feel some sort of attraction to Mitch, she refuses to

express such attraction because, as she tells him:

...You know as well as I do that a single girl, a girl
alone in the world, has to keep a firm hold on her
emotions or she’ll be lost! [87].

Blanche is aware of the social decorum that she has to observe and the emotional
restraints imposed upon her. Even though Blanche is ”flattered” that Mitch
”desired” her and even though she ”liked the kiss very much,” she is aware that
”it was the other little -familiarity- that [Shel-felt obliged to discourage...” [87].
Blanche can be herself with Mitch only in a space that they do not occupy
together simultaneously. For instance, when Mitch wants to keep his hands on
her waist, Blanche asks him to unhand her and explains that there is no need for

such excessive gentility because he is already ”a natural gentleman” [91]. She

39

also informs him that he should not think of her as ”severe old maid
schoolteacherish” but rather as someone with "old-fashioned ideals.” At this very
moment when she speaks about her ”ideals,” Williams informs us that ”she rolls
her eyes, knowing [Mitch] cannot see her face” to mock the facade of propriety
she has been holding [91]. Blanche is aware that, since Mitch cannot see her face,
she has a secure space and a very short time when she can be by herself to
express her weariness with this role-play and her disgust with her own
hypocrisy, and reveal the morbid travesty her life has become.

More revealing is the instance when Blanche asks Mitch ”Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi ce soir? Vous ne comprenez pas .7 Ah quelle dommage!--I mean it’s a
damned good thing...” [88]. In this scene, Blanche is trying to generate a private
space where she can move freely and express her feelings towards Mitch without
necessarily running the risk of damaging her public image of the Southern lady
who can control her feelings and maintain a strong grip on her desires. Blanche
can be herself with Mitch only by turning him into a non-entity or an entity that
cannot share with her her moments of intimacies and truthfulness because the
channels of communication are totally blocked between both of them. Ironically
enough, Mitch swallows the bait, for he thinks that the Blanche he sees is the real
and sincere Blanche that he wants to marry. Mitch shows sympathy and
compassion to Blanche when she tells him her story of Allan and her love for
him. That is perhaps the only sincere moment of the play, and Mitch responds
positively and proposes to Blanche: ”You need somebody, I need somebody, too.
Could it be--you and me Blanche?” To Mitch’s sincere feelings towards her and
his proposal to her, Blanche responds: ”Sometimes--there is God--so quickly!”
Blanche is giving thanks to god because, as her reply indicates, she believes that
she might have found her salvation in her marriage with Mitch. The discrepancy

between the two attitudes is conspicuous: While Mitch proposes out of

40

fascination and admiration, Blanche accepts Mitch’s proposal out of need. She
wants to rest, to be safe, and to be taken care of. Mitch does not know that the
Blanche he sees is just a mask or a public persona hiding Blanche’s private entity.

Mitch tells Blanche:

I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because
in all my--experience-—I have never known anyone
like you [87].

and Blanche responds with a grave look at him, ”then she bursts into laughter
and she claps a hand to her mouth,” a gesture that emphasizes further the
dramatic irony of this exchange. Mitch has "bought" the performance but failed
to appreciate the actress behind the mask. He thinks that the Blanche he sees is
the real Blanche, and Blanche gasps and laughs because that is the very
performative Blanche with which she meets the faces of the rest of her world. As
Laurilyn J. Harris argues, ”It is both pathetic and ironic that Blanche, who is
desperate for love and acceptance, thinks that she cannot attain them without
trivializing herself by assuming a fictive and superficial identity!”3 It is Stanley
who reveals the truth in an act of cold brutality, and uncovers to Mitch Blanche’s
past that she has desperately tried to hide. Thus, the mask is removed and
Blanche is psychologically naked before Mitch and the audience. What she has
eagerly tried to cover is now revealed, and her private past has become a subject
of public scrutiny, and a basis for rejecting and marginalizing her.

If Blanche’s first confession to Mitch about the failure of her marriage and
her husband’s homosexuality is followed by a genuine response to Blanche’s
candor, the second confession about her promiscuous affairs is followed by
rejection and hatred. Mitch does not embrace her tenderly as he did before, but

he calls her dirty and asks her to give him what he has been ”missing all

41

summer.” This is the point of Blanche’s downfall. At this moment of the play,
Leonard Berkman argues, Blanche finds ”herself...back into the whore-image
from which through truth, she struggles to escape!” Such instance is charged
with dramatic irony. Mitch’s response to Blanche’s initial confession has
encouraged her to make further truthful admissions that will not elicit the same
response from Mitch but will condenm her further. When Blanche asks him to
marry her, Mitch cries: ”You’re not clean enough to bring in the house with my
mother” [121]. This scene parallels the one when Blanche faces her husband
Allan with the truth that she discovered about his sexuality. Blanche the
victimizer who has triggered her husband's suicide with her disgust and
"deliberate cruelty" is now the victim and Mitch is the victimizer who is inflicting
his "deliberate cruelty" on Blanche and trying to hurt her in the same way she
hurt Allan. Mitch is playing in this scene the same role that Blanche played in the
suicide scene. Blanche is facing her doom now that the boundaries of her own
closet are removed and her private persona has come under the light while the
mask of her public persona has been shattered to bits and pieces. Blanche is
doomed to suffer the way Allan did. Unable to live out of his closet, Allan
decided to bring about his own death, and leave such a cruel world, and Blanche
will be forced to leave this world that she has tried hard to cling to so
desperately. Blanche's fate is "mapped out for her" [105], and the Mexican
Woman who is heard out in the street just after Blanche's confession suggests
Blanche's fate and foreshadows Blanche's spiritual death in the asylum. "Flores.
Flores. Flores para los muertos. Flores. Flores" is Blanche's epitaph; and her
"frightened" cry: "No, no! Not now! Not now!" is the only alternative left to her
through which she can defy her fate which was "mapped out for her" a long time
ago by people that she might have never met or seen. Indeed, the grammatical

mode of Stanley's sentence "her future is mapped out for her" and the absence of

42

any active subject suggest the enigmatic nature of 'the others' and the
arbitrariness of the social conventions that have classified Blanche in the category
where they think she should fit.

Mitch's rejection of Blanche does not stem from his own personal
conviction that she is not the right person for him, but is the result of the social
convention--specifically represented by his possessive mother-which prescribes
to Mitch what is right and what is wrong and dictates to him that Blanche is not
"straight" and "clean enough." Mitch's rejection of Blanche has been generated by
his friend Stanley and his mother. It is, in fact, interesting that Mitch has evoked
his mother when he says, "You're not clean enough to bring in the house with my
mother" [121]. Mitch is bound to his sick mother, and it is by his mother's
standard that he judges Blanche. Blanche has fallen victim to the people's
judgment-people she has never met: Mitch's mother and Stanley's friend,
Kiefaber. Williams is stressing the arbitrariness of the social conventions that
judge people by their appearance. Blanche is the victim of deviation from what
we label normal. She is doomed to a tragic end because she is not able to leave
the margin and live again according to the norms of society. Blanche is tagged as
being marginal, and there is no way for her to get rid of such a tag, no matter
how hard she may try. The last scene, when Mitch tries to strike Stanley and
"collapses at the table, sobbing," [141] reveals the extent of his deep remorse and
his inability to help Blanche. Mitch is totally paralyzed. He cannot act himself
and do what should be appropriate to help himself and Blanche. His sobbing and
collapse are physical manifestations of his helplessness and his feeling of guilt
and defeat. Mitch is defeated by his mother's conventionality and Stanley's
manipulation. Indeed, I suggest that the "Versouviana" music is going to stop in

Blanche's mind, for she has found the kindness in the 'strange' doctor, but a

43

similar music is going to start in Mitch's who will try to purge himself of a deep
feeling of guilt for renouncing Blanche at a time when she most needed him.

At this point in the play Williams achieves his desired effect upon the
audience. In an answer to Kazan's question about what the audience should feel
for Blanche, Williams answers: "It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a
catharsis of pity and terror and in order to do that Blanche must finally have the
understanding and compassion of the audience."10 Williams succeeds in evoking
his audience's empathy for his heroine, Blanche DuBois. Even though at the
beginning of the play, the audience might identify with Stanley more than with
Blanche, at play's end we cannot help but feel Blanche's tragedy and may even
leave the theater "troubled, not tranquil" because we have been "sitting at the
death of something extraordinary...colorful, varied, passionate, lost, witty,
imaginative, of her own integrity..."ll In the last two scenes especially, Williams
invites the audience to participate in Blanche's downfall by allowing us to hear
all the subjective noises, music, and echoes that haunt Blanche's mind and
dreams. Before the rape scene, we can see the "lurid reflections on the wall
around Blanche" and "the shadows...of a grotesque and menacing form," we
notice how these "lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall
spaces," and we also hear the "inhuman voices like cries in the jungle." At play's
end, we hear, along with Blanche, the "Varsouviana" music and how it "filtered
into a weird distortion accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle" [139].
When we see Blanche walking off on the doctor's arm at play's end and hear the
"blue piano" music swelling, then the audience may realize that Blanche's quest
for identity and her long search for a place to fit in her society is closing down on
a note of despair and agony. The backstage wall that becomes transparent during
the rape scene to expose the sordid violence of the streets paralleling the violent

action on stage allows Williams to show the relation between the decadent New

44

Orleans street life and the shameful event inside the Kowalskis' apartment, and
helps him emphasize to the audience that the rape scene we are witnessing is just
an idiosyncratic illustration of the brutality and violence of the whole society to
which Blanche has been exposed.

In the figure of Stanley, Williams has created a typical American character.

As Irwin Shaw comments on Marlon Brando's Broadway performance:

He is so appealing in a direct, almost childlike way in
the beginning and we have been so conditioned by
the modern doctrine that what is natural is good, that
we admire him and sympathize with him. Then, bit
by bit, with a full account of what his good points
really are, we come dimly to see that he is...brutish,
destructive in his healthy egotism, dangerous,
immoral, surviving”.

As Mary Ann Corrigan argues, "Stanley bears remarkable resemblance to the
kind of hero that Americans love."13 His Polish ancestors are immigrants, like
most Americans. He is also the symbol of the patriotic, and proud-to-be
American full of pragmatism and self-confidence. As a result, the audience can
readily see themselves in Stanley. They can see their origins and their pride in
being part of what Stanley represents. However, the rape scene reverses this
possible identification between Stanley and the audience, and as Irwin Shaw
explains, in the rape scene the audience is challenged to face the "harsh reality"
for they realize by play's end that what they instinctively admire is really "a base
egotistical force, destroying what it can not comprehend!“ With the rape scene,
Williams has reversed the whole equation. It is no longer Blanche who is full of
"lies, lies, inside and out, all lies," as Mitch puts it, but it is Eunice, Mitch, Stanley,
Stella, and those who are ready to accept Eunice's easy way out who are full of

lies, falsities, pretenses, and distortions. Blanche DuBois has left Stanley's world

45

of harsh reality, but she has left behind her a powerful outcry of a broken heart
in a broken world. The image Stanley holds of himself now is that of a cruel,
brutal, and destructive human being who can no longer be perceived as a victim
to Blanche's intrusion. He is a rapist who has hurt Blanche at the very moment
when she is sensitive and vulnerable. Eunice's attempt to suppress the truth
because "life has to go on" at any expense, and Stella's willingness to deny
Stanley's rape of Blanche in order to go on living with him make them all
collaborators with him in Blanche's rape and destruction. Blanche's departure to
the asylum "holding tight to [the doctor's] arm" not only demonstrates that
Blanche can find kindness in the most unlikely places, but she can do so with a
great amount of dignity, valor, and courage. Blanche is the most appealing
character at play's end. Williams has given her the exit of a character who has
admirable resilience, magnitude, and integrity even when she is facing the

adversities of defeat and loss to the forces of brutality.

Blanche DuBois: Williams' 5 Private Space

This is Blanche DuBois, the woman who cannot pass for who she is in the
society where she lives. She fails to pass in the Kowalskis' apartment in the same
way as she fails in New Orleans and in Laurel before. Blanche is rejected for who
she is, and her attempts to atone do not bring her any redemption, but rather
reinforce the very image she is trying to escape. When Williams states "I am
Blanche DuBois," he switches the focus of Streetcar. Williams himself becomes
the subject, and Blanche the vehicle that conveys such a subject. Such a
paratextual remark modifies our reading of Williams' text and raises a whole
cluster of textual signs that gives Williams's text a broader and more complex
meaning in their combinations. Thus "further meaningful potentialities arise

from [the] connotations" of these signs which were buried under the thick walls

46

of the closet that Williams has constructed around himself. With such a claim,
Williams shifts the gears from the communicative formula "I, Blanche, you" to
the more complex one "1,1 you" whereby Williams is both the addresser and the
addressee, and Blanche becomes just a metaphor for the "I" of Tennessee
Williams.

Cesare Segre's understanding of the function of a literary text is
particularly germane to our discussion of the metaphoric relationship between
Williams and his creation. It is an understanding which recognizes the complex
manner in which the author's identity is woven and intertwined with that of the
characters of his own creation. Segre perceives a literary text as "a form of
communication" where the addresser sends a message to the addressee coded in
a text that "offers itself to the reader as a set of graphic signs. These signs have a
denotative meaning whose character is linguistic. At the same time they
constitute, in the variety of their combinations, complex signs, which have also a
meaning of their own. Further meaningful potentialities arise from
connotations."15

Segre explores the different levels of communication a literary text may
embody. The communication circuit, he explains, includes "1," the addresser,
"you," the addressee, with "he" or "she" the subject of communication.16 In
Strgtcar, Williams is the addresser, "you" is the audience, and Blanche DuBois is
the subject of communication. However, Segre explains, this simple
communicative formula can become more complex once the "'I' of the addresser
attempts to identify himself, exactly as he would with a character in a play."17
And that's what happens when Williams comments "I am Blanche DuBois." The

interpretative dimensions of the text change and some linguistic signs in

Williams's text start to take different coloring and broader connotations. The

47

formula is no longer "I," the addresser, "you," the addressee, and Blanche, the
subject; it becomes "1," the addresser, "you," the addressee, and "I," the subject.

The relationship that I want to suggest between Blanche and Williams is
metaphorical, a relationship that posits identification between things which are
not necessarily identical. It is through a metaphorical structure that Williams's
claim "I am Blanche DuBois" transfers the subject, "I," to the object, "Blanche
DuBois." Blanche DuBois by herself is a subject and a representation, but through
her relationship to Williams she becomes the vehicle for the tenor, Williams. This
does not imply that Blanche DuBois is a drag character, and my reading does not
necessarily imply that Blanche should "be read as a man who wanted to be a
woman; or as a gay man, or as a transvestite."18 My reading does not force us to
be involved in a "substitution game." Blanche is a female character and Streetcar
is a tragedy about a female romantic outcast who can not find the acceptable
avenue to be herself, to express her desire, and to atone for her past of death,
guilt, and promiscuity. However, her tragedy is analogous to that of Williams,
since both the female heroine and the male playwright face the same doom of
rejection and marginalization. My reading highlights the associations between
Blanche and Williams rather than substituting one for the other. Blanche is not a
drag queen but a channel through which much of Williams's tension, paranoia,
and frustration is expressed. Even though critics have constantly warned us to be
skeptical of authorial intentions and authors' interpretations of their own
writing, I still believe that Williams's claim "I've read things that say Blanche was
a drag queen. Blanche DuBois, ya know...these charges are ridiculous!" has some
validity.19

Many critics and directors who perceived the play from such an
autobiographical perspective were able to penetrate to the complex aspect of

Williams' text. As Williams states in his Memoirs, the Italian director Visconti

48

"called him Blanche as [they] prepared the Roman production of Streetcar."20
During Kazan's direction of Williams's play, he also felt that there was more to
the play than "a moral fable of the brutalization of a sensitive soul by a sadistic
bully."21 It is "far more ambivalent and far more personal."22 In Kazan's words, it
is a "masterful work, written out of Tennessee's most personal experience."23

Foster Hirsch claims:

The play has been accepted by audiences throughout
the world as a potent heterosexual conflict, but to
ignore the possibility that the play itself is as masked
as its beleaguered heroine is to miss reverberations
that echo throughout the Williams canon.”

Such a claim points to the complexity of Blanche DuBois' characterization, and
depicts the fusion of what I label the subject Blanche i.e. the oppressed Southern
woman imprisoned in the traditions of the South, and the metaphorical Blanche
who becomes a legitimate expression for the suppressed playwright's identity, a
playwright who is caught on the edge of his private yearnings and the
prescriptions imposed on him as a public celebrity. What is shared between the
playwright and his heroine is a common paranoia of two people victimized by
the prejudice, torn by the same dichotomy, and haunted by the same fearuthe
fear that what is private might one day become public. Both Williams and
Blanche are trying to find an outlet for their identity- a private space where they
can bear their fears, feel more free to be who they are, and take the mask off their
faces to reveal what their faces are like, and put away the public personae and
the social role they are cast to play. Other critics have recognized the necessity of
adopting Williams's oblique view in reading his texts. Both Colin Chambers and
Mike Prior have captured the obliqueness of Williams's vision in Mice; where
he "often channeled [his] vision through heterosexual situations."25

49

Williams declares in many circumstances that he is not a direct
playwright, but rather a creator who resorts to allusions and believes in the
richness, complexity, and versatility of symbols. Williams states, "I am not a
direct writer; I am always an oblique writer, if I can be; I want to be allusive. I do
not want to be one of these people who hit on the head all the time." 2° Williams
is inviting us to an open-ended reading of his plays; he is inviting us to follow
him to a limitless exploration of his texts. To impose a straight-forward and
simplistic view on Williams's Strgtear is to go against the grain of the text and
its creator. In another circumstance, Williams insists again upon this oblique

angle that we have to take while reading his texts. He claims,

People have said and said and said that my work is
too personal: and I have just as persistently countered
this charge with my assertion that all true work of an
artist must be personal, whether directly or obliquely,
(Italics are mine) it must and it does reflect the
emotional climates of its creator.”

Such a claim recapitulates the perspective through which we can read tr et ar.
Williams points to his oblique mode of representing what he believes to be the
reality. In such a quotation, Williams points to the personal tone and the oblique
vision in his texts that some critics like Mark Winchell and others are trying to
suppress.28 treet ar is a mirror that reflects its creator. How much of this mirror
is revelatory in its oblique and distorted nature is another question that I will
raise and try to answer. However, I insist that it is only through an oblique point
of view that we can explore Williams' vision in Streetcar, grasp its totality, unlock
its ambiguity, and explore all the levels of its meaning.

In the following section of this chapter, I will focus more on the
metaphorical Blanche and draw the correlation between her and her creator in

the sense that both are constructing a theatrical identity, and argue that Blanche

50

has ultimately turned to a private space secured by Tennessee Williams in order
to reveal to his audience more of the image of Tom Lanier Williams-another
personae that they are very likely not to have met. The metaphorical Blanche is
no longer the central character of the play, but rather the tenor of Williams's
tension, restlessness, and clash between his private and public identities.

The parallels between Blanche and Williams are more than striking, and
they function at many levels. Williams shares with Blanche her dividedness, her
ambivalence, her paranoia, her guilt, and her hysterical outbursts, and she in
turn shares with him his creativity and his infatuation with the theater. From the
play's outset, Blanche is depicted as a character who has been assigned a role to
play. She arrives at her sister's with a trunk full of costumes that can help her
perform all the roles she wants to play and maintain all the theatrical nuances
and illusions she wants to communicate to her audience. Her language is
theatrical and scripted, it is definitely above the language Stella speaks and the
everyday dialect Stanley understands. She quotes Edgar Allan Poe, refers to
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, alludes to the chauvinistic tradition of the

'Rosenkavalier,‘ shows familiarity with m Arabian Nights, compares herself to

 

"La Dame aux Camellias," and also speaks French, which was then thought to be
the language of literature, romance, and gentility. Her plea to Stella not to hang
back with the brutes can come only from Blanche DuBois and from a highly
creative and literary mind. It embodies more than one allusion and more than
one poetic image. It recapitulates the entire history of human civilization, and
through its poetic language, it depicts the spiritual essence of human civilization.
Blanche is even able to write her own fiction about her life and creates her hero,
Shep Huntleigh, and constructs all the episodes of her own rescue. It is through

art that Blanche can escape her cruel reality, bear her loneliness, and tolerate the

51

intolerable. It is through "magic" that Blanche can live with the decadence and
transgression that she sees around herself.

The story of Blanche is Williams's story as well. Williams, like Blanche,
does not "want realism," he wants "magic." He "misrepresent[s] things" to his
audience by being evasive about the reality, and if he wants to be truthful to
them, he can be so only through oblique ways and deviant means. Williams is
deeply'committed to change all appearances, curb all conventions, and question
the unquestionable. He states: "I'm not sure I would want to be well-adjusted to
things as they are. I would prefer to be racked by desire for things better than
they are, even for things which are unattainable, than to be satisfied as they
are..."29 Is Blanche DuBois well-adjusted to her society? Is she well-adjusted to
herself? Isn't she racked by desire at play's end? How [unlattainable a dream is
Blanche's quest to bring the past back to the present, weld idealism to realism,
and reach romanticism in an unromantic environment? In this last quote,
Williams seems to be making a claim not only about himself, but also about his
heroine, Blanche DuBois. When Williams explains why he writes, he claims that
in his writing, he was "creating an imaginary world into which [he] can retreat
from the real world because...[he has] never made any kind of adjustment to the
real world."30 For both Blanche and Williams, art is a romantic quest to subvert
the reality for a better version. They both believe that art is "a criticism of things
as they exist."31 Blanche's fate at play's end is analogous to what Williams thinks
is the fate of the artist. In 1950, a few years after the opening of Streetcar,
Williams stated that in the present American society the artist found himself with
no choice but to withdraw "into the caverns of his own isolated being!” The
artist is forced to be silent perhaps in the same way as Blanche is forced to be
shut away in an asylum. Years later, Williams drew the parallel between the

artist and the insane, stating: "it appears to me, sometimes, that there are only

52

two kinds of people who live outside what E. E. Cummings has defined as this
'so-called world of ours'--the artist and the insane."33 Such a claim brings
Williams and Blanche together. Blanche starts as a romantic artist who tries to
express her voice to the others and attempts to secure her own space within her
own world, but ends the play on the margin, insane, and with a voice that does
not fit with the conventionality of others. Williams starts his life as the promising
American playwright, and ends his career imprisoned by the fear of insanity and
the shadows of loneliness in the Friggins' violent ward where he spent three
months. Both Blanche and Williams opted for the "withdrawal into the caverns of
isolation" at the end of their lives.34 In Blanche DuBois, Williams theatricalized
himself, and in his portrayal of the theatricalized Blanche, Williams has found
the safe and secure space to reveal much of himself and much of the tension of
his divided nature.

Elia Kazan wonders whether Strgtcar reveals Williams' "inner conflict" of
the "gentleness of his true heart against the violent calls of his erotic nature."35
While directing the play, Kazan became more and more convinced that Blanche's
divided nature was reflective of the very contradictory and ambivalent nature of
her creator. Williams claims: "I have such a divided nature! Irreconcilably
divided!”5 and elsewhere he reinforces his first claim. About his crisis in the
1960's, he claims that it was the result of the "contradiction between two sides of
[his] nature: between gentleness and violence between tenderness and
harshness."37 Williams shares with Blanche her paranoia and her neurosis. He is
attracted to what he is repelled by. Elia Kazan argues: "I saw Blanche as
Williams, an ambivalent figure who is attracted to the harshness and vulgarity
around him at the same time that he fears it, because, it threatens his life!“
Indeed, both biographers Donald Spoto and Ronald Hayman have suggested
that much of the tension between Blanche and Stanley is just a reflection of

53

tension between Williams and Pancho, one of his former homosexual lovers.
Both biographers agree with Fritz Bultrnan that in his relationship with Pancho,
Williams tried "to create real life situations that were then translated into
sequences in A Streetcar NM _l_T_)_e_r§i_r_e_."39 However, the similarities between
Blanche and Williams go even further than that.

Williams is a man who is not in tune with his own desires. His
homosexual desires are fraught with guilt and self-loathing. When he gives in to
his desires, he feels like Blanche; he feels the same dichotomy between her
desires and her awareness of the unconventionality of those desires. In an
interview with Robert Jennings, Williams reveals: "I've been profligate, but, being
a puritan, I naturally tend to exaggerate guilt. But I'm not a typical homosexual. I
can identify with Blancheuwe are both hysterics."‘° Williams has to tone down
his homosexual desires and often cloak them in heterosexual disguise to make
them more acceptable to his audience. He has to exercise self-effacement and to
kill his homosexual characters as well. Neither Allan in A Streetcar m
_D_eflr_e, nor Skipper in Cit o_n e m T_in_ Reef, nor Sebastian in Suddenly _La_st
Summer can appear on the stage. As Ronald Hayman states: "In spite of himself,
he ferociously punishes the characters he would most like to protect, while
punishing himself for his irresolution!”1 Williams has to be complicit in their
suicide so that he can reveal his desires and the pain they generate. Williams has
to find the language that the others can not comprehend to reveal his private
persona. If Blanche has found her target in the French language to generate her
own private space, Williams has adopted the metaphorical discourse--a
discourse that can, by definition, offer Williams the multi-layered mode of
expression that he needs to convey the complexity of his multi-faceted
personality. This is the split vision with which Williams has to contend. To affirm

his desire, he must deny his self. Williams is an outsider to the others and a

54

stranger to himself. He lives constantly with a feeling of rejection and insecurity.
Self-assurance is sought, but never achieved. "The presence of his name and
often his photograph on the front page of a newspaper in each new encampment
did not quiet his unhappy conviction that he was not liked, not wanted there,
and scorned for his sexual preference. Fame and money did not solve his
problem. He still expected to be betrayed socially and personally, even by his
closest friends and, as he grew older, by his lovers. But above all and most
painfully, by his public!”2 Just as Blanche's attempts to secure self-validation by
looking at herself constantly in the mirror, by taking care of her looks, and by
expecting "a word about her appearance" are all in vain, Williams, too, is not able
to achieve self-assurance, because whatever assurance he might get from his
friends, newspapers, reviewers, and audience is, in fact, an assurance about his
public, rather than about his private, persona that he has constructed to hide his
private one. Such a split causes Williams not only to realize that he is not a
"typical homosexual," but also to question the validity of his vocation as an
artist."3 "I was...certain that I was a dying artist and not even the least sure that I
was an artist!“ With such neurosis, such paranoia, and such fear that the private
should become public, one may wonder if Williams has ever felt the need, as
Blanche did, for someone, like Mitch, to give him the security, assurance, and
comfort he is longing for, someone who would be for him "a cleft in the rock of
the world that [he] could hide in!"
Williams echoes his heroine in Streetcar in his 1992 codicil to his will:

1, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams being in
sound mind upon this subject and having declared
this wish repeatedly to my close friends--do hereby
state my desire to be buried at sea. More specifically, I
wish to be buried at sea as close as a possible point as

55

the American poet Hart Crane died by choice in the
sea. I wish to be...dropped overboard...as close as
possible to where Hart Crane was given by himself to
the great mother of life which is the sea...45

Williams reflects Blanche's yearning death wish "to die on the sea," and be
"buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard--at noon--in
the blaze of summer and into an ocean as blue as...[her] first lover's eyes" [136].
Blanche is determined to remain true to her romanticism and her sensuality. She
adheres to her desire, and claims that she "will dieuwith [her] hand in the hand
of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond
mustache and a big silver watch" [136]. Years later, in his interview with Robert
Jennings in 1973, Williams resorts to the same image that Blanche uses when she
imagines her death. Williams adheres to his sensuality, desire, and romanticism
in the same way as Blanche does. He tells his interviewer: "I do know that I shall
never cease to be sensual-—even on my deathbed. If the doctor is young and
handsome I shall draw him into my arms."46

Blanche lives inside Williams and he still feels her inside him many years
after she was sent to her asylum and accepted the lie about her madness as a
truth with which she can now live in peace.” Years later in his Memei e,
Williams draws another parallel between his life and Blanche's. "I have always
depended upon the kindness of strangers" is a key factor not only in Blanche's
life, but also in her creator's as well. Just like Blanche, he has felt the fear of
loneliness, the pain of estrangement, and, on more than one occasion, he has
relied on "the kindness of strangers." In his Memoge’ , Williams can see himself as
the ultimate verification for the truthfulness of such a line. He states:

56

I would guess that chance acquaintances, or strangers,
have usually been kinder to me than friends... To

know me is not to love me. At best, it is to tolerate

me."8

What is more precious for a homosexual playwright who has always felt on the
fringes of human acceptance? What is more precious for Blanche, who has
followed the call of her heart and felt wrecked by her desire, than unconditional
acceptance? Blanche and Williams share the same 'prorniscuous' past, the same
overwhelming guilt, the same dichotomy between their traditional, puritanical
upbringing and their burning desires, and they also share their need to atone for
their guilt and to overcome their fears of rejection. The only door that may be
open for their acceptance and admission to the mainstream of society is
tolerance. Blanche and Williams want to be themselves, yet they want to live in
the society that rejects them for who they are.

Through these instances, it is obvious that Streetcar is autobiographical
and that it is in his heroine that Williams has embodied "his sense of isolation,"
"his disgust with his own flesh," "his concern for cruelty," and "his confused
drives." They are both "the romantic in an unromantic land!"‘9 As Kazan argues,
Williams "used his personal contradictions and the memory of his pain to make
it. When I considered him, I saw that the true artist must have the courage to
reveal what the rest of mankind conceals."50 It is not surprising at all that most of
the reviewers have felt the truthfulness the play reveals about its playwright.
Streetear is a play without a theme. It is just a fleeting moment of the reality that
Williams has succinctly grasped, depicted, and posed in front of his audience.
Williams pointed to his play's authenticity when he told Molly Kazan that
Streetcar "had no theme; it had a deeper meaning because it describes a universal
struggle in the soul of its author."51 Such a play will keep running and future

generations will still feel its fascination because Williams has depicted, as no

57

other playwright has before, our eternal tragic struggle between our private and
public selves captured and staged in the soul of the playwright himself. In fact,
the more we go into the tormented soul of Williams, the more we realize that
Blanche is just an echo of a much louder cry, and just a piece of a much larger
puzzle. Blanche, with all her grandeur as a modern tragic character, is just a
distorted mirror of what Williams's tragedy can be. Biographies which have tried
to depict Williams's anguish have failed to rewrite the life of such a misfit and
have failed to be honest to the complexity of his life. Williams is the subject that
refuses to be put under control, and the fugitive of his own kind. Donald
Windham has commented upon the duality, the inconsistency, and the

complexity of Williams:

Each of his traits was balanced, like the evenly
weighed pans of a scale, by its opposite. He was
ordinary...bashful and bold, chaste and lascivious,
talkative and taciturn, tough and delicate, clever and
stupid, surly and affable, truthful and lying.52

In Williams' fitters :9 Donald Windham Windham dwells upon Williams's

 

 

paradoxical and closeted nature:

Curtain after curtain of ambivalence has descended in
his life. Self-portrait after self-portrait has intervened
in his plays. And the same qualities that make
Tennessee a good dramatist make him an impossible
documenter.53

Such quotations emphasize the enigmatic and conflicting nature of Tennessee
Williams --a nature that the playwright himself could not convey. Williams,

corrunenting on the kind of relationship he has with his characters, states: "I tend

58

to see and hear my plays and stories before I write them; I hear the mad music of
my characters. But I don't think any piece of work is ever what one wishes it to
be, or that one's completed works ever fulfill one's potential!“ The relationship
between Williams and Blanche is based on partial similarities and associations
rather than on total identification. Blanche is only a small fragment of the whole
Williams and there is no character that can ever speak out for Williams. The

Williams that we know in his plays, and experience in his confessional Memoirs

 

is the theatrical Williams. He is the Williams who has manipulated himself in his
own writing. Williams has left his traces, and when we try to follow them back to
the real Williams, we find ourselves not before the real Williams, but before
another Williams that can never take us back to the original Williams. The real
Williams is enwrapped and closeted in the theatrical 'Williamses,‘ and the main
problem that such a self-portrait reveals is how to envisage a real Williams in the
midst of all the masks he creates and the theatrical make-up he wears. To re-
draw the demarcation line between the real and the theatrical Williams becomes
an impossible act. How can we have access to the real Williams if everything he
presents to us is conveyed through twisted ways and delivered in oblique
manners? What Stella says to Stanley about her sister, "You didn't know Blanche
as a girl," is true for Williams himself, too. We know only Williams as a
playwright, and Williams the person can reveal himself only to himself. For the
audience, Blanche is enigmatic and the only Blanche that we can have access to is
the Blanche who has experienced the suicide of her husband Allan. There are
many spots in her life that remain unilluminated to us. We are in touch only with
Blanche who is the product of the script, and so is the case with Williams himself.
The Williams who is available to us is only an effect of his script and writings.
The real Williams remains far from our reach and comprehension. Even

Williams' Memeirs and letters cannot lead us to the real Tom. Terry Eagleton

59

points out this theoretical dilemma in all literary texts: "The biography of the
author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special
privilege: this text too can be deconstructed. It is language which speaks in
literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself."55
Williams remains the secret that he can reveal only to himself and in his private
moments of silence; and such a possibility still remains questionable. This is the
nature of Williams' closet. It is a thick wall of secrets, allusions, lies, pretenses,
fictions, and also truths. The truth can never come out, and when it does, we do
not know anymore whether it is the truth or another facet of masquerading. It
comes out twisted, oblique, and distorted. Donald Windham argues that
Williams "helped to create legends and created them himselfnas he had from the
days when he made up the name Tennessee." Windham never believed
Williams's story about his name being the invention of his classmates, and
argued that the story and the name were of Williams's creation.”5

With a playwright who assumes such "surrogate personalities, surrogate
biographies, trying them on like suits of other people's clothes and substituting
them for his own when they fitted the part he was playing, sometimes briefly,
sometimes more or less permanently,"57 the biographers need to understand "the
complexity of the task they had undertaken or of the enigma they had set out to
put down in words."58 Blanche is Williams only to the extent that she reveals
parts and fragments of Williams's tension between his private and public
persona.

Blanche is a space of reconciliation. It is in Blanche that Williams manages
to accommodate his homosexuality without being rejected, to portray his
androgyny without being ludicrous, and to reveal his sensitivity without being
excessive. Williams functions in a culture where "love of beauty is seen as a

weakness in a man" and "excessive sensitivity as a fault."59 Therefore, Williams

60

needs such a mask to reveal the intolerable and speak out the unspeakable.
Williams is in touch with his female characters because of the profound
understanding he shares with them and the femininity they have in common. In
Blanche, "Williams can confess his love of fragility without sounding
sentimental!"50 Moreover, by conveying his plight as a homosexual through
depicting Blanche's plight as a woman, Williams has subverted all the borders
between the homosexual and the heterosexual. The demarcation line between
both is blurred, and Williams manages to demonstrate that Blanche's plight as a
Southern suppressed woman is analogous to Allan's and his own plight. Blanche
is the space that Williams secures for the marginalia. It is in Blanche that the
homosexual, the uprooted, the oppressed, the rejected, the fragile, the neurotic,
and the psychotic can hear their own voice, find their own consolation, and claim
their own identity.

There are many instances in Williams' 3 text that open Streetcar to such
autobiographical reading. Hand in hand with the parallels that I've drawn
between Blanche DuBois and Tennessee Williams, we find more in the text that
can imply more similarities between Blanche and her creator. As Nicholas Pagan
demonstrated, the name Blanche DuBois and Belle Reve point already to the
gender confusion that we find in Williams' text!51 When meeting Mitch, Blanche
explains that her name means "white woods" in French. Such translation is not
accurate in terms of gender. The exact French translation of 'white woods' is
'blanc bois' so that the noun and its modifier agree in their gender. "Bois" is
masculine and so should "Blane" be. But that's not the case in Blanche's
translation. It is a translation that points out to the confusion of gender, and hints
at the androgyny of Blanche, a characteristic that she shares with her homosexual
creator. 'Belle Reve' is another important detail in this case. The feminine

adjective "Belle" does not correlate with the masculine noun "Reve," and if we

61

have to stick to the gender agreement between the adjective and its noun, the
correct translation would be "Beau Reve." Blanche's dream is androgynous, a
dream that fits with her creator's when he claims "I'm only attracted to
androgynous males!"52 Just like Williams, Blanche has androgynous traits in her
character. The parallel becomes more conspicuous when Williams claims that
only artists and especially poets are possessed by such "androgynous quality!“
and Blanche is definitely an artist in her theatricality, in her language, in her
romantic desire, and in her sensitivity.

Stanley Kowalski offers us the opportunity to read Blanche as an
androgynous male when he states: "What queen do you think you are?" The
audience of treetcar has been aware of the homosexual connotations of the
word "queen" as early as the first performances of the play. According to the
mg m Dietionagy, the word "queen" used for "the efferninate partner in
a homosexual relationship" appears as part of the slang diction as early as 1924.
In fact, in a letter to Maria St. Just dated October 9th 1949, Williams himself used
the term "queen" in the homosexual sense. He writes: "Well, the town is
blooming with British queens, mostly connected in some way with the ballet!“
Therefore, it is obvious that twenty years later after the use of the word "queen"
in the homosexual sense, the audience cannot miss the homosexual connotation
of the term "queen." Mitch's statement about Blanche, "I was fool enough to
believe you was straight," and Blanche's answer "Who told you I was not
'straight'?" [117] is also over charged with the same homosexual tone we find in
the word "queen." According to the Q;f_or_d Eegliih Dietionary, the meaning of
"straight" as "a heterosexual; not practicing sexual 'perversions'" came into the
American slang in 1941, six years before the first performances of Streetear.
Therefore, the American public may have been aware of the sexual connotations

when the play was being performed on Broadway. Moreover, the quotation

62

marks around "straight" in the script draw our attention to the word itself, and I
suggest that Williams wants the actress who is performing Blanche's role to give
a special tone and implication to the word "straight." In Kazan's movie version of
Streetea , the word "straight" receives more emphasis, for Blanche answers
Mitch's question:

What's straight? A line can be straight or a street. But

the heart of a human being, oh, no, it's curved like a
road through mountains!55

Years later in his Memoirs Williams remembered Blanche's unforgettable line. It

 

is the instance when he recalled such a line that is relevant here. It is during his
narration of one of his homosexual cruises and encounters that Williams evokes
Blanche's line. When the boy claims that he is 'straight' Williams remembers
what Blanche said years ago. This is an evidence that Williams is definitely
aware of the hetero/ homosexual connotations of the word 'straight' when he
puts such a claim in his heroine's mouth and makes her speak out his beliefs,
fears and also frustrations.

Williams implies that the human heart cannot accept any restrictions and
limitations on emotions. Williams tells his audience that there is more to life than
the heterosexual love they believe in. Blanche DuBois is Williams's voice in
which he can speak out what he has to mute, and she can state explicitly what he
can refer to only implicitly. Through Blanche, Williams is trying to claim a space
within the conventional society where he lives, to assert his identity as a
homosexual, and to secure the validation and acceptance that he has been denied

for being homosexual.

63

The closure of Streetcar reinforces the idea that the play is offering a place
for the marginalized, and Williams is prompting his audience's empathy towards
the victimized and the outcast, including Blanche, Allan, and also himself. The
play's closure does not suggest that Streetcar is a celebration of heterosexual
desire as much as a plea for understanding the deviant and those who live "out-
of—bounds," as Stanley puts it [100]. At play's end, Williams is inviting his
audience's involvement and engagement with what is taking place on the stage.
He claims: "The world is incomplete, it's like an unfinished poem. Maybe the
poem will suddenly turn to a limerick or maybe it will turn into an epic poem.
But it is 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!"36
Williams's aim is to broaden the scope of his audience's perception and
compassionate understanding so that it can become more inclusive. Williams is
comparing the world to a poem that has no meaning and it is up to us either to
leave it as meaningless or to attribute to it an epic-like significance. The audience
is the actor who is going to change to the drama taking place before them by
being collaboratively active and by having a broader perspective than the
characters who are performing on the stage.

The major turning point in the audience's empathy and the event that
forces us to turn away from Stanley and become more empathic to Blanche is the
rape scene. This scene is an act of condemnation not only of Stanley, but also of
Stella, Mitch, the poker players, and Eunice, who try to maintain the status quo.
It is a condemnation of the entire society which has made Blanche DuBois a
victim of its falsities and brutality. Through the rape scene, Williams has also
managed to switch our empathy from Stanley to more compassionate
understanding of Blanche. Even though Blanche may have been erroneous in her

attitudes towards Stanley, there is nothing that can explain or legitimize his

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crime of rape against her. The rape scene engages the involvement of the "other
implied reader...who sees the final scene as an occasion to reassess rather than
endorse" Stanley as hero. Indeed, "at this point [the rape scene] of the play, this
reader will [hopefully] have recognized his or her complicity in what can only be
described as coercive closure”.

Eunice, Stanley, and Stella are trying to force us into this coercive closure;
they want us to see that Blanche alone is responsible for her fate, and she carries
within her the hubris of her doom. They want to wash their hands of the evil
conspiracy and convince us that what we are watching on stage is Blanche's
inescapable end. However, in the last scene, Eunice's pacifism when she says to
Stella: "Hush! Hush! Honey" trying to suppress the truth [134], and Stella's
acceptance into this pacifism unquestionably, along with Stanley's gratuitous
violence and aggression towards Blanche make it clear that the three of them are
involved in the conspiracy of Blanche's victimization, and silence, and perhaps
indifferent to the vile act of rape that Stanley has committed upon her. When
Blanche desperately asks: "What happened here? I want an explanation of what's
happened here" she is trying to unlock the secrets of this conspiracy, and utter a
plea to draw from the audience their empathy, their understanding, and perhaps
their reaction to the violence and cruelty to which she was subjected. By posing
such a question, Eunice's pacifism, Stella's erasure, and Stanley's coercion can not
be denied any more. The facade of happiness and propriety the Kowalskis put
up does not hold anymore, and the deliberate cruelty with which they
abandoned Blanche is indeed unforgivable.

