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Authors
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
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Most of Williams’s plays are collected in the seven-volume The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (1971–81). Some later dramas are available in separate editions; a few others are still to be published. Other writings include a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950); short stories printed in several volumes and finally brought together in Collected Stories (1986), edited by Gore Vidal; a volume of screenplays, Stopped Rocking (1984); and poems collected as In the Winter of Cities (1964) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). Where I Live: Selected Essays, edited by Christine R. Day and Bob Woods, appeared in 1978. Williams’s Memoirs (1975) is interestingly revelatory but is not a reliable biographical guide; neither is Dotson Rader’s Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (1985). Donald Spoto’s A Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (1985) is workmanlike; a historically sound treatment is Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else Is an Audience (1993) by Ronald Hayman. More theoretically inclined is Nicholas Pagan’s Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach (1993). A Jungian reading of the plays is provided by Judith J. Thompson in Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol (1987). Time relationships are explored by Patricia Schroeder in The Presence of the Past in Modern American Drama (1989). Structural patterns are identified by Judith J. Thompson in Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol (revised 2002). Philip G. Kolin edited Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (1998); Matthew C. Rodané prepared The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. George E. Crandell compiled Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography (1995). The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I, 1920–1945 (2000) was edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler.
Though some critics see Tennessee Williams's work as overly obsessed with "perversion" -- with murder, rape, incest, and nymphomania -- Williams's characters inhabit a world as emotionally unstable as their author's. Born Thomas Lanier to a southern belle and an abusive traveling salesman, Williams was forever marked by the alienation and psychological pain of his childhood. After dropping out of the University of Missouri, he accepted a job in his father's warehouse and wrote furiously by night, but the pressure resulted in his first nervous breakdown. Not long afterward, his beloved sister, Rose, suffered a mental breakdown so devastating that their mother signed the papers to give her a prefrontal lobotomy. Williams changed his name to "Tennessee" while living in New Orleans. After producing several plays in local theaters, Williams enjoyed his first big success with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and followed it up with such powerful plays as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Other plays include The Rose Tattoo (1950), Camino Real (1953), and The Night of the Iguana (1961).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Since the late nineteenth century, an archetype, or stereotype, has been constructed of the southern woman. We see indications of that type as early as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; she also appears in works of Chopin, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hellman. Ineffectual, parasitic, with their fates connected inexorably to land, money, family, and tradition, these women are often portrayed as dangerous or destructive to the people around them. Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is both an extension of and a variation upon that type.
1. Why does A Streetcar Named Desire open with Stanley and Stella, rather than with the arrival of Blanche? What is their relationship based on, and why does it deepen Blanche's predicament?
2. In many of the scenes in this play, the longest monologues are by Blanche herself. As an audience, do we hear Blanche in the same way at the opening of the play as we do later on? Describe how and why our response to these monologues may change over the course of the drama.
3. Compare this play to O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. These are both highly emotional works, with passionate eloquence, angry confrontations, and painful revelations. How do these two plays keep from being mere exercises in voyeurism, forays into private misery?