Blanche manages at play's end to arouse all our empathy and
compassionate understanding. Her words are accusatory and they prompt us to
further introspective investigation and self-examination. Stanley's macho-

attraction, his representation of the 'typical' American male, the disruption that

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Blanche is about to bring to his home, his innocent behavior at the beginning of
the play, and the threats that Blanche represents invite us to a game of
conspiracy with him against Blanche. Blanche questions this complicity and
invites us to reconsider the role of such a game. Her line, "I have always
depended on the kindness of strangers," debunks our sympathetic reading of
Stanley, deconstructs the positive image we have held of him, and sets up a
communicative channel of understanding between her and the audience. In fact,
as June Schlueter argues, "Blanche's reliance on the kindness of strangers, even as
family and acquaintances assemble to witness, not to prevent, her expulsion,
encourages the awareness of how little kindness the reader has shown!"58 and
also reminds us of Blanche's fear that "maybe we are a long way from being
made in God's image" [72].

Kazan follows this line in his staging of Streetcar. He explains his

understanding of the relationship between Blanche and the audience as follows:

I wanted Blanche to be a 'difficult' heroine, not one
easy to pity, and for the audience to be with Brando at
first, as they were closer in their values to Stanley
than to Blanche. Then, slowly, Jessie and I and the
play would turn the audience's sympathies around so
that they'd find that their final concerns were for her
and that perhaps, as in life, they'd been prejudiced
and insensitive!59

.Kazan wants to tap into the audience's initial prejudice and insensitivity towards
the marginalized and to invite them to take the hard way to the "arduous journey
through Purgatorio" because he is aware that the easy way always fades away
quickly and does not leave its imprints on the audience.’0 The audience, for

Kazan, has to experience the pain to reach purgation and he wants his audience

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to give Blanche a well-earned and fought-for sympathy. Kazan wants his
audience to earn their purgation through experiencing the tension between the
normal and the 'abnormal,‘ and the marginal and the conventional. He wants
them to cross from the safe shores where they are standing to the unsafe shores
where they discover that the 'abnormal' is as normal as the normal, and the
marginal is as conventional as the conventional. In this way, Kazan adheres to
Williams's quest for tolerance, understanding and compassion toward a
confused self with multiple faces to carry and many roles to play. This is what

Kazan aims at when he declares:

...As the play progresses, and especially in the scenes
where Blanche fearlessly declares herself and tells her
history, the onlookers should admire her courage. It
was my hope that they should then slowly reappraise
her and perhaps even be dismayed at their original
prejudices. Only in the end and with difficulty should
the audience find special worth in this difficult
person.71

Kazan is helping the audience to see the worthy side in Blanche's character, and
to see her as the sensitive character who is trying to atone for her deadly feeling
of guilt when she faced her husband with the unspeakable truth and screamed in
his face: "I saw! I know! you disgust me..." [96].

Williams' closure of Streetcar is effective in drawing the audience's
attention to the marginalia of the play. Had the play ended with the separation of
Stanley and Stella, the audience would have probably had the opportunity to
release and get rid of their tension that has been electrified inside them
throughout the play, especially after the rape scene. Therefore, the audience

would have distanced themselves from the play for the playwright, the director,

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and the actors would have brought poetic justice on the stage and the catharsis
that the audience wants to experience. The ending of Streetcar is not cathartic.
Stella comes back to Stanley, and he with "his fingers tries to find the opening of
her blouse." Stella has decided to live in her denial. She knows that she can live
with Stanley only through pretending that he never raped her sister Blanche. At
this point of the play, if the audience still choose to grant their empathy to
Stanley and Stella, they can not do so without denying that they are granting
their empathy to Stanley, the rapist, and his wife Stella who has collaborated in
this rape through her silence and denial. The end of the play poses a moral
dilemma to the audience that is more likely to be sorted out in Blanche's favor,
especially with the failure of Stanley, Stella, Mitch, and Eunice to bring the play
to a more just closure.

Through the ending of Streetcar Williams is hoping to invite the audience

 

to see themselves as characters and their life as a stage in a large theater. The
three-hour performance is not a period of sheer entertainment, but a moment
when we, as members of the audience, feel involved with Blanche and
responsible for the victimization of the outcast. The performance is not a
fictitious moment of mystification and evasion, but it is a moment that hopefully
will generate a genuine response from the audience and encourage each of its
members to open up to more humane possibilities and more compassionate
understanding. During the performance, the restricted space of the stage
expands to become more inclusive. The stage can become the space where the
members of the audience project themselves and try to observe their own
reaction to the situation that the play invites them to consider. In the moment of
watching the play, the fusion between the external space, the stage, and the
internal space, ourselves, may be achieved; the barriers that separate our public

self from our private self are possibly removed, and the gap between our inner

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selves and outer selves is reduced. During the three-hour performance, the
audience are held witnesses to this public artifact that Blanche has become, and
the desperation with which she has held to this public artifact in order to survive
in her hostile environment. For some members of the audience, it would be
possible to write off Blanche's struggle and steer their compassion away from
her, but for others this would mostly be impossible. Some of the audience would
leave the theater with the fear that they themselves have given up their identity
for the public artifacts the others want them to become or have (un)consciously
collaborated in the construction of these artifacts that we and the others are. The
audience, if they allow themselves to succumb to the experience the play is
asking them to partake with its characters, would pay reverence to this moment
of truth and be ready to recognize this truth of victimization and atonement
inside themselves as well.

Williams has deliberately removed any possible smoke screen that the
audience may use to impose distance between Blanche and themselves. Stella,
Stanley, Mitch and Eunice collectively form a proxy of the audience. In Stanley,
we can see the possibility of our brutality and violence; in Eunice, the possibility
of our denial, indifference, and pacifism; in Stella, our inclination to accept this
pacifism; and in Mitch, we experience, as Williams may have hoped for, our
regret and guilt for having abandoned Blanche at the very moment when she
needs him most. Williams has projected his audience's possible attitudes on the
stage and has allowed us to see the pattern of renunciation and guilt already
performed on the stage before us so that we can avoid such an irreversible fate
and perceive its tragic outcome. Blanche does not depart for the asylum in
distress and humiliation but rather with admirable dignity and grandeur.
Blanche may be defeated by Stanley's coercion and insensitivity but there is

some valor and resilience about her that may trigger the audience's compassion

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and empathy. Blanche's words to her sister "...don't-don't hang back with the
brutes!" resonate at play's end, and the audience realizes that Stella has failed to
live up to her sister's creed--a failure that hopefully they will not invite upon
themselves.

Williams has succeeded in building a bridge of understanding between
himself as a homosexual outcast and his audience. By arousing his audience's
empathy for Blanche, Williams is transforming the theater into a temple of
tolerance and inviting his audience to share with him his closeted space so that
he himself can be understood, accepted, and validated. Williams is no longer by
himself in his closet. He is extending its boundaries to be more inclusive, less
lonely, and thus more tolerant. Through Blanche, Williams revealed his truth, the
truth of a suppressed homosexual playwright. Williams is aware that if he is to
awaken his audience's empathy towards himself, he can achieve it only through
partial revelation, partial sincerity, and partial honesty. Williams is far beyond
achieving total understanding and complete compassion with his audience. He
can be honest with them only by claiming half truths and by conveying a toned
down and understated confession. The audience are allowed to hear only a faint
echo of Williams' cry. His relief is only temporary, and he is by no means able to
find lasting comfort with his audience. Once the last member of his audience
leaves the theater, the temple of compassion falls apart and becomes a vacuum.
The audience's departure marks the desolation of the space that Williams has
been striving to secure, and the 'inward' space of the theater is engulfed into a
larger 'outward' space, i.e., the whole society. Williams is once again alone with
his fear of loneliness and isolation. The performance is over, and Williams has to
seek refuge once again in New York's streets, or in the dim alleys of the French
Quarter of New Orleans, or in the cruising areas of Key West where he can find

company, compassion, and kindness in the hearts of 'strangers! Only in those

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streets can the celebrity Tennessee Williams meet Tom Lanier Williams. In those
streets Williams has to look into every face he meets to recognize those moments
of truth, sympathy, and understanding. However, the quest is impossible and
the common bond that Williams may have fostered during the performance
proves again to be unattainable, unreal, and only theatrical. The audience
remains anonymous to Williams, and so does Tom to his audience. The audience
is always the stranger that Williams can be familiar with only in temporary and
fleeting moments. The performance is over and Williams has to seek refuge in his
typewriter and look for consolation in his script. Williams has to go back to his
papers to re-enact such moments of understanding and compassionumoments
that can be captured only on paper in sporadic, temporary, and fleeting
instances.

In portraying himself in such a highly coded and closeted way, Williams
has accepted his own demise. He is inflicting on himself the same erasure that he

inflicted on Allan in A Streetcar Named Desire on Skipper in Qa_t m e lie; Ii;

 

_Rmf, and on Sebastian in Suddenly L_a_st S_um__n_r_e_r;. Williams is refusing to come
out to his audience in the same way as he refuses to let his homosexual
characters come out on the stage. In such a self-portrayal, Williams runs the risk
not only of becoming an erasure but also of being a fragment of who he is.
Williams is much larger than Blanche despite her grandeur, her gentility, and her
refined literary taste. The space that Williams has secured for himself in the
character of Blanche DuBois is so small that it may turn him into a claustrophobic
seeking his own death. Williams, the creator, has imprisoned himself in his
creation, Blanche DuBois. Williams, in his closet, has been reduced to a figure of
speech. He is reduced to a metaphor, or a synecdoche, or to an entity with a lost
originuan entity that can define itself only in reference to a similar entity, not to
itself. Williams can reveal himself only in partiality, and, no matter how much

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we may admire Blanche DuBois, she still remains just a fragment and fading

trace of the Williams whom we seek in his text.

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Chapter II
The Gay Self: Lies that Come True

has caused a lot of confusion and critical dilemma to theater reviewers and critics
alike. Williams argues that his play is about the truth and the critics argue that it
is about evasion from the truth. Catherine Hughes, for example, contends the
evasion as a weakness in the play and one of its negative aspects. Although she
considers get, as one of Williams's "most highly theatrical plays," she believes
that it does not bring the audience to a clear resolution because "many things
[are] still kept in the air at one time" at play's end.1 Walter Kerr, writing in the

New York Herald Tribune has argued that Qt "is a beautifully written play... a

 

play of evasion: evasion on the part of its principal character, evasion perhaps on
the part of its playwright."2
Such critical attitudes stem from the critics' dilemma regarding the play's
central character, Brick Pollitt. Some critics see him as a latent homosexual who
can never come to terms with his homosexuality and his own erotic feelings
towards his friend, Skipper, who commits suicide after he admits his erotic and
physical attraction to Brick. Others have argued that Brick is not homosexual and
his confusion and disorientation throughout all the play come from his feeling of
guilt because he is not ready to listen to Skipper's confession, and chose to hang
up the phone when Skipper disclosed his own homosexuality and his
homoerotic feelings towards Brick. The play ends with no closures and the
audience / readers are left in the dark with neither a clear resolution about
Brick's sexuality nor a hint about what the future may hold in store for him.

These paradoxical critical attitudes reveal some flaws in the interpretive

framework that these critics are trying to impose upon the play. The homosexual

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identity that Williams constructs in his play is not easy to unfold; and it does not
yield itself easily to the readers, the audience, or the critics. The critics want to
stabilize the homosexual self in gel. They want to see it in black or white, and
they want to find a definite answer to their simplistic yes/ no question about
Brick's sexuality. Brick's identity is not fixed, not stable, and perhaps not
recognizable all together. Our interpretation of the homosexual self in Qa_t should
take into consideration the multiplicity of its narrative. Brick's story is told from
more than one point of view. We hear Mae's and Cooper's version, Maggie's and
Big Daddy's, Brick's, Skipper's remains 'undramatized' and thus withheld from
us. The homosexual, apparently, is a self without a voice, multi-folded, of
multiple narratives, and with its own secrets that it has to keep for its own sake.
It is an entity that can not narrate its own narrative. The gay story can not be an
open story with a definite ending. It is a story with many voices and with no
closure. It is a secretive self that has to fight against its own authenticity, and if
we try to penetrate to its authenticity, we shall find it folded in one secret after
another, and in one layer after another. The homosexual self becomes an
artificial edifice of many selves with different faces, one face can recognize the
other, and perhaps it can not. Such faces may remain unrecognizable and
perhaps incoherent as well.

Eve Sedgwick argues that "In this century... homosexual definition... is
organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence."3 Therefore, the gay self
is not represented in a linear and straightforward narrative. It has to be de-
stabilized, and it comes to us in a series of ruptures, incoherence, fragmentation,
and mutilation, if not annihilation and erasures all together. David Savran agrees
with Sedgwick about the nature of the construction of the homosexual self. He

states:

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Throughout [Williams's] work for the theater of the
1940's and 1950's, homosexuality appears--ever
obliquely--as a distinctive and elusive style, in every
word and no word, as a play of signs and images, of
text and subtext, of metaphorical elaboration and
substitutions, of disclosure and concealment-win short,
as textuality itself.4

From this perspective, the homosexual self is dislocated and misplaced. It
is here and there, everywhere and nowhere. Its displacement points to its
enigmatic nature. It is the entity that refuses definition, acts against
categorization, and removes all sorts of boundaries and binary distinctions. The
meaning of the self is not contained in what the characters say about it, it rather
comes in signs and gestures, hints and ellipses, and images and conceahnents.
The homosexual self is not what it is said to be, but rather what it is not. It is a
disappearance and a concealment, a mask and a screen, and a shadow that points
to an entity that lurks behind it. It expresses itself through the language of the
metaphor--a language of association and disassociation, similarities and
dissirnilarities, a language of existence and non—existence. It is an ambiguous self.
It negates itself to affirm this self. From this perspective, we can read get to look
for association and disassociation. We should be well—equipped to understand
the signs and the hints that Williams is sending us; we should be able to look
through the screens he is putting in front of us not to confuse us, but rather to be
able to tell us the story. We should be able to speak out the ellipses which are
rampant in every page of the script, recognize the erasures that we encounter,
and read "the thing" that Q deals with for what that "thing" is and meant to be.
cg; becomes not a play of language and words, statements and claims, truths
and certainties, but "a play of signs and images" as David Savran chooses to

perceive it.

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Williams's de-stabilization of the homosexual self in C_at, has its roots in
Williams's perception about life in general. Williams does not believe in a stable
and coherent homo / heterosexual self. The self, for Williams, is plural and in
constant flux. It is a subject of rearrangement and re-consideration. He wrote to

Donald Windham:

Naturally we have very little integrity, if any at all.
Naturally the innermost "I" or "You" is lost in a sea of
other disintegrated elements, things that can't fit
together and that make an eternal war in our
natures... We all bob only momently above the
bubbling, boiling surface of the torrent of lies and
distortions we are borne along.5

Williams is asking us to redefine our understanding of the self. Unlike his critics
and reviewers, he is arguing that we can never have access to a totality of
selfhood. Our knowledge is only fragmentary and our understanding is doomed
to remain partial and incomplete. The war between the fragments of the self is
eternal. It is a state that defines our pre-existence and postulates our post-
existence. The elements of the self never "fit together." Thus, no coherence, no
stability, no unity, and no continuity of the self is ever attained. The "normative
constructions of sexuality" are deconstructed as David Savran argues!5 Therefore
coherence is sought, yet never to be achieved. For Williams "some mystery
should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of
mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own
character to himself" (117). Full knowledge and recognition of oneself is almost
impossible. The self refuses to yield itself to other selves, and also to itself. It just
has this quality of resistance and defensiveness about it; it never lets itself out to
people. It is a self which is always on guard. Such mysteries and secretiveness

are not just a question of aesthetics as much as qualities of life for Williams: "I

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live with [my characters] for a year and a half or two years and I know them far
better than I know myself... But still they must have that quality of life which is
shadowy..."7 Life, for Williams, is "shadowy," it has twilight characteristics about
it. The opposites are not opposites, they are just two ends of the same spectrum.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are not two well-defined binary
compartments in Williams's understanding of sexual identity. They are rather
two concepts which are intertwined and interwoven together. "I think that
everybody has some elements of homosexuality in him, even the most
heterosexual of us," Williams told David Frost in his interview.8 And in another
interview with Mel Gussow, Williams added that "no living person doesn't
contain both sexes...” We are in halves, and the image of the androgynous
perhaps best describes Williams's understanding of the fluidity and continuity of
sexuality. Williams is a playwright of ambiguity and obliqueness: "You may
prefer to be told precisely what to believe about every character in a play... Then
I'm not your playwright."10 Williams does not tell us what to believe and what
not. He does not place tags on his characters, he would rather give them a quality
of life which is their mystery that they hold only to themselves. Meaning is not
stated in get, it is inferred, deduced, felt and implied. To have different
expectations from Williams is to tackle his plays with an interpretive framework
that does not fit with the nature of his works, and perhaps reveals more of our
resistance and abstinence in reading Williams's plays.

Williams is adopting a Pirandellian understanding of the self. Brick and
most of Williams's characters are a collage of different images, and a montage of
different, if not paradoxical, roles. The identity of Williams's characters is similar

to the identity of Pirandello's. They are "an agglomeration of roles, a loosely
unified grouping of identities," and "a configuration of masks."11 The self , for

Williams, is analyzed and understood in terms of "images" and "roles". The self is

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performative and perhaps theatrical. There is no self outside its own
performance, and his characters are the roles that they are performing. Only in
very scarce moments do we have the chance to meet Blanche, Brick and
Sebastian (we never do as a matter of fact) outside their performance. They are
playing roles for the other characters and a double role for their audience. Who
they really are remains a question yet to be answered. We can have access only to
their masks and we can see only the faces they are holding for us. "You didn't
know Blanche"12 is relevant not only for Blanche, but much more so for Brick,
Sebastian, Skipper, and most of Williams's characters. We can peek at what is
behind the cover only through what is left uncovered, but we can never be sure
whether these uncovered spots are part of the mask or not. We are not to meet
Williams's characters on our ground, but on their own terms, listen to what they
say, and be patient not to categorize them in some already defined
compartments. As Williams states: "I've always sensed the fact that life was too
ambiguous to be... to be presented in a cut and dried fashion."13 Williams's
understanding of the self is that it can not be contained even by itself. As Stephen
Stanton claims, Williams's "romantic nature is most pronounced in his unusual
sensitivity to the multiple levels of the self."14

The critics' obsession with a stable and authentic self proves to be a
mythical misconception in their understanding of Williams's plays. Williams
does not fulfill‘our voyeurism, does not satisfy our gaze, and does not respond to
our rush to conclusions and definitions. He challenges the dominating view that
the self can be fully known and exposed. As Roy Schafer mentions, identity "is
not so much stable identity... as identity that is always at risk... Identity at risk
implies acceptance of there being no final resting place and a great need to
tolerate ambiguity, tension, and deferral of closure."15 Williams seems to hold the

same belief when writing gag. The play ends with no sense of closure. In fact, its

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ending is dislocated between the play's two textual versions: the one that
happens to be known as the Kazan or Broadway version, and the other as
Williams original version. In both versions meaning is deferred, and the
homosexual self remains unstable and ambiguous. The tension of the narrative
about the homosexual self is left unresolved, perhaps postponed, but never

slackened. As Stephen Frosh mentions:

People are not really structured in stable, integrated
ways but are, by nature, full of fluidity, contradiction,
impulse and frustration, psychological processes
brought together only to make coherence within the
domains of rationality seem attainable. For that
matter, rationality is itself an ideological fiction,
imposed upon the irrationalities of psychological
reality; intellect subordinating emotion, repression
constraining desire.16

To impose rationality upon the self is to take away from it the complexity of its
"psychological reality."

It is from this theoretical perspective that I will approach Brick's dilemma
in ea and explore the construction of the homosexual self in Williams's play. I
propose that the gay self that Williams presents to his audience in Qa_t is a
product of negotiation between the personal factors and its social environments.
It is a product of tension between its private longings and the social demands
which are being made upon it. The self is an invention and reinvention as a result
of the dialogue between these two forces. It is "a dialectical relationship with
social organization. It is full of conflict, particularly between what is desired and
what is encountered."17 The self seeks its own liberation from these social forces,
from its past, and its history that determines its destiny, but the quest for
liberation proves to be in vain as Williams demonstrates in Cg. Nicholas de
Jongh points to this identity tension in Caht and argues that Williams's play

"becomes the finest truly modern play about homosexual desire... It relates the

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demands of the public world to private lives. It questions the idea of fixed or
unchanging sexual identity and the complex tension of the conscious and
unconscious mind."18 Therefore, Qa_t can be read only through its signs and hints,
through its ellipses and erasures, through its masks and screens. It is a play of the
unspoken, a play that deals with "the thing" that does not dare speak its own
name. Q, as Roland Barthes would describe it, is a text "that discomforts...
unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions," questions
"the consistency of his tastes, values, memories," and "brings to crisis his relation
to language."19 get achieves this effect upon the audience. It shakes them out of
their comfortable composure and challenges them to reconsider their
assumptions. It questions the relationship between the signifier and the signified,
and proves that meaning may not be contained in the sign, but it may be lurking
behind the sign. Meaning is not in the text and in what the characters tell us, but

in the subtext; it is not in the linguistic sign, but in the theatrical signal.

The Gay Self: Masks and Facades

Williams has included enough hints and signals in his script to make the
audience believe that Brick may be homosexual. His nervousness, restlessness,
detachment, disgust with heterosexual physical attraction, and his alcoholism
may be seen as earmarks of his homosexual desire. De Jongh argues that Brick's
reaction to Big Daddy when the latter suggests that Brick's relationship with
Skipper might not be normal "keys with the description of the latent homosexual
who was also often characterized as alcoholic caught off-guard." De Jongh

observes that Williams's following stage description of Brick:

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His
heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his
breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse (Cat,
116)

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fits with the description of the latent homosexual:

Pressures from repressed homosexual inclinations
often produce acute or chronic anxiety neurosis.
Analysts report that anxiety states palpitations,
sweats, phobias and the like frequently turn out to be
caused by unconscious homosexual tendencies which
when they threaten to break forth into full
consciousness produce feelings of acute fear and
tension.20

De Jongh reads Brick's detachment, palpitation, sweat, and fears as the fear of the
latent homosexual whose sexuality is about to be exposed. Brick is under the
pressure of a crisis. The constant showers he takes are attempts to cleanse himself
and to put out the inner fire that he is feeling. Brick's restlessness and
detachment are not a result of his feelings of guilt over Skipper's suicide, but
more of a result of a hidden secret. Brick's hanging up the phone and his refusal
to hear Skipper's confession about his homo-erotic desire is not a secret in the
play anymore. Both Maggie and Big Daddy know about it, and that's what
torments Brick and causes all his seclusion and detachment. As Jung has pointed

out:

Nothing makes people more lonely (and perhaps
more detached) and more cut off from the fellowship
of others, than the possession of an anxiety hidden
secret. Very often it is "sinful" thoughts and deeds
that keep them apart and estrange them from one
another...21

As Jung claims , Brick's detachment is a result of a secret that he has to keep to
himself, and he can not face the others with it because of its 'sinful' nature. It is
clear that in get Brick perceives any sort of homosexual love and homosexual

couples in derogatory terms. He sees gay couples in terms of "queers, Sissies,"
and "fairies." His understanding of homosexuality is in tune with the society's

understanding that homosexuality is a religious and social aberration. Brick has

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accepted his society's harsh judgment of homosexuality unquestionably. He
describes Peter Ochello and Jack Straw as "fairies", and at this very moment

Williams adds in his stage direction:

In [Brick's] utterance of this word, we gauge the wide
and profound reach of the conventional mores he got
from the world that crowned him with early laurel

(£8.11, 122)-

Brick realizes that this society can never accept homosexuality for what it
is. This lack of tolerance and openness causes his loneliness, detachment, and
estrangement. As Foster Hirsch argues: "Brick, at any rate, is not comfortable
with his sexuality, and Williams presents his maladjustment as a result of

indoctrination by smug and intolerant straight society."22

Homophobia is so
rooted in Brick's environment and ingrained in the majority of the people's mind
that he has begun perhaps to think that they are 'right' and he is 'wrong'.

Brick tells the audience that his attachment to Skipper is not physical and
has always been sexless. He informs Big Daddy that there was no physical
contact between them except "once in a while he put his hand on my shoulder or
I'd put mine on his, oh, maybe even, when we were touring the country in pro-
football an' shared hotel-rooms we'd reach across the space between the two
beds and shake hands to say goodnight..." (123). Brick's perception of his
relationship with Skipper would be plausible, if it were not for his excessive
nervousness, his alcoholism, and his constant protestations that his relationship
with Skipper was "normal." Moreover, Skipper's confession to Brick about his
own homosexuality points out that this relationship, though it might have

seemed "normal" was, in fact, physically and sexually charged. This is perhaps

the side that Brick wants to deny in his relationship with Skipper.

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More important to this argument is Brick's relationship with Maggie and
his attitude towards heterosexual physical attraction. In his article, "Homosexual

Signs," Harold Beaver argues that

Homosexuality... transgresses against breeding... it
appears the very incarnation of social self-
destruction... It threatens to turn abundance to
sterility... it transgresses not merely against breeding
but against the institution of marriage and of the
family.23

Brick's relationship with Maggie fits with this observation. Brick refuses to go to
bed with Maggie and have physical contact with her, and therefore he refuses to
give Big Daddy, and Big Mama the grandson for which they yearn. His sexual
abstinence and alcoholism are acts of revenge against a society which does not
recognize and validate homosexual desire. They are acts of destruction against a
society that denies homosexual desire and marginalizes it. "The homosexual has
never submitted to a contract," Beaver contends, and Brick would have nullified
this contract if it were not for the social shelter against his society's homophobia
that this contract provides him." Brick does not undo his contract with Maggie,
but he has managed to empty it of the significance, the importance, and the
ramifications that his society has bestowed upon it. Unlike Mae and Cooper
whose marriage is conducive to a family and wishful financial reward, Brick has
refused to place his desire within the framework of such social transactions, and
has refused to be part of the heterosexual politics. Maggie kisses Brick on the
mouth, which "he immediately wipes with the back of his hand." Big Daddy who
notices such a gesture asks: "Why did you do that?" And Brick answers: "I don't
know. I wasn't conscious of it" (81). Such slips define the homosexual self in get,

and such hidden signals point to the homosexual subtext in Williams's play.

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The closer Maggie tries to get to Brick, the more sophisticated and
complex his masks for concealing the truth become. When Maggie puts more

stress on Brick to force him to face the truth, Brick exclairns questioningly:

I married you. Why would I marry you, if I was ----- ?
[49].

However, when Brick uses this argument to deny his homosexuality, the
audience is already aware that Brick's marriage is just a mask of mystification
and concealment. Maggie has, by this time, revealed that she has been "just a sort
of tagging along as it was necessary to chaperone" Brick and help him "to make
good public impression" (59). In her relationship with Brick, Maggie has been
used as a laissez-passer to enter the public world and acquire the seal of
conformity and acceptance. When Maggie tells Brick that at her friend Alice's
party the best looking man in the crowd followed her to the powder room and
tried "to force his way in," Brick replies coldly, "I see no reason to lock him out of

a powder room in that case." To which Margaret responds:

.. I'm not going to give you any excuse to
divorce me for being unfaithful or anything
else.

Brick: I wouldn't divorce you for being unfaithful or
anything else. Don't you know that? Hell. I
would be relieved to know that you'd found
yourself a lover (51).

This exchange between Brick and Maggie speaks to another instance earlier in
the play when Brick urges her to "take a lover!" (40). This would give him a
reason for rejecting his wife and women in general. Even though Brick would
know that Maggie is unfaithful to him, he would not divorce her, because

marriage is the public and social institution that allows him to live with his

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homosexual feelings and yet be part of the heterosexual majority of his society.
To acquire the seal of public approval and identity, Brick is willing to sacrifice
any sort of genuine feeling of love and integrity and live with fake, plastic, and
deadly cold emotions of pretense and mystification.

Maggie has always played a mandatory role between Brick and Skipper in
accommodating their desire. As Eve Sedgwick would have argued, Maggie's
relationship with Brick serves only as a way of "triangulating" the homosexual
desire in the female body. Brick has never been intimate with Maggie. Their
marriage is loveless, and we are never let to experience in Brick's relationship
with Maggie the same passion and intimacy we sense in his relationship with
Skipper even though such a relationship was never consurrunated or dramatized
on the stage. Maggie is the third part in the Maggie, Brick, and Skipper triangle.
Brick tells Big Daddy: .

I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left out
because she and me never got any closer together
than two people just get in bed, which is not much
closer than two cats on a—fence humping... (125).

Maggie, on the other hand, is recalling her sexual encounter with Skipper, tells
Brick: "we made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us!" Mark
Winchell follows this line of reasoning and argues that "paradoxically, Maggie's
body is the one place where Brick and Skipper can experience a blameless
physical communion. It has an appeal akin to what Fiedler characterizes as the
appeal of the whorehouse--'a kind of homosexuality once removed."25
Homosexuality has to be relegated to the female body, it is an entity that has to
remain only a fantasy or a dream. It is only in Maggie's body that Skipper and
Brick can have a vicarious physical encounter. The homosexual self has to be
contained, therefore, within the female body; and it is only within the

heterosexual boundaries of the female body that it can exist.

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R. M. Mansur points to the dichotomy between illusion and reality in
Brick's character. He argues that Brick's "dilemma is that of a man who knows
the painful truth about himself, but who would like to cling desperately to his
self-created illusion, and go on disintegrating rather than change for the better,"
and Mansur concludes that Brick "is an irreparable illusionist."2" Brick is aware of
his homo-erotic desire, according to Mansur, but he is also aware of the
impossibility to live with it. In fact, when we, the audience, see Brick on stage,
we see him at a very crucial extremity of his life. He is facing Skipper's death,
experiencing the pain of the loss of his friend, and trying to reconstruct for
himself an illusion by which he can find consolation and comfort again. Brick at
this moment is on the crossroads of the past and the future, the past where he
has managed to convince himself that his relationship with Skipper is a pure
friendship that does not involve any homosexual feeling between them, and the
future where he has to save his face from the humilations that the others may
cause him because of this relationship. The turning point in Brick's life is the
moment when he receives Skipper's phone call admitting his homosexual
feelings for Brick. This moment in Brick's life denotes the shattering of Brick's
past illusion that his relationship with Skipper is not homosexual and marks the
beginning of another role he has to play to conceal the nature of this relationship.

Skipper's voice on the phone is the voice that Brick does not want to hear.
Brick's refusal to speak with Skipper is an attempt to deny and suppress his own
feelings. He wants to disown these feelings because he is afraid that once the
unspeakable is spoken, it can never be denied. Brick prefers to live with the
illusion of denial rather than with the reality of what he is. It is more comfortable

for him to deny and neglect his identity and private self as a homosexual than to

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deal with Skipper, because he will have ultimately to deal with his emotions and
come to terms with himself. Brick's fear does not stem from this over-taxing self-
fulfillment, but rather from the others' reactions to homosexuality. Brick shouts
at Big Daddy breathlessly: "Don't you know how people feel about things like
that? How disgusted they are by things like that?"(121). For Brick, homosexuality
is a terrifying inadmissible truth because it is inevitably public. "Brick simply
can't acknowledge the homosexual tendency within himself," Nancy Tischler
argues, "because he accepts the world's judgment upon it."27 Even though his
relationship with Maggie is unsatisfactory and unhappy, Brick wants to live
within those enclosing boundaries of this relationship, because they give him the
comfort and safety of normalcy and conformity. He is afraid that his passion
might compel him to break his matrimonial and family ties and force him into
exile and loneliness. Brick finds ease by being with the others even though the
others are strangers to him. He does not want to hear Skipper for fear the eyes
and the tongues of others might tear them to pieces and force them into a more
deadly seclusion. Consequestly, he wears different masks and puts on other
faked faces so that he might be able to survive. The mask is social, a result of the
fear and anxiety from society. In puffing on all these faces, Brick is trying to find
a compromise between his private and public selves. He is trying to be in the
mainstream. Gerald Weales argues that Brick refuses to consider the possibility
of his homosexuality because "society condemns the homosexual and demands
that he conform or face rejection. Brick chooses to- reject rather than be rejected, to
drink in disgust at society, but he carries with him the pretenses of that society,
the need to lie about his sexuality."28 Brick's lies and masks are attempts to
achieve conformity. With every lie, and every mask, Williams points to the

bottomless nature of Brick's tragedy.

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Maggie draws the audience's attention to Brick's role-playing. It is Maggie
who tells us that Brick is avoiding to deal with Skipper, and who tells us how
Skipper and Brick were trying to convince themselves that their relationship was
'pure,’ 'innocent,’ and 'normal! To cloak their intimate relationship with
normalcy and commonness, Brick and Skipper form a football team that allows
them to be as close to each other as they want to be, yet at the same time avoid
any homosexual intimacy in their relationship. As Mark Winchell argues, this
football team allows Brick and Skipper "to foster the illusion that they are still
boys... they are safe in their homo erotic Eden."29 Margaret confronts Brick with
the truth that he and Skipper "organized The Dixie Stars that fall, so [they] could
keep on bein' teammates forever! but somethin' was not right with it!... between
[them]" (60). It is this confrontation with the truth that compels Brick to retreat
into seclusion and total detachment. Brick is afraid that more intimate, sincere
and honest communication with Maggie would strip off the illusions and the
masks he is wearing. He is afraid that his fate would be identical to that of
Skipper when Maggie confronted him and "destroyed him, by telling him the
truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in... had told him
could not be told" (60). Brick once again, evades this truth. Towards the end of
his private conversation with Maggie about the nature of his relationship with
Skipper, Brick feels that the truth is about to be revealed and his identity is about
to be discovered, thus he resorts to more masking and disguise. Seizing the

opportunity his niece provides him when she comes up-stairs, he says:

Tell the folks to come up!--Bring everybody
upstairs!... Little girl! Go on, go on, will you? Do what
I told you, call them! (57-8).

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Brick wants the others to invade the private space that Maggie has secured for
herself to talk with him and to trace back the secret of his relationship with
Skipper. The family members are used as a means of confining and restricting
this space so that any sort of genuine revelatory communication between him
and Maggie is restrained.

Brick's sense of detachment and superficial involvement is a strategy in
his battle for survival. It is a defensive measure to which he resorts for fear of
being attacked and discovered. It is only through silence that he can assert
himself and feel that he is being accepted as one of the others. Williams is careful
to render Brick's psychological confinement to his audience. In fact, when we
first hear Brick, we hear him speaking from the enclosed and confined space of
the shower. The sound of the running water materializes the psychological
barriers that Brick has erected between himself and Maggie. It is only through
shouting and screaming that Maggie can reach Brick. Throughout the play, we
see more physical facts about this psychological detachment. Brick appears "in a
white towel-cloth robe" (32) in the first act, and in a "white silk pajamas" in the
third act (103). Although white is the color that might symbolize the state of
innocence, idealism, and purity that Brick wants to convey to the others, it can
also suggest the lack of involvement and attachment in Brick's character. White is
the color that has no color, in the same way as Brick is the character that has lost
any personal traits, and has become colorless for fear any other color that he
should have might be rejected on the basis of being different, abnormal, and
strange.

In the course of the play, Brick's mask of detachment becomes more and
more conspicuous. Williams's stage directions describing the protagonist tell us
that "a tone of politely feigned interest, masking indifference, or worse, is the

characteristic of his speech with Margaret" (19). Williams further adds that Brick

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"has the additional charm of that cool air of detachment [of] people who have
given up the struggle" (19). The struggle that Brick has given up is that of his
private self versus his public self, the struggle of being different, self-assertive,
and truthful, yet recognized rather than rejected for being so. Brick finds
compromise between these conflicting tensions in his solitary confinement. He
talks to Maggie in abrupt sentences. He is "faintly vague," and answers Maggie's
questions in very unsatisfactory short answers. Brick wants to keep Maggie at a
distance, to the extent that he can retreat to himself, give the illusion of normalcy,
and enjoy the "solid quiet... perfect unbroken quiet" (91). Through this
detachment, Brick "exiles himself into his own narrow shrinking universe,
distracting himself from the outside world by tuning in T.V. or singing a song. At
almost every juncture, Brick refuses conversation, avoiding it as he would a
contagious disease."30

In his conversation with Big Daddy, Brick becomes even more tragic and
also more resourceful in his diversionary and misleading tactics. By subscribing
to this hostile homophobic discourse, Brick reaches the endless bottom of his
tragedy. Brick labels Jack Straw and Peter Ochello with the very pejorative terms
that the others would use to label him. He calls both Jack and Peter "old sisters,"
"queers," "fairies" and "Sissies," and speaks about homosexuality in terms of
"sodomy," "dirty things," and "unnatural things." Brick's discourse shows us how
self-loathing he has become. He has totally erased his identity as a homosexual to
avoid the hostility of the homophobic others. He has become just an erasure and
a role to play so that he can avoid the animosity and antagonism of the others.

Not only has Brick become more tragic in his conversation with Big
Daddy, but also more evasive and misleading. At the very moment when the
truth is imminent and Big Daddy named the lie with which Brick tries to live,

Brick proves to be even more evasive. Big Daddy confronts:

90

Anyhow now!--we have tracked down the lie with
which you're disgusted and which you are drinking
to kill your disgust with, Brick... This disgust with
mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!--dug the
grave of your friend and kicked him in it!--before
you'd face truth with him! (127).

But Brick denies: "[Skipper's] truth, not mine!" To top it all Brick decides to use
Big Daddy's truth about his cancer which has been kept from him as a means of
diversion and escape. Ironically, Big Daddy's truth is manipulated by Brick to
conceal another truth. Big Daddy, who is helping Brick to face the truth, can not
himself face his own. He screams and shouts "with a fierce revulsion," leaving
the stage "lying! Dying! Liars!" (131); and Brick remains standing alone on the
stage as he has always wanted to be.

The consequence of these masks and screens that Brick uses as means of
evasion from the truth of his homosexuality is that he and the audience would
never have the chance to know the 'real' Brick, if such a real Brick were ever to
exist. Brick's reality becomes a fiction of his own construction. The self is a fiction
that we create and an image that we market. Brick wants to cater to his society a
very specific image of his own, and this image is created and designed after the
prescriptions that his society expects from him. Brick's self is a prescriptive self. It
follows pre-supposed expectations and certain social needs. The homosexual self,
in get, can not write its own script, and create its own discourse. And if it does, it
has to follow the prescriptions of the social forces which contrive to deny its
existence, and refuse to give it the legitimacy that it is longing for. It has to be
told from the others' pOint of view. Skipper is dead and therefore cannot talk
about it, and Brick is left too numb to describe it to his audience. The homosexual

self is edified by characters who exist 'outside' the homosexual circle— characters

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like Big Daddy, Maggie, and Mae and Cooper. Thus, the authentic self remains
an ontological impossibility.

Brick's self has turned out to be performative. We don't know the 'real
Brick' in the same way as we don't know the 'real Blanche' that Stella tries to tell
us about. Both Brick and Blanche are performing a role of themselves. Blanche is
performing to her sister, to Stanley, and to his friends; while Brick is performing
to Big Daddy, Maggie, and the rest of his family. The role that they are to play
and the self become synonymous. They are what they are performing. Both
Blanche and Brick are obsessed with their showers, and their cleansing, both are
dealing with their "disgust" with the idea that homosexuality is closer to them
more than they want to think. Blanche is purging herself of the feeling of guilt at
her homosexual husband's death, and Brick is coping with his homosexual
friend's suicide. Brick's case might be more complex than Blanche's in the sense
that he is what he is repelling and what he is pretending not to be. Blanche uses
her clothes to play all these roles, She is aware of the subtle effect that colors
might have on her audience. She made her appearance on the stage in a white
dress; and Brick spends most of the play in his white pajamas. Purity is what
they are longing for and what they want to communicate to the others. The mask
drops only in fleeting moments. In a moment of frankness and honesty, Blanche
decides to get rid of the mask for a while. In a theatrical gesture she turns to the
audience and rolls up her eyes in an act of self-mockery, and disdain at the moral
codes and hypocrisy to which she is abiding. Blanche generates a small space
where she can be herself for a while. Similarly, when Brick is about to face the
truth with Maggie, he asks his niece to bring people up at the very moment when
Maggie is about to reveal the truth about his relationship with Skipper. Both
know how to manipulate their private or public space to protect themselves.

Both Blanche and Brick are toning down themselves in order to pass and to be

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accepted. Both are aware that they need to cater and to hide, to shimmer and to
mystify, to pretend and to deny in order to be accepted in their immediate
environment. The result is that their identity is blurred and blended into the
performative self; and the former becomes the latter and vice versa. As Arnold

Modell argues:

As a consequence, the individual loses touch with the
vital affective core of the self, and life loses its zest
and meaning. Some individuals become estranged
and decentered from their own private self and are as
false and inauthentic within themselves as they are
with others. In the struggle to preserve private space
they therefore achieve a tragic pyrrhic victory.
Ironically, the fight to protect the private self
continues even after the individual has lost contact
with it... In closing oneself off from others, one
inadvertently closes oneself off from oneself.”

Brick is doomed to be only the mask of who he is. Appearance takes
precedence over the essence. Indeed, this essence dissolves to become only
appearance. Even if it remains, there is no way for the audience to know this
essence and to understand it comprehensively. "The means employed to protect
private space against intrusion by others is also re-created within the self," as
Arnold Modell demonstrates.32

Big Daddy seems to behave that behind these layers of masquerade, Brick
is hiding an authentic self and a real identity that he can extract in a moment of
truthful communication. He wants to cut through what he calls "scruples,
convention, crap" (95) of existence, and gets to thetruth of Brick's alcoholism,
detachment, and wasted life. He expects Brick to dig into his past relationship
with Skipper, examine his marriage with Maggie, and look back at his life to
reach a sort of self-revelation that may allow him to gain his life back. Big Daddy

believes that the self can understand itself through self-examination and

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introspective and retrospective examination. Big Daddy believes that Brick can
realize the mendacity of his existence, remove the screens and masks he lives
with and be able to live a life of honesty and authenticity. However, these
attempts towards the truth and authentic self prove to be in vein.

There is no moment of self-revelation or self—understanding in g;a_t. All the
characters remain locked in the self—illusion they construct. In no moment do
they reach to each other, and the self is presented with no exit and no escape. Big
Daddy himself who is trying to reach an authenticity and genuineness with

Brick, suggests 'mendacity' as a way of living. He screams and shouts to Brick:

I lived with mendacity!» why can't you live with it,
there's nothing... there's nothing else to live with
except mendacity, is there? (111).

Even though Big Daddy reveals self-awareness about the quality of his existence,
he does not seem to be able to find an alternative. He is suggesting to Brick

exactly what he is trying to escape from. His moment of self-awareness:

Think of all the lies I got to put up with!--Pretenses!
Ain't that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you
don't think or feel or have any idea of... Having for
instance to act like I care for Big Mama!- I haven't
been able to stand the sight, sound, or smell of that
woman for forty years now!--even when I laid her!--
regular as a piston... (110).

remains unrealized and never to be materialized later in the play. He suggests to
Brick what he is repelled from. The breakthrough from a world of pretenses and
mendacity does not seem to be within Big Daddy's or Brick's reach. The self is
locked into its performativity. It has to perform its roles no matter how
pretentious and inauthentic such roles might be. No essence is beyond the role,

and no reality beyond the illusion. Big Daddy can not face his own truth either.

94

He prefers the illusion to the reality. Brick confronts him with the reality of his

cancer, and Big Daddy responds with devastation and screams:

All - lying sons of lying bitches! Yes, all liars, all
liars, all lying dying liars!... Lying! Lying! Liars!...
(131).

To remove all these thick screens and big walls separating him from Brick,
and to understand and reach out to his son, Big Daddy has walked into Brick's
private space. The bedroom is the place where Big Daddy tries to invite Brick to
open up to him. Even though it may seem to be just a bedroom, one can see in it
the very characteristics of the homosexual closet where the homosexual identity

is usually constructed. In his "Notes for the Designer," Williams writes that the

bedroom that Maggie and Brick share

Hasn't changed much since it was occupied by the
original owners of the place Jack Straw and Peter
Ochello, a pair of old bachelors who shared this room
all their lives together. In other words, the room must
evoke some ghosts, it is gently and poetically haunted
by a relationship that must have involved a
tenderness which was uncommon (15).

This room represents the new homosexual politics that exists within the politics
and economics of a heterosexual culture, yet it questions and redefines this
culture. The room is a place where the homosexual desire is conceived and the
homosexual politics and economies are originated. Peter Ochello and Jack Straw
created their own family in this room, and the plantation that Big Daddy
inherited is the embodiment and the fruit of this consumed homosexual desire.
The room stands for another subversive alternative to the predominant
traditional understanding of the notion of family, and illustrates how other
alternatives can be possible. Yet, this room is also the object of the heterosexual

gaze, the object of Mae's and Gooper's voyeurism, Big Mama's intrusions, and

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the Reverend Tooker's curiosity. It is a place of social, political, and religious
surveillance. Every character in the play including Gooper's and Mae's children,
the no-neck monsters, want to know what happens behind the closed doors of
this closet. They are all spies lurking behind its walls eavesdropping and trying
to understand the mystery and the exoticism of the closet. The bedroom fits with
Sedgwick's description of the closet. Allowing the audience to catch a glimpse
into the closet, a site that Eve Sedgwick has postulated as an epistemological,
"curious space that is both internal and marginal to the culture: centrally
representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even while
marginalized by its orthodoxies."33 The closet is a place of fascination, yet of fear,
that all the characters are curious about while afraid to enter and be part of it.
Reverend Tooker, Mae, and Cooper are curious to know what happens in side
this room, but one cannot imagine their wanting to be associated or a part of this
closet, or subjects to such curiosity and voyeurism themselves.

Brick's room is analogous, as Savran explains, to Barthes's description of
what he calls the "Racinian Antechamber: a space between, a room in which one
waits, 'a site of language! of debate that stands in opposition to the turbulence
outside!“ This place maybe a place of inward turmoil, a place of fear and
anxiety that the hidden secret might become suddenly an open secret, and what
is private might turn to be public. Yet, it is a place of serenity and peace. It is a
refugee from "the turbulence outside," it is a place of privacy and eroticism, and
honesty and frankness. This room is the place where "the homosexual subject is
constituted" as David Savran argues. The closet sets the demarcation lines and
the only legitimate space where the gay self can exist in a homophobic and
intolerant culture. Once the boundaries of the closet are removed, the
homosexual self has to face either the threat of violence and aggression or the

embodiment by the heterosexual culture. Brick, in retreating more and more into

96

his closet, and thus adding one mask and one screen after another to his make
up, is, in fact, protecting his homosexual identity from the ferocity of Mae and
Cooper, and even Maggie, and all the demands that the heterosexual culture is
making upon him. True but sad, the homosexual identity can not survive outside
its closet, and Williams is aware that the 1950's is not the ideal decade of
unconditional tolerance.

Brick's bedroom is an inward space as well. The closet is not a
geographical space, it is rather a virtual space and so is the bedroom where Big
Daddy is trying to handle his conversation with his son, Brick. The setting is not

realistic. Williams states:

The set should be far less realistic than I have so far
implied in this description of it... The walls below the
ceiling should dissolve mysteriously into air; the set
should be roofed by the sky; stars and moon
suggested by traces of milky pallor, as if they were
observed through a telescope lens out of focus (16).

Williams, from The Qaee Menagerie, through A Streetcar M grate, to Qa_t
9g e _H_o_t Iii; R_oqf, has always been interested in a sort of plastic theater and
transparent scenery which allow the audience to see what they usually can not
see. The walls of Williams's screens are transparent in Streetcar, and the
projection of shots from the past on large screens in Menagerie invites the
audience to see the emotional coloring that the characters are experiencing
during the moment of performance, and brings the past and the present together
in the now of the performance. In his book, Deeim'g fo_r_ Q Theatre, Jo
Mielziner believed that Williams was concerned with a drama that can
externalize "the inner man and made his spiritual longings a concrete viability on

stage." Mielziner's description of Menagerie's setting rings true as well for get:

97

My use of translucent and transparent scenic interior
walls was not just another trick. It was a true
reflection of the contemporary playwright's interest
in... and at times obsession with... the exploration of
inner man. Williams was writing not only a memory
play, but a play of influences that were not confined
within the walls of a room.35

This description is appropriate to get as well. The room takes an interior
dimension. It is an inward space that correlates with Brick's mind and yet it is an
externalized space that transcends the walls and the geographical limitations of a
room. It is a room where the past survives and shapes the present. It is a room
whose walls open up to an unlimited horizon, a horizon of the stars and the
moon, it is a horizon of other possibilities that may be available. It is a room
where Peter Ochello and Jack Straw worked hard and died to make such
possibilities come true. Brick misses such possibilities not because he is not
willing to live up to his options, but because the voice of his society torments him
and its view on homosexuality dooms him to marginalization and gives him the
label of an outcast. The voice of the public Brick has toned down the voice of the
private Brick. The homosexual identity is destined to remain a torn identity- an
identity in constant risk of loss-- loss of respect, integrity, and longings. The
homosexual self is a story of doubt. It is afraid that if it asks for more, it might
lose what it already has- no matter how little that might be. The homosexual self
can survive only in the darkness of the closet in Qa_t for fear that any bright light
might blur it, freeze it, or even annihilate it as what happened to Skipper in Q;
Allan Grey in Streetcar, and Sebastian in Suddenly Les; Summer. The
homosexual self prefers this darkness to light because it is delicate and fragile; it
is an identity in its embryonic stage, and any outside element that is strange to
the closet might contribute to its extermination. The closet does not shed much
light on the homosexual self, but it tells more about the society where the gay self

tries to exist. It does not speak to the luck of courage in the gay self to confront

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and blurt its homosexuality in every face, but it tells something about the
cowardice of the society which is intolerant to difference. It is a society that is
afraid, insecure, lacks maturity, and not confident yet to deal with differences. It
is scared and appalled, because it has failed to make everyone conform to its
norms and regulations. The American society has not succeeded yet in
accommodating the homosexual self. It can not remove the boundaries of the
closet; and if it does, it is only to threaten and to deny. It aims at deluding the

gay self into a culture that has never secured a safe zone for the gay identity.

The Gay Self and the Critics

The homosexual self that Williams constructed for his audience in the
1950's, and 1960's has become the subject of criticism from different critics. It is
argued that Williams has resorted to a language of accommodation to dramatize
the homosexual identity on the Broadway stage. For some critics, Williams's
homosexual self is not affirmative. It points to its own erasure more than to its
own assertiveness. It claims its absence more than it states its presence. It is an
understatement of what it should be, and it is devoid of its own voice and
complexity. Supporters of the Gay Liberation accuse Williams of evasion and
indirectness. Graham Jackson, for instance, points out that Williams did not

bring up the issue of homosexuality as a subject itself:

In Williams' plays, homosexuality is implied but
never actually stated—that is, until 1968... In his earlier
plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, gamino Bil, Qa_t
Ln e _H_ot I'm Roof, Suddenly _La_st Summer, and fie
M_il_l_< Train Dgsn't me Here All}: Mere,
homosexuality is the thing never named, or talked
about only in whispers, behind closed shutters. It is
the thing Blanche saw when she opened; that door
she should never have opened, it is the thing Maggie
alludes to when she talks about the strange
relationship between Brick and Skipper; or it is the

 

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thing that leads to a grisly death on the streets of
Cabeza de Lobo, the thing Catherine Holly will not
stop talking about, the thing Mrs. Venable wants to
cut out of Catherine's head--always the Unnamable
Thing.36

According to Graham Jackson, homosexuality is always an issue of 'hush... hush'
for fear the unspoken is articulated, and the entity which does not speak its
name becomes an open matter. Homosexuality, Jackson contends, remains "a
thing" in Williams's plays "always the unnamable thing" that has to remain
under covers and smoke screens.

Albert Devlin tends to agree with Jackson's claim. Devlin recognizes that
Williams is complicit in the construction of "the speechless self" of Brick, even
though Devlin recognizes that Williams does not have another choice in the
ways to represent the gay self.37 Therefore, according to such critics, the
homosexual self is relegated to a secondary position in Williams's plays, and it is
communicated only through metaphors of mutilation and annihilation. The split
and incomplete self is the metaphor of the gay self. The split self in Menagerie”
and m T_wg-Charaeter P_lay depicted as male and female, in SW a_n_d_
M as body and soul, in T_he liege Tattoo as desire and fidelity, becomes a

 

metaphor for the gay identity. It speaks for the incompletion, the dividedness,
and the erasure of this identity. It speaks for the way the gay self is split
between the 'conventionality' of its society, and the 'unconventionality' of its
own desire, and its 'illegitimate' private longings, and its need to conform and
be publicly accepted according to the codes and norms of behavior.
Homosexuality is never allowed to be a name of its own in Williams's plays.
Williams's gay self is not affirmative according to some critics. John Clum
argues that (it is a frustrating play because the "potential of an abiding love

between two men" is being mutilated. "Homosexuality," for Clum, "is linked to

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an inability to grow up into any kind of relationship" in Williams's play. It
remains unrecognized and yet to be materialized. Williams has failed as Clum
argues "to forge a positive language for the homosexual love the play tries to
affirm!” Clum argues that the only positive and affirmative presentation of the
homosexual self is to be found in the stage directions to which the audience has
no access. He recognizes that Jack Straw and Peter Ochello are not the
stereotypical homosexual characters and "do not carry the freight of negative
stereotypes other Williams homosexuals carry: they are not frail like Blanche
DuBois's suicidal husband; nor voracious pederasts like Sebastian Venable... nor
are they self-hating like Skipper!”0 However, "beyond the stage directions, there
is no positive language for Straw and Ochello." If there is any positive tone to
the gay identity in Q, it remains beyond the ears of the audience, for this tone
is locked into the undramatized stage directions of Williams's play. The only
voice we are meant to hear in _C_a_t, is that of Brick's homophobic attacks on
Ochello and Straw. The positive and affirmative homosexual self remains not
only invisible but also silent.

Williams's claims about Brick's sexuality have added more frustration to
the critics. Williams is evasive when he talks about Brick. In an interview with
Arthur Waters, he suggests that "Brick is definitely not a homosexual...
although I do suggest that, at least at some time in his life, there have been
unrealized abnormal tendencies [in his characterl!"1 In his response to Walter
Kerr's charge that Williams is being evasive about Brick's sexuality in get,
Williams poses the question: "Was Brick homosexual?" and answers: "he
probably,-no, I would even say quite certainly-~went no further, in physical
expression than clasping Skipper's hand across the space between their twin
beds in hotel rooms--and yet his sexual nature was not innately' normal.""2

More evasive than Brick is Williams himself regarding Brick's sexuality. He

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points to the duality of Brick's sexuality, but never denies at least his
protagonist's homosexuality even though he denies the possibility of physical
- love between Brick and Skipper. Williams labels Brick's tendencies as "not quite
normal," and adds that his sexual nature was not "innately normal." Such claims
and such non-affirmative representation of the gay self is perceived by critics as
Williams' way to accommodate the gay cause to the comfort zone of the majority

of his heterosexual audience. Williams claims:

You still want to know why I don't write a gay play? I
don't find it necessary. I could express what I wanted
to express through other means. I would be
narrowing my audience a great deal... I wish to have a
broad audience because the major thrust of my work
is not sexual orientation, it's social. I'm not about to
limit myself to writing about gay people..."3

Such a statement was seen by some critics as Williams abandonment of the gay
cause for the sake of the audience's approval and validation. John Clum claims

that:
If one's goal is the approbation, and financial reward,
of a broad audience, then one must not 'force upon'
that audience any more than they find acceptable.
Like many closeted homosexuals... Williams has a
fine sense of how much people 'want to know!“

John Clum reveals a sort of paradox between what Williams claims to
achieve and what he really sets up to fulfill. John Clum observes that on one
hand Williams claims "the highly personal nature of his work and of his close
relationship with his characters," but on the other hand, he does not really launch
himself to achieve what he sets up for himself to achieve. Q11, according to Clum,
does not "conform" with Williams's assertion: "I draw all my characters from my

self. I can't draw a character unless I know it within myself!“l5 Thus, the ultimate

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conclusion, for Clum, is that Cit is not a gay play, but rather a heterosexual play.
"Williams... has written here a virulently heterosexist play," Clum observes. Once
again, the creator is being separated from his creation, and Williams is being
distanced from his own work and from his own plays which are and remain to
be the only space that he could secure to reveal his tension and to resolve much
of the maladjustment that his society brought upon him. Even the space that
Williams has secured for himself is being taken away from him. Williams is
denied the security of this space he created for himself, and he is being denied
the comfort that it brings upon him. Williams is presented again with a large gap
and a huge distance that separate him from his work. He has spent all his life
longing for a life-long companionship. His plays present the only affirmation life
gave him that such an option is possible for him. unfortunately, critics took away
from him the only confirmation and affirmation for such a possibility. Clum's
claim is not different from that of Mark Winchell's about Streetcar where he
argues that Williams, the homosexual playwright, ended up by writing a
heterosexist play.“ The absence of an assertive homosexual identity does not
imply that Williams ended up by writing a heterosexist play. It rather implies
that Williams was operating under a political environment and an ideological
framework that come between the creator and his own creation to dictate to him
the type of play he could write, and to force him into a particular discourse about
homosexuality. Such discourse may be limiting and confining, yet Williams was
able, in fact, to find the place where such a discourse could be turned against
itself, and where what might seem to be accommodationist is subversive, and
what is non-affirmative is, indeed, challenging and assertive. The homosexual
self that Williams is presenting to his audience is the product of a negotiation. It
is a self which is negotiating its own space, and trying to explore the in-between

liminal spaces where it can claim its own complexity. The homosexual identity in

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Cit is a result of negotiation with its political, social, and historical environment.
To deny such factors in the construction of the gay self in Qa_t is to mutilate this
self one step further, and to take from Williams the credit that should be
attributed to him for being able to speak the unspeakable, and to tell a story that

was rarely told on Broadway stage.

The Negotiative and Affirmative Gay Self

As J. F. Buckles demonstrates, the self is always "negotiating with and
within its relationships with socializing forces and cannot escape being pulled to
and from by norms and language and social institutions!” The self is not a total
autonomous entity. It exists in a context that shapes it, even though such a
context is similarly shaped by this self. The relationship is interactive, and so is
the self. To believe in a totally independent and autonomous self is to deprive it
of its social context, and to end up by creating an ideal self that does not exist at
first place. It seems to me that when critics are arguing that Williams does not
create an assertive and affirmative gay self, they are, in fact, arguing for an ideal
self that did not exist in Williams's time i.e. the 1940's and 1950's, and does not
exist even in the second half of the twentieth century. They are demanding that
Williams create a self that is isolated from its cultural and political context-- a
homosexual self that is cut off from the homophobia of the time, and the
internalized fears and worries that homosexuals had to live with because of such
homophobia. They expect from Williams magic and not reality, and Williams
was definitely unwilling to feed his homosexual and heterosexual audience alike
the illusion of perfection and social justice that proves to be only an ideal.
Williams takes illusions away, removes the facades, and deals with the screens
we construct to create such illusions. Whether his audience, reviewers, or critics

are ready to deal with the ugliness of this reality is a decision that is left up to

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them to make. Williams did not give us the perfect gay self in Qa_t, but instead, a
self in constant negotiation—a self in a state of fluctuation and constantly under a
sort of adjustment that speaks for its maladjustment in a society of conformity
and rigidity. As Ellis Hanson says: "any sexual identity is not an immutable
essence, but a performance, a negotiation, 'peace talks'" of a sort.48 The
homosexual self in Qa_t is in 'peace talks' with Maggie, Big Daddy, and the rest of
the Pollitt family. It is in constant conversation with Brick himself, Skipper, the
past, the present, and its future. It is in negotiation with the political and social
forces of the time period. It is in a dialogue with the homophobia of the 1950's
and the moral strict codes of Broadway and Hollywood. It is in and out for
dialogues and adjustments. These are the demands and the requirements of a
struggle for survival. To ask Williams not to adopt the techniques of
masquerading, evasion, and erasure is to ask him to be suicidal, and to abort the
homosexual self that he wants to dramatize on Broadway stage in its cradle.
Williams's homosexual self is a sign that refers us back to the time period, the
political, social, and cultural milieu which have produced it. Such a sign reads
well. It points to the limitations within which the homosexual self can operate,
but also subverts these limitations, asserts itself, and claims itself for what it is.
Williams presents a homosexual self with and without a make up. The screens
and the facades are its make up, but this make up is part of it- part of the gay
identity. It is a forced choice that gays do not have the right to reject. A better
alternative might be there, but the willingness of the 'American culture' and the

gay self as well to admit such an alternative as an Option is not necessarily

granted.

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As the historian Martin Duberman remembered: "It took an enormous
amount of courage to openly declare yourself to be a lesbian or a gay male!“
There was no safe zone for gays and lesbians in the 1940's and the 1950's. Charles

Kaiser witnesses to such a hard fact:

When you were born in the late twenties or early
thirties, which is my generations--I was born in thirty-
six--it was a disgrace to be gay. There's something
wrong with you. You're an embarrassment to your
family--you're a 'sissy,’ you're a 'fairy,' you're a
'panflsy.‘ Whatever the appropriate words were of that
era.

To be gay is a social and political embarrassment. Gay men were perceived as a

social danger and a threat to the national security:

By the end of the 1950's, the anti-homosexual
campaign had spread far beyond the government and
military. Fanatical vice squads arrested countless men
and women in gay and lesbian bars, cruising areas
and even their homes, while local newspapers printed
the names and addresses of these "perverts"... In 1958,
a Florida legislator even succeeded in dismissing
sixteen faculty and staff members from the State
University in Gainsesville on charges of
homosexuality.51

Homosexuality is a perversion, a charge, and a crime requiring punishment and
rehabilitation. There were no possibilities outside the norm. The social
expectations are not to be curbed. Charles Kaiser demonstrates the ideal
respected and accepted picture of a family is of a male and female couple with
"three children, a barbecue, and a two-car garage." The 1950's and 1960's were a
time period where "conformity of every kind was king."52

Hollywood and Broadway were not free from such homophobia and
conformity. Art was supposed to reinforce rather than subvert the already
existing social and political beliefs. Art was not expected to question the ideals

that people were made to hold about their lives. "For the New York theater, like

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Hollywood," David Savran claims "was subject to strict legislative censorship
that worked in complicity with the severe ideological constraints of the period."
He adds: "Dating back to the passage of the so called Wales Padlock Law in 1927,
plays which 'depict[ed] or deal[t] with, the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex
perversion were prohibited from the New York stage!"33 Homosexuality falls
under such prohibitions. "In 1934 the Hollywood production code banned all
representations of homosexuality in films," Savran wrote, and "the National
office for Decent Literature of the Catholic Church impelled 'publishers and
newspaper editors' to practice 'a form of self-censorship that kept homosexuality
virtually out of print!”

Williams was operating under such codes of limitations and inhibitions.
His art had to fit with prescriptions and regulations. As David Savran points out,
"Williams insisted, with some justification, that he could not stage his
homosexuality directly or candidly during the 1940's and 50's, believing that
'there would be no producer for it' given the homophobic program of the
Broadway theater."55 Williams faced such a problem not only when writing his
scripts, but also when translating them into movies. The homosexual theme had
to be further blurred and erased in the motion picture, and the possible
homosexual relationship between Skipper and Brick had to be removed. Instead
of such a relationship, Brick is represented as the illusionist athlete who wants to
live in the past. He is a young man who does not want to grow up and to assume
the responsibilities of the reality, and the requirement that his family and his
wife are making upon him. The homosexual theme is toned down, and more
emphasis is placed upon sports and Brick's past as an all-American athlete. Brick
is not represented as a man who refuses to fulfill his sexual and physical 'duties'
towards his wife, but rather as a man who might have lost his impotence but not

his desire, to perform with his wife. As Maurice Yacowar states, "Richard Brooks

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adds a shot of Brick in the bathroom, burying his face in Maggie's slip and
caressing it in agony!“ The effect of such a scene is to suggest "that Brick still
desires his wife" therefore, his heterosexual desire is not under question. What is
being questioned instead is his physical capacities to perform the role that is
bestowed upon him. The screens and covers that Williams uses to depict
homosexuality and to construct the homosexual self are not a matter of choice as
much as a question of survival. Gore Vidal believes that the very few artists
whose homosexuality was not a hidden secret to the critics all paid a significant
price for their frankness and honesty?‘7 The critics were not welcoming to
Williams's plays, and he was not willing to meet these critics on a safe ground,
and give them the certainties that they were looking for. Theywere ruthless and
unsympathetic to him and to his characters, and he was willing to protect his
characters even through evasion and lies.

The homosexual identity that Williams constructed is itself a result of the
homophobia of the reviewers and the critics. Had Williams presented them with
a more openly gay character, the critics and the reviewers' attacks would
probably not have been any less tolerant and accepting. Perhaps, in such a case,
the critics would have found a more firm moral ground to attack him and raise
doubts about his literary abilities. The critics can pretend to be confused by
Williams's characters, about Brick and his sexuality, but it is also obvious that
they themselves are evasive and mendacious. The reviewers were reluctant to
point out the possibility of Brick's homosexuality. In his review, Brooks Atkinson
includes not a single reference to Brick's dilemma or to his relationship with
Skipper. In the reviews where Brick's and Skipper's relationship was mentioned,
it was not recognized for what it is, but it was exposed to be condemned and
rejected on the very moral and social basis that Williams is criticizing in his play.

Such critics become themselves the very epitome of the "conventional lie" and the

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mendacity that Williams is arguing against. "There is the implication, at least,
that the most motivation in the play derives from an unnatural relationship"
between Brick and Skipper, John McClain wrote.58 McClain is deploring
homosexuality, and not accepting it, he is condemning rather than
understanding. Later, and in her first book on Williams published in 1961, Nancy
Tischler repeatedly refers to homosexuality as a "perversion" that requires "the
inevitable punishment."59 Brick's homosexuality, for Tischler, is a sickness. She
asks: "Is brick a homosexual, if he is, can he be cured?" Brick needs a "cure"
according to Tischler, and this remedy can be sought only in his "conversion" to
heterosexuality!50 Such a tone is to be echoed in later academic works on
Williams. Francis Donahue refers to Brick's and Skipper's relationship as "the
unnatural affiliation."61 Such attitudes reveal how much resistance these critics
are exercising not to read Williams's plays. They are reading Williams's work
extrinsically rather than intrinsically for Williams has never meant to portray
homosexuality as a perversion and the sense of mutilation and incompletion,
usually associated with the homosexual self in Williams's plays, does not shed
lights on homosexuality as a perversion as such as much as it tells us about the
norms and conventions which could not accept and recognize this
homosexuality. Williams's gay self is the product of this academic and
institutional homophobia. To be illusive is a necessity, and to be evasive is not a
question of choice. The gay self can not bear the bright lights of Broadway's
theaters. It is to remain a shadow that lurks behind the curtain. As David Savran
argues, Williams's presentation of homosexuality has to be "ubiquitous and
elusive. It structures and informs all his texts, yet rarely, especially in his plays,
produces the (un) equivocally homosexual character that most critics look for in
attempting to identify a homosexual text. Instead, Williams's homosexuality is

endlessly refracted in his work, translated, reflected, and transposed." It is this

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homophobia that forces the gay self in Williams's plays to be so, i.e. "translated,
reflected, and transposed!"52 The homosexual self in _C_a_t_ is a result of the social,
political, and academic attitudes of the time.

One can read Williams's plays in parallel with his Memoirs, his letters,
and other private writings such as his journals. The most obvious outcome that
such private writings point to is that if the social attitudes towards
homosexuality had been more tolerant and accepting, Williams might have
presented us with a gay self with a different make up. As Foster Hirsch notices,
Williams's Memoire "doesn't change the plays, but it compels us to admit their
masks and transpositions" which are social and political at first place!53 The
discrepancy between the way the homosexual self is depicted in these private
writings and in his public writing, i.e. his plays, does not reveal a loss of honesty
on the part of the playwright himself, but a social resistance to open up a tOpic
that is still considered to be a taboo. In the Memoirs, Williams is openly
admitting his homosexuality and he is celebrating his homosexual desire. We
don't encounter the same masks, screens, and facades that we encounter in his
plays, but we meet Williams who is in the state of 'jouissance'. Niaz Zaman
makes the case that "Williams was not at odds with his own sexuality, but rather
with a potentially hostile society!“ Williams's Memeirs, letters, and journals are
confessional not necessarily in the religious meaning, but in the way he
communicates to himself and others that there are other options and alternatives
in life that can be enjoyed. There is no guilt in Williams's Memoire, but there is
fear in his plays. His fear comes from the artificial edifice we call society. His
celebration in his letters and Memeirs stems from his comfort with himself, and
his long journey of self-validation. Niaz Zaman makes the case that "even as
[Williams] was evading homosexual issues in his plays, and veiling them in

metaphor and innuendo... he was writing openly to Donald Windham about his

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own homosexuality... It was the social and theatrical atmosphere, rather than a
personal inability to speak that created the forced silences that also resulted in
the strange horror that streaks Williams' 5 writing."65 In his letters to Donald
Windham, Williams does not avoid any opportunity to tell Windham about his
homosexual encounters and his cruising ventures. Sometimes the letters are so
graphic and detailed to the point that one may wonder about the attitude of the
public towards such a celebrity, if such letters were made available to the public
at that time. Williams does not hide and cover his homosexuality when he is
certain that he is communicating his desire to those who understand and also
appreciate such a desire. Williams, for example, writes to Windham about his

love affair and homosexual encounters with Kip:

We make up two or three times in the night and start
all over again like a pair of goats... The sky
amazingly brilliant with stars. The wind blows the
door wide open, the gulls are crying. Oh, Christ. I call
him baby... When I lie on top of him I feel like I was
polishing the statue of liberty or something. He is
enormous. A great bronze statue of antique Greece
come to life... I lean over him in the night and
memorize the geography of his body with my hands...
His skin is steaming... He lies very still for a while,
then his breath comes fast and his body begins to
lunge. Great rhythmic plunging motion with panting
breath and his hands working over my body. Then
sudden release and he moans like a little baby...”5

Williams adds towards the end of this letter:

Please keep this letter and be very careful with it. It's
only for people like us who have gone beyond shame!

Williams as his letter reveals is not ashamed of his desire. He is embracing his
love for Kip, and other men. His desire is unchained, unabashed, and exuberant.
His masks and masquerades reveal the public Williams who is shaped by a

"sense of self-preservation" as Windham informs us. With the gay lib movement,

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and with the possibilities of a more open-minded society, Williams's unchained,
unabashed, and exuberant private celebration of his desire makes its way to the

public. In Williams's play Small Craft Warnings, Bobby, the young homosexual

 

character, expresses his desire with an ecstatic tone:

A lovely wild young girl invited me under a blanket
with just a smile, and then a boy, me between, and
both of them kept saying "love," one of 'em in one ear
and one in the other, till I didn't know which was
which "love" in which ear or which... touch... The
plain was high and the night air... exhilarating and
the touches not heavy...”

Bobby's exuberance in 1972 echoes Williams's in 1940 when he wrote his letter to
Donald Windham. This ecstasy and exuberance were postponed for more than
30 years; and Brick Pollitt, Allan Grey, Skipper, and Sebastian Venable did not
have the chance to express the same ecstasy, excitement, and resilience that
Bobby does. Such a possibility was taken away from them not by their creator,
Tennessee Williams, but by those for whom Williams was writing. Brick, Allan,
Skipper, and Sebastian are left mutilated, incomplete, distorted, and
transfigured. Their desire is deferred. They are negotiating their identity with
their immediate environment, and that's all they got from the negotiation: death,
suicide, and lies.

The gay self that Williams constructs for his Broadway audience is an
affirmative self in spite of its erasure, and in spite of the critics failure to perceive
it in such positive terms. Williams is not "affirming [his audience's] homophobic
reaction" as John Clum claims. On the contrary, he is questioning this convention
and raising doubts about their assumptions through different ways. If there is an
erasure in 93;, it is not one of defeat, and if there is silence and detachment in the
representation of the gay self, such silence and detachment are not signs of

withdrawal and retreat. From such a perspective, Brick's withdrawal does not

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align him with those "weak people, you weak, beautiful people! who give up
with such grace..." The play's ending does not necessarily read in Maggie's way
where the lie comes true and Brick is converted to heterosexuality. It can be read
as Brick's ending where he affirms and confirms his sexuality in the way that
might be effective, but not confrontational. Williams's evasiveness is Derridian.
Homosexuality in _C_a; and other Williams plays is "under erasure." It is crossed
out, but it remains legible. Both the word and its deletion are present, for the
signs that Williams has given us about Brick's sexuality are erasures and also
signs of resistance to the predominate heterosexual values that Big Daddy, Big
Mama, and Maggie want to impose on Brick. This strategy of erasure "is the
strategy of using the only available language while not subscribing to its
premises."68 Derrida describes such strategies as a "discourse which borrows
from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage
itself!“ Williams has emptied these dominant conventions whether they are
social, political, or sexual from within. He is not confrontational, yet he is
subversive. He is not accommodationist, yet he manages to place the homosexual
subject in the center of Broadway stage in spite of its conservatism and
intolerance. No other playwright of Williams's time period has been capable of
presenting homosexuality with the same intensity. Unlike other playwrights,
Williams has presented his audience with gay characters in many of his plays.
When he does not, the playwright's own gay sensitivity makes its way on the
stage.

Williams ambiguity about Brick's sexuality does not erase as much as it
affirms. If Brick is ambivalent about his sexuality, if he uses masks to hide and to
mystify, such tactics, not only help Brick co-exist with his immediate
environment, but also make the play more subversive. Brick remains an enigma

till play's end, and thus he takes away from the audience the right to judge him,

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to place him in a compartment, and to tag him with a title or a name that does
not reveal the complexity of his character as much as it oversimplifies his
sexuality and places it into a stereotypical frame with which they are
comfortable. Brick, through his evasion, takes the power to name and categorize
away from his audience. As Harold Beaver demonstrates: "Power is the right to
formulate categories, to control the moral currency, to define the nature of
'nature! Defeat is humiliation extorted as a confession."7° Till play' end, Brick
remains the owner and the clairner of his own discourse. Neither Big Daddy nor
Maggie is able to take such an advantage away from him. Brick has remained the
one and the only one who can write his own script, and he diligently refuses to
give such an authority to any of the other characters.

The play's ending affirms and asserts the gay self as well. Cahtdoes not end
"with a compromised version of marriage and procreation, as Brick is forced to
turn Maggie's lie about her pregnancy into the truth."71 Such a reading of the
ending of get is rather superficial and oversimplifies the complexity of the play.
Through sleeping with Maggie to make the lie true, Brick does not necessarily
confirm his heterosexuality. As a matter of fact, through such a lie, Brick has
found the mask that he can wear to hide his sexuality, and to portray to the
others the image that they want to see in him. Maggie's lie, for Brick, is the mask
behind which he can conceal his real identity forever. The coming child will be
the proof for Brick's family that Brick fits in their norms and suits their common
moral codes of behavior. The child will offer Brick's family and society the
illusion that his marriage with Maggie is fruitful, genuine and fulfilling. Brick
subscribes to this lie quickly and with "gratitude [that] seems almost infinite" to
Maggie, because she offers him the perfect mask that he has been looking for
throughout the play. Even though Maggie thinks that Brick's silence to this lie is

a "gallant" gesture of him to "save [her] face!" it is, in fact, an intelligent move on

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Brick's part to save his own face. This lie is becoming the reality with which Brick
is going to live forever. Brick's closing line of the play "wouldn't it be funny if
that was true?" shows that Brick is "going to make the lie true" not because he
loves Maggie, but rather because he wants to defend himself against the harsh
and mendacious world he lives in. This lie is the only weapon that Brick has to
defeat Gooper's and Mae's plans to disinherit him. It is through this lie that Brick
can invalidate his brother's attacks and counterpart Mae's accusations. This lie is
the closet and the refuge where Brick can survive, bear his fears and hide his
identity without fully adjusting to the conformity of the norms. Through such
representation of appearance and reality or illusion and truth, Williams proves
that there is no truth outside the illusion of the truth; and what we usually label
as truth is but a lie that comes true. Williams agrees with Big Daddy's belief that
"mendacity is a system we live in" (129). The gay self can live only through
falsehood, and can survive in this world only through contriving, feigning, and
counterfeiting. The gay self needs its masks and make up. It is this very facade
that constitutes the 'essence' of the gay self. Williams seems to hold the belief that
this is true for every character in his play, including Big Daddy, who is trying to
separate himself from the mendacious world he lives in. Big Daddy has accepted
Maggie's lie at the end unquestionably. He does not express any doubt or fear
that Maggie might be telling a lie. He immediately decides to ask his lawyer to
come the following day to write his will. Big Daddy has experienced the pain of
the truth and has learnt that mendacity is the system we live in. At the end, Big
Daddy has saved himself the pain of discovering that Maggie is lying. He finds
comfort and consolation in this lie. And Brick has decided to live his life without
necessarily being confrontational with the people around him. Mae and Cooper
will stop talking, Maggie will get the plantation (that's the only thing she cares
for any way) Big Daddy and Big Mama will have their long expected son from

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Brick, and Brick will have the mask that would save his life forever in the middle
of a hostile and homophobic society.

Reading the play in the way Clum deos, i.e. as a conversion to
heterosexuality, is to discard its implications and to resort to an easy way out in
resolving its complexity. Brick does not turn to Maggie because of a sudden
renewed physical attraction to her, such physical attraction and fascination is not
expressed anywhere in the play. I am suggesting that Maggie is always playing
the role that she was playing in the past in the Brick, Skipper, and Maggie love
triangle. One can suggest that Maggie's body is still the embodiment of Brick's
and Skipper's desire, and the point of their physical encounters if such
encounters are to take place. Brick is vicariously re-establishing a bond with his
dead friend in Maggie's body. Maggie has always played the 'tagging' role in
Brick and Skipper's relationship, and she apparently will continue to do so.
Moreover, the room where such heterosexual desire is consummated is the very
room where the homosexual desire has claimed itself. Once Brick's and Maggie's
relationship is resumed, Brick will enhance his chance to inherit the legacy of the
homosexual couple that Big Daddy inherited from Jack Straw and Peter Ochello.
It is up to Brick, then to handle this legacy, cherish it and pass it on to future
generations. Homosexuality is not marginal in Q. It is central to the play's
setting, it triggers the actions and the confrontations between the characters, and
the destiny of the plantation inherited from the gay couple is the dramatic
question that has to be resolved towards play's end.

The image of the homosexual self that Williams presents does not conform
to the stereotypical image of the homosexual either. It confirms a new gay self
that was not presented in any of Williams's plays before get. Homosexuality
makes its presence in Q; where the audience does not expect it to be. For

instance, Brick is not the stereotypical gay man that we meet in Streetcar. Allan

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Grey has "a nervousness, softness, and tenderness which wasn't like a man's,
although he wasn't the least bit efferninate looking - Still - that thing was there..."
(Streetcar, 95). Brick does not fit with this profile and almost stereotypical
description of the gay self. On the contrary, "Brick is," as De Jongh argues, "the
modern American theatre idea of the perfect male hero. He is the embodiment of
all that masculinity is supposed to entail. He is not damned with the tell-tale
signs of artistry, sensitivity or nervousness!”2 Therefore, De Jongh contends, "the
play dare[s] to suggest that homosexual desire may lurk unacknowledged in the
body of a hot, heavily male sex-object!”3 Moreover, this homosexual self is also
the object of our fascination. Brick is attractive and desirable. Maggie comments
on his beauty: "I wish you would lose your looks. If you did it would make the
martyrdom of Saint Maggie a little more bearable. But no such goddam luck. I
actually believe you've gotten better looking since you went on the bottle" (29).
Maggie can not get Brick out of her mind. She seems to strongly believe that
Brick and Skipper are attracted to each other, yet she is not capable of letting
Brick go. The homosexual self in get does not assert itself through its erasure and
detachment, but through its beauty and other physical qualities. The beauty of
the male body is’ a matter of celebration in Q, and other of Williams's plays. It is
not a taboo that has to be veiled, it is an entity that has to be admired and
embraced.

Big Daddy represents another affirmation of the gay self in get. He is the
icon of a patriarchy that places man in the center of the family and the social
structures. For Arthur Miller, Big Daddy is "the very image of power, of
materiality, of authority!“ In spite of his old age, he still has a leach for Maggie.
He is still "contemplating... pleasure with women" on his sixty-five birthday (95).
He wants to pick up a woman and "strip her naked and smother her in minks

and choke her with diamonds... and hump her from hell to breakfast" (99).

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Williams does not leave Big Daddy in such confinements. Instead he made this
exemplum of the normative heterosexuality one of the most tolerant characters to
homosexual desire in the play. He faces Brick: "Always, anyhow, lived with too
much space around me to be infected by ideas of other people. One thing you
can grow on a big place more important than cotton!" is tolerance! 1 grown it"
(122). Unlike Brick, Big Daddy has managed to distance himself from the
conventional beliefs and ideas of his time. He has used the distance that
separates him from other people to think for himself and to realize that what the
others reject and condemn is not necessarily wrong and condemnable.
Homosexuality is not to be feared; according to Big Daddy, it is to be
understood, if not appreciated. It is thanks to Jack Straw and Peter Ochello that
Big Daddy is who he is today. Big Daddy does not allow Brick to talk about this
couple in such pejorative terms. He feels a certain kind of affiliation and fidelity
to Jack and Peter that we do not see him expressing even to Big Mama to whom
he has been married for almost forty years. This is the affirmative and assertive
gay voice that we hear in get. Affirmation does not necessarily come from
Skipper and Brick, but rather from Big Daddy, for he is the character that the
audience might relate to the most because of the vividness and the warmth with
which Williams has drawn the character. Big Daddy is the voice and "the carrier
of homosexualityuthe heir to the estate" that captures a new order based on the
homosexual politics and economics.”

Homosexuality is not alien to Big Daddy. The life he has shared with Jack
Straw and Peter Ochello has shown him that love between two men is possible,
and the other prejudices and misconceptions that people have about homosexual
behavior are a consequence of the scruples and the predominant social

conventions. Big Daddy has "knocked around in [his] time" (117), and he adds as

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if to confirm to his son not only his tolerance, but also his identification and

understanding of homosexual feelings:

I said 'Hold on!'--I bummed, I bummed this coun
till I was- slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y's and
flophouses in all cities before I- (117)

Big Daddy does not have the chance to tell Brick all that he wants to tell him, and
as Williams informs us in his stage direction Big Daddy "leaves a lot unspoken"
(115) about his past and his years of youth. Big Daddy is on the verge of a
confession that Brick is not willing to hear. Brick's fear and impatience deprive
him of the chance to experience a more intimate and closer relationship with Big
Daddy. Had Brick given his father the chance to open up to him, he might have
realized that he has more in common with his father than he may think he does.
Brick's internalized fear of who he is and who he might be proves to be
alienating. It alienates him both from himself and from his father. This fear, in
fact, has prevented Brick from seeing the similarities between himself and his
father, a realization that might have significantly changed Brick's life, his
perception of his father, and more importantly, himself.

Williams has used different parallels to suggest certain similarities
between Big Daddy and his son, Brick. Apart from being familiar with
homosexual feeling, and probably with the gay experience as well, Big Daddy, in
his relationship with Big Mama, resembles his son Brick in his relationship with
Maggie. Big Daddy has lived with Big Mama for almost forty years, but has
never gotten to love her at all. Big Daddy has never felt close to Big Mama: "I
slept with Big Mama till... five years ago, till I was sixty and she was fifty-eight,
and never even liked her, never did!" (95). Big Daddy knows what it means to
live with a person he does not love. After forty years he realizes that life spent in

such a way is a waste, and for forty years he has been wasting his life with

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pretenses and illusions of happiness in the same way his son, Brick, is destroying
his life with alcohol. Big Daddy has spent all of his life pretending that he is what

he is not. He claims to Brick:

Think of all the lies I got to put up with!— Pretenses!
Ain't that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you
don't think or feel or have any idea of? Having for
instance to act like I care for Big Mama!--I haven't
been able to stand the sight, sound, or smell of that
woman for forty years now! «even when I laid her!-
regular as a piston... (110)

For forty years, Big Daddy has never felt close to Big Mama. There is a great
distance and a huge gap separating both of them. Brick feels the same way
towards his wife Maggie: "I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left out
because she and me never got any closer together than two people just get in
bed, which is not much closer than two cats on a fence humping" (125). What
brings Big Daddy to Big Mama, and Brick to Maggie is just instinctual animal
desire. Their respective marriage beds have brought them together without their
being necessarily together. They go through the motion of the sexual intercourse,
but they never experience the intimacy and ecstasy of the act. For them, it is a
ritualistic act with no essence. It is an act that refers to nothing beyond the act
itself, and merely a performance they put for each other. Both Brick and Big
Daddy have been deluding themselves with the illusion of happiness, and both
have been trying to convince themselves that if they maintain the illusion of
happiness, then they can really be happy. However, neither can put up with this
lie further. Consequently, Big Daddy tries to reach to Brick so as to communicate
to his son what he has failed to communicate for almost forty years, and to
establish an honest bond even for the short period of time that has remained in
his life. The play's closing line recalls the parallel between Brick and Big Daddy.
When Maggie states: "I do love you, Brick, I do!" and Brick responds: "Wouldn't

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it be funny if that was true?" (173), the audience can hear the echo of Big Mama
when she tells Big Daddy: "I even loved your hate and your hardness, Big
Daddy!" and he responds with the same line as Brick: "Wouldn't it be funny if
that was true..."

Life is a cycle in _Cet, and Brick has ended where Big Daddy has spent all
his life with pretenses, lies, and mendacity. No matter how hard the individuals
may try to set themselves free, the mendacious world imposes itself upon their
will, undermines their volition, and distorts their dreams, their longings, their
hopes, their wishes, and the way they want to be. Brick subscribes to the
"conventional lie," "the scruples" and the "crap" that such conventions press upon
the individual (95). He is destined to live with the lie of a wife, a son, and a
family; a lie that is discomforting and comforting for it gives him the comfort of
falsehood and illusions, but it takes away from him who he is. With this lie, Brick
is merely a social artifact. He is an image, a tag, and a role that his society and its
conventions expect him to be. The individual Brick is dead, he died when he
hung up the phone on Skipper, but the social Brick is still alive. He can still
pretend that he never liked Skipper, he can still pretend that their relationship
was just a "real... real... friendship." He can still pretend that he likes his wife
Maggie, even though we know that he never did, but we are aware that all his
life is pretenses. The more he pretends, the more his society validates these
pretenses because that's what they want to hear and see in Brick. They do not
want to see Brick for who he is, they want to see him with his masks, his lies, his
make up, and his masquerade, because it is this Brick who fits with the role they
assigned for him and the costume they cut and designed for the role. The image
of Brick is more important than Brick himself. A lie has substituted the truth. The
truth is nothing but an accepted and agreed upon lie. It is a lie that has lived with
us for a long time to the point that we have forgotten that it originated as a lie. It

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dropped the title of a lie, and took a more respected title--that of a convention.
This is the make-belief strategy that Williams is questioning. He is questioning
the social conventions, raising doubts about the common consensus, and
pointing out that once we are honest and frank with ourselves and with each
other, then we can discover that we have more in common than when we start to
cater and adjust to each other. The audience can leave the theater and pretend
that Brick's and Maggie's life can go on, they can pretend that their life is going to
be rosy and beautiful, but then they should be aware that they are fooling only
themselves and constructing a large edifice of lies and a web of mendacity.

Brick is locked into the web of the past and entangled into what his father
used to be. Brick has followed those steps faithfully only to realize that there is
no breakthrough. The gay self is locked into its past, it is imprisoned in its
history, and the breakthrough is no easy possibility. The self needs more courage
and endurance to stand for what it is in the midst of cries and uproars, demands
and requests to be what it is expected to be and not what it is willing to be. It has
to curb the path of the past, the paved ways of history, and escape a determinism
that might prove to be just inescapable. '

Williams's affirmation has made his drama not only humanitarian in its
dimensions, but also political. He is the playwright of the torn, mutilated, and
marginalized individuals, but his treatment of the plight of the individuals is
political as well. As Savran observes about Williams: "here was a writer who
called himself a revolutionary and meant it, a playwright who produced a new
and radical theatre that challenged and undermined the Cold War order!“
Williams is trying to secure a space for the individual in the midst of pressing
social realities, arbitrary conventions, and stiff traditions. C. W. Bigsby's

observation about Williams's drama is perceptive:

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If, after the 1930's, Williams rarely chose to formulate
his sense of oppression in overtly political ways, his
portraits of individuals pressed to the margins of
social concern, trapped in a diminishing social and
psychological space, are not without ideological
significance, for, as Michel Foucault has reminded us
there is a link between space and power."

Williams has decentralized the notion of conventions and traditions, and has 're-
placed' the individual in the center of his philosophical beliefs. Williams has de-
objectified the moral system under which the individual operates. He has made
the value and the moral system subjective and grounded in perception. Values
are no longer systematic and objective. They are more grounded in the
individual's identity and performative self. In Williams philosophy, the self is

central holding its own system of beliefs, values, and morals.

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Chapter III

Orpheus Descending: The Myth of a Liberated Self

In his play Qgpheus Descending which premiered on Broadway in March

1957, Tennessee Williams continued a project that he had already started with
he Glass Menagerie: The exploration of the possibility of a liberated self—a self
that can define itself, break away from conformistic conventions, and express
itself in a way that it deems itself to be. Perhaps the manifesto for Williams’s
Qrgpheus Descending was already established in 1953 with Qamino Real when
Williams explains:

My desire was to give these audiences my own sense

of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water

in the mountains, or clouds changing shape in a gale,

or the continually dissolving and transforming

images of a dream. This sort of freedom is not chaos

or anarchy. On the contrary, it is the result of

painstaking design...1
I find Williams’s description of what he is attempting in Camino Real applicable
to nghegs Degending as well. In his four major characters in We, Val
Xavier, Lady Torrance, Carol Cutrere, and Vee Talbott, Williams is exploring the
possibility of a liberated self. The four characters’ experiences differ from one to
another, yet they are all haunted by the same dream—a dream of freedom from
what Herbert Marcus calls the ”one-dimensional society.”2 Val, Lady, Carol, and
Vee are all trying to transcend imposed limitations and explore different
possibilities through love, sex, religion, and art. Their journey is not without pain

and loss, but the self-realization that they may achieve even in very fleeting

moments is worth the effort, as Williams seems to argue through his character

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Carol Cutrere, who tells Val: ”What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at
whatever comes near you, with both your hands, until your fingers are broken?”3
The breakthrough may seem to be momentary for these characters, but the light
they catch and the self-understanding they achieve prove to be worth what they
undertake.

In his preface to Orpheus Descending, "The Past, the Present, and the
Perhaps," Williams explains that his play is about four protagonists who
continue to ask ”unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people,” and the
rest of the community who have accepted the ”prescribed answers that are not
answers at all, but expedient adaptations or surrender to a state of quandary”
(vi). The differences that Williams is drawing between those who are willing to
ask questions and those who are not are the differences between those who are
willing to struggle for liberation from the codes that their society imposes upon

them and those who want to follow the herd as they always did and remain

locked within the roles they are assigned to play.

Val’s Vision of a Liberated Self.
gplee_us Descending tells a story of an awakening to the self and the long
Cl ormant desire that remains unexpressed in an oppressive society similar to that
01 Two-River County. The tale is that ”of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a
Conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a
Ql'ricken coop” (Q;ph_eu§, vi). Val walks into the Two-River County community,
alid as a result, the lives of Lady, Carol, and Vee and the entire community are
never the same. Val has brought this small village community something of his

Vvildness, and has left his snakeskin jacket not only as a memento and celebration

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of his spirit, but as an indication that the life of this community can never be
restored to what it used to be. Val is able to make all this change and commotion
within this community because Williams has created in him a character of multi-
dimensions and special grandeur. Val is an Orpheus and an artist, he is a myth
and a reality, he is an ideal and a dream that points to the possibility of better
options and better chances, yet an ideal that reality has twisted, distorted, and
reduced to its own commonality. The question that I would like to pose is the
following: Does Val manage to reach the possibility of a liberated self that he
potentially embodies? Or does he remain a myth, i.e. a misconception, and an
ideal that verges on the brink of a utopia?
Val's first enters accompanied by the Choctaw cry from the Conjure Man.
This cry, as Williams tells us, is associated with Val as if it is a cue for him to
enter. This Choctaw cry associates Val with protest, pain, and dissatisfaction in
the same way as it highlights his essential, wild quality. Williams writes in his
stage direction:
Val enters the store. He is a young man, about 30,
who has a kind of wild beauty about him that the cry
would suggest... His remarkable garment is a
snakeskin jacket, mottled white, black and gray. He
carries a guitar which is covered with inscriptions.
(26)
Val’s beauty is wild, and his jacket suggests something untamed, natural, and
raw. The snakeskin jacket also represents Val’s regenerative powers and
highlights his masculine and sensual qualities. It is an emblem of the ”naked
umashamed quality of passion,” as Williams explains.4 The guitar Val is carrying
]has been perceived by many critics as a phallic symbol that attracts and

fascinates the other female characters. Val’s wildness and particularity are in

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juxtaposition with the rest of the community of Two-River County that the first
scene establishes. ”Curiosity is a human instinct,” Beulah Binnings affirms, but
this instinct has no immediate implication for their everyday life (14).

Val is established as an intruder in Qrpheus Descending. John Ditsky
argues that Val is ”a messenger from another order of creation,” who is

perceived as a danger and a threat to the community because he leads them to

”rouse up to [themselves].”5 Val is a catalyst that will activate and intensify

Lady’s and Vee’s liberation. The community perceives him as a threat because he
invites new changes and questions the values that they are used to. Val comes to
Two—River County as a liberated character who is free from the burden of the
past as well as the inadequacy of such social institutions as marriage and family.
He is not programmed to conform like the rest of the community. Like Blanche,
who satisfies her desire outside the recognized institution of the patriarchy, Val’s
sexual desire is not institutionalized as yet. He is a free agent who, in spite of his
thirty years of age, has managed to preserve his freedom and independence.
Val’s desire operates outside the boundaries of patriarchal authorities and
institutions. He has managed to preserve his own Dionysiac nature that is in tune
With his wildness and beauty. Val is not a social archetype, but rather the
emblem of the natural and liberated man. When Val enters the life of Lady, he
threatens the validity of the institution of marriage and family and removes the
boundaries of their norms. Lady throws herself into a relationship with Val
Without considering the social implications and ramifications of this relationship.
As Samar Attar comments about the sexual intruder, Val also ”poses questions as

to the validity of other societal values and conventions such as work and social

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responsibility!”5 Val is debunking social ties and institutions. Instead, he is
glorifying a self with no inhibitions, restrictions, or restraints.

Not only is Val unwilling to subjugate his desire to family and marriage,
but he is also a character with a blurred past and untraced origin. He has no
family, as he informs Lady. ”When I was a kid on Witches’ Bayou,” Val tells
Lady, ”after my folks all scattered away like loose chicken’s feathers blown
around by the wind- I stayed there alone on the bayou, hunted and trapped out
of season and hid from the law!” (63). Neither the audience nor the Two-River
County community know much about Val’s past. He is a stranger to them, one
who does not belong to them or to any other community. If the individual is
defined through the community, which 5/ he belongs to, Val then is an
indefinable individual. Val is a character to be defined on his own terms as an
agent of his own identity. He is constantly on the move. Carol tells him: ”We
followed you through five places before we made contact with you” (31). He has
no place of birth or family origin. Like Tom Wingfield of The (Sling Menagerie
and Lord Byron of m Re_a_l, Val must break away from the past and destroy
any family ties before reaching self-understanding and self—fulfillment. Tom,
Byron, and Val have to keep moving in time and space to discover the truth of
Who they are. Their movement is towards the Terra of Incognito. Their quest is a
romantic quest, and what attracts them to the Terra Incognito is the
unpredictability of the unknown, and the hope that maybe in exploring the
unknown they will realize their proper and own longings, and thus find more
Comfort and inward peace. The distance that Va! and Williams’s characters travel
in their constant movement allows them to put themselves at a distance from the

Society where they live and form a more independent view about who they are

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and who they deem themselves to be. Non-conformity is the curse and the
blessing of Williams’s characters. They lose the security of the group and the
comfort of the crowd, but they gain themselves, even though these selves may be
shattered, hurt, injured, and fragmented towards the end of their journey of self-
discovery. The loss is inevitable, but the gain is more valuable. Those who are
afraid to take this risk and choose to conform to the prescriptions of their society
shall always remain dependent on the dictations of the society where they live.
In such a case they collude with their own defeat by collaborating with their own
entrapment. They remain, as Val informs Lady, ”sentenced to solitary
confinement inside their own skins, for life!” (63).
Val is liberated from the norms in almost a supernatural way. He tells
Lady, ”My temperature’s always a couple degrees above normal the same as a
dog’s, it’s normal for me the same as it is for a dog, that’s the truth.. .” (48). And
he claims that he ”can sleep on a concrete floor or go without sleeping, without
even feeling sleepy, for forty-eight hours. And I can hold my breath for three
minutes without blacking out... and I can go the whole day without passing
Water.” He adds, ”They say that a woman can burn a man down. But I can burn
down a woman... I’m saying I could. I’m not saying I would” (54). The character-
reference letter Val shows Lady focuses on his particularity: ”This boy worked
for me three months in my auto repair shop and is a real hard worker and is
good and honest but is a peculiar talker and that is the reason I got to let him go
but would like to—would like to-«keep him. Yours truly” (52). Val, in his
particularity and supernatural quality, has become almost a demi-god. Vee’s
perception of Val as a Christ-like figure adds more to the supernatural dimension
of his character. In his search for a liberated self, Val has transcended beyond the

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human physical limitations and turned into a mythical figure similar to the

Romans' and Greeks' demi-gods.

The vision that Val holds is a vision of a liberated self—a self with
absolute and unrestrained freedom, as he tells Lady:
You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so
it can’t light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its
wings in the sky? That’s true. I seen one once, it had
died and fallen to earth and it was light-blue colored
and its body was tiny as your little finger... They was
transparent, the color of the sky and you could see
through them. That’s what they call protection
coloring. Camouflage, they call it. You can’t tell those
birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks don’t
catch them, don’t see them up there in the high blue
sky near the sun!... They fly so high in gray weather
the Goddamn hawks would get dizzy. But those little
birds, they don’t have no legs at all and they live their

whole lives on the wing, and they sleep on the
wind... and never light on this earth but one time

when they die! (56).

Throughout the play, Val is associated with the image of the bird. In Act 2 Scene
4, Lady tells Val: ”I said to myself, ’this boy is a bird with no feet so he has to
sleep on the wind...’ and I wanted to help” (100). When Val speaks about his
Youthful experience with the young girl on the bayou when he was fourteen,
both the young girl and Val are associated with the image of the bird. ”Her

naked skin was like that,” Val informs the audience. ”Oh, God, I remember a
bird flown out of the moss and its wings made a shadow on her,” he adds. ”Yes,
I followed, 1 followed like a bird’s tail follows a bird, I followed” (65). Moreover,
the bedroom alcove where Val and Lady have enjoyed their sexual encounters is
" masked by an Oriental drapery which is worn dim but bears the formal design
of a gold tree with scarlet fruit and fantastic birds” (11). The image of the bird is

associated with a lost Eden of desire, ’plaisir,’ carefree love, and physical and

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romantic encounters. It is a Dionysiac image through which Val reveals the
liberated spirit that fascinates and attracts him.

The vision that Val has is that of the uncorrupted and unmasked
individual. He wants to live beyond the eyes of the hawks and be able to soar in
the sky like the legless birds. Val wants to escape the basic categories in which
most people endure. He wants to be one of ”the kind that’s never been branded”
(55). Val is afraid of brands, tags, and commodities. He is seeking a self with no
title and no tag. He wants to defy the defined and the limited. He holds a vision
of a boundless space and a flowing identity through which he can be who he is
and what he does. The mercantile and transactional world scares Val. He tells
Lady: ”I’m disgusted... There’s people bought and sold in this world like
carcasses of hogs in butcher’s shops!” (55). The image of the world that Val is
afraid of is animalistic, sanguine, and violent. He is aware of how human

interaction has been reduced to a transaction in the world where he lives. He

does not want to be bought; neither does he want to be a buyer. He wants to
escape this simplistic, yet frightening, binary division of the world. He wants to
escape the mercantile commercialized world to live as an individual without a
brand.

Val's vision of liberation and freedom is almost inexpressible and
inexplicable. He has to resort to the language of the symbol to express an ideal
that seems to be beyond the reach of his own reality. In the image of the bird, Val
is seeking elevation, pure love, and sublime feelings. He wants to be a
transparent creature through which people can see. He wants to understand and
be understood, and escape the clumsiness of the heavy weight of earth and

return back to earth only in his death. Far away from earth, Val sees in the legless

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birds the option to explore the distant horizons and the far possibilities. As
Gulshan Rai Kataria notices, ”the bird reveals Val Xavier’s yearnings to
transcend his corporeal and earthbound condition!” The birds, along with the
snakeskin jacket, reveal Val's Dionysiac nature and speak for his dream of
freedom and liberation.

Val translates his vision into art and music. As Nancy Tischler argues, Val
is discovering the redeeming power of art. ”Although disgusted with the flesh
and the world, Val has found in art a means of cleansing and sanctification. His
guitar is his sacred symbol, evidence of an immortality and a transcendence of
flesh achievable in art!” Val's guitar enables him to transcend and overcome the
corruption of the world and reach new purity that he can find only in the realms

of art. He tells Lady:

I’m thirty today, and I’m through with the life that

I’ve been leading... I lived in corruption but I’m not

corrupted. Here is why. [Picks up his guitar]. My

life’s companion! It washes me clean like water when

anything unclean has touched me... (50).

Val’s guitar connects him to his vision and helps him achieve the incorruptible
World that he envisions.

The guitar also sets Val on the edge of mainstream society and enhances
liis particularity. On his guitar are inscribed the names of great black musicians
Such as Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and others.
Emphasizing the liberating nature of music, Val claims Leadbelly to be the
” greatest man ever lived on the twelve-string guitar! Played it so good he broke

the stone heart of a Texas governor with it and won himself a pardon from jail”

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(51). The names of the musicians autographed on Val’s guitar connect him to the
blues and jazz tradition—a music about people who are looking for their lost
origin and usurped identity and expressing a longing for a mother land that they
have never seen. Through his music, Val expresses his own dislocation,
uprootedness, and discomfort with the environment where he lives. These
emotions of loss and liberation are expressed in the song "Heavenly Grass" Val
sings throughout the play.9 The song illustrates a romantic longing for a lost
origin and speaks for his existential dilemma.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she gave me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.10
Val’s song describes the mythic conflicting nature of human existence. On the
one hand, we long for the ideal and the perfect, but on the other hand, we are
debased by the ignoble and the corrupted. It also depicts the world that Val
wants to reach out to. The repetition of ”heavenly grass” and the diction of the
poem-”shone clear as glass” and ”the lonesome stars”-introduce us to a world
beyond earth and a sphere different from the world of Two-River County. In
fact, this world is in juxtaposition to the earthly world where ”my mother cried...
my feet walk far and my feet walk fast.” For Val, the moment of birth is a
moment of loss. He is in search of a world that is far removed from his actual

reality, yet is still familiar to him. Val is a romantic Wordsworthian in both his

dream and in his quest. Life is a recollection of lost memories, and a drifting

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away from a lost origin. The earth is the prison and the cage from which Val
wants to liberate himself and soar back to his heavenly grass. He is in quest of a
prelapsarian world—a world that is not physical and concrete in its nature. It is
only in this world that Val can re-connect with himself and come to a realization
of his selfhood. Williams believes in this transformational and transcendental
power of art and music when he says that the ”impulse of song... breaks out of
confinement and goes on despite orders to halt.”11 Only through music can Val
stand up to the contradictions and fragmentation imposed upon him. Between
the strings of his guitar and the lines of his song "Heavenly Grass," Val can find
cohesion and meaning for what he would like the world to be. Williams’s use of
music discloses the beginning of his disillusionment with language. Williams is
losing trust in the power of the word to liberate and free individuals from the
compartments and the conceptions by which they live. The liberation of the self
can be sought in music instead for only the note, and not the word, can re-
connect individuals to their private inner space. Williams is committed to an
emotional reality that can transcend the concreteness of the mercantile mentality
of our time. Behind his use of music, Val is seeking the immediacy that the
spoken word has lost. Music is always here and now. The dislocation and
rupture that "Heavenly Grass" illustrates is underscored in the music of Val’s
notes. In music, Val can find refuge from the dislocation and rnisplacement that

the written word has created.

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From Self-liberation to Self-mutilation
Val is not able to achieve the liberation he seeks in Two-River County. The
ultimate end he has to face is ugly and deadly. Val is lynched and burnt. The
Jabes, the Talbotts, the Dollys, and the Beulahs of Two-River County have
defeated him at the end. He becomes the sacrificial icon of the county. The
audience is left to ponder the value and the particularity of Val’s vision. Does
Val's death signify the impossibility of a liberated self, or does it suggest some
flaws in Val’s vision that have to be redefined and re-worked?
Carol Cutrere points to what may have gone wrong with Val’s vision. As

a warning, Carol tells Val:

You’re in danger here, Snakeskin. You’ve taken off

the jacket that said: ”I’m wild, I’m alone!” and put on

the nice blue uniform of a convict! I drove all night to

bring you this warning of danger. .. (76).
Val is denying what has made him particular. He is toning down his wildness
and settling for the common options and the safe choices. Val has put away the
snakeskin jacket, and as Jack E. Wallace notes that ”now his snakeskin jacket has
a new meaning. Instead of being a sign of innocent wildness and pagan freedom,
it represents the sexual bondage that Val feels he must escape...”12 Again and
again, he reminds Vee, Lady, and Carol that he is done with the past. Val wants
to put behind him his past with its entire wild spirit and settle now in Two-River
County for a job. He is disillusioned and disgusted with the bohemian life he has
been living. He thinks that the past years of his life have been squandered and

wasted. Val tells Carol:

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That’s about what I figured. But I don’t go that route.

Heavy drinking and smoking the weed and shacking

with strangers is okay for kids in their twenties but

this is my thirtieth birthday and I’m all through with

that route... I’m not young any more (32).
Val in this speech is aware of his age, and he associates his past wildness and
wandering spirit with his youth. But now, since he is getting older, he wants to
settle for the common options and opts for the conservative and traditional ways
of life as opposed to the experimental Val he used to be. Hugh Dickinson
suggests that, ”This is a curious speech for a man who will boast of his
proponent virility.”13 This is the new Val who wants to escape his past and
embrace a new image of what he never used to be.

Val is heedless not only of Carol’s warnings but also of other warnings.

He sees the danger that surrounds him in Two-River County, but he is not
willing to protect himself against it. Even though ”he can’t get used to this
place,” he tells Lady, because he does not ”feel safe,” he ”want[s] to stay” (88).
When he hears the dogs barking off stage and ”the chain gang dogs... chasing
some runaway convict...,” Val responds alertly: ”Run boy! Run fast, brother! If
they catch you, you never will run again! That’s-—for sure...” (88). Tragically, he
never heeds this warning himself. Val is almost self-destructive and self-
defeating in his heedlessness. In spite of his discomfort in Two-River County, Val
has surrendered to the life of this small community. He has come to Two-River
County as an itinerant folksinger seeking self-liberation and self-fulfillment, but
ends up a prisoner to the world into which he has descended with a hope and a

dream. The vision has turned to ashes, and Val’s enthusiasm and free spirit have

become a part of the past that he himself has collaborated in denying and

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burying. Val is perhaps defeated by external forces and a hostile environment,
but what he has inflicted upon himself is no less cruel than what Jabe Torrance
and Sheriff Talbot have brought upon him. Val is collaborating with his own
defeat and destruction. He is lynched and mutilated by the townsmen, but the
self-mutilation Val inflicts upon himself has prompted their vile retaliatory acts
against him. At play's end, Val is not able to confront the townsmen, because he
has lost ”concord ” with his past and himself. As Dharanidhar Sahu argues, ”The
individual is capable of protest and confrontation when he lives authentically in
concord with his inner voice. But when the rapport is broken, the man is no more
sensitive and human enough to refuse. He accepts and enjoys the spirit of
compromise.”14 And Val’s inner voice is not his own any longer. It has
succumbed to and been subdued by the voices of the others.

Val is no longer the romantic that he used to be. He denies his own
sexuality. In denying his sexuality, Val is denying his own subjectivity and
mutilating an important constituent of his inner and private self. Val is a threat to
his own subject and his own identity; he is the victimizer in his own
victimization, and the agent of his own imprisonment. Val is a romantic who has
lost faith in his romanticism and the liberating power of love. He does not talk
about love in terms of vision and sublime feelings; he talks about it as a debased,
sinful, and dirty feeling. When Lady tells him:

You see, we don’t know each other, we’re, we’re--just gettin’ --
acquainted.

Val responds:

That’s right, like a couple of animals sniffin’ around
each other... (62)

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Val sees human love in animalistic terms, which is the very feeling that he wants
to purify himself of. As Hugh Dickinson argues, love for Val is a ”lure and
distraction from the true course of freedom.”15 Love in Val’s understanding is
equated with illusion. It is ”the make-believe answer,” he tells Lady. ”It’s fooled
many, a fool besides you an’ me, that’s the God’s truth, Lady, and you had better
believe it” (64).

Because love is an illusion and a make believe answer for Val, he resists
Lady’s love for him at the beginning of the play, rejects Carol’s interest in him,
and ignores the Valentine card from the pink-haired lady. Instead of freeing
himself, Val abstains from women and imposes limitations and restraints upon
his own desire. In this respect Michel Foucault’s views on sex, sexuality, and
desire are informative. In one of his interviews, Foucault claims that ”what we
must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires but to make
ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure (plaisirs).”16 From this
perspective, Va! is not making himself susceptible to desire; on the contrary, he is
finding ways and means to exercise self-control upon his desire. Even his
relationship with Lady fits into this context. He does not subvert the patriarchal
institution. Although he has this affair with Lady, he remains monogamous, and
exclusive in the way he acts his desire. He is uncomfortable with Carol because
she is the one who subverts the provincial sexual politics of the Two-River
County community. He is more at ease with Vee since she manages to sublimate
her passion into the acceptable conventional and moral frame of religion and
ethics. Val is a paradoxical and contradictory character. He is aware of the
tragedy and the loneliness of human destiny when he tells Lady that ”we’re all of

us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!” Yet, he shuns

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human contact and devalues the significance of human love and understanding.
Therefore, he remains locked within the confinements of his own skin because of
this conflicting, paradoxical, and even fragmented nature. In 1971, When
Williams was asked by Jean Fayad: "Val is a very complex character; he gives to
each one what they demand..." Williams responded: "But these fragmented
personalities are not reconciled. There is still a duality. A duality is not
reconciled." Val is trapped within his own skin, but also within what the
condition of humanity is meant to be. Williams concedes that such fragmentation
and dualities are permanent conditions of humanity. Williams shares Hart
Crane's belief that the human self is fragmented like a ”broken tower,” as the
opening epigraph of Streetcar suggests. The human being is shattered,
tormented, and torn between opposites at each end, and it is to this fragmented
nature to which the self remains tied.

Even though Val has expressed his willingness to remain incorruptible
and outside the transactional world of exchange between those who buy and
those who are sold, Va! is not really able to transcend this world where the
human being is commodified. Val cannot remain outside ”the materialist system
of ownership.” ‘8 Commenting on this inescapable system of corruption, Williams
states that Val is ”trapped in his corruption and engaged in his struggle to
maintain his integrity and purity.”19 He resents Lady for his being caught and
trapped within this system. In his relationship with Lady, he can not escape the
past that he describes in mercantile terms: ”all my life I have been selling
something to someone” (51). Now, this past when Val was commodified is not

far away from him in his relationship with Lady. He feels that he is being

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objectified by Lady. She is the buyer and he is the seller. Val can not see that his
relationship with Lady could escape this polarization. He claims to Lady:

A not so young and not so satisfied woman, that

hired a man off the highway to do double duty

without paying overtime for it... I mean a store clerk
days and a stud nights. (101)

Williams comments on this incident between Val and Lady:
Val is very hurt when he discovers that Lady used

him as a stud to satisfy her sexual needs. He is at first

disappointed but finally reconciles himself to this idea

because it is part of his nature.”
Val’s and Lady’s love for each other is underscored in this mercantile system.
This system aborts any sense of self-fulfillment that Va! and Lady want to
achieve. Furthermore, it was this system which did not allow Lady to lead a
happy life with David Cutrere. When he exchanged her for a more established
and wealthier woman in Two-River County society, Lady had to abort the child
she was carrying, and had it "cut out of [her] body, and they cut [her] heart with
it!” (78). Val’s relationship with Lady meets a similar and perhaps more tragic
end. When Val takes the money from the cash box to use for gambling, he is
admitting his financial dependency on Lady and casting himself in the role of a
seller within the very mercantile system that he is rejecting for its corruption.

By walking into Lady’s store, Val places himself at great risk for he makes
himself vulnerable to a dehumanizing system, as ”the store represents the barren
world of commerce, of people bought and sold, that Val tries to rise above.”21
Signi Falk reaches the same conclusion, stating that ”Val courts disaster when he

seeks to exchange his itinerant freedom for a job in the mercantile store.”22 The

integrity, cohesion, and purity that Val aims to fulfill remain a chimera and an

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illusion that can never be transformed into a reality. Val is doomed to remain
broken and incomplete. Williams’s poem Qrgplyepe Descending describes
succinctly Val’s doom and destiny in the play gpheus:

And it will not be completed,

No, it will not be completed,

For you must learn, even you, what we have learned,
That some things are marked by their nature to be not
completed

But only longed for and sought for a while and
abandoned.”

Val can not become a complete and liberated self. The nature of human existence
is ”to be not completed.” Val has sought a dream and a vision of liberation, but
this vision hits the hard rocks of reality and the dehumanization of the system
within which these relationships have to exist and operate. The vision of
liberation is ”sought” and ”longed for” but it has to be ”abandoned” towards the
end, not only because of the pressure of the tough circumstances and the
provincialism of Two-River County, but also because of Val’s ambivalence and
fear of the price that the fulfillment of this vision might cost him. Val has a
vision, but he has never believed in the practicality, the value, or the possibility
of this vision. Val, like the Orpheus of the poem,

Must learn, even you, what we have learned,

The passion there is for declivity in this world,

The impulse to fall that follows a rising fountain.

Now Orpheus, crawl, O shamefaced fugitive, crawl

Back under the crumbling broken wall of yourself,

For you are not stars, sky-set in the shape of a lyre,

But the dust of those who have been dismembered by
furies!”

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The failure of Val to transform his vision into a reality has led some critics
to see him as weak and lacking the maturity and courage to change his life to
what he wants it to be. Athena Coronis claims:

Val is not so powerful, and strong as [Lady] thinks.

He is rather weak, reluctant, and passive, unable to

defy the authoritarian images that confront him. He is

at his best when he consoles and offers solace to

unhappy and unfulfilled beings like Lady25
Val’s weakness, negativity, and reluctance are more blatant in his desire to
remain invisible and to hold his love for Lady within the restricted limitations of
the alcove. Lady’s and Val’s love for each other survives inside a space that is
similar to the space of the closet. Williams describes this space as follows:
”Another, much smaller, playing area is a tiny bedroom alcove which is usually
masked by an Oriental drapery which is worn dim but bears the formal design of
a gold tree with scarlet fruit and fantastic birds” (11). Similar to the closet, the
alcove is a space within the larger space; it is a private space that exists within
the larger public space. It is maneuvered and constructed as a result of what the
larger society deems illegitimate and thus forbidden. The design of the curtain
suggests that Lady and Val are in a mythical Edenic space of Venus, Cupid, and
Eros. It is the lyrical space of their erotic encounters and passionate energy.
When the nurse faces Lady with her pregnancy towards play's end, Lady
exclairns: ”Why are you staring at me?” And the nurse, recognizing the alcove
space as the private space of the consummation of their forbidden passion,
replies while ”start [ing] toward alcove: 'I’m not staring at you, I’m staring at the
curtain. There is something burning in there, smoke’s coming out'” (138). The

nurse is curious about the secrecy of Val’s and Lady’s closet. She wants to peek

into this closet to demystify its secrecy and also to destroy the boundaries that

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separate this private space from the rest of the public space within which it
exists; thus rendering the relationship between Va! and Lady a public affair for
exposure and moral judgment.

Within such a space, Val wants to keep his love relationship with Lady.
Scared of Jabe coming downstairs, Val tells Lady: ”Don’t he know I sleep here?”
and Lady offers him the reassurance he is looking for: ”Nobody knows you sleep
here but you and me” (103). Towards the end of the play when Val learns about
Lady’s pregnancy, and asks her: ”Is it true or not true, what that woman told
you?” And Lady answers, highlighting the psychological trauma of Val: ”You
sound like a scared little boy” (139). Va! is afraid that, with Lady's pregnancy,
what had been private will become public. The secret will be out, and their
relationship will have to be recognized and admitted by both of them and also
the community. Val can not hide his feelings any more, can not curb his identity
more than he has, and can not cater to the rest of the provincial community more
than he has. The truth is out, and with it comes the possibility of full self-
realization. Val’s and Lady’s desire has to be recognized now, if not accepted.
They can not hide in the closeted alcove anymore. With Lady’s pregnancy, both
Lady and Val become visible. Val is scared of this visibility. He prefers to remain
hidden and under the cover of the curtain. Even when he expresses his vision of
the legless bird, Val is fascinated by the bird’s invisibility. The birds are
”transparent, the color of the sky and you could see through them... Camouflage,
they call it. You can’t tell those birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks
don’t catch them, don’t see them up in the high sky near the sun!” (Italic
emphasis is mine) (56). Williams is demonstrating that no matter how lyrical the

closeted space maybe, Val’s and Lady’s love can not survive within its limits.

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They suffocate and ultimately die. Val is defeated by his environment and by the
hostile mentality of the crowd as he is defeated by himself. He is a prisoner to his
own fears. Indeed, he fits with Wylie Sypher’s description of the ”existential hero
manque." Sypher argues that the ” [hero manque’s] adventures never make him a
hero, yet he thirsts for heroism in an age that is mediocre... The Dandy resists the
ordinary, which is the inauthentic, but he fails to gain the authentic. He is an
existential hero manque.”” Val is running away from the corrupted system, but
in his escape he starts running from himself as well. In his quest for his vision of
liberation, he has destroyed this vision and thus mutilated himself.

Val’s mutilation is also ontological. He is an Orpheus and a Christ-like
figure as well. He embodies the qualities of Orpheus. He is a wanderer and a
musician ”whose music had almost magical properties, able to tame wild beasts
and reconcile contending parties!” Williams is attracted to the Dionysiac quality
of this myth. Benjamin Nelson, commenting on the parallels between the myth of
Orpheus and the story of Val in MS Descending, states that Val, like the
mythic Orpheus, ”has brought some beauty, his personal beauty of the wild and
innocent, to the under kingdom, and he has attempted to rescue one of the
captives.”” Both Val and Orpheus are musicians, singers, lovers, and also
marginalized outcasts. Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, was killed by a snake, and
Orpheus decides to take a journey to Hades, the world of the dead, to save his
wife. The King of the Dead let him in and allows her to return with him to earth
because he has been mesmerized by the music of Orpheus. The King of Hades,
however, makes it a condition that Orpheus should not turn back and look at
Eurydice before he reaches the upper world. Orpheus almost fulfills his quest,

but when his anxiety causes him to turn around to make sure Eurydice is

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following him, he violates the condition he has agreed upon. As a punishment,
Orpheus is deprived again of his wife, and he himself is dismembered. Not only
does Orpheus fail to liberate his wife from the underworld and defeat death, but
he himself also becomes imprisoned to the world of the dead from which he has
been trying to free her. Orpheus is a captive to the underworld and also to his
own anxiety. The Orpheus myth recapitulates Val’s quest to liberate Lady from
her dead self and to awaken her again to her desire and Dionysiac free spirit. His
failure to achieve such a quest parallels Orpheus’s failure to defeat the forces of
death and highlights the dramatic irony that he himself has fallen captive to the
same forces from which he was trying to liberate Lady. Both the myth and the
play point to the impossibility of a dream in the midst of an ugly reality. The
harmony and the beauty of Orpheus’s music does not change and transform the
hearts of the dead; neither does Val’s music change the spirit of Two-River
County.

Val is also often perceived as a Christ-like figure. There are some Christian
allusions in ngheus Deeeending that enhance such a reading. Among his
superhuman qualities, Val tells Lady that he was once tied up to a post for a
whole day without passing water, a story similar to that of Christ who was tied
up to a post before his crucifixion. Val refers constantly to his thirty years of age
and his departure from the life he has been living, which can be read as an
allusion to Christ’s death around the same age. Most of the play's action takes
place on the Saturday before Easter, i.e. between the time of the crucifixion and
the resurrection. Finally, Vee relates Val to Christ in her vision that she has been
waiting for. Vee recaptures her vision only to Val, and she chooses to trust him

with her story about what she has seen and experienced. In fact, Val comes

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bearing the same mission as Christ. Christ came to save, and so does Val, as his
name Xavier suggests. Both of them come to break and destroy the existing laws
and the rigid moral codes. In the same way as Christ offered his flesh and blood
for redemption and salvation, so does Val. He offers his life to save that of Lady.
Whether Val is an Orpheus or a Christ-like figure, the outcome is the same. The
three figures -Val, Orpheus, and Christ- descend to the world of hell to save and
redeem, and all meet the same destiny of dismemberment, death, captivity,
crucifixion, and the destruction of the forces of light and the spirit of change. In
gpheus Descending, Williams dramatizes the death of the gods, the demise of
the kindred spirits, and the impossibility of escape from the dominion of power
and darkness. The light that marks the liberation of the self is yet to come.

Most critics have been perplexed and confused by Williams’s multiple
allusions in (_Lrphgre. Walter Kerr, however, who has noted that ”the brilliance of
Williams’ best work lies precisely in its admission of complexity... as the root
condition of our lives.”” John Gassner called this play ”one of the most chaotic
contemporary works of genius.”30 Nelson claims that ”in the story of Val
Xavier... Williams presents a conglomeration of pagan and Christian symbolism
and myth which obliterates almost all else in its intensity and confusion!” As
Kimball King claims, ”critics who have complained that Qrphepe Qegending
bewildered its audience with excessive signaling failed to recognize that the
playwright was engaged in a Promethean adventure, which, despite its potential
for failure, he felt compelled to undertake.”32 Critics are often perplexed by the
complexity of Williams’s work. They seek characters cut according to their own
views who fit into clearly defined compartments. They are often perplexed by

the rich texture of his characters and the absorption and transformation of

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mythical, Christian, and pagan references present in Williams's text. What is an
intertextual mosaic in Qrpheus is perceived by many critics as confusion of
symbols and allusions.

The metaphor of the mosaic fits with Williams’s characterization of Val
Xavier, who like a mosaic, is divided, dispersed, fragmented, and contradictory.
It is, however, this very fragmentation that gives him his tragic grandeur. His
fragmentation is his weakness and his tragic flaw; it is also his richness and
complexity. Va! is an Orpheus, a Christ-like figure, a musician, and an artist;
however, this multiplicity does not make him a confusing character, but rather a
character larger than life, and a self that is beyond containment and confinement
in its multiplicity and fluidity. The self, for Williams, is complex and of multiple
facets; and any attempts made by critics or the audience to resist the complexity
of these characters make them collaborators in the mutilation inflicted on
Williams’s characters by the society in which they live.

Williams's use of the Orpheus myth as well as Christian and pagan
allusions fits with his understanding of the self as a complex structure. In his
interview for _P_l_a_yl;gy magazine, Williams states that ”all [his] great characters
are larger than life.”33 They are icons who have managed to resist the
fragmentation of the world they live in without necessarily nullifying this
fragmentation. They are able to extract beauty out of ugliness, meaning out of
chaos, and order out of disorder. As Judith Thompson argues, Williams makes
his characters larger than life because he wants ”to universalize the particular
and the peculiar, to find those analogues or archetypes in myth, legend, or fairy
tale that will tap the collective unconscious and give archetypal meaning to

personal plight!“ Williams’s characterization of Val transcends the boundaries

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between past and present; as well as the rigidity and artificiality that separates
now from then.

Through the use of the Orpheus myth and Christian allusions, Williams
tries to liberate the self from the limitations and the restraints of time. Williams
envisions a self in a timeless world. In his essay ”The Timeless World of a Play,”
he conceptualizes this vision, and explains that his responsibility as a playwright
is to snatch ”the eternal out of the desperately fleeting,” which is the greatest
”magic trick of human existence.”35 Williams wants to portray his characters
outside the ”shattering intrusion of time.” For Williams, time is the enemy that
has to be defeated because it is the enemy that shatters, divides, and fragments.
Williams seeks this ”repose” in the world of his plays because it ”allows
contemplation and produces the climate in which tragic importance is a possible
thing, provided that certain modern conditions are met. ”36 The timeless world of
the play is an occasion for meditation and self-reflection. It is a moment of self-
understanding and self-realization. Williams praises the timeless quality of
Greek tragedy, because it offers the audience a sense of ”magnitude” since ”the
created world of the play is removed from that element [time] which makes
people little and their emotions fairly inconsequential/37 The timeless world of
the play brings the audience to terms with their own emotions, and consequently
with themselves. In this self-reflection, redemption will hopefully be achieved
because it is only in this timeless world that they can ”pity and love each other
more deeply than they permit themselves to know” in ”this continual rush of
time.”38

Yet, what Williams envisions is paradoxical and ontologically defeating.

Time always embodies and engulfs even in the very moment when we seek

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liberation from it. By blurring the specificity of Two-River County through
Christian allusions and mythic references, Williams creates a world that can
exemplify ”the past, the present, and the perhaps,” as the preface of Oppheus
suggests. Val, Lady, Carol, Vee, and the tide of forces against which they are
struggling are part of the present in the same way as they are part of the world of
Hades, and the world where death is ultimate. In C_)rpl_r_e1§, Williams has re-
created a myth for our time. Through the Orpheus myth and Christian allusions,
Williams ”seeks to expose the ruthless savagery still extant in modern man.”
Consequently, Williams’s play provides ”important psychological insight into
the anatomy of violence/’3’9 and uncovers the ugliness of group consciousness
and the limiting confinements exercised upon the self as a result of this
consciousness which prevail in human attitudes and behaviors

Qpllepe Descending depicts the timeless and universal plight of human
enslavement and the hope for freedom and liberation. It is a story told and re-
told by different people in different times and about different characters. The
past is not far away, and we are doomed to re-live the same experience of our
ancestors. The past presses itself against our own will even though we long to
separate ourselves from it and would like to believe that we live in a better world
than that of our predecessors. The self remains locked in these confinements of
time, and most of Williams's characters fail to liberate themselves from its
octopus-er grasp. Tom Wingfield, for example, follows the same footsteps of
his father, who fell in love with long distances. Blanche DuBois falls victim to the
same cruelty that she herself inflicted upon her husband Allan Grey. Brick
Pollitt's life parallels that of Big Daddy to the point that Brick’s relationship with

Maggie seems to duplicate that of Big Daddy’s relationship with Big Mama.

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Lady Torrance meets the same destiny as her Italian lmrnigrant father, and both
are defeated and murdered by the same man and the same brutal forces. Val,
with the dignity of the defeated, follows in the footsteps of the mythical Orpheus
and the legendary Jesus Christ. The self can not be liberated from time and from
the past. It is a re-enactment of past cruelties, past pains, and past sufferings. The
self is pre-destined and pre-determined to be what it is; it is a product of its own
past, its own history, and its own environment, yet an entity that is destined to
be at odds with this environment. The self is chained to these forces which run
opposite to its desire and what it is longing for, but this struggle is what defines
it, and provides it with its essence. The essential core of the self is that of struggle
and resistance, evasions and masquerades, masks and role-playing, self-erasure
and self-affirmation; in-between lies the bright possibilities of victory as well as
the dark forces of defeat. The self is under attack from inside and from outside,
from internalized fears, anxieties, confusion; it is under threat from friends and
relatives and other institutions which have placed themselves as its own guards
and safe watchers.

Val is defeated by all these forces at the end of WELS- He is killed by
the mentality of the mob that can not accept change and prefers to remain blind
to other options and better possibilities. Val can not reconcile his paradoxes or
live up to the opposing drives within himself. He is torn by polarizations and
extremes. He can not find the texture where these opposites can be synthesized
and celebrated. He cut himself off in order to live up to an image of who he is
not. The burden of the wanderer spirit is unbearable for Val, and he can not carry
its weight by play's end. His snakeskin jacket has to be passed on to another

character to cherish and spread the spirit of wildness and defiance that it

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represents. Lady fails to perpetuate Val’s inheritance; Carol Cutrere who is
entrusted with the snakeskin jacket to carry on the spirit, may hopefully succeed
where Val did not. Many questions are posed by the fall of ms final
curtain: Why isn’t Lady capable of carrying on this spirit? What is there about
her character that she should redeem so as to be able to fulfill this mission? What
factors contribute to Lady’s tragic downfall and ultimate death? Does she achieve
self-liberation at play's end? The same questions can also be posed about Carol
Cutrere. Through examining these questions, I am hoping to further investigate

Williams’s understanding of a liberated self and the character who may embody
this understanding in Qpheus Descending.

Lady Torrance between the Past and the Future: The Ambivalent Self

Similarly to Val, Lady has mutilated herself and made many concessions
and compromises at high personal expense just to survive, and be able to live
with Jabe and the Two—River County community. Yet, in her mutilation and
entrapment, Lady is always seeking her own escape and liberation from the
cruelties that she endured for most of her life. The ultimate end that she has to
face is her death by the same forces of evil from which she is trying to liberate
herself. In an attempt to protect Val from Jabe's bullets, Lady sacrifices herself
and dies without achieving the self-fulfillment that she has so sought. Why does
she fail in the same way as Val does? Why does she face the same end as his?
Why does she fail to be the one who can carry Val’s wild spirit and inherit his
vision and his snakeskin jacket? And what circumstances and conditions hinder

her from achieving her vision of liberation and freedom?

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Lady's dilemma starts with the loss of her father, who was burnt to death,
and the destruction of the orchard he planted on a piece of property called Moon
Lake. The loss of the orchard signals, for Lady, the loss of an Edenic and
prelapsarian state of being. The orchard is an earthly paradise with its
”grapevines and fruit trees” and ”little arbors.” Lady’s father has turned a cheap
wasteland into a place where young people can meet to ”court up a storm” and
express more freely their passion and desire. The orchard is a libidinal place
where young people could ”go out to... drink that Dago red wine an’ cut up an’
carry on an’ raise such cane in those arbors!” (16). This was a place of the free
Dionysian spirit of Lady. It was in this orchard where she knew and met David
Cutrere, and where both of them together discover their own passion, and
consummate their mutual love. Like two carefree people, they enjoy each other’s
company, and make the best out of this sexually free Edenic garden. Sometimes
her father ”would look around for his daughter,” Beulah tells us, ”and all of a
sudden Lady wouldn’t be there!” Dolly suggests that ”it’s hard to shout back,
’here I am, Papa,’ when where you are is in the arms of your lover!” (17). Both
Lady and David were such ”a beautiful. thing,” ”and those two met like you
struck two stones together and made a fire! Yes- fire. . .” (14). All of this comes to
a halt when Lady’s father made the irreversible mistake in the eyes of the Two-
River County community of selling liquor to some colored men. The Mystic
Crew burnt the orchard down to the ground, and Lady's father died trying to
smother the flames. The Edenic paradise is destroyed, and Lady becomes a
shattered entity that retains its identity only through the memories that she
carries of a once joyful past. Alone, broken, bereft, and jilted by David Cutrere

for another local girl with more money and social prestige to save his family

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home, Lady accepts the financial security that Jabe offers her and marries him in
spite of her own will.

Such events mark the turning point in Lady’s life. Her desire is no longer
her own, it is rather placed in the hands of Jabe for his own disposal. Instead of
being part of her own subject, Lady’s desire has become part of a transaction
between her and Jabe based on exchange values and determined by what he is
willing to offer and what she is ready to return. Her identity is placed inside a
mercantile system instead of being contained by herself and performed
according to what she deems herself to be. Beulah tells Dolly: ”He bought her,
when she was a girl of eighteen! He bought her and bought her cheap because
she’d been thrown over and her heart was broken by that” (14). And Lady thinks
of herself in the same transactional terms when she tells David: ”You sold
yourself. I sold myself. You was bought, I was bought. You made whores of us
both!” (79). Within the socially sanctified and socially accepted institution of
marriage, Lady finds herself forced to sell her body to Jabe in order to seek the
financial security he is offering her after her father's death. Marriage, however,
gives her neither protection nor self-fulfillment. It is rather a big lie that she lives
by every day and gives her the appearance of propriety and respectability. Lady
is mutilated and incomplete after David jilts her: ”I carried your child in my
body the summer you quit me but I had it cut out of my body, and they cut my
heart with it” (78). Lady’s past is taken away from her, and so is her heart. She is
destined to be mutilated and incomplete for the rest of her life. In this state of
existence, Lady has sought her own death, as she tells David: ”I wanted death
after that, but death don’t come when you want it, it comes when you don’t want

it! I wanted death...” (78). In spite of her loss of her father and her lover, Lady

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has enough valor to survive and keep on living. She is on pills, and is ”going to
pieces,” as she tells Val, but she tries to understate her tragedy and minimize her
pain when she talks to David (46):

I haven’t gone down so terribly far in the world. I got

a going concern in this mercantile store, in there’s the

confectionery which’ll reopen this spring, it’s being

done over to make it the place that all the young

people will come to, it’s going to be like--the wine

garden of my father, those wine-drinking nights

when you had something better than anything you’ve

had since!” (80).
This speech reveals how far Lady is separated from reality. She is pretending that
she is not hurt, because she does not want David’s pity. But deep down the
trauma of the past still has its impact upon her. The two alternatives that she
opted for--that of her marriage to Jabe and her harboring interest in the
confectionery—will definitely push her further down into loss and mutilation.

In her marriage with Jabe, Lady has acquiesced to couple herself with
death. There is nothing human and passionate about Jabe Torrance. Lady calls
him ”Mr. death,” Val tells Lady that ”he looks like death” (109), and Williams
refers to him as ”death’s self, and malignancy” (141). In a macabre image that
reveals the dread and the pain Lady has to deal with in her marriage with Jabe,
she tells Val:

I know! Death’s knocking for me! Don’t you think I
hear him, knock, knock, knock? It sounds like what it
is! Bones knocking bones... ask me how it felt to be
coupled with death up there, and I can tell you. My
skin crawled when he touched me... (135).

Lady has settled with such a man because she wants to deny her passionate side,

and she wants to bury her desire that was destroyed with the death of her father

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and the loss of her lover. She wants to be with a man who can remind her the
least of her love and her past, and who can draw her the farthest away from her
human side. In Jabe Lady has found a convenient prison for her desire and
herself. They live in the same house, and yet not together. ”They got two
separate bedrooms which are not even connectin,”’ Dolly informs us, and
”everything is so dingy an’ dark up there... It seemed like... a county jail!” (14).
She has settled for this isolation and imprisonment in order to escape from her
own self. With Jabe Lady is allowed neither to dream nor to be inspired. She is
nailed down to an ugly reality through the concessions she has made at her own
expense. Her life has turned into a nightmare, as she tells Val, ”because I sleep
with a son of a bitch who bought me at a fire sale, and not in fifteen years have I
had a single good dream, not one...” (57). Without her dreams and her
inspirations, Lady has found herself living in hateful deprivation. ”She could live
with him in hate, ”Beulah observes, ”peOple can live together in hate for a long
time” (18).

Lady’s passion for life, romance, love, and free sexuality, does not fade
away, but is translated into a passion for money. Vee has found an outlet for her
passion in painting and in religion, while the alternatives Lady explores are no
less futile. She has cultivated a business-woman persona, and occupies herself
with running Jabe’s mercantile store. Beulah hints at theway Lady has displaced
her passion when she states about Lady and Jabe: ”Notice their passion for
money. I’ve always noticed when couples don’t love each other they develop a
passion for money” (18). Lady has developed a facade of professionalism behind
which she can hide her emotions. She interviews Val, checks references, gets him

to wear a dark business suit in the store instead of his snakeskin jacket, and

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negotiates with him his salary and commission. This is Lady’s business persona.
She wants this persona to be affirmative in the business world to compensate for
the emotional anorexic life she currently endures.

Despite her oppressive circumstances, Lady has never lost her passion.
The confectionery that she is creating can not be read solely as a sign of her
growing mercantile interests for it is also her shelter and refuge. It is a ”shadowy
and poetic” space, as Williams describes it in his opening stage direction.
Therefore, the confectionery has a personal significance for Lady, it is in this
poetic space where she tries to re-assert her own self as a subject and liberate her
”frozen self” from the long austere and cold years that she has lived with Jabe.
Through constructing this confectionery, she is restoring a part of her life that
was destroyed and taken away from her. Kimball King furthermore has
suggested that ”The confectionery which Lady plans to open on Easter Sunday...
looks like the wine garden of her father’s... Thus it becomes a construction of a
part of her life which she views nostalgically and which also emphasizes the
magnitude of her personal loss...”0 Through the confectionery, Lady wants to
look back and reclaim the past with its innocent, pure, and idyllic spirit. She is
restoring the wildness of this past and hoping that what was then not tolerated
may be tolerated and perhaps even celebrated now. ”The confectionery,” Lady
tells David, ”which’ll reopen this spring, it’s being done over to make it the place
that all the young people will come to, it’s going to be like—the wine garden of
my father, those wine-drinking nights when you had something better than
anything you’ve had since!” (80). Athena Coronis comments on the rejuvenating
nature of Lady’s project: ”Lady’s attempt to recreate her father’s wine garden in

the mercantile store may be seen as an indication of her inner wish to renew

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herself, to pull herself... out of deadly corruption and evil, to start her life anew”.
Coronis continues: ”Her effort to make the confectionery a meeting place for
young people re-affirms her desire for life, purity, and love. The opening of the
store in the spring symbolizes the project of hope and warmth, the dawn of a
better tomorrow, the recovery of a frozen self. ”‘1
The coming of Val Xavier to Lady’s store accelerates this process of

recovery from the ”frozen self” that Coronis has succinctly described. Val has
made Lady more determined to follow her own desire and follow the will of her
heart rather than succumbing to the harsh circumstances where she has found
herself entangled. Her attraction to Val has reassured her that she is still a human
being capable of loving and feeling. Though skeptical at first, she believes in his
vision. In response to his description of the flying transparent birds, she replies:

Show me one of them birds and I’ll say, Yes, God’s

made one perfect creature! - I sure would give this

mercantile store and every bit of stock in it to be that

tiny bird the color of the sky... for one night to sleep

on the wind -- and float! --around under th’- stars...

(56).
Lady’s optimism manifests itself in her readiness to give up all that she has in
order to know what it feels like to be as free as the transparent legless birds.
Moreover, when Val tells her about his view that ”we’re all of us sentenced to
solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!” Lady replies that she ”cannot
agree with something as sad as that statement!” (63). Though desperate, Lady
wants to believe that there are still possibilities. But unfortunately, Lady doesn't
live to see the day when she is free and liberated from the chains that pull her

down to corruption. The forces of Jabe destroy her in the way they collaborated

in destroying her father. Lady’s self is locked to the same destiny as her father’s.

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The way Lady and her father envision their lives as innocent, idyllic, and wild is
not tolerated by Jabe and his kind. Lady fails to fulfill her dream and transform it
into a reality. She fails in her quest for a liberated self and therefore she meets the
same destiny as Val. She has fallen another prey to the forces of evil. With her
death, Lady exemplifies the sad fact that the past can not be restored and the self
can not seek its own refuge in this past no matter how glorified this past is and
how tempting such an alternative might be.

Lady’s attempt at reconstructing the past proves to be artificial and
elusive. Everything about the confectionery is artificial including the branches of
the fruit trees and the flowers on the walls and ceilings. Lady is trying to
duplicate the past instead of searching for other alternatives and more original
possibilities. She has managed to demolish her illusion about the present that her
life with Jabe is of any significant quality; but in her search for another
alternative she has accepted the illusion of the past as an ideal alternative. The
past is another force that Lady fails to escape. Her self-realization that takes place
at play's end happens like a revelation about the past rather than an awareness
about the present or the future. Again, Lady evokes memories about the past and
the ”little fig tree between the house and the orchard” (140). Lady’s revelation
has a dream-like quality about it that is reinforced not only through the poetic
images of the bearing fig tree, the Christmas ornaments and the ”glass bells,
glass birds, tinsel, icicles, stars” and snow, but also through the past tense that
prevails throughout the entire passage. Lady’s revelation is still a dream that is
far remote from her. It is a dislocated dream—a half-dead memory and a
renewed hope in its embryonic stage. Lady’s self-realization is still incomplete at

play's end. She is still searching for the appropriate language that would express

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this dream, reveal her inspiration, and describe the released energy that she is
experiencing. This language is yet to be formulated. While unable to construct
this language to write herself, Lady resorts to the language of the past and that of
metaphors and similes. Lady compares herself to a fig tree that was cursed, but
can now bear once again. The metaphoric language does not express the entity as
such, but what it is like by means of comparisons to other entities and other
subjects. Lady’s identity remains hidden behind the screens and the facades of
this metaphoric language. The subjective ”I” of Lady is dislocated and relocated
to the vehicle of the metaphor, i.e. the fig tree. Lady is rejuvenated at play's end,
and her energy is revived, but she remains locked not only into the memories of
the past, but also into the labyrinth of language. She is a subject in search of its
own language to write itself. While this voice is yet to be found, she remains
dependent on a language that is not her own. She remains fragile, defenseless,
and vulnerable to Jabe's forces, and dies at play's end signaling out the demise of
another sensitive and fragile character who has been struck down by the ugly
brutality of a deadly reality. Williams’s sensitive characters whom he describes
as the ”moths” in one of his poems, find the world too aggressive and too brutal
for their sensitivity that remains yet to be appreciated and cherished.

Lady’s failure is similar to that of Blanche in the way they both allow the
past to interfere with their present and press against their own will for liberation
and freedom. Blanche can not escape ”the memories of Belle Reve and the death
of her homosexual husband; and Lady can not get over the death of her father
and the loss of her lover. Neither can she convince herself that the quality of her
life will not change with the re-creation of the wine garden. ”Just as Blanche’s

final attempt to find a new meaning with Mitch is shattered by the events of her

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past and the brutality of the present,” argues Benjamin Nelson, ”so too is Lady’s
attempt to regain life with Val destroyed by the past and the viciousness of her
present milieu!”l2 The doom of Williams’s characters is that in their quest for
identity and liberation, they resort to an image of themselves that they are
already familiar with. Therefore, instead of engaging themselves in redefining
and re-examining their own image, they start performing a role that they used to
perform, and they wear the mask of the same persona they used to act. They
deny or block out the fact that what they are re-enacting can not match in any
way the originality and the genuineness of this past. The effect is detrimental
since the reality is perverted, twisted, distorted, and remodeled just to fit with
the views they want to hold of the world. The doom of Lady and Blanche is that
they refuse to involve themselves in a negotiation about their identity. It is worth
noticing that the characters who are able to survive the cruelty and the threats of
erasures they face everyday are the characters who are aware that the self can not
exist in isolation and is a product of negotiation and dialogue. Lady fails to place
her project of liberation within a larger social context. She is too self-centered in
her quest and she lacks resilience and commitment to a larger cause than herself.
Examples that fit with the latter category of Williams's characters, to mention a
few, are Maggie and Brick in _C_a_t gr lief T_ip 1_2_o_0_f, and Carol Cutrere in Qgphepe
flseending. These characters have learnt in their quest for liberation that reality
has to be faced on its own terms.

Lady has also proven to be vengeful in her quest, not that she does not
have reasons and justifications for being so, but her vengefulness is gratuitous
and not constructive. Jack Wallace argues that ”there is admittedly nothing very

noble about Lady’s plan to renew the wine garden, no thought of settling the

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world right, no real concern for the good of the community!” Even though one
can not understand how Lady can be involved in and caring about a community
that has robbed her everything she has and contributed to her destruction
through their silence to the evil that has befallen her, one can not help noticing
the irnpracticality of Lady’s act. ”Hell, I don’t even want it,” she screams to Val.
”It is just something’s got to be done to square things away, to, to, to--be not
defeated!... Just to be not defeated!” (130).

In seeking independence from Jabe, Lady has become dependent on Val.
Out of loneliness, she enjoys being with Val. He offers her companionship in the
midst of the dark and cold store. He also comes into her life at a time when she
needs some affirmation and reassurance that she can be humanly capable once
again of loving and being loved. Often in the play, she holds Val's guitar to
prevent him from leaving her: ”I’m going to keep hold of your ’life companion’
while I pack! I am! I am goin’ to pack an’ go, if you go, where you go!” (134).
Lady can not imagine what her life would be like without Val, she is scared of
the emptiness she has to face once he leaves. Eager to protect him and alarmed
by the danger that he is exposed to, Lady releases him at play's end. ”You’ve
given me life, you can go!” (140). But, it is already too late for him to escape the
cruelty of Jabe and his evil intention. With such a claim, Lady has transformed
Val into a functional entity who is free to go once he has fulfilled his duty:
”You’ve done what you came here to do... ” (140). And obviously they have
nothing more to give to each other.

Benjamin Nelson has succinctly observed about Lady’s ambivalence
towards love that she ”has not been afraid of love; she has been betrayed by it.

She is a full-blooded woman, warm and passionate, who had known love, been

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terribly injured, and has detached herself from life, through wanting desperately
to live.”“ Lady is betrayed and injured, and I am suggesting that she is not
capable of forgetting what love has caused her even when she is with Val. She
has never totally invested herself with him, she has always been on guard with
him, and she has never managed to put the experience of the past behind her.
She is a damaged woman and she has never forgotten that she is so. She wants
Val, yet she feels she has to hold back. She wants the romance, yet she is afraid
that the ghosts of the past will come back to haunt her again. She is willing to put
her heart on the line for Va! and assume the risk of living with him, yet she is
afraid that her heart will be once more smashed and crushed. In her attitude
towards Val, Lady is always ambivalent and sometimes even devious.

Lady does not reveal her real feelings towards Val honestly and frankly.45
She feels she has to maintain the mask of propriety and decorum: ”I’m not
interested in your perfect functions, in fact you don’t interest me no more than
the air that you stand in. If that’s understood we’ll have a good working
relation...” (57). But when he is out of her sight she allows the audience to see
what she has hidden from him. ”She throws back her head and laughs as lightly
and gaily as a young girl,” Williams’s stage direction informs the audience.
”Then she turns and wonderingly picks up and runs her hands tenderly over his
guitar as the curtain falls” (58). Lady can express her feeling towards Val, and be
herself only vicariously. In touching Val’s guitar, she is caressing Val’s body that
she knows no one would allow her to have. Similar to Blanche, Lady needs a
private moment to drop off the public mask and share only with the audience a

moment of honesty and integrity.

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Lady resorts to the same devious indirection and masquerade when she
invites Val to live in the alcove of the store ostensibly to save money on rent, but
in reality to court him for companionship and hopefully to seduce him. She tells
Val:

There wouldn’t be no obligation, you’d do me a favor.

I’d feel safer at night with somebody on the place. I

would; it would cost you nothing! And you could

save up that money you spend on the cabin. How

much? Ten a week? Why, two or three months from

now you’d--save enough money to... (90).
The stage directions further describe Lady’s nervous perplexity. She ”makes a
wide gesture with a short laugh as if startled” (90). Feeling her emotional
nakedness and her fear that her real intentions and feelings towards Val might be
revealed, Lady says, ”Where does heat go in this building?” while ”shivering”
and ”hugging herself” (90). This scene is filled with tension that is revealed in
understatements and gestures—a tension that stems from Lady’s desire for Val,
but this desire can never be expressed or released. In the passage quoted above,
Lady talks about so many things in a short period of time. She talks about feeling
unsafe on her own, about Val’s saving some money, about the cabin where he
lives now, about the favor that he can offer her, and the no obligation that he has
towards her, but she never mentions anything about her feelings and physical
attraction to him. She piles up one reason after another to convince him to live
with her, but the truth is lost in the midst of this verbal conglomeration. She
”gasps aloud,” ”utter[s] a startled exclamation,” and ”a startled laugh,” and ”sits
stiffly without looking at him,” and her voice sounds ”harsh and sudden,” but

she never reveals what she wants from Val. Lady is afraid that if she were more

truthful towards Val, she might lose in him the possibility of a future companion.

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She is caught in an awkward situation where she cannot reveal the truth, she has
to pretend and to deny; and if she reveals the truth about her feeling, she is not
sure either that the outcome will be anymore satisfying. Blanche is caught in the
same dilemma in her relationship with Mitch. She hides and conceals the truth
about her past. Both Blanche and Lady are caught between the truth they want to
reveal and the mendacity they are forced to practice in order to survive. Both of
them fear the abandonment and loss that the revelation of the truth may entail,
and therefore choose to remain estranged and distant from the very people they
want to be the closest to and the most honest with. Only towards the end of the
scene does Lady ”look at [Val] directly for the first time since mentioning the
alcove” (95). Her laughter is still ”senseless.” Her mask is dropped again when
Val takes some money from the cash box and runs away. Coming down from the
stairs, Lady realizes that Val has left; and she ”wanders desolately back to the
door, opens it and stands staring out into the starless night as the scene dims
out” (96). At that moment she realizes the depth of her loss. After their
confrontation in the last scene of Act four, Lady decides to be more honest. In an
outcry, she tells Val: ”NO, NO, DON’T G0... I NEED YOU!!! TO LIVE... TO GO
ON LIVING!!! (102).

Lady’s deviousness and masquerading backfire. Val is confused by her
intentions and ambivalence: ”I ain’t dissatisfied with you. I’m pleased with you,
sincerely!” She tells him; and Val, questioning Lady’s sincerity and highlighting
her deviousness, answers: ”You sure don’t show it” (61). He suspects her of
trying to buy and to use him. He resists her offer, and when she asks him to stay

in the alcove, Williams tells us that ”his manner is gently sad as if he had met

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with a familiar, expected disappointment” (91). And finally he confronts her with
the painful truth that she does not want to hear:

«A not so young and not so satisfied woman, that

hired a man off the highway to do double duty

without paying overtime for it... I mean a store clerk

days and a stud nights... (101).
Because of her deviousness, Lady is misunderstood and hurt. Her relationship
with David follows the same pattern. She talks in half confessions and half
truths. She evokes with him the beautiful memories of the past, but she asks him
to reciprocate neither in pity nor in love. She regrets being open and frank about
her emotions towards David and what he means to her. ”I made a fool of
myself!... I-threw away-pride...-I said things to him I should of been too proud
to say...” (88). Lady puts decorum, pride, social etiquette, and propriety before
herself and her own desire. She places society first, and relegates herself to a
secondary position. She irnprisons herself to what her society expects her to be,
and places herself as the watchful guardian of her own prison. She has sought
her own liberation, but she has become a collaborator in her own damnation.
Lady can not free herself from the values that her society has been imposing on
her, and she has internalized them convincingly and at points unquestionably.
Lady has disguised her own feelings from herself and has toned down her own
voice, and molded herself in order to fit with the small image of her that the
town's people project on her. In doing so, she has denied or blocked out from her
mind the possibility that such a tragedy could ever happen to her. Williams
seems to be making the case that individuals have to live the intensity of their

emotions and experience the sensibility of their humanity for what these

experiences are worth. He makes his case clearer in the way he portrays Carol

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Cutrere who is capable of living with emotiOnal intensity and is ready to

embrace the full range and complexity of her humanity and her desire.

Carol Cutrere: Writing Her Own Self

At the end of Qrpheus Descending, Carol has to carry out the spirit of
wildness, protest, and valor that Val Xavier has undertaken. Even though there
are similarities between Carol and Val, she carries this spirit with a modified and
revised vision. Carol shares with Val his wildness and his restlessness with
conventional society and traditional values. She dissociates herself from her
society and all its moral values and laws. Learning that Carol is looking for
cartridges for her revolver, Dolly says: ”She don’t have a license to carry a
pistol,” and Beulah responds: ”She don’t have a license to drive a car” (24).
Obviously, Carol pays no attention to what society allows her to do and not to
do. She places herself out of its restraining control and codifying rules and
regulations. There are certain affinities between Val and Carol. In one of his stage
directions, Williams tells us: ”It’s important that VAL should not seem brutal in
his attitude toward CAROL; there should be an air between them of two lonely
children” (74). Val and Carol are lonely in their search and in their quest for
freedom. They are both fugitives. Val is roofless, he moves from one county to
another, and Carol ”has an odd, fugitive beauty which is stressed, almost to the
point of fantasy, by a style of makeup with which a dancer named Valli has
lately made such an impression in the bohemian centers of France and Italy” (21).

Both Val and Carol are bohemians, wild, and fugitives. Val wears the

snakeskin jacket as a badge for his wildness and free spirit; and Carol expresses

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her fascination with and simultaneously her disappointment at the loss of the
wild spirit from the country. She tells Val:

Something is still wild in the country! This country

used to be wild, the men and women were wild and

there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts, for

each other, but now it’s sick with neon, it’s broken out

sick, with neon, like most other places... (127).
Carol is reacting against the artificiality and the superficiality of the country that
is ”sick with neon.” She is not fascinated by the commercialism that has
prevailed in the country and she is determined not to be part of it. Similar to Val,
she is in search of some primal innocence and romantic ventures. Moreover, her
association with the Conjure Man ”further indicates her embattled alliance with
wildness, freedom, and racial brotherhood!”6 Williams describes the Choctaw
cry as ”a series of barking sounds that rise to a high sustained note of wild
intensity” (26). Carol wants emotional intensity and she wants to live her life up
to her potentialities. Val has somehow accommodated the commercial aspect and
the corruption he has tried to avoid, but Carol has not. It saddens her to see” Val
settling for the common options and the commercial world of Lady’s store. She
feels lonely in her spirit and in her venture when she realizes that Val has
abandoned her and has exchanged the snakeskin jacket for ”the nice blue
uniform of a convict.” Carol warns Val that the loss of his snakeskin jacket and
his wildness will ultimately lead to his demise, but what he offers her in return is
a ”rolex chronometer that tells the time of the day and the day of the week and
the months and all the crazy moon’s phases” (75). Carol is asking Val to remain

the wild and free spirit that he is; but he is asking her to become the monitored

and programmed individual that she can never be. Carol resists Val’s offer, and

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Williams describes this confrontational scene that dramatizes the different
directions the ”two lonely children” have taken as they drift away from each
other:

He takes her hand and tries to force the watch into

her fist. There is a little struggle, he can’t open her fist.

She is crying, but staring fiercely into his eyes. He

draws a hissing breath and hurls the watch violently

across the floor (76).
The struggle between Carol and Val is a struggle between those who are tempted
to give up, accommodate, and collaborate in their own downfall, and those who
are determined to resist and live the life they deem best for themselves. Val
wants to take Carol's spontaneity away from her; he is looking for the
reassurance that a similarly spirited individual is also willing to accommodate
and monitor herself the same way as he does. Carol is left alone in her dream of
freedom and in her battle to remain the woman she is. But in spite of this
loneliness and Val’s abandonment she never gives up. It is her valor and her
spirit of the warrior which have allowed her to carry on the mission that Val has
failed to achieve and convinced Williams that she is subversive enough to be
capable of being the rebellious spirit of Two-River County.

Carol stands for her own subjectivity. She is affirmative and assertive.
Unlike Val, who has mutilated himself through rejecting women and romantic
ventures, Carol claims her identity and tries to liberate her desire even though
this liberation costs her her reputation and ultimately marginalization. Carol
finds relief in sex even though this relief is momentarily and the sexual act is

painful for her. She finds solace in the act of lovemaking. She admits to Val:

The act of love-making is almost unbearably painful,
and yet of course, I do bear it, because to be not alone,

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even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the

danger. It’s dangerous for me because I’m not built

for childbearing (75).
For Williams, as Kimball King argues, ”liberation from the stern rules and
hypocrisies of the faces of darkness often takes the form... of the pursuit of
sexual liberation!”7 Irene Shaland elaborates in more details that ”sexual love is
the opposite of death; it represents a drive to live, and sex is a repeated metaphor
for an ecstatic life lived fully in the present moment... Sexuality is transformed
into salvation when it seems to be life’s only fulfillment. Then it becomes an
attempt to find God in one’s fellow-man in a world which God Himself seems to
have forsaken!”8 Carol wants the Two-River County community to face what
they can not usually face, and to deal with her as a woman who asserts her own
desire and does not cut herself off just to fit into her society’s compartments and
the image that they expect her to be. Carol is in search of her liberated and
unchained self. She is aware that once she lives through the conventions and the
codes of Two-River County then her life and her individuality are not her own
anymore. She has learnt from the dead the unforgettable lesson that life is meant
to be lived to the extremes, and her embracing of the wild and the fantastic is her
way of living up to these extremes. Speaking about the dead, she tells Val: ”They
chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill.” And she continues: ”But all they say
is one word and that one word is ’live,’ they say ’live, live, live, live, live!’ It’s all
they have learned, it’s the only advice they can give.- Just live... Simple- a very
simple instruction...” (40).

Critics have tried to place Carol in the same compartment that she is

trying to break out of, impose upon her the same moral standards that she is

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questioning, and bind her to the same chains from which she is trying to free
herself. Through such an attitude, these critics have expressed their discomfort in
facing the liberated self that Carol deems herself to be. In imposing these
limitations upon Carol, these critics are expressing their resistance in accepting
and dealing with Carol as a subject who 'claims, affirms, and asserts her own
identity. For instance, John Clum makes some claims which do not probe the
complexity of Carol’s character but rather take away from her her subversive
nature and the questioning spirit she embodies. ”Carol’s wildness,” Clum claims
”is no threat to the Southern patriarchal order. She is a remittance relative, paid
to get out of town, but not in danger when she breaks her contract and appears.
She is an embarrassment to her family and an outrage to the women, but nothing
more!”9 Clum underestimates Carol’s subversive power. If the case were similar
to what Clum describes, Carol would not have been banished by the entire
community in spite of her aristocratic background and her brother's apparently
powerful and influential position within the community. Carol is not banished
just because she is an annoyance to the community. Hugh Dickinson blames
Carol for not being constructive in her criticism of the society where she lives,
and in the way she asserts herself. He states: ”the only alternative she offered
[Val] was to join her in the old, self-destructive life of flouting society and
jooking.”5° He overlooks Carol’s commitment to racial equality and her protest
against racial injustice and discrimination. The most common ways of discarding
Carol’s self-assertion and the liberated spirit she is determined to live by come
from critics who place their own moral judgment upon her rather than examine
her motives and objectives. These critics have denounced Carol as immoral and

have based their denouncement on the evidence of her bizarre life style. For

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instance, Jeanne McGlinn, even though she is mostly sympathetic to Carol’s
cause, states that her ”economic resources bankrupt and her personal sense of
well-being threatened by the rejection of her family and community, Carol
employs bizarre survival tactics.”51 More groundless is Benjamin Nelson’s
observation about Carol. For him she is the ”corrupted aristocrat, the last tainted
remnant of a civilization and way of life that once was royal and honorable.”52
Definitely, Carol does not find anything royal or honorable about her socio-
economic background, and neither can she affirm that the society where she lives
as civilized. The critics’ attitude towards Carol does not reflect the way Williams
portrays his character. It is rather an intellectualized version of the way Dolly,
Beulah, and the Two-River County community see Carol. In the same way as
Carol has fallen prey to the moral judgment of the other women who think of her
as an ”absolutely degraded” and ”corrupt” woman, the critics can not perceive
Carol in a more positive way and in a less judgmental manner (40). If these critics
see Carol as the freakish, immoral, and corrupt woman, Williams responds to
them succinctly in his essay ”Something Wild...” ”Mutilations,” he states, ”is
another word for freaks. For God’s sake let’s have a little more freakish behavior-
-not less.”53 If we are to understand Williams’s characters with their dilemmas,
their sense of doom, and their longing for freedom and liberation, we have to
embrace their ambivalence, their weakness, their bizarre behavior, and
sometimes their grotesque response, because that’s when we just start touching
upon the surface of their humanity, and maybe that of our own as well. Williams
is initiating a whole cultural revolution and new understanding of the role of sex
and sexuality in defining the subjectivity and the independence of the individual.

However, the reactionary attitudes of such critics make it obvious that Williams’s

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revolutionary ideas and politics about the self and identity were ahead of his
time. It took a couple of decades after Qpheus Descending for philosophers and
thinkers to re-examinine the politics of self and identity in a way that Williams
would have liked to see. For instance, Michel Foucault claims that

sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s part of our

world of freedom. Sexuality is something that we

ourselves create--it is our own creation, and much

more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire.

We have to understand that with our desires, through

our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms

of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it’s

a possibility for creative life54
Such a claim could not be more true for Williams’s characters especially for Carol
Cutrere.

Early in the play the audience learns something about the way Carol uses

her own sexuality. Dolly asks Beulah:

Can you understand how any body would
deliberately make themselves look fantastic as that?

And Beulah responds:

Some people have to show off, it’s a passion with

them, anything on earth to get attention (21).
Through flaunting her sexuality in front of the towns people, Carol is seeking
visibility and recognition. Unlike Val, who has chosen to hide behind the alcove
curtain, confine his relationship with Lady in such a small space, and live a
closeted life for fear others should discover his secret desire, Carol wants the
entire community to know who she is and what she is doing. She is not willing to
curb her desire to the power fabrics of her community, and she is determined not

to live a life of hypocrisy and double standards. ”I’m an exhibitionist!” she

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exclairns, ”I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive!
Don’t you want them to know you’re alive! ” Val’s attitude juxtaposes hers. His
response: ”I want to live and I don’t care if they know I’m alive or not” (39)-
illustrates how he wants to pass in silence, while Carol has chosen to live out
loud. Carol’s exhibitionism is subversive not only because it makes her visible,
but because she is also capable of inventing and creating herself while
underscoring the importance of the social taboos and the social conventions in
the image she is creating of herself. Carol’s act of self-creation or self—
theatricalization is an act of resistance and defiance. Her exhibitionism is not for
the sake of exhibitionism and self-exposure. She tells Val: ”I suppose it was
partly exhibitionism on my part, but it wasn’t completely exhibitionism; there
was something else in it, too” (39). Carol is not the ”1er vagrant” that the town
people want to see in her, she is the political and social protestor who is
committed to her vision of equality and justice for the deprived and the
oppressed. Carol’s exhibitionism is not just sexual and personal, it is more. It is
political and ideological as well. Arthur Miller recognizes Williams’s political
and ideological subversion when he claims in Timebends that Williams was not
”the sealed off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the
soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line.”55

Carol is what they used to call ”a Christ-bitten reformer” who is trying to
secure justice for the downtrodden and the deprived. She tells Val she writes
”letters of protest” and she ”squandered the money [her] mother left [her]” to
”put up free clinics.” Moreover, on the cause of black civil rights she becomes a
staunch advocate. She has protested the wrongs done to blacks: ”I thought it was

wrong for pellagra and slow starvation to cut them down when the cotton crop

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failed from army worm or boll weevil or too much rain in summer” (39). In the
case of Willie McGee, who ”was sent to the chair for having improper relations
with a white whore,” Carol ”put on a potato sack and set out for the capital on
foot... to deliver a personal protest to the Governor of the state” (39). Carol is
raising the consciousness of the community and leading a one-woman revolt
against the hypocrisy of Two-River County. As Samar Attar observes, ”Carol
Cutrere... reveals the atmosphere of the town, its racist violence and the moral
corruption and hypocrisy which lie behind the facade of social respectability!”5
Carol has managed to demonstrate how individuals can apply themselves not
only to their own best, but also to the best of the community. Her sense of
involvement, engagement, and attachment is opposed to Val’s sense of
detachment, invisibility, and lack of engagement. She is willing to put herself
and her life on the line, while he has ”a kind of refusal to concern himself with a
problem that isn’t his own” (73). Carol has realized that if somebody’s identity
and autonomy are taken away, then the day when she herself will be robbed of
her own identity and freedom is not that far off. She takes it upon herself not to
let this happen—a responsibility which Val is reluctant and ambivalent to
assume.

Because of her sense of self-liberation, and her striving for justice and
visibility without necessarily offering herself as a sacrifice, Carol is the character
who is most prepared to inherit the snakeskin jacket, to carry on the spirit of
wildness and protest, and to have the closing lines of the play. In the midst of the

cries of ”anguish,” ”the fierce blue jet of fire” and ”the faces of demons,” Carol

stands more determined and firmer in her beliefs. She claims:

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Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean

skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and

these are tokens passed from one to another, so that

the fugitive can always follow their kind... (144).
The audience is left with the hope that Carol’s destiny will not be similar to that
of Val. Carol remains a token among Williams’s characters—a token of liberation
and freedom that even the Sheriff’s voice ”Stay here! Stop! Stop!”-can not stop.
”She crosses directly past him as if she no longer saw him, and out the door”
(144). Val’s death and the cruelty of the towns people do not change much of
Carol’s subversion and her strong belief in better possibilities. Carol is the
transparent bird of Val’s vision, as he describes her in Act Two Scene One. ”Fly
away, little bird, fly away before you get broke,” he tells her (75). But Carol is a
bird that is meant to be visible in order to unsettle and disturb those who are
unwilling to see her and who remain blind to her existence.

Carol fits with Williams’s understanding of the theater and the way he
envisioned it to be. If art is ”a kind of anarchy... in juxtaposition with organized
society” and ”runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society
apparently must be based,”57 then Carol Cutrere is all of that. Williams’s
description of the ideal theater can also describe the sort of individual he
envisions and the role that these individuals should play in their society. For
Williams, the function of the theater is to break open and tear down traditional
meanings and replace the old-fashioned authorities with values of one’s
devising. This seems to be Carol’s goal in her quest for her own identity and
selfltood. Carol belongs to a theater with ”something wild, something exciting,

something that [we] are not used to. Offbeat is the word.”58 She embodies

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Williams’s view of a liberated self that is dependent only upon its own

autonomy.

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Chapter IV

"Out, Out, Human Outcry:" Theatricality as an Impasse

In his play fie mgharacter P_la_y, Williams reaches an apocalyptic view
of the destiny of the theatrical and performative self. In this play Williams
expresses a grim vision about the self and the impossibility of the self to liberate
itself from its theatricalism and its performativity. The characters in Williams’s
play are playing the roles of themselves and the demarcation line between reality
and performance is blurred. Fiction and reality merge together. Unlike others of
Williams’s scripts where art and fiction represent an escape from reality, in fie
Tie-Character ng performance does not provide Felice and Clare such an
escape. Tom in fie gm Menagerie, Blanche in A Streetcar Named De_sire and
Brick in Ce; pp e m; _T'g Beef resort to a fiction of their own creation to deal
with their harsh reality. They write their own script and they try to create their
own identity as they would like it to be, but in fie Tie-Changer P_ley Felice
and Clare can not afford the luxury of this escape. Their imagination becomes the
prison where they have to live, and the theater becomes not so much the space of
freedom and liberation as a place of confinement and seclusion. Felice and Clare
are not confined to an institution of one sort or another, but they are confined
within themselves, within limitations they impose upon themselves and accept
as obstacles towards their own freedom. The effect of Felice’s and Clare’s
confinement is not tragic in the sense that it does not lead them to a mental
hospital at play‘s end as it does with Blanche, or to their destruction and death as

with Lady and Val in Qphepe. Felice and Clare live in and with their own

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confinement which defines their state of being. They can not have a life outside
this confinement, and they do not know what their life would be like without it.

In fie Egg-Character fley Williams re-examines the possibility of a
liberated self, i.e. a self that stands outside its own theatricality and outside the
accepted norms and the standard conventions. In this play, we hear the echo of
Val’s words that ”we’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our
own skins, for life.”1 It is made clear for us in IE Tic-Character ng that the
odds against which individuals have to fight to become who they are are not
necessarily just social and political, but are internalized within the individuals
themselves. The social and the group pressure against which Val, Lady, Blanche,
Brick, and Tom contend are almost absent or secondary in _Tfie five-Qharacter
P_lay; and even if they are present, they are not dramatized on the stage of The
Dye-Character Eley. In this play, the self is locked within itself, and the relief
that other characters have found in staging themselves according to their own
script is not available to Felice and Clare. T_he m-Character _P_l_a_y is not just
about the incommunicability of ideas and emotions to others, but it is also about
the incommunicability of these emotions to oneself as well. Felice and Clare are
not just two individuals who are estranged to their society as is Blanche, Lady, or
Tom, but they are also estranged to themselves.

In fie Lye-Character P_lay Williams's characters are professional artists as
well. Blanche and Brick are artists in the way they stage themselves, and so is
Val. But Felice and Clare are professional artists. They write and act their own
plays. However, in spite of their artistry, the world they live in is no less austere
and less tragic than that of the world where Blanche, Brick, Val, Lady, and Tom

live. Williams’s play reflects the disillusionment of an artist with his own art. The

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promise that Williams saw in art at the beginning of his career as a way to
freedom and liberation from the harsh reality he dramatized in Menagerie does
not seem to be possible in _T_h_e fie—Qharacter flay. Williams started his career
with a promise of liberation and freedom that he saw in the theater, but he ends
with disillusionment towards the end of his career. In this chapter, I will explore
the confinement of the self within its own theatricality and performativity, and
also examine Williams’s apocalyptic vision of his own art that fails to free and
liberate the self and Williams, the artist himself, from its own shackles and from
the chains of the society where it exists.

fie Tie-Character fley takes place in ”a deep Southern town called New
Bethesda” and is about two siblings named Clare and Felice who live alone in an
abandoned house and who were orphaned after their father killed their mother
and then committed suicide. Now, they are terrified of leaving the house to face
the outside world with the family scandal they were forced to witness. They are
afraid to walk to Grossman’s Market and to deal with the insurance company.
Felice and Clare are also abandoned by their acting company, who proclaim in a
telegram that the two siblings are insane. The theater is their house. It is the same
place where the family tragedy was staged. Deserted as they are, they have no
choice but to live with this seclusion and find mutually shared resourcefulness
that can sustain their dreadful existence haunted by memories of death and
abandonment from the past. The play within the play they are performing is a re-
enactment of their family tragedy. Felice wrote M Tie-Character P_lay with two
characters who are also named Felice and Clare, and obviously Felice is playing
in Williams’s play the role of Felice that he wrote for himself in the play within

the play. Clare is also playing the role of the character Clare.

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The Play Within the Play and the Theatrical Self

In Williams's play, the differentiation between actors who play characters
and characters who are actors is simultaneously blurred and highlighted not to
reinforce the difference between the actors and the characters they play, but to
comment upon the theatrical and performative nature of the self.

In their state of destitution and confusion, Clare and Felice have nothing
left but to ”speak their lines with diminishing confidence, perform their lives
even if that performance has been drained of meaning”2 Felice and Clare, C. W.
E. Bigsby argues, ”have no alternative but to continue their performance; though
denied an audience, they are denied equally the significance which that audience
might have been prepared to grant to that performance...” Bigsby continues:
”The theater is the condition of their existence; acting the only verification of
their being.”3 But in spite of this devaluation, they continue their performance.
No ending is in sight for Felice and Clare. Both the interior and the exterior plays
are without closure. Felice comments on his play: ”It’s possible for a play to have
no ending... in order to make a point about nothing really ending!“

The structure of fie ng-Qharaeper P_lay is Pirandellian. The play within
the play is not just a technical aspect in Williams’s play, it has a thematic
relevance to the play and it is in accord with Williams’s views on the theatrical
self. This structure allows Williams to explore the relationship between the roles
one plays and the real person one is. It allows him to dramatize the veils behind
which the self recreates itself and the costumes in which it performs its different
roles. Thus, the structure of the play within the play highlights the tension
between the theatricality and the authenticity of the self; and, thus, explores the

nature of the relationship between the real and the fictional and blurs the

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differences between both. The play within the play is a thematic and intrinsic
component in Williams’s vision.

Bigsby describes Williams’s vision as ”deconstructive vision.” Williams in
fie Lye-Character P_lay blurs the demarcation line between actor, character, and
author. He inextricably mixes reality with fiction and intertwines the past and
the present. The self is a collision of all the roles it plays. The gap between
illusion and reality is so narrowed to the point that it becomes non-existent; thus
being and acting become synonymous in a performance where reality and play
are woven of the same thread. The set of the play is the theatrical space of this
collision where the reality yields to the power of fiction and imagination. The
reality is a product of the imaginative prowess of both Felice and Clare. The set
of the play is a space of dislocation, decentralization, and ”differance,”5 to
borrow Derrida’s terminology. Bigsby explains further Williams’s deconstructive
vision when he adds: ”the sense of dislocation of logic and continuity is a major
force in Williams’s work.”6 The set contains ”the incomplete interior of a living
room in Southern summer” and some other ”scattered unassembled pieces of
scenery for other plays than the play-within-a-play which will be ’performed.”’
Williams hopes that this ”incomplete,” ”unassembled,” and ”scattered” setting
will suggest ”disordered images” and a ”nightmarish world... with all its
dismaying shapes and shadows” (308). The ultimate effect of this setting is that
of dislocation, disconnection, and disorder. It is a broken world of bits and pieces
that will never come together. Williams is suggesting that this setting is a
reflection not only of Clare’s and Felice’s psyche and their ”mind approaching
collapse” but also a reflection on the state of human existence. fie M-

M Play is a drama that is staged in the human psyche of Clare and Felice

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that also points to the inwardness of these characters and dramatizes the
dividedness and the dislocation of the self. It is a play which depicts a self of
differance.

The setting of fie _T_v_ve-Charaeter firy deconstructs logic and linearity. It
is a stage where ”the boundaries of realistic space and time no longer hold,” as
Annette Saddik demonstrates.’ The past collides with the present in this setting.
Memories are acted and re-enacted in front of the audience. In the course of the
play, we witness Felice’s and Clare’s fears and anxieties because of that haunting
moment when their father killed their mother and then committed suicide. We
watch Felice and Clare sorting out the past, coming to terms with the present,
and finding ways and means of handling their future. The coherence of a
physical space is also denied in this play. The setting is a theatrical stage, but also
a ”house [that] has turned to a prison.” Felice remarks: ”I realize, now, that the
house has turned to a prison,” and Clare responds, ”I know it’s a prison, too, but
it’s one that isn’t strange to us” [354]. Felice and Clare claim their familiarity with
this house or this prison-like theater. The audience is left in limbo by Clare’s
claim and is never sure whether Clare and Felice live in the theater or the family
house has been transformed into a theater. The only certainty that the audience
and the critic can claim is that the house and the theater are used
interchangeably. The interior and the exterior sets are inter-mixed. As Nicholas
Pagan notices: ”. .. We may find ourselves wondering where the interior set ends
and where the exterior set begins, and vice-versa. This problem of separating
inner and outer set will later be carried over to the problem of separating inner
and outer play.”8 The audience is plunged into the interiors of the world of the

psyche in a dream-like atmosphere that surpasses the real. The world of the self

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is dramatized in this play where we are invited to observe the self in its
disconnection, dislocation, and differance. We are witnessing ”a mind
approaching collapse” [308]. The movement of the play is inward and limnetic.
Both Clare and Felice probe as deep as they can into their own psyche to
understand who they are and to contain their own experience. It is a movement
of disclosure and enclosure. Williams aims at exploring the personal and the
inner ”subjective”(308). Whether Felice and Clare will be capable of fully
understanding themselves and containing their own identity is yet to be
answered. Williams’s deconstructive vision does not aim at annihilating and
eliminating the self, but it focuses on re-creating and reshaping this self through
the process of dismantlement.
Williams also dismantles the differences between actor and character.

Clare and Felice the actors carry the same names as the characters. Felice and
Clare are acting a double role in both the interior and the exterior play. The play
within the play is a continuum to the exterior play. To try to draw the
demarcation line between the interior and the exterior play becomes irrelevant
since Williams seems to be making the case for a continuum rather than a
rupture between the world of reality and that a fiction. Clare points to this
continuum between the interior and the exterior play. Felice tells Clare: ”. .. go
get your things.”

Clare: Get what things?

Felice: Your purse, your handbag, for instance.

Clare: 1 don’t have one to get.

Felice: You’ve lost it again?
Clare: This still seems like a performance of The Two-

Character Play (360).

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In another incident, Clare expresses her fear at being locked inside the theater,
and Felice informs her that probably they are, because the ”backstage phone is
lifeless as the phone in fie five-Qharaeter fley was.” (362). The continuum
between the interior and the exterior play, on the one hand, and the fictional and
the real, on the other, is further intensified in other moments of the play. Felice
and Clare are discussing some possible reworking of the scenario of fie Lee-
Charaeter P_lay when Felice makes the observation:

The revolver and the box of cartridges that you found

last night have never been anywhere else in any

performance of the play. Now I remove the blank

cartridges and insert the real ones... (356).
At this point, the audience becomes more and more aware that the reality of
Clare and Felice is an extension of the supposedly fictitious play they are
performing on the stage before us. The reality is an extension of the play. The
story of the interior and the exterior play is the real story of Felice and Clare.
Moreover, when Williams decided to give his revised version of the play the title
of the play within the play, fie T_we-Charager flay, instead of Qtetgy, he
narrowed further the gap between the interior and the exterior play and brought
them to an ultimate collage of fiction and reality. The boundaries between the
fiction and the reality of the two siblings collapse, and neither the factuality of
the reality nor the imagination of fiction describes accurately Felice’ s and Clare’s
state of being. Therefore, as Bigsby contends ”the theater is the condition of their
existence; acting the only verification of their being.”9 Felice and Clare are caught
inside their performativity. They can not step outside the roles they perform, for
if they do, they will face nothing but the abyss. Performativity is the only essence
that they have to their identity. It defines who they are and gives life to their

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selves. Without it, they are left prey to death and reduced to a state of non-being.
When Clare asks Felice to stop the performance, Felice answers: ”With no place
to return to, we have to go on, you know” (316), implying that there is nothing
left for them except their performance.

The only Felice and Clare that we can have access to are the performative
Felice and Clare. They perform on the stage, and they perform in the play within
the play. And when they face some other ”real” situations outside the world of
the theater, they tend to perform as well. In his stage direction, Williams
describes Felice and Clare in theatrical terms: "He is a playwright, as well as
player... His hair almost shoulder length, he wears a great coat that hangs nearly
to his ankles... a bizarre shirt... trousers of soft-woven fabric," and Williams adds
at the end of his stage directions that "the total effect is theatrical and a bit
narcissan” (309). Felice is theatrical, and Clare carries the same traits in her
personality. She is an amalgamation of roles and different casts: ”She has, like
her brother, a quality of youth without being young, and also... an elegance,
perhaps even arrogance, of bearing that seems related to a past theater of actor-
managers and imperious stars” (310). Her personality has different shades and
masks. ”Her grand theater manner,” Williams writes, ”will alternate with
something startlingly coarse, the change occurring as abruptly as if another
personality seized hold of her at these moments” (310).

Both Felice and Clare perform when they are outside the interior and the
exterior play. They confront the world through their performance and the show
they put together. In art, they find resolutions to real life situations. Felice and
Clare want to go to Grossman’s Market to meet the insurance agent and inform

him. about the status of their settlement after the death of their parent. To cope

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with this situation, Felice and Clare have scripted and also rehearsed this
meeting together. Felice suggests they should ”enter with some air of
assurance... like a pair of-” and Clare edits the script ”prosperous paying
customers?” Felice then rehearses what they intend to tell Mr. Grossman: ”We
are going to tell him convincingly that in spite of all spite and, and-contrary-
accusations-Father’s insurance policy will be paid to us by the Acme Insurance
Company” (343). Later they start rehearsing the dialogue that they are planing to
deliver at Mr. Grossman’s office:

Clare: (at a fast pace): We’ve been informed by the-

Felice: Acme Insurance Company

Clare: (at a fast pace): that the insurance money is-

Felice: (at a fast pace) Forfeited (343).
Such an exchange between Felice and Clare is charged with theatricality and
artificiality. Felice suggests the same strategy in order to get a hotel room for
which they made no previous reservation. ”I think I remember seeing a hotel
across the plaza from the theater when we came from the station,” Felice states.
”We’ll go there, we’ll enter in such grand style that we’ll need no reservation,”
he adds (361). Through putting on airs, pretenses, and performances, Felice and
Clare try to handle their reality. Whether they are in the play or in the play
within the play, or outside the theater scenarios, Felice and Clare are always
performers playing whatever role the situation calls for. Even in the very
moment when they think they are not performing, this moment of
”improvisation,” is part of their performance. The performance is their essence
and the boundary they can not surpass and overcome.

Felice’s and Clare’s performativity is not similar to that of Blanche's in

Streetear. For Blanche, fiction is a substitute for reality, and it is only through art

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that she can process and transform the reality where she lives. Shep Huntleigh is
an illusion she has created for herself to feel loved and to make herself believe
that there is always someone who loves her and cares about her enough to rescue
her. In fie Tee-Character _Pl_ay, fiction is not a substitute for reality. The reality
is designed and patterned like a fiction, and it is within the boundaries of fiction
that the reality exists. In E five-Character fly fiction and reality are two
closely connected entities, and each can disrupt the other without traits and
traces of this disruption. For Blanche, performance is a mask; but for Felice and
Clare, it is a reality. When Blanche's mask is dropped, we discover behind it the
scars, the pain, and the distortion of the past. For Clare and Felice, the mask is so
close to the face that it can hardly be. dropped. And if it does drop, we may
discover that there is nothing behind the mask. The game of the performance is
all there is to the life of Felice and Clare. The mask is the very skin of the face,
and only in the mask we see the face. The origins of this theme in Williams’s
and pretenses. The fragile veneer behind which he hides his relationship with
Skipper, maneuvers his own space, and deals with his own alcoholism is part of
his identity. The gay self is an amalgamation of masks and performances in Q,
as is Clare’s and Felice’s identity in k T_we-Qharacter m. Williams, in both
plays, is making the case that the theater is the metaphor that describes best the
performative nature of the self and the amalgamation of masks and roles in
which this self/ identity is constructed. Brick, Felice, and Clare do not play roles
that are strange to them, but they play and act themselves. The role and the self
are not antithetical as much as they are inter-changeable. In a similar manner, the

face and the mask are also inseparable. As Bigsby argues, the dramatic tension in

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fie Deg-gharaeter fley no longer comes ”from the space which opens up
between illusion and the real,” as it did in Strgtear and Menagerie.” Instead, it is
generated by the collage between the two, and the sense of confusion and
disruption that this collage creates. Through deconstructing the boundaries
between fiction and reality, role and self, and face and masks, Williams leaves his
characters with an identity that is unstable, decentralized, and disoriented. It is a
self with no location and no origin. Williams is not depicting a self in a state of
disintegration, regression, or decline, he is rather dramatizing the condition in
which this self exists. Felice, Clare, and Brick have to live with this condition. In
fie Im-fiarager fley, Williams is not a moralist who believes in the lapse of
the self from an ideal state. He is more inclined to argue that this dislocation,
disorientation, and disconnection are the very essence of the self that his
characters have to bear

Through his deconstructive vision, Williams draws our attention to the
unsettling, switching, and disrupted condition within which the self can exist,
thus rendering any attempt at defining the self through stable and clear cut
categories almost impossible. The only condition that can modify, and not define,
our understanding of the self is its performativity. In accepting the
performativity of the self, we can understand that the self is always in a constant
state of flux and in a process of making and re-making that is never complete
and final. ”Identity,” as noted ”is not an object” that can be contained and pinned
down into a single clear-cut definition; it is, rather, ”a process which self-
consciously strives towards, but never reaches, total intelligibility.”11 The self is
”subject to internal contradictions which are never resolved and thus fails to

become concretized or fixed.”12 The self reacts against definitions, limitations,

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and narrow scopes. It is only through the notion of performativity that these
”internal” contradictions are resolved, understood, and contained to be
embraced and celebrated. Under performativity, these contradictions are not
resolved by means of nullification, but rather by accepting them as integral and
crucial components to our understanding of the self.

In the theater Williams has found a metaphor to convey the theatricality,
the performativity, and the artificiality of a multi-layered self for it is on the stage
of the theater that playwrights can demonstrate how mendacity is part of the
truth, performativity is part of who we are, falsehood is enclosed within the
matrix of our identity, and the separation between falsehood and truth is almost
impossible. The theater is not just performances and entertainment; it is this, but
also a comment on the fictitiousness, the theatricality, and the unreality of the
real. Irma’s statement at the end of Genet’s The Balcony ”You must now go
home, where everything—you can be quite sure—will be even falser than here”
(96) not only rings true, but reveals the extent to which the real is fictional and
theatricality is another face of reality.

The theater and the play-within-the-play technique offer Williams the
space to pose ontological questions about the nature of the self, its theatricality,
and the connection between human beings and the roles they play. Williams is
problematizing the relationship between the self and the roles it plays, and of
course demonstrating that the distinction between the essential self and the roles
it plays may not be that clear-cut. The play-within-the-play highlights a double
vision, not so much a dichotomy of appearance and reality and illusion and
truth, but rather a confluence of the two. This dramatic technique does not

present the audience with a drama in the illusion of a reality, but in the illusion

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of an illusion which points to the illusive nature of the real as well. Tom
Wingfield succinctly expresses this idea in Menagerie when he says: "I give you
truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."13 Unlike the characters in a realistic
play who have to pretend that there is no gap between who they are and the
roles they play, the characters in Williams’s _Tfi Tie-Character fley are ”aware
of their own theatricality.”l4 Therefore, in a drama that refers to its own
theatricality, the play-within-the-play makes it impossible for the audience to
pretend that illusion and fiction are not pertinent to the real.15

In T_he T_wq-Qharacter P_lay, the audience can not ignore that Clare and
Felice are actors performing the roles of the actors Clare and Felice. Clare
comments on Felice’s hair: ”why, it’s almost as long as mine,” and Felice
responds: ”you know I wear a wig for the role of Felice” (320). This moment in
the play captures the ontological questions that Williams poses about the self and
its relations to the roles it plays. The audience may lose any certainty about who
the real Felice is and whether there is another Felice outside the roles he
performs on the stage. Felice’s comment points to the dual nature of the person
on the stage: an actor playing a character who is an actor, or the ”real” Felice
taking the ”role” of Felice. The only Felice the audience can have access to,
however, is the performer Felice. Williams seems to argue that if we are to
assume that there is an essential and central self to Felice, this self remains
inaccessible; and we, as audience, remain at a simulation level as to Felice’s real
identity and essential self. We, as audience, have to take Felice’s identity at
(inter)face value, and accept the simulation of Felice as the real one, for both
Felices are theatrical in essence. Felice becomes an image duplicated not into a

mirror or a screen on the theatrical space, but into his own face. And the

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duplication of faces becomes an infinite multiplication of faces and roles. As
Bruce Wilshire argues ”the self that appears behind the various social roles it
performs is itself another performance. There is no substantial or atomic self
behind the appearances.”16 Homan succinctly describes this state of confusion,
deferral, and opaqueness when she maintains that it is through this theatricality
that ”we see how integral... the supposedly illusory world of theater is to the
reality/‘7 Martin Esslin supports Homan when he states: ”all human interaction
in the real world [is] based on ’role-playing,’ conventionalised behavior, hence
’acting?”’18

More towards the end of his career, it becomes clearer that Williams
believes in a disunited and divided view of the self. With this view, he is
abolishing the idea of well-constructed plots, coherent characters, and linear
structure in his plays. He is experimenting more with his concept of a
decentralized subject and a multi-faceted SElfl'tOOd. Williams’s discourse about
the self is no longer coherent and linear not only because he perceives the self as
divided and polarized, but because he sees it as a multiplicity and fragmentation,
of scattered particles, and shattered pieces that have never been incorporated
into a coherent unified entity.

The ambiguity of the self is what fascinates Williams. Through believing
that this ambiguity is an integral part of the self, Williams is accepting
contradictions, opposites, and tensions as constituents of this self. His characters
are torn between who they are and who they are not, between the image the
others impose upon them and the image they want to design themselves. They
are always in a state of disjunction and dislocation. In Pinter’s The Caretaker,

Williams admires this characteristic of allusiveness and ambiguity. He states:

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”The play was about the thing that I’ve always pushed in my writing...If you
write a character that isn’t ambiguous you are writing a false character, not a true
one!“ Williams expresses his admiration of Harold Pinter and who he calls ”the
new wave of Playwrights” on the basis that their drama captures this ambiguity
in human identity, and they have found the appropriate means to convey this
multi-layered identity. ”The whole attitude of this new wave of playwrights,” he
claims ”is not to preach, you know. Not to be dogmatic, to be provocatively
allusive. And I think that’s much truer.”” The only truth that human identity has
is its ambiguity, allusiveness, and disharmony. The self in fie Lye-Qharaeter
fley is a configuration of masks and a collage of different theatrical roles. It is a
self that has given up its search for a reconciling symbol, and its need for
coherence, unity, and harmony. It is a self that is in flux, with its loosely unified
facets and its state of rupture.

This chaos and multiplicity prove to be frightening and discomforting at
times for both Clare and Felice. They realize the rampant disorder around them
and inside themselves, yet they try to impose order upon this disorder and find a
sense of cohesion so that the fragmented memories of the past and their
relevance to their present start to make sense. Clare’s and Felice’s quest for order
is a quest for meaning in a world that seems to them fragmented, divided, and
nonsensical. It is an attempt to establish order upon ”the disordered images of a
mind approaching collapse” (308). Clare expresses this longing desire for order
and coherence when she exclairns to Felice: ”No show!” Felice asks: ”What then?
- In your contrary opinion?” and Clare answers: ”Restoration of--order!...
Rational, rational” (313). Clare and Felice want to understand their traumatic

past, come to terms with their father’s suicide and their mother’s death, and

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break the cycle of isolation and estrangement that this past has imposed upon
them, and find a way to cope with their fear of what the future may have in store
for them. The play within the play becomes their coping mechanism. Out of the
play within the play, they create a mirror to reflect an image of themselves so
that they can see who they are, face their fears and anxieties, come to terms with
their own psychological nakedness, and break the cycle of death and suicide in
which they find themselves confined.

Felice: Fear is a monster, vast as night-

Clare: And shadow casting as the sun.

Felice: It is quicksilver, quick a light-

Clare: It slides beneath the down-pressed thumb

Felice: Last night we locked it from the house.

Clare: But caught a glimpse the house of it today.

Felice: In a corner, like a mouse.

Clare: Gnawing all four walls away (311).
In this exchange Clare and Felice talk about their fear and their dilemma, and
recognize that even though, ”last night [they] locked it from the house,” they
have to face it now because they ”caught a glimpse of it today” (311). In their
own performance, they are stripping away their own illusion to deal with their
reality on its own terms. Art is not an escape for them; it is rather a self-reflective
mirror that sends back to them their own reflection and their own self. In their
performance, Clare and Felice do not create other characters, but they come to
terms with their own characters. About the same passage quoted above, Francis
Gillen argues that ”the obvious use of rhyme and the rhythm of the music both
suggest the attempt to assert control through art. Fear itself, spoken about and
presented on stage, is fear already begun to be brought under control.”21

In the play within the play, Clare and Felice are confrontational. The

drama they act is a reenactment of their past trauma. In spite of their broken

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language, they are vocal about their mother’s death and their father’s suicide,
and they are grappling with the possible reasons that might have pushed their
father to such a vile act. Their own confinement is also a subject of debate. At a
certain point in the play, Clare does not seem to be willing to deal with her own
confinement. ”You shouldn’t have spoken that word!” Clare regrets, ”’Confined!’
That word is not in the-...” Determined to sort out this feeling of isolation and
destitution, Felice reminds Clare that the only way for them to be out is to speak
out, because silence has a monstrous snowball effect. ”Oh. A prohibited word.
When a word can’t be used, when it’s prohibited its silence increases its size. It
gets larger and larger till it’s so enormous that no house can hold it” (338). Clare,
realizing the danger of her denial, and accepting the painful truth and the need
to confront her reality, ”smiles and forms the word ’confined’ with her lips; then
she says it in a whisper... confined, confined!" (339). Clare and Felice leave no
room for pretenses and illusion. It is upon such a climatic moment of
disillusionment that the first act closes.

Clare and Felice are crossing the safety zone and holding themselves
accountable for who they are and where they are. They are trying to understand
the ”forces which shaped their identity and examine their own existence." The
play within the play is not an escapist strategy. On the contrary, in their
performance Clare and Felice are trying to rewrite their identity and thus own it
not through fiction or illusion, but through having a grip on their own reality.
Felice and Clare are grappling with the attempt to find a way to live in the
present without necessarily forgetting the past or letting it infringe and impose

its ugliness and grimness upon the present. Both siblings are involved in a

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negotiation between a self defined by the past and a self that tries to possess
itself.

From this perspective, Felice and Clare, in finding their own voice and
constructing their own identity, are involved in a process of creation similar to
that of the construction of a narrative. As Kim Worthington suggests: ”In the act
of conceptualizing one’s selfhood, one writes a narrative of personal continuity
through time. That is, in thinking myself, I remember myself: I draw together my
multiple members-past and other subject positions-into a coherent narrative of
selfliood which is more or less readable by myself and others.”22 To perceive the
self as narrative implies that one should try to accept a multiplicity of
interpretive frameworks and perceptions from which this self can be examined
and understood. The meaning Felice and Clare are bestowing upon themselves
can not nullify the multiplicity and the plurality of the self. Meaning by
definition is always subject to a multiplicity of interpretations, revisions, and also
misinterpretation: ”The history one tells of one’s self... is a narrative in which
moments of the past achieve some kind of interconnection, even coherence.”23
Kim Worthington observes that "this meaning constituting narrative does not
guarantee permanent fixity or access to the meaning or truth of the self, but it
provides a more or less stable conceptual framework from which to begin to
understand the present and anticipate the future.”24 The meaning that is
constructed is not immune to gaps, omissions, and ellipses. Its basic validation is
that it is an attempt by the self to contain and embody its own subject(ivity).
Constructed in the same manner as a narrative, the self is always in flux.
Defining the self as an act of creation and construction does not necessarily

classify it under the category of fiction, if we deem fiction as untrue and

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fallacious. The self is a fiction only in the sense that is ”an active interpretive
process.”25

Though disturbed and threatened by the multiplicity of their selflrood,
Clare and Felice never find it possible to forsake their multiplicity and reduce it
to a one single role to play. The only belief in the ”everlasting” that they can still
hold is that no play has ever ended, and everything is constantly set in motion.
Felice and Clare are longing for ”a release from the burden of multiple roles,” but
”at the same time however, there is a fear of stability, of being ’confined’... to one
role.”” When Clare comments: ”the part of Felice is not the only part that you
play,” Felice replies, ”from now on, it might be” (320). Felice’s comment remains
ambivalent, and also irrelevant to the outcome of the play. Exhausted with her
role-play, Clare demands an end to her performance, but the only place where
she believes she can rest is a hotel room. The hotel room in Williams’s plays is
not a space of permanence and stability, but rather of temporality and transitions
where the distinction between the private and the public is blurred, and where
the individual experiences a certain kind of freedom and latitude without total
detachment from the public. It is a space in-between that takes different colors
and different shades. If the self is multiple, of different facets, and a variety of
facades and an amalgamation of private longings and public roles, then it follows
naturally that the hotel room, as a space of intersection, is the only space where
this performative self can find a home. The hotel is the transitory setting that can
contain a self in a state of flux and mark the displacement of a stable self in such
an in-between space. Like the theater where the narrative of reconfiguration and
revision about the self is constructed, the hotel is always a space of re-

configuration, transformation, and revision. Clare’s and Felice’s escape to a hotel

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would offer them a change from one space to another, but would never set them
free from the performativity of their own identity. Every space that Felice and
Clare occupy, whether it is a theater or a hotel, is a place of performance. There is
nothing outside the performance and no life outside the theater. The self can
exist only through its performativity. ”Our home is a theater,” Felice observes
(315). Theatricality is the only space where they can exist and their acting
becomes analogous to their being.

The play's ending marks this impasse. Clare and Felice attempt to commit
suicide by pulling the trigger of a gun in the same way as their father did, but
they ultimately realize that outside the performance, there is only hollowness,
nothingness, and death. To escape from the state of performativity is to fall into a
state of meaninglessness. Their performance is the only context within which
meaning can be constructed, created, or imagined. No ending is provided to the
play or the play within the play. At the moment the play stops, it does not end
for that same pause is a part of the performance, of scripted silence, and non-
action. Suicide does not provide an outlet to Clare and Felice. Instead, they
choose to continue the process of self-fashioning and self-designing. Theatricality
is an impasse with no exit to another state of being.

The theatrical impasse in which Clare and Felice find themselves locked is
not an annihilating and self-denying option. It is, rather, affirmative and
assertive. By choosing to continue the performance and thus rejecting suicide,
both Clare and Felice are starting to assume a more active role in designing their
own identity and to distance themselves from any other factors that may prevent
them from fashioning their own identity. By play's end, Clare and Felice become

indistinguishable from their own drama. They are the actors and the writers of

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their own script and the tale and the tellers of their own narrative. N 0 source of
verification of Clare’s and Felice’s story is available to the audience except their
own. They are their own validators of a story that they only can tell. What is
outside the subjective self is toned down and rendered obsolete in Williams’s
play. Instead, the subject is made the subject of its own. The theatrical space
offers Clare and Felice the possibility to re-imagine and reconfigure their own
identity without letting the past be the only factor to determine this identity. By
not committing suicide, Felice and Clare are refusing to re—shape their destiny
after that of their mother’s and father’s. They are breaking away from the re-
enactment of the past and managing to find their own voice. The ending of fie
fie-Charaeter fley marks the release of the two siblings from the ties and the
forces of the past, which have added more to their fears, anxieties, and fright. As
Ren Draya suggests:

At least for now, they have faced and defeated their

fear of death. They have courageously acknowledged

their frightened heart but have not retreated in panic.

At the play’s end there’s no sense of self-pity. Their

outcry is the sound of their humanity; of their fears, of

their final acceptance of hfe and se .

The quality of this acceptance is questionable and remains always a matter
of critical debate. However, it is important to mention that though ”in both their
faces is a tender admission of defeat” (370), their choice to live in spite of all the
odds against their existence and their isolation is rather brave and commendable.
Clare and Felice are not defeated by these odds, they do not accept them at face
value, they are rather determined to face and challenge these odds. Felice and

Clare have stripped away the illusion of an ideal and perfect life, and they have
accepted these odds as part of what they have to deal with in their life. By play's

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end, Clare and Felice have found consolation in each other, and they reach out to
each other in an act of genuine care as they have never done before in the play.
”They reach out their hands to one another,” the final stage direction describes,
”and the light lingers a moment on their hands lifting toward each other. As they
slowly embrace... THE CURTAIN FALLS” (370). The outside world may be
sordid and unwelcoming, but the journey Felice and Clare have taken together in
fie Iw_o-§haracter P_lay has brought them together and they have seen in each
other the reflection of their fears, their past, and their pain. By embracing each
other, Clare and Felice demonstrate their ability to face their own psychological
nakedness and accept themselves for who they are. Performativity is an impasse,
but it is not a deadly one. With their valor and endurance, Clare and Felice have
turned this impasse into a possible livable option. In spite of this affirmation, the
ending of fie I_vv_o-§haracter P_lay is not a happy one in the conventional sense.
”[T]he gun of the abnormality of family insanity is apparently pointed at them,
rendering them powerless to leave the house, the stage, or the theater.””
Moreover, they are still locked within the thick walls of the theater, and deprived
of any contact with the outside world. The fate of Felice and Clare remains
fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity. What is to become out of them, and
whether they will stick to this final resolution and reject the possibility of a
suicide remain questions that only the future can unfold. Felice and Clare do not
break away from their isolation and chaotic world, but through their art they
manage to face the inevitable, tolerate the intolerable, and rewrite themselves.
Art is not an escape in fie Twe-Qharacter P_lay, but a means through which they
can probe the darkest secrets of their past, and venture together on a journey of

mutual understanding and self-realization. Without the audience to validate

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their performance, Felice and Clare continue their performance playing the role

of actors, audience, and playwrights who can validate their own performance.

The Theatrical Self and the Need for New Realism

In a play that explores the self as an unstable, changing, and theatrical
entity, the notion of conventional realism has to be curbed and defamiliarized in
order to fit with the non-linearity of this performative self that Williams is
dramatizing in fie I_w_o-§haraeter P_lay. As Saddik suggests:

fie T_wg-Character fley does not cater to the central
illusions of realism, but rather stretches and
transforms the boundaries of realistic conventions,
playing with the notions of realistic space, consistent
and logical character, (dis)closure, and the
reestablishment of a dominant order. Williams 'teases'
the audience with the expectation of the unfolding of
a stable narrative core, yet each 'disclosure' reveals
only more uncertainty.”

Early in his career, Williams questioned the value of realism in dramatic

representation:

The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire
and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who 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.”

If the self is multiple as well as multi-faceted, then the two-dimensional and
linear photographic realism can not reveal the essence of this self in all its three-

dimensional complexity. Any photographic realism, according to Williams,

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represents only two dimensions of this multiple self, i.e. appearance. The
unconventional techniques which disturb and subvert the realistic representation
are not without a function to fulfill. ”All other unconventional techniques in
drama,” Williams claims, ”have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach
to the truth.”31 Unrealistic representation of the truth is more realistic than
conventional realism in representing the truth. This unconventional
representation that Williams labeled as ”expressionism” is not an escape from
reality as Williams sees it. Williams’s suspicion of traditional realism does not
nullify the fact that he is a playwright who is dealing with reality in its manifold
complexity. John Gassner proposes that Williams’s realism is ”poetic realism,”
and explains that ”it edges over into theatricalist realism because he tends toward
the symbolist school of writing, and whenever symbolism has to be given
physical equivalents it becomes theatricalism.”32 Gassner’s understanding of
Williams's realism as a sort of ”theatricalist realism” sheds more light on the way
Williams perceives reality as theatrical and the self as performative.

Williams’s ”theatricalist realism” does not pretend to convince the
audience that the representation they see dramatized on the stage is reality itself.
It does not attempt to bridge the gap between the theatricality of the stage and
the outside reality. Williams’s ”theatricalist realism” does not require the
audience to collaborate in constructing the illusion that what they see on the
stage is the reality they live every day. Instead, Williams's theatrical realism
collides theatricalism and realism, and makes them the same entity of the same
nature, i.e. a theatrical reality. This new equation that Williams poses highlights
the artificiality of what we see on the stage to draw the audience to the

conclusion that their reality is no less artificial than the theatrical representation

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they see on the stage. In Williams’s equation, the characters are of many faces,
and multiple facets. Blanche is the Southern belle who married Allan Gray, but
also the ”infamous” woman of the Flamingo Hotel who flirts with the newspaper
boy and sleeps with the young soldiers from her neighborhood. Blanche is what
Stella knows her to be and what Stanley is insisting that she be. She is a collage of
images constructed by Stella, Stanley, Mitch, and herself. We see Blanche only
through the different roles she plays and the many costumes she wears for these
roles. The same is true for Tom Wingfield of _The fie Menagerie. He is the head
of the family who wants to keep it together, but he is also the man who can not
deny his desire to escape. He tries to break away from his family, but through his
memories he is attached to his sister Laura more than he thought he was. He is
an actor, but also a narrator. He is the writer of his own play, and the director of
his own script. fie _Glafi Menagerie is a creation of Tennessee Williams, but Tom
Wingfield shares with his creator his creation. Like Blanche, Clare, and Felice,
Tom is a collage of roles and images, faces and facets, masks and facades. Behind
such a representation of his characters is Williams’s belief that

sometimes the truth is more accessible when you

ignore realism, because when you see things in a

somewhat exaggerated form, you capture more of the

true essence of life. The exaggeration gets closer to the

essence. This essence of life is really very grotesque

and gothic. To get to it you’veéot to do what may

stnke some people as distortion. .
Williams in both fie §h_SS Menagerie and m vae—Qharaeter P_lay invites us to
the cosideration that his characters' identities are a matter of subjective

construction and a result of different roles--some of which they have picked up

for themselves and some of which have been imposed upon them. The

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theatricality of his characters is highlighted not to illustrate that theatricality and
reality are unbridgeable, but to demonstrate that they are of the same nature for
the reality is itself preformative. The entire world is a stage for Williams’s
characters. Brick, for instance, is giving his performance on the stage of the
Morosco Theater, but every other incident is a performance on a different stage
and with a different set. His conversation with Maggie is a performance, his
conversations with Big Daddy are even more so, and every word he says and
every step he makes is for a well-calculated theatrical effect. The entire world is a
stage within the stage in the same way as most of Williams's plays are a play

within the play. Streetcar, Menagerie, Q, Suddenly Lee; Summer and other

 

plays carry the seeds of Williams's views about the reality and the self which

ultimately are fully realized in fie Two-Character Play.

The Author as Character: The Ultimate Layer of the Theatrical Self

Williams’s deconstructive vision does not only blur the demarcation lines
between reality and illusion, past and present, the self and role-play, and
theatricality and reality, it also blurs the identifying lines between author and
character. Saddik recognizes this self-reflexive dimension of the play and
contends that ”Williams’ exposure of the instability of identity in terms of both
'character' and 'authOr' is yet another element in this work which blurs
constructed boundaries and shatters illusions of wholeness/3‘ Nicholas Pagan
agrees that Williams’s deconstructive vision also ”renders problematic the
straightforward existence of the author.” Pagan further contends that: ”The
'presence' of the author here or any where else in Williams’s plays is a

supposition or (superstition?) in need of rigorous examination.”35 In Williams’s

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fie T_wg-Character fley, the author is a character. Felice is an actor but also a
playwright, and it is the life of this playwright which is fictionalized on the stage.
Clare states: ”-sometimes you work on a play by inventing situations in life, that-
-correspond to those in the play, and you’re so skillful at it that even I’m taken
in. . .” [365]. The details of Felice’s life are woven into the texture of his fiction and

his own memories are selectively incorporated into his own drama. As in

 

Sebastian's life in Suddenly Last Summer the borderline between the life of the
creator, Felice, and his own creation, fie Two Character Play, becomes non-
existent. Mrs. Venable observes:

Sebastian was a poet! That’s what I meant when I said

his life was his work because the work of a poet is the

life of a poet and-vice versa, the life of a poet is the

work of a poet, 1 mean you can’t separate them. . .3"
Mrs. Venable’s claim is also true for Clare and Felice, for Williams’s other artist
figures, and for Williams himself. Williams echoes Mrs. Venable’s claim in many
other circumstances, one of which is when he asserts in an interview in 1975 that
”in [his] writing [he] always reveal[s] [himself]” and he adds: ”my plays actually
deal with me.”37 Thus Williams mingled his own voice with that of Mrs. Venable

and that of Mark in I_n me Be; 91 e Tokyo Hotel who states that "an artist has to

 

lay his life on the line."38 Williams and all his artist characters are acting fictional
versions of themselves. The autobiographical detail and the fictional text are in a
state of collage not in an attempt to verify the validity of one at the expense of the
other, but to question and subvert the significance of representation and reality,
and to illustrate that the separation between the two is an impossible act of
foolishness and intellectual arrogance. The reality and its representation thereof

are of the same nature if not reciprocally identical.

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Through blurring the demarcation line between author and character,
Williams is re-examining the identity of the author and its construction in the
same way as he does with his characters in his drama. The identity of the author
or the artist is performative as well. Indeed, if there is an artist who is capable of
deconstructing this borderline between the fictionalization of a character and the
historical reality of the author, this artist has to be Tennessee Williams who bears
the stamp of a name that hinges more on the borders of fiction than on that of
the reality.

In writing, Williams has found a space where he can create his own
identity and reconstruct his own image to tailor it to what he wants it to be rather
than to cater to what the others expect from him. To Williams, writing is what
the theatrical space is to his own characters. In the same way as Felice and Clare
find in the interior play a way to look inside themselves, sort out who they are,
come to terms with their tragic past, Williams found in writing a way of
redesigning his own image. In all his plays from Menagerie to Streetcar, get,
fipheus, The Two-Charaeter Play, and others, Williams is fully occupied writing
Tom, the artist, and turning real life situations into pieces of fiction and drama to
be staged and theatricalized. In writing Williams discovered the powers of a
transformative imagination that is capable of rendering a more real image of the
self than reality itself. Michel Foucault comments in one of his interviews on this
transformational power of the imagination that is deeply engrained in the
creative process. ”You see” Foucault claims,

That’s why I really work like a dog, and I worked like
a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic
status of what I am doing because my problem is my

own transformation. That’s the reason also why,
when people say, ’well, you thought this a few years

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ago and now you say something else,‘ my answer is...

(Laughing) 'Well, do you think I have worked like

that all those years to say the same thing and not to be

changed?39
Williams could not have agreed more with Foucault’s claim, for he saw his work
as so personal that it is almost impossible to separate the creator from his own
creation. The value of art is self-transformational—and in this transformation,
one is led to (re)discover all the multi-sidedness of his / her identity and acquire a
more comprehensive understanding of these seemingly nonsensical tensions and
violent contradictions. It is between these tensions and contradictions that the
complexity and perhaps the uniqueness of the human psyche / identity lies.
Williams would have accepted Foucault’s claim unconditionally that ”this
transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is... something rather close
to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed
by his own painting?”4o Williams echoes Foucault’s statement when he insists
that he writes for his own needs: ”1 have always written for deeper necessities
than the term 'professional' implies, and I think that this has sometimes been to
the detriment of my career. But more of the time to its advantage!“1 Such
personal needs have been to the "detriment" of his career because the critics have
mistaken Williams’s self-transformation and self-discovery for self-indulgence
and lack of professionalism.

Williams started his career in the theater because of the many promises he
saw on the stage. Often he states that he didn’t become the poet that he wanted
to be because it is only in the theater that he could find an outlet for his own
voice and a safe haven in which he could recreate himself. Williams states that he

”discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which [he] felt

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acutely uncomfortable...[Writing was his] place of retreat, [his] cave, [his]
refuge."42 Writing opened up a space and a new horizon for Williams where he
could resolve the conflicting tensions of his personality and bring together his
own multiple voices and images with greater coherence. The private Tom is torn
between the nature of his own desire and the conventional exigencies of his
family and others of his public life. Tennessee Williams, the image of the
conflicting Tom, aims at consolidating these tensions, but in doing so, he ended
up by highlighting these tensions and placing them under the scrutiny of the
public eye. Again, the image is that of a mirror reflecting another image in
another mirror, and the reflections are not more or less genuine than the original
artifact that is being reflected upon them. In his essay ”On a Streetcar Named
Success,” Williams describes himself and his public personae as ”a fiction created
with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen
you that existed from your first breath...“L3 The theater gave Williams the space
to refashion his identity and re-shape his private self into more theatrical public
and performative personae. However, the new artifact of Tennessee Williams
that Tom created out of himself does not reveal less tension and less anxiety than
the introverted, secluded, and isolated Tom.

In the theater, Williams saw the promise of a community that provided an
essence and stronger bond than the actual community into which he had been
born i.e. his family and his society. In the theater, Williams sought a community
that could be based upon more honesty, understanding, and compassion.
Williams sees himself ”as having a highly personal, even intimate relationship
with people who go to see plays.” ”I still find it somehow easier,” he claims ”to

level with crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony

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sections of theaters than with individuals across a table from me. Their being
strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to
talk to!“ The audience of the theater is Williams’s surrogate family with which
he can share himself honestly and unconditionally. Jack Wallace succinctly
describes the importance of the theater to Williams in this respect. Wallace writes
that for Williams ”theater is essentially popular and cathartic; its aim is to
entertain--literally to hold the audience together by stimulating and purging
hostility, and by healing, for a few hours at least, the wound of isolation!”5 The
theater brings the audience together in a moment of honesty and truth. In the
closed space of the theater, they share understanding and are invited to offer
sympathy and compassion to those who are on the brink of collapse—a
sympathy and compassion that they may find difficult to experience and express
in the rush of everyday life. The theater creates for them a vicarious situation
close to the one they experience in everyday life, but from which they can find
ways to disown and distance themselves. The theater brings the audience back to
itself not only through confronting themselves, but also through finding
companionship in the most unlikely places to be found, i.e. in the presence of
strangers. The playwright is seeking to reach out to the darkest side of human
nature and shed more light on this darkness so that the audience may recognize
this same darkness inside themselves and acknowledge it as part of who they
are. On the stage of the theater we can recognize our own theatricality, and in the
performance we can see our own performativity. ”Our hearts are wrung by
recognition and pity; so that the dusky shell of the auditorium where we are
gathered anonymously together is flooded with an almost liquid warmth of

unchecked human sympathies, relieved of self-consciousness, allowed to

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function...”“'5 The playwright seeks to remove the thin veneer of propriety that
people uphold, and he is inviting them to launch themselves on a journey of self-
discovery. ”The theater has made in our time its greatest artistic advance through
the unlocking and lighting up and ventilation of the closets, attics, and
basements of human behavior and experience,” Williams claims.” The
movement of Williams’s art is towards the inside and the very inwardness of the
individual. It aims at probing and exposing, at reading and understanding in
order for people to be able to accept their own image and reshape this image not
according to what it is doomed to be, but rather according to what it is longing to
be.

The self that Williams wants to construct is a self liberated from the
limitations of society and the restraints of time, i.e. a self outside its own history.
In the transformative power of the imagination Williams has explored his
longing for a timeless world that the theater and acting can secure for him. Time,
for Williams, is infinite. It is the now and the indefinite then, the past and the
present and what is yet to come. In 1950, he wrote, ”a character in a play [is]
irnmuned against the corrupting rush of time!” Through art, Williams is hoping
that the artist, the character, and the audience can exist outside time if only
during the very limited and fleeting hours of the performance. The time of the
performance becomes another temporal space where the audience and the artist
alike can re-define their identity and reshape themselves in a manner that
transcends ”the corrupting rush of time."49

In escaping the rush of time, Williams is making the case for a self that can
defy its own death and demise. Williams's dilemma as artist is an existential

ontological one: If death is defeating and devaluates human existence, then what

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is the point of human existence in the first place? In art Williams has found an
affirmative answer: ”An artist will never die or go mad while he is engaged in a
piece of work that is very important to him."50 Through art, the artist can
challenge and even defeat death. Nicholas Pagan comments on Williams's
prolific writing: ”Williams’s constant rewriting is a relentless attempt to delay
this moment of dispossession.”51 Jacques Derrida describes the pain and the
alienation that ”this moment of dispossession” causes an author. It is a moment
of anxiety and anguish; and paradoxically enough, a moment both of completion
and of demise and dispossession. For Derrida, when an author signs his work, he
is breaking the bond / ties that have contributed to this creation. He is undoing
the intimacy between himself as a creator and his own creation. The act of
signing is a moment of dispossession and dislocation. ”When I sign,” Derrida
claims, ”I am already dead [I am D.J. deadlsz. I hardly have the time to sign then I
am already dead... I have to abridge the writing, hence the siglum, because the
structure of the ’signature’ event carries my death in that event.”53 Williams's
prolific writing and his revisions of his plays even after they are published, and
the transformation of poems and short stories into plays and sometimes even
into more than one version of the same play, is an (un)conscious attempt to delay
that moment of dispossession. It is a way to combat and defeat death. In spite of
his limited critical and popular success after fie figlet gLf E Iggean_a, Williams
kept on writing partly to sustain his reputation as a major playwright, but partly
to escape the restraints of time and death, and thus to irnmortalize the moment of
creation. It is through its performance on the theatrical stage and through the

different roles it has to play that the self can exist. Only when the performance is

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over and the tappings of the typewriter stop does the self cease to exist. The
theater is a raison d’étre for Williams.

In writing Williams found a safe space for freedom and self-expression.
Sex(uality) offered him the same consolation. To him, writing and sex were both
life-affirming as well as confirmations of his own identity and sexual desire. In a
letter to Donald Windham dated September 20'", 1943, Williams wrote:

There are only two times in this world when I am

happy and selfless and pure. One is when Ijack off on

paper and the other when 1 empty all the fretfulness

of desire on a young male body. There must be a third

occasion for happiness in the world.“
Writing to Williams is no less a liberating romantic venture than the sexual act.
In fact, he describes writing in explicit sexual terms, for he sees the creative act as
an assertion and affirmation of desire and identity. Writing is ”like a love affair.
It goes on and on and doesn’t end in marriage. It’s all courtship!”5 Both writing
and sex are an affirmation of the subjectivity and the individuality of the subject.
Through them, the individual is who 5/ he is, and the entirety of the social,
conventional, and normative baggage is rendered obsolete. Hence, the purity, the
happiness, and the selflessness that Williams experiences. His affirmation of his
sexuality and desire is an abandonment of social control and conventional
rationality. Once this rationality and control are abandoned, then the individual
is left with more space for a freer and more subjective expression.

Williams’s dream of constructing a self that can exist outside the
normative social conventions and outside its own history did not come true. The

surrogate community of the theater within which such a self can exist proved to

be just another imagined community no less illusory than the society and family

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communities from which Williams tried to escape. Williams’s disillusionment
about the theater as a community is clear in T_he Dye-gharacter fley. The
audience is described in terms that depict not only its insensitivity, but also its
lack of compassion for and understanding of the artist. Clare, in fact, describes
the audience in very unfavorable terms. ”Do they seem to be human?” she asks
Felice. Then she calls them ”idiots,” (358), ”enemy forces” (317), and ”curious
trespassers!” (335). Clare blames the audience for not being able to yield to the
artist. They ”don’t get lost in a play!” They are ”fur-bearing mammals” who are
”furious, unfed apes” (320). When Felice tries to call the director of their
performing company, Clare suggests that ”perhaps the audience caught him and
fed him to their dog teams-” (359). The animal imagery with which the audience
is associated calls attention to its cruelty, savagery, and grotesqueness. Clare and
Felice are seeking understanding from the audience, but this understanding is
yet to be found. Clare has become a subject of the audience’s mockery, which has
rendered the relationship between the audience and the artist antagonistic and
confrontational. According to the stage directions, ” [Clare] freezes. There are
several guttural exclamations from the house: above them, a hoarse male laugh
and the shrill laugh of a woman.” And Clare responds to this mockery: ”She
suddenly flings her cloak to the floor as if challenging the audience to combat.”
On this note of hatred, antagonism, and confrontation, Felice announces that ”the
performance commences!” (325).

At the end of the inner play, the audience deserted Clare and Felice, and
therefore, they have prevented the performance from having any meaning and
significance. The audience did not connect with Clare and Felice, and while the

two performers were lost in the play, the audience ”weren’t, so they left” (357).

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The theater is no longer the temple of common understanding, sympathy, and
compassion that Williams deemed it to be. Instead, it has become a place of
isolation and alienation no better than the society where the artist lives.
Loneliness is the state of being for the artist: ”but to be an artist is to be
essentially lonely. To be passionate and lonely isn’t the easiest of things in the
world,” Williams claims.56 With this moment of abandonment, the artist has to
face confusion, doubts, and uncertainty. Francis Gillen observes that the
”playwright, too, is trapped within himself, never knowing if the reality that he
perceives is ever understood by anyone, and hence doubting its reality and
perhaps his own.”57 The theater has turned into a prison where the characters
and the playwright alike are locked within their own performance and left with
no connection to the outside world. In the theater, the artist can never be a
complete individual as Williams had h0ped to become. He is dependent on the
audience to define him and to sustain this definition. In The Twe-Qharacter flay,
Williams seems to have reached the conclusion that the artist is always contained
within the image that the audience and the critics have carved out for him. J.L
Styan wrote about the reliance of the playwright on the audience for meaning
and order. The ”miracle of theater,” he states, ”is that a community, an audience,
has agreed to let drama happen!” Without the audience, drama turns into an
absurd act drained of meaning and importance. The playwright makes an
unspoken commitment with the audience which requires the collaboration of
both to make sense out of what the playwright is presenting to them. If this
commitment is broken, the communication between the playwright and the
audience will collapse, and the order and coherence the playwright has tried to

present to his audience will turn into chaos. Such a collapse marks the end of the

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performance as well as the demise of the artist. ”fie Lee-Character P_lay
dramatizes the dependence of the artist upon an audience, and suggests that the
audience is a necessary part of the creative experience and the identity of the
artist himself is always under the scrutiny of this audience waiting for their
validation and legitimation. The freedom of the artist can never be complete. It is
codified and dependent on what the audience is willing to accept and to reject.
Thomas Adler comments on Williams's growing resentment of this ultimate
dependence from which he could not escape. Williams himself, Adler writes ”is
well aware of this need of communicating with an audience for the act of artistic
creation [and the artist himself] to be complete.”59 He continues "Williams can
never prove to be an entity of his own for the artist's self-identity depend[s] upon
being heard by others!”0

Towards the end of his career, Williams started to realize that he was
caught in the image of Tennessee Williams that he created out of Tom Williams.
The two roles were in constant conflict, and the duality in these roles was
perhaps the source of Williams’s suspicions and paranoia. In fact, as early as
1958, he admitted to Mike Wallace his discomfort with this duality. When
Wallace asked Williams:

You’ve also told me.. .that for a long time, you were a
lonely man and rather afraid of friendship,

Williams responded:

Not afraid of it, but suspicious of it. I’m never certain
whether they’re liking Tom Williams or Tennessee
Williams, you know... and I deeply resent the fact
that becoming a prominent playwright has made me
like that!51

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As his response clarifies, Tom Williams is lost and contained in the public role of
Tennessee Williams. The line is blurred between both entities and the
multiplicity of the roles. The fictitiousness of the public artifact Tennessee
Williams has totally engulfed and devoured the reality of Tom Williams.
Similarly to Felice and Clare who do not know where their life begins and where
their role playing ends, Williams has also fallen victim of his own fiction and his
own artistic genius. The author has become a character of his own creation.
Williams even starts to resent and defy the image the public has created of him
with his own collaboration.

Williams was growing more and more resentful of his play The Glass
Menagerie-«a play which contributed much to the creation of the artifact

Tennessee Williams. In 1965, Williams expressed publicly his feeling of

 

resentment towards m Glass Menagerie because it placed him within a. frame
of an image that was making him uncomfortable. ”You should remember that
you’re always competing with your earlier work,” he tells John Gruen. Williams
adds: ”In my particular case, they all say, ’Oh, that glass Menagerie!’ Until you
almost begin to hate it! Because you know you have been working fiercely all the
time since. And it’s not quite possible to believe that you haven’t created
something since then!” Williams's frustration stems from the fact that the public
and the critics were not capable of understanding the multiplicity of styles and
the variations of characters with which he tried to endow the American stage.
Not only is Tennessee Williams in constant clash with Tom Williams, but even
this public artifact of Tennessee Williams is further fragmented and divided into
the Tennessee Williams of The flee Menagerie and the post-Igueee Tennessee
Williams.

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Williams remained a fragmented artist as art and theater failed to provide
him with the sense of completion and totality he was hoping. Throughout his
entire career, Williams dramatized the sense of completion of the artist.
Williams’s artist characters are all involved in this quest for wholeness and
completion. However, they never achieve this aim. Blanche through her own
theatricality can not write her own script, and she ends up subjected to the
ending that Stanley, with the collaboration of Stella, write for her. Brick’s
theatricality leads to more ambivalent outcomes. He never gives up his
masquarding and if he seems to accept the role that Maggie has assigned him at
play's end, it is because he sees in this role a stretch over the one he is already
playing. Val’s destiny is no less tragic than that of Blanche. His guitar and his
music do not take him farther than Two-River County where he meets his own
demise. While Sebastian dies without completing his poem in Suddmly L_as_t
Summer, Nonno in T_he _lflgllt _o_f :13 iguana die immediately after finishing his
poem. _Ig mg 3431‘ _o_f _a_ ILkXQ meg, Mark can not paint anymore because his
paintings have become too personal, and as a result, he can not separate himself
from his own art. In other words, Mark becomes an entity of his own creation;
and when his art can not sustain the life of this entity, it all ceases to exist.
Paradoxically enough, the climactic moment when the artist achieves harmony
with his own art marks the very moment when the artist starts to live depending
on this life-sustaining artifact we call art. Once the artistic expression becomes
impossible, the artist discovers that he has been dependent on this artifact, and it
is almost impossible to be an entity of his own again. Williams suggests that
writing is no longer life-sustaining, but it is, rather, a painful and draining life-

taking process. He reveals his ambivalence towards art and writing: ”Writing for

216

me is a continual see-saw between rapture and despair which leaves me so
exhausted, nervously and physically, that I actually believe each play reduces my
life expectancy by several years!"53 Writing, which for Williams was a romantic
venture of self-discovery and a safe haven for a more assertive and affirmative
identity, ended up, for him, as more of an enclosed space of exhaustion and
despair.

Williams’s disillusionment with the function of art in his life and with his
own image as an artist is not a product of his later career. Disillusionment is
deeply rooted in his early plays. However, his Broadway success kept his
disillusionment under the surface of glamor, fame, and the financial security that
this success brought him. When we compare Williams’s fiction to his drama, we
realize that Williams did not find in the theater the level of truthfulness, honesty,
and understanding that he was seeking. For instance, the short story that was
later transformed into k glass Menagerie is more honest in its portrayal of its
narrator than he _Gl_a§ Menagerie. The narrator of ”Portrait of a Girl in Glass” is
more frank and more open than his counterpart Tom of the dramatic version.
The homosexual dimension in the narrator’s portrayal, even though it is just
hinted at in the short story, is totally eliminated from the dramatic script or
placed under layers and layers of evasion and avoidance. be ClLag Menagerie
brought Williams success and recognition, but it also highlighted the limitations
and the restraints of the illusory, if not evasive, nature of theatrical
representation. The theater is representational and therefore by definition, it is
illusory, removed, dislocated, and inaccurate in its representation. What
Williams‘ is presenting to his audience is always a copy removed from its

original, a copy with faded colors, shrinking dimensions, and toned-down

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volume. Williams uses the image of the ”ghost” to describe the illusive
representational nature of the theater. In 1960, in his note to gem fo_r Su_mm&
_l:l_o__t_e_l: A M _Pl_ay, Williams states that ”all plays are ghost plays, since players
are not actually whom they play.”"4 The actor on the stage is a representational
sign representing an image of what 5/ he is and what 5/ he is not. Actors are
signifiers with no accurate correlation and direct relation with the signified, i.e.
the character he is playing. He is a part of a representational system that is loose,
incoherent, and totally incongruent. Not only does Williams see the theater and
the actors as ”ghost” representations, but he also sees himself in the same terms.
In 1977, in a _Ne_w _Yo_rk Lune; article, Williams complained that he was ”widely
regarded as the ghost of a writer--remembered most for works which were
staged between 1944 and 1961.”"5 The author, Williams, is himself an actor who is
not actually whom he plays. The author himself is caught in the same illusive
system of representational theatricality. Williams is a shadow of a shadow, and a
copy of an image that he can never be.

In the audience, Williams has sought companionship, but in the public
dimension of drama, he found a thick wall of barriers and isolation. The theater
that Williams hoped would shed light on the attics, the basements, and the
closets of the human existence turned into an ”attic” itself. Williams states:

I feel strangely remote from everything-insulated"
cut off from the mainstream. Home--the attic--the
literary life—the creative trance-it makes you feel like
you have practically stopped living for a while. I want
life and love again--and a swift flow of significant
experiences.66

The theater is the ultimate closet for Williams; and the masks and the facades are

part of the face of the author who has become a character in his own plays. The

218

playwright, to borrow an image from Derrida, can write only "derriere le rideau,"
i.e. behind the curtain.” The theater does not dispel] the darkness of Williams’s
closet; on the contrary, it adds an extra dimension to it. It is a closet with an
audience who can express love and admiration for the playwright, but little do
they know that the author they are admiring and applauding is a copy of an
original they do not know, and can not have access to. The story of Williams’s
career of success and failure is a story of erasure and effacement, a story of self-
annihilation rather than one of self-assertion and affirmation. Williams's later
failure on Broadway can not necessarily be attributed to his lack of talent and
literary capability so much, but to his decision to tear down the walls of the
closet that were suffocating him. The audience and the literary critics were not
willing to deal with Williams’s disclosure about who he really was. It was easier
for them to grant their love and admiration to a fragmented Williams rather than
to an honest Tom. The truth proved equally painful to Williams’s family and to
the strangers whose love and acceptance he sought. The theater, in the same way
as the outside world, is a world of mendacity, of pretenses and role-playing. It is
in this world that Williams found the metaphor that best reflects and embodies
the mendacity and the pretenses of the real world. Brick’s statement ”mendacity
is a system we live in” rings true on more than one level.‘58 Williams knew that
when the critics refered to him as the greatest American playwright, they were
indeed referring to a small fragment of who Tom Williams was.

In 1973, Williams claimed that the ”reviewers were intolerant of [his]
attempt to write in a freer way.”"9 He then went on to explain his frustration with
the way the public and the critics perceived him: "They want to try to judge you

on traditional form when you’re trying to move to something freer, like

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presentational theater... "7° Williams is not free in the theater. On the contrary, he

is stifled and his voice is rejected by the critics and the audience alike. Williams's

 

 

early plays such as The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Q, and others in which he
sought his own free space, turned into his own prison. Clare and Felice are
caught in the middle of their interior play, and locked within the thick walls of
the theater that has become their own prison. Like Clare and Felice, Williams is
also a prisoner to his own plays, to the success they brought him, and to the
public personae they bestowed upon him. Through T_he Iflg-Character Bley,
Williams was able to engage in a dialogue about his own plays, his past, and his
own identity not just as an author, but also as a character staging his own drama.
In this figure of the artist character, Williams is dramatizing his own life and his
own personae of a playwright who is locked in his own art and in the classics
that he put on the American stage.

The image of the prison and confined spaces is a recurring motif in
Williams’s plays. From fig: m: Nightingale which takes place in a prison on
an island from which there is no escape to IE Iloogharacter P_lay where the
theater itself has become a prison, Williams is commenting upon the fate of the
individual who is destined to remain lonely and incomplete. The loneliness and
incompletion are dramatized in m Tic-Character Ijl_ay as this exchange
between Clare and Felice reveals:

Clare: [like a child]: When are we going home?
Felice: - Clare, our home is a theater anywhere that
there is one.

Clare: If this theater is home, I’d burn it down over
my head to be warm a few minutes. . . (315).

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Clare can not find the comfort and familiarity of a home in the theater. It is a
space from which she wants to break away and escape. The unfamiliarity of the
theater is further intensified by the fact that the theater is located in ”an
unspecified locality” called ”New Bethesda," and isolated from the rest of the
world since the phone has been disconnected. The stairs in the theater lead to
nowhere, all the doors are locked and every possibility of escape is rendered
null. The theater is lit with the "benign light of a late summer afternoon,” and ”a
dusky violet light deepening almost to blackness at its upstage limits” (308). In
the middle of this theater is a ”statue of a giant, pedestaled, which has a sinister
look” (308). Obviously, this is not the theater Williams envisioned earlier in his
career as a sanctuary offering light and comfort, warmth and understanding, and
compassion and love.

The theater in which Clare and Felice find themselves locked is a theater
of darkness and gloom. Felice informs the audience that ”the house [the theater]
is so old, so faded... seems to be whispering to me: ’You can’t go away. Give up.
Come in and stay.’ Such a gentle command! What do I do? Naturally I obey”
(353). There is no life to Clare and Felice outside the theater and outside the
performance. Clare’s and Felice’s exchange about the confining nature of the
theater reveals Williams’s disillusionment with and ambivalence toward art and
his growing despair about the relief the theater can offer:

~Clare: . . .So it’s a prison, this last theater of ours?
Felice: it would seem to be one
Clare: I’ve always suspected that theaters are prisons

for players...
Felice: Finally, yes. And for writers of plays... (364).

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Such an exchange reinforces Felice’s early realization that ”the house has turned
to a prison” [354]. Kalm’s conclusion that ”the theater has been [for Williams]
the agency for freedom, both personal and artistic, but, as he discovered, and as
the entrapped Felice and Clare symbolize, it can also be a prison" is an astute

understanding of Williams's disillusionment with the theater.’1

A Self Caught between the Word and the World.

The alienating effect of the theatrical representation is further deepened in
the very medium that the artist and the playwright use to communicate with the
audience, i.e. language. With 13 Night o_f the Iguana, Williams admitted his
skepticism about the ability of language to communicate and to reveal. In 1962
Williams stated his new vision about language and the role it should play in his
own drama. In an 1962 interview with John E. Booth about m Night. _f the
Iguana, Williams stated:

I suddenly saw the light—that there were enough long

speeches, which is my specialty, unfortunately... I

realized there was too much talk. I mean there were

speeches of five lines where half a line could have

done it. Right now I am engaged in trying to say--

trying to express a play more in terms of actions. Not

in terms of physical action; I mean, in a sort of gun-

fire dialogue instead of the long speeches that I’ve

always relied on before. Let me say that I depended

too much on languageuon words.’2
Williams is seeking his own liberation from language now. He is realizing that
human nature is more complex and ambiguous than can be revealed in a clear-

cut fashion. Only allusiveness can reveal this ambiguity and can portray the self

in its complexity and multiplicity.

' 222

I_he T_vm-Charaeter my reflects Williams’s skepticism about language
and underscores his new vision about language and communication. It is a play
that explores the tragedy of limitations imposed by language, and as Lyle
Leverich suggests, ”the tragic failure to communicate one’s true feelings not only
to others but also to oneself in an interior dialogue!”3 Language does not bring
the self in tune with itself. The self instead remains ”the other” to itself. 1E I_wh-
Character m is the play of disfigured aesthetics, broken sentences, and
incomplete dialogue. Such disfiguration, brokenness, and incompletion speak for
the characters’ disfiguration and impossibility of knowing themselves for who
they are. It is a confused language of a confused self, and an aborted meaning of
an erased identity. It is a language that ”serves to indicate the impossibility of
containing or rationalizing the interior life of the self,” and the distortion and
fragmentation of this self." The ellipses, the pauses, and the exclamations present
in Q are also prevalent in The Two-Character _131_ay. Brick can not tell his story
and remove the veils, and neither can Felice nor Clare. They have to cut their
sentences short when they feel the rush and the imminence of the moment of
revelation. They hold themselves back when their own truth starts to bring
pressure on them to be told and revealed. The following exchange between Clare
and Felice highlights their incapability to face their destiny through their
language. Their dialogue is that of limitations, pauses, and erasures.

Clare: You shouldn’t have spoken the word!
”Confined”!

Felice: Oh. Prohibited word. . .

Clare: Then say the word, over and over, you--
perverse, monster, you! Scared to? Afraid of a-

Felice: I wouldn’t do lunatic things. I have to try to
pretend there’s some sanity here.

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Clare: Oh, is that what you’re trying? I thought you
were trying to go as far off as possible without going
past all limits...

Confined, confined!

He thrusts the pillow over her mouth... she struggles as if
suffocating... [339].

In Clare’s and Felice’s exchange words and sentences are erased. Clare
accuses Felice of being ”scared” and ”afraid,” but she never states explicitly what
he may be afraid of. Meaning is never stated, always implied. It is only during
the course of the play that we learn that the past is the source of their fear and
discomfort. Moreover, because of this erasure, words mean more than what they
usually mean. The word ”confined,” for example, is highlighted in quotation
marks, and is left up to the audience to construct the meaning of ”confined,”
since they are left in a state of quandary regarding the reasons for this
confinement. Felice and Clare can not unlock their secrets to each other and to
the audience. They can not pass the limitations of language and the restraints of
their dialogue. Clare remarks: ”I thought you were trying to go as far off as
possible without going past all limits...” However, this dialogue exchange
between them shows that they can not go that far and the limitations of language
are stronger than what they think. Afraid that Clare may say more, and unready
to hear and reveal more about their truth, Felice ”thrusts the pillow over [Clare's]
mouth... she struggles as if suffocating...” (339). Felice is trying to obstruct and
obfuscate the truth and the revelation that is about to come from Clare. Hence
Clare’s fear ”my voice is going!" does not mean exclusively that Clare is literally

losing her voice, but also implies her incapability to confide in and console Felice

and the audience alike.

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Clare’s and Felice’s failure to extend their dialogue to the limits of truth
and honesty does not necessarily stem from their unwillingness or unreadiness
to do so for this failure is inherent in language itself. Language does not reveal; it
rather interprets. And in interpreting, it changes and distorts like a distorted
glass that stands between the interlocutors. When the play opens, we see Felice
”slowly, reflectively, writing” (309). Felice is consciously trying to pin down
language to the meaning he wants to communicate to the audience. He is
struggling with the unstable, unfixed, and representational nature of language.
He wants to stop time for an hour and a half to tell the audience about his own
and his sister’s fear, but time will not stop for him, and language will not offer
him the opportunity to create a tableau for his audience out of his fear and
anxiety. The instability of language is defeating. It fails the artist because the
picture he beholds in his imagination is never close to the picture audience may
hold in their eyes. The voice the artist conveys to the audience resonates in a
processed and distorted version of what it was. Language does not belong solely
to the artist, ”the signifier belongs to everybody,” as Barthes reminds us.75
Therefore, meaning is never exact; it is always a matter of speculation, inference,
and differance. The message is never exact and truthful to what it describes. It is
communicated with shades and shadows, illusions and implications, and
disputes and debates between the artist and the audience. The word and the
world never correlate and coincide. There is no immediacy to the message, it is
always delayed and postponed. By the time it reaches the audience, the voice of
the artist might have already been transformed into an echo, shattered and

divided, which marks the destruction of a self that is yet to be made. The self is

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never fulfilled, it is always conveyed in a multiplicity of conveyances. Language
through which the self is asserted is also the very means of its destruction.

The self to which we can have access through language is, therefore, a
linguistic representation. It is a series of images. As I. Fichte avers: ”I nowhere
know of any being, not even my own. There is no being. I myself know nothing
and am nothing. There are only images: they are the only thing which exist, and
they know of themselves in the manner of images... I myself am one of those
images; indeed, I am not even this but only a confused image of images/’76 The
self is reduced to a reflection on a screen or in a mirror. It is a virtual
representation of lines, shapes, and surfaces with no depth and nothing beyond
the reflection. We are back to the image of a mirror reflecting other images
reflected in other mirrors, and the ultimate observation is that of confusion,
decentralization, and loss of authenticity. The conclusion one can draw is that the
nature of the self follows that of the medium in which it is conveyed. Language is
elusive, ever shifting, referential, and endlessly flowing; and so is the self. In this
linguistic system, the self can be identified only in close approximation.

In the course of the play, Felice observes metaphorically: ”that’s the
interpreter,” and Clare responds with disappointment, surprise, and
exclamation: ”Oh, my God, he’s telling them what we’re saying!?” (334). Clare’s
astonishment expresses the linguistic ontological dilemma that I traced
previously. She is afraid that her message will never reach the audience the way
she meant it; and if it does, she fears that this message will be distorted, defaced,
and dislocated. Clare is aware that language is an open-ended interpretative
system which renders impossible the task of pinning down the meaning of her

play, or the true interpretation she is offering the audience. Through this

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interpreter, Clare’s and Felice’s message is losing some of its meaning and
immediacy. The audience will never know who Clare and Felice are. They will
know only the approximate representational image of them that the interpreter is
constructing for both of them. The ”I” of Clare and Felice becomes a linguistic
construct. As Derrida admits: ”What is called the speaking subject is no longer
the person himself, or the person alone, who speaks. The speaking subject
discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded...
on the basis of an organized field of speech/’77 It is this secondarity and
differance which scare Clare. The interpreter has no physical presence on the
stage. It is the very language of the artist that is interpreting and thus distorting.
Clare and Felice are defeated not by their unwillingness to reveal themselves, but
by the games of language and meaning. Their dilemma is not personal as much
as it is ontological and universal. There is no honesty and truthfulnessto the
truth anymore. If the truth is mendacious for Big Daddy and Brick in Caht, it is
”sick, sick-aberrations!” for Felice, as he describes it in fie Iwe-Charaeter Bey
(315).

Felice and Clare are caught in the repetitive cycle of language in the same
way they are trapped within the play and the performative nature of their
identity and selfliood. Felice screams to Clare: ”stop repeating, repeating!” (327)
and ”his outcry could be seen as a plea for release from the language... that traps
him.”78 Felice’s outcry is a comment on the enslaving nature of language, a
language that locks our minds and bodies in a pre-set system of signifiers and
signifieds set for us prior to our existence. Ironically, in this pre-set and socially-
constructed system the individuals have to seek their own freedom and find their

own idiosyncratic voice.

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Some modern twentieth century thinkers and philosophers have
explained and shed more light on this dilemma that individuals have to face.
Their conclusions illustrate that language can not be the medium through which
the individual can speak out his individuality because it is the language of the
other. Roland Barthes writes: ”the language I speak within my self is not of my
time; it is prey, by nature, to ideological suspicion.”79 Derrida could not have
agreed more. Explaining his frustration at the ideological embodiment inherent
in language and in artistic expression, Derrida claims: ”as soon as I speak, the
words I have found (as soon as they are words) no longer belong to me...”80
Language and words are imposed upon the individual. They are tarnished with
a long history of ideological abuse and tyranny. Hence, the self-expression of the
individual and the artist can not help being contaminated by this history and
tarnished by shades and meanings from which they can not purify this language.
The language we speak does not carry our own voice, but that of society and
others. In this view, there is no possibility of a private language and even the
most intimate voice that we hear from ourselves is not necessarily recognizable
as our own. Individuals are mutilated and victimized even by the very language
they speak. Individuals are subdued by the tyranny of language "dismembered,
dis-remembered, disintegrated," in Gilbert's and Gubar's terms.81 If we are
seeking a pure "1" this search is in vain. We are embedded in "the other," and "the
other" is embedded in us. "I'm this, that and the other," Williams claims.82

The ontological trauma of the individual is that this language is the source
and the limit of the individual’s self-awareness. As Emile Benveniste states: ”It is
in and through language that man constitutes himself as subject, because

language alone establishes the concept of ’ego’ in reality, in its reality which is

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that of the being.”83 The self is deeply implicated in language to the point that
this self does probably turn to a purely linguistic construct and becomes a
linguistic narrative. Lacan also depicts the self/ subject as an artifact that is
invented in and by the linguistic and social structures which are located outside
the individual himself. Thus, for Lacan, the subject/ self is without a center; and
if it does have a center, this center does not exist within the self, but within the
very social and ideological forces outside the self. In fig, Lacan expresses this
view succinctly when he avers: ”I identify myself in language, but only by losing
myself in it like an object/’84 Hélene Cixous agrees with Lacan’s conclusion
”everything turns on the Word: everything is the Word and only the Word," she
claims. "We must take culture at its Word, as it takes us into its word, into its
tongue... No political reflection can dispense with reflection on language... For
as soon as we exist, we are born into language and language speaks (to) us,
dictates its law..."85 Both Lacan and Cixous are expressing a paradoxical,
confusing, and schizophrenic state of being. The moment the individual speaks
out who 5/ he is, s / he turns into an object manipulated, designed, and invented
by language. The ultimate outcome is not that of self-assertion, but more of self-
alienation into this pre-existing, depersonalized and intricate system we call
language. Ellie Rogland-Sullivan explains: Lacan ”depicts Man as a
representational, symbolic being who believes that he autonomously originates
ideas which, in fact, he only acts out. We are born into a vast symbolic network
of words, codes, and meanings which inhabit, direct, and control us..."86 The
individual is the subject and the predicate of language.

These views of the self as a linguistic and ideological invention are not

without implications. To state that the individual is determined by language and

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ideology eliminates the notion of agency, authenticity, and autonomy from the
individual who is rendered merely a public artifact created by extra-personal
ideological terms. These views eliminate the tension between the private
longings of the individual and the necessity of this individual to exist as a social
being. One can embrace the idea that the self is the product of an inter-subjective
and extra-personal discursive process, but at the same time can not deny the
resistance and the resilience with which this individual responds to these
deterministic ideological forces. The views of the subject that Lacan, Derrida,
Foucault, and others present to us do not account for this tension. And if they do,
it is only to demonstrate that it is conducive to the destruction of the individual
and the annihilation of individuality.

Williams’s characters do not accept such a fate of annihilation and
extermination. They do carry with them the reminiscence of this marginalization,
and defeat, but they handle their defeat with valor and resilience that is unique
to them. Foucault’s, Derrida’s, Lacan’s and others' accounts of the subject do not
include such characteristics as the ones that Williams’s characters embody,
neither do they explain the resistance and confrontation with which Williams's
characters face these sources of defeat and annihilation. Williams's characters are
defeated, but they manage to secure the audience’s admiration for their
capability to deal with the odds of their existence, and cope with them sometimes
partly, but enough to keep them alive, assertive, and affirmative.

Even though defeated and mutilated by language, Clare and Felice
manage to overcome the trap of language and create an intimate rapport with
each other within the boundaries and the limitations that language imposes upon

both siblings. The incomplete sentences, the pauses and the ellipses in _The Two-

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hara er Play are not exclusively signs of people defeated by language and

locked into its commonality and pre-set rules, they are sometimes the private
language that both characters have found to share their common experience-a
private language through which they can speak out their fears and anxieties.
Speaking of their fears, Felice states:

Felice: Fear is a monster vast as night--

Clare: And shadow casting as the sun.

Felice: It is quicksilver, quick as light-

Clare: It slides beneath the down-pressed thumb

Felice: Last night we locked it from the house.

Clare: But caught a glimpse of it today.

Felice: In a corner, like a mouse

Clare: Gnawing all four walls away (311).
This exchange reveals the mutual understanding between the two siblings. As
Jacqueline O'Connor demonstrates, when Felice and Clare ”help each other
finish sentences, they indicate their interwoven lives and personalities, and their
limited ability to aid each other in communication.”87 Even though they are
isolated from the outside world, they can still find solace in each other. Felice and
Clare find it almost impossible to communicate with the outside world, but their
past and their common experience has made it possible for them to reach out to
each other. This sort of language traces the journey of two siblings who are
trying to break away from the limitations of the self and the barriers of language.
As Thomas Adler suggests, the incomplete dialogue represents Clare’s and
Felice’s attempts to break ”out of the self and make contact with the other" for
the "completion of dialogue and/ or self identity depends on the presence of and

interaction with the other.”88 The other that Clare and Felice find to offer them

comfort and validation is not their family and society, but each other. Only Clare

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can offer Felice understanding, and only Felice can feel Clare’s fears because both
have crossed the same path, lived the same tragedy, and learned that the only
redemption possible for both of them is to offer the marginalized, the uprooted,
and the lonely who they are what the others and their family have refused to
grant them. In each other, Felice and Clare have found a god who understands
and shares their pain.

Even though language is a social code that can be stiffening, and confining
for the individual, Clare and Felice have managed to curb this code and make it
the medium through which they can express their fears, convey their SElthOd,
and enter ”into a saving communion of shared humanity.”89 Language is no
longer a diminishing social system through which Clare and Felice have to
reduce their own self to repetitions and clichés, it is rather a space that can allow
them to become their own subjects, and render their past and their fears more
tolerable. Williams realizes how difficult it is "to put what [we] think and feel
into speech/9° as one of his characters expresses, but he never takes away from
his characters the possibility of affirmation and self-assertion. The human
condition is painful, defeating, and confusing, but there is always room for the
individual to survive in the midst of this confusion, labyrinth, and Babylon-like
world. Williams imbues his characters with valor and resilience not to transcend
their limitations and become demi-gods, but to find dignity in defeat, and live up
to their humanity with all its contradictions, and with all the ontological
confusion that surrounds human existence. By not resorting to silence, Clare and
Felice start to speak for themselves and become autonomous agents of their own
making instead of collaborating in their own demise through their silence. Only

by accepting to transact through this social artifact we call language, both

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siblings start to challenge the past which defines who they are and distance
themselves from the image that this past has forced upon them. m M-
gharaeter Elhy demonstrates that individuals can maintain their originality and
individuality even though they have to express themselves through a linguistic
system that is not their own—a system that reflects more the oppressive social
and ideological aspects of our culture than the individuals’ longings and

aspirations.

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Conclusion

In spite of the ontological and ideological odds against which Williams is
working, and which I outlined in my introductory chapter and developed
subsequently, he has managed to present to his audience a performative and
fluid self that shakes established values, opens the small closets of narrow
minded thinking, and tears down conventional ideas to replace them with those
of one's own devising. In his project, Williams is hoping to re—establish the
dignity of the individual and restore the humanity of the human being. "What I
am writing about is human nature," Williams claims. His characters have "a
natural elegance, a love of the beautiful, a romantic attitude toward life," and his
"main theme is a defense of that attitude, a violent protest against those things
that defeat it."1 The human spirit is under threat as Williams sees it, and the
individuality of the individual is under siege; but Williams is determined to
write to save the individual from extinction. In Williams's drama, his vision is
apocalyptic, but the option of being a sensitive, giving, and compassionate
human being is still a possibility, and the ability to overcome the brutality of the
world we live in is still feasible. In his drama, we rediscover ourselves, we
recognize our human face, and find the long forgotten pleasure of being human
again.

Williams's career has been consumed in opening up spaces and securing
safe zones for the deformed, the mutilated, and the uprooted that we all might
be. As Celeste, the visionary from m MiltiLaLeh explains to Trinket:

I'd say to her everyday, forget your mutilation, it's not

the end of the world for you... Hell, I'd say, we all
have our mutilations, some from birth, some from

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long before birth, and some from later in life, and

some stay with us forever.2
If the odds of our existence are so prevalent and part of our everyday life, then
the ultimate message is that perhaps we all have to settle for these odds, not as
an act of fatal subservience, but as a celebration of our own humanity that
remains far from being perfect in Williams's understanding. The message
Williams is sending to his readers, audience, and critics is one of acceptance. It is
a message to embrace life with all its odds, extremities, contradictions, and
complexity because between the tensions of its paradoxes lies its vitality.
Williams's message makes a request of us i.e. to steer away from the deadly
absolutism of what we call the truth. "The truth?" the Son in fie Purification
asks:

Why ask for that?

Ask it of him, the player_

for truth is sometimes alluded to in music.

But words are too loosely woven to catch it in...
A bird can be snared as it rises

or torn to earth by the falcon.

His song, which is truth,

is not to be captured ever.

It is an image, a dream,

it is the link to the mother,

the belly's rope that dropped our bodies from God

a longer time ago than we remember!3

Williams is trying to cut the individual loose from the tyranny of the truth for it
is confining and rendering the identity of the individual a one-fixed version of

what this identity is constructed to be. With skepticism, doubts, and scrutiny

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Williams approaches the truth. "Why ask me for that?" does not reveal only
Williams's unwillingness to answer the question, but also points to the hidden
agenda that may lie behind asking for the truth. If the truth is sought only to
define, determine, and fix according to clearly-established values and
compartments, then Williams is not willing to define the truth in such terms. The
truth is more fluid and allusive than most of us want it to be. For Williams, it is
an "[allusion] in music," thus remains just "an image" or "a dream." If this truth
has ever had an origin, its origin is untraceable, and our birth marks our loss of
this origin, or maybe this loss goes far back into remotely past recollections that
our memories fail to bring back. Williams is accepting the shady meaning of life,
and ready to walk us through its twilight zone. He claims:

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... All creation is the boat, not just one
nation, not just one ideology, not just one system.‘

Williams's vision expands beyond the narrow focus of systems and ideologies
and refers us back to what we all share together as an irreducible common
denominator i.e. our humanity.

Williams's drama does not destroy the individuals nor does it deny them
an identity of their own. The self that Williams presents to us is simultaneously
ideological and counter-ideological. It is a product of the cultural rules,
regulations, and beliefs in which we are born and shaped, it is expressed in a
language that has existed prior to our own existence, but in its longings and
inspirations for other possibilities, it reveals what this culture has taken away

from the individual. This identity is counter-ideological not only in the sense that

236

it questions these rules and laws, but also reformulates and reworks them
towards its own private inspirations. Therefore, the self in its negotiation with
the ideology in which it is produced challenges this ideology from within and
presents better options of freedom and democracy than what this ideology
already presents to us.

Williams establishes this identity in a more pluralistic landscape than his
critics, and his audience alike were used to in the 1950's and 1960's. In doing so,
he is launching an attack on all the traditional and essentialist thinking that has
confined the self to limited frames and renders it more of a unitary, fixed, and
straight linear entity. Williams's understanding of the self, as I demonstrate in
this study, is more fluid and more accommodating to paradoxical human nature
than the traditional ways by which the self has often been perceived. Williams's
depiction of the self as pluralistic and performative indicates the impossibility to
rationalize the interior caves and curves of the self, and the distortions which
arise from attempts to do so. As pluralistic and multi—faceted as it is, the self that
Williams depicts is not a call to embrace the chaotic and live in a Babylon state of
being, but rather an incentive to dismiss the static and monolithic in us, and to
extend and embrace our democratic values in ourselves and in our everyday
interaction with others. It is a call to the realization that there are as many selves
as there are individuals who are multiplicities of faces and roles that can not be
contained in just one face and one identity. This is the revolutionary, iconoclastic
playwright Williams deemed himself to be and that other critics and playwrights
have seen in his drama. Arthur Miller wrote in his biography Timebends that
Williams was not "the sealed off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical

politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and picket line."5 Williams is the

237

n6

"poet of the human heart but he is also the iconoclastic playwright who puts
our perception in doubt, makes us re—examine our values, and challenges our
well—defined categories by which we perceive each other. Savran, in his re-
evaluation of Williams, realizes that he "was a writer who called himself a
revolutionary and meant it, a playwright who produced a new and radical
theater that challenged and undermined the Cold War order."7 In the midst of
McCarthy's hearings, the threatening homophobia of the 1950's and 1960's, and
the resultant prevalent conservatism, Williams managed to Open on the
Broadway stage a space of acceptance and compassion. However, it is also this
iconoclasm in Williams's works which has made both critics and audience wary
of him, and contributed to pushing him to the edge of insanity, and to his being
confined to a mental hospital ward for long periods so as to silence him for the
disturbing images of corruption and brutalities he depicted in his drama.
Williams's depiction of the self as a performative, multiple, and
paradoxical entity challenges the theories and perceptions of his time which tried
to examine and understand the self in more linear manner. The critics' failure to
see the value of Williams's work after 13 l_\l_ight if th_e Igga_ne can be greatly
attributed to the lack of language to understand, to describe, and to analyze what
Williams was presenting to his audience. Williams's work is ahead of its time; it
is the threshold and the foundation on which recent playwrights such as Harold
Pinter, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet are still developing in their respective
plays. What Williams has offered the American theater defies the already
existing formulas to which critics and audiences were accustomed. In his later
works, he achieved what he was set to fulfill early in his career. Williams was

drawn to the theater by "the desire of an artist to work in new forms, however

238

awkwardly at first, to break down barriers of what he has done before and what
others have done better before and after and to crash, perhaps fatally, into some
area that the bell-harness and rope would like to forbid him."8 Not only was
Williams challenging and subverting our understanding of the self, but also
subverting the expression in which this new understanding is to be conveyed
and communicated.

In one of his interviews Williams has revealed his rejection of any
systematic thinking and expressed how his revolutionary approach and
understanding to theater does not correlate with the ideologies and the "isms" of
his time. "People think I'm a communist," he claims, "but I hate all bureaucracy,
all isms. I'm a revolutionary only in the sense that I want to see us escape from
this sort of trap."9 Williams escapes all theoretical frames and paradigms. In fact,
if we approach his work only to place him in a clear-cut theoretical category, our
effort would more likely be in vain. Approaching Williams's work from a single
theoretical perspective is reductive for it fails to comprehend the pluralistic self
Williams dramatizes on the stage. In the course of this study, I have come to the
realization that Williams‘s works should be approached from a psychoanalytical
perspective without denying the cultural, historical, rhetorical, and biographical
readings which can also illuminate and enrich our understanding of them.
Williams's works open themselves to such critical possibilities not only because
of their complexity and humanistic dimensionality, but also because of the multi—
layered identity which Williams presents to his audience. Future scholarly
studies of Williams's works will, I predict, find it increasingly useful to steer

away from limiting singular critical paradigms to approach Williams's works

239

which are much more complex, inclusive, and subversive in content and
philosophy, than we have allowed them to be.

When I began researching and reading for this study the question of
whether Williams is a modernist or a postmodernist posed itself with an
obsessive urgency. However, as I arrived at the conclusion of this study, I have
realized that the answer is not perhaps relevant at all to our understanding of
Williams. If the modernist "objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it
according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning,"10 as
Lyotard defines, then Williams is not modernist according to this definition.
However, if modernist literature "questioned the certainties that provided a
support for traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality, and the
conception of the human self,"ll then Williams can be perceived as an integral
part of this literary movement. By the same token, if postmodernism defines
itself as the theory that perceives the human being as a product of the
normalizing effects of power and institutions, and the linguistic medium in
which humans are perceived by themselves or imagined by others, and presents
its objective as "to reveal the 'meaninglessness' of existence and the underlying
'abyss,’ or 'void,' or 'nothingness' on which our supposed security is precariously
suspended,"12 then Williams is not willing to accept this theory at face value for
he gives his characters more resilience and agency than such theory is willing to
grant the individual. Simultaneously, if postmodernism defines itself as resisting
closure, order, and stability, and tends to open more space for paradoxes and
contradictions, then one can find justification for aligning Williams with such
theory. However, I really wonder about the validity of such practice if the

boundaries between theories themselves are constantly shifting and a product of

240

their own history and culture. Moreover, such attempts would not contribute to
our understanding of Williams as much as point to the limitations of the
theoretical paradigms in/ through which we are trying to place him and
understand his philosophy.

Before bringing this study to a closure, I would like to clarify the
autobiographical reading I chose to pursue in some parts of my dissertation. In
my reading, rather than seeking exact correlation between Williams's life and his
writing, I was, instead, more interested in the metaphorical relationship between
him and his creation as I have demonstrated in my chapter on _A Streetcar
M11111 Des_ir;e. Moreover, this autobiographical reading brought me to the
conclusion that Williams's identity as a homosexual playwright can not be
isolated and separated from the way he perceived the nature of identity in
general. Early in his life, Williams's homosexuality made him aware of the masks
he had to wear to deal with a brutal father who could not tolerate the fact that his
son was a "sissy," and a mother who had managed to spare herself the trouble to
see her son, Tom, for who he is and not for who she wanted him to be. Under
these circumstances, Tom had realized the wide gap between who he is and who
others want him to be, and perhaps concluded that the outer public role was
mistakenly taken for the truth of the inner reality. Ironically, he found that with
his own family, he had to be who he was not. Early in his life Williams realized
that the people who were the closest to him were greater strangers to him than
the unfamiliar faces he cruised in New York city's Time Square or in the dark
streets and alleys of New Orleans' French Quarter.

The authenticity of the self is to be constantly sought, yet never achieved.

Early in Williams's life, he learned what kind of face and image he had to present

241

of himself to survive and cope with the ugliness of brutal rejections. Early on he
learned how to transform himself into a public lie of pretenses and facades, and
to create a masquerade. Consequently, the young Tom was pushed to the dark
corners of the closet where his sole outlet of self-expression was his writing, his
stories, and his plays that he could share with us sometimes in half confessions
and other times in whispers and hints, but always with a frankness and
truthfulness to the times and the culture in which he was forced to co-exist. His
homosexuality also drove him away from his family at an early age, and
prompted him to seek a home for himself in highly unlikely places. From one
foreign country to another, from one state to another, and from one hotel room to
another, Williams was constantly searching for a safe haven where he could be
the Williams that he had wanted to be. It is no surprise, therefore, that he
peopled his plays with characters who are struggling against the same odds and
driven by the wish for a home and acceptance. To these people he offered a
dream and a vision:

I think the strange, the crazed, the queer
Will have their holiday this year

And for a while, A little while,

There will be pity for the wild.

A miracle, A miracle!

A sanctuary for the wild

I think the mutilated will

Be touched by hands that nearly heal,
At night the agonized will feel

A comfort that is nearly real.

A miracle, a miracle!

A comfort that is nearly real.13

242

When we examine the faces of Williams's characters' identity, analyze the public
and private identity of Blanche DuBois, notice the masks and guises of Brick
Pollitt, and realize the sense of mutilation which beset Williams's characters, then
it becomes apparent to what extent Williams has turned himself and his own
quest for identity into the very theme of his own works. In writing
autobiographically, Williams not only dared to be himself, but also managed to
dramatize how the artist captured this sense of homelessness, loneliness, and
mutilation to which the human race is ultimately condemned.

Williams and his characters are drifters, bohemians, and malcontents who
are trying to find their own way in the society in which they live. Williams shares
with his characters the spirit and restlessness of the wanderer: "I think I've been
expelled from America, and I'm no longer in the mood to take it. I want to get
together a repertory company with one or two American actresses to go down to
Australia with me..."“ The image that such a remark brings to mind is similar to
the image of Val Xavier, the wandering artist with his guitar and his wild
snakeskin jacket. Williams shares with his creations his sense of uprootedness
and non-belonging which manifest itself in the lack of family or other
institutional ties: "Most of you belong to something that offers a stabilizing
influence: a family unit, a defined social position, employment in an
organization, a more secure habit of existence. I live like a gypsy. I am a fugitive."
And in a statement that echoes Val's monumental line, "we're all of us sentenced
to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!" Williams adds: "No place

seems tenable to me for long anymore, not even my own skin."15

243

Williams's artist characters from Tom Wingfield in Menagerie, to Blanche
DuBois in Streetcar, Val Xavier in O_rpheus, Sebastian Venable in Shddenly _La_st
Summer, Clare and Felice in m-Charaeter P_lay, Mark in h; _the IE hf e T_Lflqm
Hotel, and Flora Goforth in m M M mesh: Ship flge Anjahore
epitomize the artist's quest for selfhood and completion. In Chad—no hell, Lord
Byron explains Williams's artist characters' quest for selfhood. I will "make a
departure!" he exclaims "from my present self to myself as I used to be." He urges
the audience "Make voyages!" and adds, "attempt them! - There's nothing else..."
He explains why an artist makes such attempts:

But a poet's vocation, which used to be my vocation,
is to influence the heart in gentler fashion... He ought
to purify it and lift it above its ordinary level. For
what is the heart but a sort-- [he makes a high,
groping gesture in the air]-a sort of--instrument! --
that translates noise into music, chaos into-~order--a

mysterious order!“5

Williams has envisioned the self in a state of total freedom and has
challenged throughout his entire career the boundaries of his comfort zone to
achieve the limitless. "I won't ever make a good captive," he wrote at the
beginning of his career. "I guess what I will do is drive beyond safety-—till I
smash-_Cleanly and completely the only hope.” It is this sense of completion
that Tom Wingfield hoped to achieve when he abandoned Laura and Amanda;
and Val Xavier envisioned when he walked into Two-River County. Williams's
artists are in search of a Terra Incognito where they can free themselves from the

burden of the past and the restraints of their immediate environment. However,

244

when their search proves to be in vain, their Terra Incognito becomes their
imagination where they can rearrange and remodel the ideal world they seek in
accordance with their own desires

The imagination is the private space of Williams's characters where they
construct themselves and recreate the world they dream to inhabit. It is within
this sphere of the imagination that they can move and operate freely and
fearlessly. The imagination is the space where their dreams, their hopes, ideas,
and ideals of themselves are created and sustained. They seek refuge in their
imagination because the rest of the world is getting smaller and increasingly
minimized for them. The public space is dwindling and closing down on them
and leading to their suffocation, death, or madness under the best of
circumstances. The inner space of the imagination is the only refuge allowed to
them. This is a means still available to Williams's characters to survive and co-
exist within the brutal reality, but by the same token it is also a possibility that
points to the state of impoverishment and sterility that these characters have to
face. Their imagination is the cell where they are locked, alienated, and
victimized. Their imagination is their doom; and what has proved to be their
escape and refuge has become the cell where they have to face their loneliness
and ultimate demise. The imagination is both their sustainer and their principal
destroyer. They are alienated and marginalized not in the outside world but also
in the imaginative world they have created for themselves in their quest for what
is ideal and perfect. Their dreams have turned to ashes. They have wakened to
either the brutality of the reality or to the realization that even in their
imaginative refuge, they have not liberated themselves. They have instead

created a self that others reject and destroy because it is not real for them, and

245

therefore does not fit in the mold in which these characters are placed. The self
remains unliberated and, ironically enough, imprisoned in the imagination to

which it has turned, in desperation, for both shelter and safety.

246

NOTES

 

Introduction:
‘ W.H. Auden, Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House,
1976) 395-96.
2 Judith Butler, Gender trouble: Feminism gel me Subversion o_f Identig (New York:
Routledge, 1990) 138
3 Ibid., 141.

‘ Roy Schafer, "Conformity, Individualism, and Identity," The Inner World in the
Outer World ed. Edward Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 34.

5 Stephen Frosh, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and the Self (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 31.

° Henrik Ibsen, Pg Gmt, trans. Norman Ginsbury, Masters _(h‘ Modern Drama. ed,
Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd (New York: Random House, 1962) 13-67. See Act
5 scene 5.

7 Butler, Gender Trouble 140.

8 Ibid., 140.

9 Tennessee Williams, Summer e_n_d Smoke, Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New
York: Signet Classic) 115.

1° Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, and the Red
Notebook (New York: Penguin Books) 309.

‘1 Irving Howe, "The Self in Literature," Constructions of the Self ed. George Levine
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) 249.

’2 Judith Butler, Gender trouble 7.

‘3 Kim Worthington, Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporegy
Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 161.

1‘ Schafer, "Conformity, Individualism, and Identity," 34.

‘5 Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critical Inggh'ry 8 (1981): 107.

1“ Howe, "The Self in Literature," 249.

‘7 Paul Ricoeur, The Cenflict 9f Integpretatiohs (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1974) 169-170.

'8 Colin Eisler, "'Every Artist Paints Himself:' Art History as Biography and
Autobiography," Social Research 54 (1987): 89.

‘9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 55.

3° Stephen Frosh, Identity Crisis, 3.

2' Ibid., 3

22 Howe, "Self in Literature " 266.

23 Frosh, Identity Crisis, 13.

2‘ Levine, Constructions of the Self, 10.

25 Patricia Waugh, Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992) 8.

‘6 Brian McHale, Postrnodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) 36.

2’ Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1978) 279.

28 George Levine, Introduction, WM 2.

29 Arnold Modell, "The Private Self and Rational Theory," The Inner World in the
Outer World ed. Edward Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 55.

3° Levine, Constructions of the Self 4.

3‘ Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown
Publishers, Inc., 1995) 299.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

247

32 Ibid., 8.

33 Ibid., xxiii.

3‘ Tennessee Williams, Conversations ed., Albert Devlin (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1986) 197.

35 Gore Vidal, Introduction, Tennessee Williams's Collected Short Stories (New York:
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1985) xx.

3" Williams, Conversations 39.

37 Tennessee Williams, Where I Live (New York: New Directions, 1978) 109.

38 Donald Spoto, The kindness of Strangers, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985) 198.

39 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Anchor Press, 1983) 161.

‘° John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and multiplicity (London, England: Pluto

Press 1998) 125.

‘1 Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers, 198.

‘2 Williams, Conversations, 239.

‘3 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984) 67-68.

“ Williams, Memoirs 50.

‘5 Stephen Crites, "Storytime: Recollecting the Past and Projecting the Future,"
Narrative Psyggology, ed. Theodore Sarbin (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1986)
159.

‘6 Williams, Conversations, 299-300.

‘7 Norman Denzin, Integpretive Biography (California: Sage Publications, 1989) 25.

‘8 Tennessee Williams, Letters to Doneld Windham, (N. Y: Penguin Books, 1977) x

‘9 Donald Windham, Lost Friendship: A Memoir of Truman Capote, Tennessee
Williams and Others (New York: William Morrow, 1983) 194.

5° Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tenness_e_e Williams, 169.

5‘ Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Willims (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc.,
Publishers, 1969) 201.

52 Leverich, Tern: The Unknewn Tennessee Williams, 174.

5’ Ibid., 174.

5‘ Ibid., 301.

55 Nicholas Pagan, Rethinking Literagy Biography: A Ppstmodern Approach to
Tennessee Williams (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993) 9-10.

5" Roland Barthes, Image-Musie-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975) 161.

57 Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (New York: The Citadel
Press, 1961) 93.

5“ Leverich, Tom: The nknown Tennessee Williams xxv.

5’ Marlon B. Ross, "The Making of Tennessee Williams: Imagining a Life of
Imagination," Southern Humanities Review 21 (1987): 123.

6° Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,"
The Struehgralist Controversy: The Language pf Critigs’ m and the g'ence of Man, eds.
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1970)
271.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

248

Chapter I: Blanche DuBois: Public Faces and Private Longings.

1 Ruby Cohn, "The Garrulous Grotesques of Tennessee Williams," Tennessee
Williams ed. Stephen Stanton, (Prentice-Hall, Inc., New Jersey, 1977) 46.

2 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975) 161.

3 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (Signet Book, 1974). Subsequent
references to this Edition of the play are cited parenthetically in my text.

‘ Thomas P. Adler, A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth ad 1e, Lantern (Boston: G.
K. Hall, 1990) 43.

5 Quoted by Leonard Berkman in "The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois," A
Streetcar Named Desire, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988)
34.

6 Quoted in "Realism and Theatricalism in A Streetcar Named Desire," 56

7 Berkman, "The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois," 37.

3 Laurilyn J. Harris, "Perceptual Conflict and Perversion of Creativity in A treetcar
Named Desire " Confronting Tennessee Williams's: A Streetcar Named Desire ed. Philip
C. Kolin, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993) 91.

9 Berkman, "The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois," 38.

1° Elia Kazan, A L_ig (New York: Anchor Books, 1989) 330.

" Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebelliog Pph'tan, (New York: The Citadel
Press, 1965), 146.

‘2 Irwin Shaw, "Masterpiece," m Nfl Republie, 22 December 1947.

‘3 Mary Ann Corrigan, "Realism and Theatricalism," 58.

“ Ibid., 58.

'5 Cesare Segre, Structi_1re _an_d Time: Narration Poeh'y, Models, trans. John
Meddemmen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)

1‘ Ibid., 10.

‘7 Ibid., 12.

‘8 Anne Fleche, "When a Door is a Jar, or Out in the Theater: Tennessee Williams and
Queer Space," Theater Journal 47 (1995) 266.

‘9 Tennessee Williams, Conversations _wlh Tennessee Williams ed. Albert J. Devlin
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) 189.

2° Williams, Memoirs 147.

2‘ Kazan, A L'_1fe, 347.

22 Ibid., 348.

’3 Ibid., 347.

2‘ Foster Hirsch, A Pomait 9_f_ the A_r_t1Lt _The plays pf Tennessee Willim (New York:
Kennikat Press, 1979) 34.

’5 Colin Chambers and Mike Prior, Plam'ghte' Pregress (Oxford: Amber Lane Press
Limited, 1987) 115.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2‘ Walter Wager, ed., T_he Playm‘ghts Speak (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967) 231.
27 Memoirs, 188.

”3 See Mark Royden Winchell, "The Myth Is the Message, or Why Streetcar Keeps
Running," Confronting Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, ed., Philip C.
Kolin (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993).

29 Albert J. Devlin, ed., Conversatiohe With Tennesg Williams (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1986) 90.

3° Williams, Conversatiens. 106.

3‘ Tennessee Williams, Where I hiye ( New York: A New Directions Book, 1978) 8

32 Ibid., 35.

33 Ibid., 43.

3" Ibid., 125.

249

35 Kazan, A Life, 348.
81.

37 Williams, Conversations 297.

3" Quoted in Michel Ciment, Kazan o_n_ Kazan (London: 1973) 71.

39 Ronald Hayman, Tennessee Williams: Everyone & i_s_ Q Audience (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993) 103.

‘0 Williams, Conversations, 28.

‘1 Hayman, Everyone Else, 110.

‘2 Kazan, A fie, 495.

‘3 Williams, Conversations 228.

‘4 Williams, Memoirs 134.

‘5 Dotson Rader, Tennessee Williams: C11 hf _the Heart (New York: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1985) 345.

‘6 Williams, Conversations 232.

‘7 Many years after the production of Streetcar, Williams also quotes Blanche when he
talks about his relationship with Elia Kazan. "It may seem as if I am blaming Kazan for
the beginning of my disasters as a drugged writer. I have never blamed anyone for
anything but deliberate cruelty, for there has always been in me the conviction of
Blanche, that 'deliberate cruelty is the one unforgivable thing'" |Memoirs, 170].

‘8 Williams, Memoirs 131.

‘9 Nancy Tischler, "The Distorted Mirror: Tennessee Williams' Self Portrait,"
Tennessee Williams ed., Stephen S. Stanton (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977) 169.‘

5° Kazan, A L'_1fe, 353.

5‘ Ibid., 352.

52 Donald Windham, M Friendship (New York: William Morrow, 1983) 265-266.

53 Donald Windham, ed., Tennessee Williams' Letters t_o, Donald Windham 1940-1965
(New York: Holt, Rinehard, and Winston, 1976) X.

5‘ Williams, Conversations 249.

55 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An_ Introduction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983) 138.

5" Windham, hgs_t Friendship, 174.

57 Ibid., 194.

58 Ibid., 169. g

59 Tischler, "The Distorted Mirror," 169.

5° Ibid., 169.

6‘ For more ample discussion of the relevance of names to gender issues in Streetcar,
see Nicholas Pagan's Rethinking Literary Biography, 63-69.

‘2 Williams, Conversations 29.

‘3 Ibid., 299.

6‘ Maria St. Just, F_i\re O'glock Angel, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990) 26.

‘5 It is this version of Blanche's line rather than the original line in the script that
Williams chooses to quote in his Memoirs when he is referring to the young boy who
refuses to sleep with him because he is straight. Williams chooses this line because of its
heavier homosexual tone. See Memoirs 53-54.

‘6 Williams, Conversations 90

‘7 June Schlueter, Dramatic Closhre: Reading me Eng (London: Associated University
Press, 1995) 103.

‘8 Schlueter, Reading Closure: Reading m Shel, 103.

‘9 Kazan, A L_ife, 343.

7° Ibid., 353.

7‘ Ibid., 353.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

250

Chapter II: The Gay Self: Lies That Come True.

‘ Quoted in Signi Falks, Tennessee Williams (Boston: G.K. Hall&Co., 1978) 87.

2 Walter Kerr, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," New York Herald Tribune 25 March 1955: 12.

3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990) 85.

‘ David Savran Communists, Cowboys, and Queers (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1922) 83.

5 Donald Windham, ed. Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham (New York:
Penguin Books, 1977) 92-93.

6 David Savran, "Mapping the Closet with Tennessee Williams," Shrdies in Literary
Imagm’ ation 24 (1991): 71.

7 Tennessee Williams, Where I Live (New York: New Directions Book, 1978) 72.

8 Albert Devlin, ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1986) 146.

9 Mel Gussow, "Tennessee Williams on Art and Sex," New York Times 3 Nov. 1975:
49.

1° Williams, Where I Live, 72.

1‘ Stephen Stanton, ed., Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977) 10.

‘2 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Penguin Books, 1974) -
111.

‘3 Williams, Conversatiens, 98.

1‘ Stanton, Tennessee Williams 14.

‘5 Roy Schafer, "Conformity, Individualism, and Identity," The Inner World in the
Outer World ed. Edward Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 34.

1" Stephen Frosh, Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and the 21f (New York:
Routledge, 1991) 3.

'7 Ibid., 31.

‘8 Nicholas de Jongh, Not in Front ef the Audience: Hemosexualiry on Stage (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 74.

‘9 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975) 14.

2° De Jongh, Not in Front of the Audience 75.

2' CG. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1961) 192

22 Foster Hirsch, Portrait of the Artist (New York: Kennikat Press, 1979) 49.

23 Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critieal Ingrriry 8 (1981): 99.

2" Ibid., 99.

25 Mark Winchell, "Come Back to the Locker Room Ag'in, Brick Honey!" Mississippi

marterly (1995): 706.

2" R.M. Mansur, "The Two Cats on the Tin Roof," [perhal of the Karnatak University-
Humanities 14 (1970): 157.

27 Nancy Tischler, Tghhw Williams: Rebelliohs Plgtan (New York: The Citadel
Press, 1961) 214.

28 Gerald Weales, American Drama since World War II, (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc., 1962) 29.

2’ Winchell, "Come Back to the Locker Room," 704

3° Philip Kolin, "Obstacles to communication in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" Western

Speech Cgmmru_u'cation 39 (1975): 76.

 

 

 

 

 

251

3‘ Ibid., 50.

3" Ibid., 49.

3° Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 56.

3‘ Savran, Mapping the Closet, 67.

’5 Jo Mielziner, Desigru_n' g for the Theater (New York: Bramhall House, 1965) 124

3‘ Graham Jackson, "The Theater of Implication: Homosexuality in Drama," _The M2
Homosexual i_n_ Literature: A Bibliography, ed. Ian Young, (Metuchen, N .J.: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc. (1982) 253-54.

37 Albert Devlin, "Writing in 'A place of Stone': Q 9h e Hht Lu; Roof," ed., Matthew
Roudané, The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) 110.

38 See Mark Lilly's chapter on Tennessee Williams in his book Gay Men's Literage in
the Twentieth Century for the discussion of mutilation as a way to represent the gay self.

39 John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992) 156.

‘° John Clum, "'Something Cloudy, Something Unclear' : Homophobic Discourse in
Tennessee Williams" South Atlantic Qrarterly 88 (1989): 170.

“Williams, Conversations 35.

‘2 Williams, Where I Live 72.

‘3 George Whitemore, "George Whitemore Interviews Tennessee Williams," Cey
Sunshine Interviews Volume I, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine
Press) 315-320.

“ Clum, Acting Gay, 166.

‘5 Clum, ”Homophobic Discourse,” 163.

‘6 Mark Winchell, "The Myth is the message, or Why Streetcar Keep Running,"
Confronting Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, ed. Philip Kolin, (W estport:
Greenwood Press, 1993) 143.

‘7 J. F. Buckley, Desire, the Self, and the Critic (New Jersey: Associated University
Presses, 1997) 15.

‘8 Ellis Hanson, "The Telephone and Its Queemess," Cruising the Performative, eds.
Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995) 53.

‘9 Quoted in Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1997) 100.

5° Ibid., 78.

5‘ Savran, ”Mapping the Closet,” 60.

‘2 Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 66.

5° Savran, ”Mapping the Closet,” 62.

 

 

 

5‘ Ibid., 59-60.

55 Ibid., 59.

5" Maurice Yacowar, Tennessee Willims and Film (New York: Frederick Unger
Publishing Co., 1977) 43.

57 See Gore Vidal, Introduction, Collected Steries by Tennessee Williams (New York:
New Directions, 1985) 23.
5“ John McClain, New York Journal-American 25 Mar 1955: 20.

59 Tischler, Refilliohs P1_1r1_'tan, 261/62.

6° Ibid., 210.
6‘ Francis Donahue, The Dramatic Wgrld of Tennesge Williams (New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co., 1964), 60.

Savran, ”Mapping the Closet,” 58.
‘3 Hirsch, A Portrait ef the Ar_t1§' t, 11

252

6‘ Niaz Zaman, ”The Confessional Art of Tennessee Williams,” diss., George
Washington University, 1987, 7.

65 Ibid., 189.

5" Windham, Tennessee Williams’ Letters 10.

‘7 Tennessee Williams, Small Craft Warnings, The Theater of Tennessee Williams, Vol.
5 (New York: New Directions, 1976), 264.

‘8 Beaver, ”Homosexual Signs,” 115.

"9 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 282.

7° Beaver, ”Homosexual Signs,” 107.

7' Clum, Acting Gay, 162.

72 De Jongh, Not in Front of the Audience 73.

73 Ibid., 74. -

7‘ Arthur Miller, ”The Shadows of the Gods,” The theater Essays of Arthhr Miller, ed.
Robert Martin (New York: The Viking Press, 1978), 190.

75 Savran, ”Mapping the Closet,” 64.

7" David Savran, Communists owbo s and eers (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992) ix.

" C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992) 37.

 

 

 

Chapter III: Orpheus Descending: The Myth of a Liberated Self

' Tennessee Williams, Camine Real (New York: New Directions Books, 1970) vii

2 Herbert Marcuse, The One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press)1.

3 Tennessee Williams, Qpheus Descending (New York: Signet Classic 1976) 31. All
the other references to Orpheus Descending will be included within parenthesis in the
text.

‘ Jack E. Wallace, "The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus
Descending," Modern Drama 27 (1984): 326.

5 John Ditsky, The Onstage Christ: Studies in Persistence of a Theme (N .J: Barnes &
Nobles, 1980) 135.

6 Samar Attar, The Intruder in Modern Drama (Frankfurt: Lang, 1981) 24.

7 Gulshan Rai Kataria, The Faces of Eve: A Study of Tennessee Williams's Heroines
(New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1992) 104.

8 Nancy Tischler, "The Distorted Mirror: Tennessee Williams's Self Portrait,"
Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton (New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1977.) 160-61.

9 Williams did not include this song in the script, but the reader and the critic can
have access to it in the volume of Williams's poems entitled In the Winter of Cities.

1° Tennessee Williams, In the Winter of Cities (New York: New Directions, 1956) 101.

" Quoted in the Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending by
Jack E. Wallace published in Modern Drama 27, 1984, p. 331.

‘2 Ibid., 327.

‘3 Hugh Dickinson, Myth on the Modern Stage (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1969) 306.

1‘ Dharanidhar Sahu, Cats Qt; e Het Tin Rflf: A Shrdy ef flr'enated garagere in the
Major Plays of Tennessee Williams (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1990) 90.

5 Dickinson, Myth on The Modern Stage, 309.
‘6 Michel Foucault, Ethics :Shbjgtiviry and Thrm (New York Press, 1994) 137.

‘7 Williams, Conversations, 209.

253

'3 John Clum, "The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in Suddenly Last Summer,
O_rpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth " The Cambridge Companion to
Tennessee Williams ed. Matthew C. Roudné (U .K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
137.

’9 Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams ed., Albert Devlin
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977) 209.

29 Ibid., 211.

2‘ Clum, "The Sacrificial Stud," 137.

22 Signi Falk, Tennessee Williams (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1961) 101.

23 Williams, In the Winter of Cities 28.

2‘ Ibid., 28.

’5 Athena Coronis, "Tennessee Williams and Greek Culture," diss., University of
California, 1986, 48.

2" Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Arts 41.

27 Abraham H. Lass, David Kiremidjian, and Ruth M. Goldstein, The Dictionary of
Classical, Biblical, and Literary Allusions (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987) 187.

”3 Benjamin Nelson, His Life and Work (London: Peter Owen, 1961) 210.

29 Walter Kerr, Pieces at Eight (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957) 134.

3° John Gassner, Theatre at the Crossroads 223-226.

3' Nelson, His Life and Work 202.

32 Kimball King, "The Rebirth of Orpheus," 33 (Tennessee Williams Literary lournal
1.2 (1989): 33.

3" Williams, Conversations, 240.

3‘ Judith Thompson, "Symbol, Myth, and Ritual in The Glass Menagerie, The Rose
Tattoo, and Orpheus Descending," Tennessee Williams: A Tribute ed. Jac Tharpe
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977) 682.

35 Tennessee Williams, Where I Live (New York: New Directions, 1978) 52.

36 Ibid., 51.

37 Ibid., 51.

38 Ibid., 53.

39 Esther Merle Jackson, The Broken World of Tennessee Williams (Madison: U of
Wisconsin Press, 1965) 146.

‘° King, "The Rebirth of Orpheus," 29.

‘1 Coronis, "Tennessee Williams and Greek Culture," 40.

‘2 Nelson, His Life and Works 200.

‘3 Wallace, "The Image of the Theater," 332.

“ Nelson, His Life and Works 2000.

‘5 For a more ample discussion of Lady's and Blanche's sexual and emotional
dishonesty see Mark Lilly's essay entitled "Tennessee Williams" in American Drama
edited by Clive Bloom.

‘6 Wallace, "The Image of the Theater," 331.

‘7 King, "Rebirth of Orpheus Descending," 32.

‘3 Irene Shaland, Tennessee Williams on the Soviet Stage (University Press of
America, 1987) 62.

‘9 Clum, "The Sacrificed Stud," 138.

5° Dickinson, Mflh on the Modern Stage, 307.
5‘ Jeanne McGlinn, "Tennessee Williams' Women: Illusion and Reality, Sexuality and

Love," Tennessee Willieme: A Trihhte, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1977) 520.

52 Nelson, Hes“ Life and Wprks, 198.

5’ Williams, Where I Live 14.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

254

6‘ Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivig and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley and others, ed.
Paul Rabinow, Vol. I, (New York: The New Press) 163.

65 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press) 180-81.

56 Attar, The Intruder in Modern Drama 45.

57 Williams, Where I Live, 8.

58 Ibid., 11.

 

Chapter IV: "Out, Out, Human Outcry:" Theatricality as an Impasse.

' Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending, Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New
York: Signet Classic, 1976) 63.

2 C. W. E. Bigsby Modern American Drama, 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992) 67.

3 Ibid., 111.

6 Tennessee Williams, The Two Character Play, The Theater pf Tenneseg Williams,
Vol. 5 (New York: New Directions Books, 1976) 360. Subsequent references to this
edition of the play are cited parenthetically in my text.

6 The term "difference" is coined by Jacques Derrida with the "-ance" spelling instead
of "-ence" in order to indicate the sense of difference and deferal inherent in the
representational nature of meaning. See A Clossary of Litera_ry Terms by M.H. Abrams
5th Edition, page 204 for further clarifications.

6 C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to twentieth Cenm Drama 2: Tennessee '
Willian_is_, Arthrrr Miller, Edward Albee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
80.

7 Annette J. Saddik, The Polities of Reputations: The Critical Receptien of Temesg;
Williams' Later Plays (London: Associated University Presses, 1999) 93.

6 Nicholas Pagan, "Tennesee Williams' Out Cry in The Two- Character Play," Notes on
Mississippi Writers 24 (1992) 69. [67-79].

9 Bigsby, Modern Ameriean Drama, 67.

‘6 Ibid., 67.

" Ruth Christine, Judith Drinkwater, and John Macklin, The gripted glf: Textual
Identities in Contemporary Spanish Narrative (England: Aris & Phillips Ltd, 1995) 8.

Ibid., 8.

‘3 Tennessee Williams, The Class Menagerie (New York: New Directions Books, 1970)
22.

‘6 Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatie form (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1966) 60.

‘5 Lionel Abel comments on the use of the play-within-a play and on the theatrical
nature of the reality even in plays that do not make use of such a theatrical device. Abel
states: "Yet the plays I am pointing at do have a common character: all of them are
theater pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons
appearing on the stage in these plays are there not simply because they were caught by
the playwright in dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but because they
themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note of them... only
that life which has acknowledged its inherent theatricality can be made interesting on
the stage..." [6].

‘6 Bruce Wilshire, Role Plajgh' g and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metapher
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991) 278.

‘7 Homan, "When the Theater Turns to Itself," 410.

‘6 Martin Esslin, "Actors Acting Actors," Modern Drama 30 (1987): 76.

255

‘9 Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) 98.

2° Ibid., 98.

2‘ Francis Gillen, "Horror Shows, Inside and Outside My Skull: Theater and Life in
Tennessee Williams's Two-Character Play," Forms of the Fantastic eds. Jan Hokenson
and Howard Pearce (New York: Greenwood Press, 1982) 228.

22 Kim L. Worthington, Self as Narrative: Subjectivig and Community in
Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 13.

23 Ibid., 15.

2‘ Ibid., 15

7'6 Ibid., 13.

‘6 Annette Saddik, The Politics of Reputation, 101.

27 Ren Draya, "The frightened Heart: A Study of Character and Theme in the Fiction,
Poetry, Short Plays, and Recent Drama of Tennessee Williams," diss., University of
Colorado at Boulder, 1977, 144.

66 George Niesen, "The Artist against the Reality," Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed.,
Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977) 492.

'6 Saddik, The Politics of Repetatien, 92.

3° Tennessee Williams, Production Notes, The Class Menagerie (New York: New
Directions Books, 1970) 7.

3‘ Ibid., 7.

62 John Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1954)
351. -

33 Tennessee Williams, Conversations, 264.

3‘ Saddik, m Politics o_f Reputation, 101.

36 Nicholas Pagan, Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach to
Tennessee Williams (London: Associated University Presses, 1993) 32.

36 Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New
York: Signet Classic, 1976) 12.

37 Williams, Conversations 297.

36 Tennessee Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Dragon County (New York: New
Directions Books) 22.

’9 Michel Foucault, Ethics: Shbjm'vity and Trgth, 131.

6° Ibid., 131.

6‘ Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (Garden City: Boubledy, 1975) xix.

‘2 Foster Hirsch, Portrait ef the Artist (New York: Kennikat Press, 1979) 6.

° Tennessee Williams, Where I Live, 21

6‘ Ibid., 78.

‘6 Jack E. Wallace, "The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus
Descending," Modern Drama 27 (1984): 328.

‘6 Quoted in Tribute, 842.

‘7 Williams, Where I Live, 116.

‘6 Ibid., 52.

‘9 Ibid., 52.

6° Ibid., 141.

5‘ Pagan, "Tennessee Williams' Outcry in the Two-Character Play," Notes on
Mississippi Writers 24.2 (1992),?6.

62 There is a pun-on words in [I am D. J. dead]. D. J stands for Derrida's signature,
Jaques Derrida and also is prounced like the French word 'déja' which translates to
’already' in English. 50, the sentence "I'm D. J. dead" means "I am already dead."

 

 

256

’6 Jacques Derrida, Que, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 19. I credit Nicholas Pagan, who draw my attention
to these quotes on Derrida's views.

5‘ Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham 1940-1965
ed. Donald Windham (New York: Penguin books, 1977) 105.

66 Tennessee Williams, Conversations, 11.

66 Tennessee Williams, "Concerning Eugene O'Neill," Center Theatre Group/
Ahmson's Theatre's Inaugural Season Program, 12 September: 1967: 1.

57 Gillen, "Horror Shows, Inside and Outside My Skull," 229.

56 J. L. Styan, Drama, Stage and Audience (London: Cambridge University Press,
1975) 3.

59 Thomas P. Adler, "The Dialogue of Incompletion: Language in Tennessee

Williams's Later Plays," marterly |our_nal of Speech 61 (1975) 55.

 

60 Ibid., 62.
6‘ Williams, Conversations, 56.
62 Ibid., 122.

6‘3 Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown
Publishers, Inc. 1995) 331.

6‘ Tennessee Williams, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play, The Theatre of
Tennessee Williams V018 (New York: New Directions, 1992) 202.

66 Tennessee Williams, New York Times (8 May, 1977, section 2, p3.)

66 Leverich, Tom, 333

6’ Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the wen gobiography, Transference, Translation:

Texts and Discussions with Iacgues Derrida, ed. Christine McDonald, trans.Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Schoken Books, 1985) 76.

66 Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Rmf (New Directions, 1975) 129.

69 Williams, Conversatiohs, 236.

7° Ibid, 240.

7' Sy M. Kahn, "Listening to OutCry: Bird of Paradox in a Gilded Cage," New Essays
on American Drama ed. Gilbert Debusscher and Henry I. Schvey (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1989) 51 (41-62).

72 Williams, Conversatiuns, 97-98.

73 Leverich, Tom, xxiii.

7‘ Judith Drinkwater, The Scripted 31f, 109

75 Roland Barthes, "Theory of the Text," Untyih' g the Text: A Post-St_ructuralist Reader,
ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 37 (32-47).

76 Quoted in Worthington's Self as Narrative 162.

7’ Derrida, Writing and Difference, 178.

’6 Saddik, The Politics of Reputation, 102.

79 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975) 40.

6" Derrida, Writing and Difference, 177.

6' Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Weman Writer
and the Nineteenthfienrury Literay Imag1_r_\' ation (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984) 98

66 Williams, Convereations, 263.

63 Emile Benveniste, Problems in Ceneral Lingug' tics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Florida:
University of Miami Press, 1971) 224.

6‘ Jacques Lacan, Eg’ts: A Selem'un, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977)

 

 

 

.66 Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" trans. Annette Kuhn, Sign_s, 7 (1981-
1982):44 (36-55).

257

66 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, "Lacan, Language, and Literay Criticism," Literary Review
24 (1980-81): 577 (563-577).

67 Jacueline O' Connor, Dramatizing Dementia: Madness in the Plays of Tennessee
Williams (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997) 72.

66 Adler, The Dialogue of Incompletion, 49-50.

69 Ibid., 49.

9° Tennessee Williams, "I can't Imagine Tomorrow," Dragon Count_ry (New York: New
Directions, 1970) 140.

Conclusion:

1 Tennessee Williams, Conversations yvi_th Tennessee Williams ed. Albert J. Devlin
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) 45.

2 Tennessee Williams, Dragon Count_ry, (New Directions Book, 1970) 87.

3 Tennessee Williams, 2_7 Wagons M o_f Cotton (New York: New Directions) 40.

6 Williams, Conversations 90.

6 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A _Lfi (New York: Grove Press, 1987) 180-81.

6 Lyle Leverich, Tom: fie Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown
Publishers, Inc. 1995), 5.

7 David Savran, Commgrs’ ts, Cowboys, un_d meets (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1992) ix.

6 Tennessee Williams, Where I file (New York: A New Directions Book, 1978) 56.

9 Williams, Conversations 292.

1° Jean-Francois Lyotard, fie Postmgern Condition: A Report 9h Knowledge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979) 74.

1‘ M. H. Abrams, A Glow pf Literary Terms (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
1988) 109.

'2 Ibid., 110.

‘3 Williams, Draan Count_ry, 81

1‘ Tennessee Williams, My! _Y_or_k Times, 22 June 1983.

‘6 Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Anchor Press, 1983) 247.

‘6 Tennessee Williams, Camino Real (New York: New Directions, 1970) 77.

‘7 Quoted in John Lahr's, "Fugitive Mind," fie _lievi Yorker 8 March, 1999:93.

 

 

 

 

 

258

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