Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams is an American playwright known for his plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Originally named Thomas Lanier Williams III, the Mississippi-born playwright is considered one of the most famous American dramatists of the 20th century, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony Award for his work.

Fig. 1 - Tennessee Williams is best known for his plays such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Tennessee Williams: biography

Tennessee Williams was born to Cornelius and Edwina Williams on 26 March 1911. As an infant, his mother mostly looked after him because of his father's career as a shoe salesman. Williams' father was an alcoholic, violent, and frequently absent because he had to travel for work.

The Willaims lived together in Mississippi alongside his two other siblings: Rose Isabel Williams and Walter Dakin Williams. However, owing to a job promotion in 1919, the Williams family were made to move over 400 miles away to St Louis, Missouri.

Tennessee Williams' education and work

While in St Louis, Williams attended Soldan High School before joining the University City High School. In 1929, he decided to enrol at the University of Missouri to study journalism. He found little pleasure in his studies and instead found more interest in writing poetry and plays. One of his plays was even performed by the Dramatic Arts Club while he studied there.

His father forced him to withdraw his place at University so that he could begin working at the International Shoe Company factory to help support the family. The work was not made for him, however, and he left the job for his own mental wellbeing.

He rejoined higher education in 1936 in St. Louis before transferring to the University of Iowa in 1937 and graduating with a BA in English the following year.

In 1939 he received recognition for a production which gave him a $1,000 grant. He used this money to move back to New Orleans. As time passed, he began to achieve more and more success, particularly with his productions A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie. These plays were even adapted into films, further heightening his commercial success.

Unfortunately, after the 1950s, he received negative criticism due to his new dramatic styles. These reviews impacted him greatly and sparked a mental decline that resulted in an increase in alcohol and drug abuse in an attempt to minimise his depression.

Fig. 2 - A streetcar in New Orleans.

Tennessee Williams' romantic relationships

Despite early explorations in relationships with women, Williams then began to explore his sexuality in other ways. His first relationship with a man began and ended in 1940 with Kip Kiernan when Williams was 29. But this brief affair left Williams in significant heartbreak, especially as Kiernan died a few years after their break up.

Williams began a new relationship during a visit to New Mexico in 1945, where he met Amado 'Pancho' Rodríguez y González, but the relationship was unsteady, leading Williams to end it in 1947. In the biography of Elia Kazan, the director of the first stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the pair's relationship was even paralleled to the Kowalski's in her biography.

After he returned from an Italian holiday in 1948, he fell in love with Frank Merlo, and this love developed into a relationship that would then last over a decade. However, Williams experienced further hardship when Merlo passed away in 1963 from lung cancer soon after their relationship ended.

In his 60s, Williams' loneliness and fear of romantic isolation as an aging gay man pushed him into a relationship with the 20-year-old Robert Carroll. The relationship was turbulent, and the relationship didn't last; however, the pair remained friends until Williams' death.

Tennessee Williams' difficulties in life

Tennessee Williams lived a turbulent life owing to the conflicting relationships with his family members and lovers, drug and alcohol abuse, the losses he experienced, and the critical eye of the media.

Williams didn't have a particularly positive relationship with his father, who disliked his son and was supposedly abusive to his wife. Nor did he have a good relationship with his mother, who pressured him to convert to Catholicism while he was under the influence of medication. Williams also struggled to come to terms with his mother allowing his sister, Rose Williams, to undergo a frontal lobotomy to cure her schizophrenia. He shared his closest familial bond with Rose, and he continued to pay for her hospitalisation.

William's critics also caused some strife in Williams' writing career, particularly in his productivity. Many claimed that Williams' success was only from his early works and that his later material was too negatively impacted by his personal and professional failures.

Williams experienced intense scrutiny to produce 'popular' works in addition to negative responses towards the common themes that served as the subject material of his work: sex, violence and the death of the American Dream. As a result, Williams' depression and insomnia worsened, and he became increasingly dependent on drugs like amphetamines which he used as an attempt to self-medicate.

Tennessee Williams' death

How did Tennesee Williams die? Williams died on 25 February 1983 in a hotel room in New York. His death was initially thought to have been caused by choking on a bottle cap, but it was later revealed that he died from the high levels of Seconal (a drug taken for insomnia and anxiety) in his bloodstream.

He was buried, against his wishes, in a cemetery in Missouri.

Tennessee Williams' works

Tennessee Williams wrote a variety of plays, essays, poems and memoirs throughout his life, but he is most celebrated for his plays. His plays are exemplary of the Modernist period of drama, which often featured dramatic genres such as realism and expressionism. Below is a shortened list of examples of what Williams has published throughout his career.

Plays

• The Glass Menagerie (1944)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
• Camino Real (1953)
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
• Orpheus Descending (1957)
• Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
• Vieux Carré (1977)
• Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
• A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)

Novels

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

Collections of short stories

• Hard Candy: A Book of Short Stories (1954)
• The Knightly Quest (1969)
• Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974)

Poems

• In the Winter of Cities (1956)
• Androgynous, Mon Amour (1977)

Tennessee Williams' plays: influences and themes

The Glass Menagerie (1944)

The Glass Menagerie follows the narrated memories of Tom Wingfield. He tells a tale of the complicated relationship between himself, his dominating mother, Amanda, and his disabled sister, Laura. The play is an example of expressionist theatre that gives insight into Williams' internalised and subjective thoughts on the world.

Tom's description of his sister in this scene highlights how she seeks escapism. Despite the fact he is trying to explain how his sister is peculiar, it highlights how Laura can find pleasure in life through her glass ornaments and imagination.

Tennessee Williams' characters share many similarities with the individuals in his personal life. For example, his parents could be seen to parallel the parents of Tom and Amanda Wingfield, as they share an absent father figure and dominating mother figure. The narrator of the production also shares a similarity to Williams; they both worked in shoe factories and found pleasure in literature rather than their jobs. Williams also based the narrative on a short story he had written in 1943, called Portrait of a Girl in Glass.

There were also notable historical and societal influences that influenced Williams' writing of The Glass Menagerie. He set the production in a time of heightened civil unrest during the Great Depression, a time that trapped factory workers (like the narrator) in poor working conditions. Similarly, the influences of the American Civil War and the Old South still weave their way into this narrative as Amanda, the mother figure, used to be a Southern Belle: a figure who was admired for upholding stereotypically lady-like characteristics such as chastity, hospitality and grace.

There are many themes that this play touches on, such as

• Accepting reality
• Declining mental and physical health
• Escapism
• Memory, regret and nostalgia
• Family conflict
• Tragic beauty
• Loss
• Family duty and responsibility
• Abandonment
• Fragility

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

A Streetcar Named Desire begins when the Southern Belle, Blanche, meets with her sister, Stella, and her sister's husband, Stanley. It follows the dynamics of the three living together as Blanche's past resurfaces to haunt her. In light of the decaying Old South and the fragility of the Southern characters in the face of the New South, A Streetcar Named Desire is a part of Southern Gothic literature.

This quote is from Blanche as she arrives at the Kowalski household acts, and it is a tragic allegory for her life. Similar to other characters, Blanche's desire is the hamartia that takes her to her death and the afterlife.

Once again, Williams seems to draw on influences of his own personal life into the narrative. Blanche's mental health and institutionalisation at the end parallels the fate of Rose Williams. Furthermore, Stanley's masculine, aggressive energy could be seen to parallel Williams' lover: Pancho. Through the character of Alan Grey, a youth attempting to conform with heterosexuality while harbouring deeper desires, the play could also reflect Williams' own exploration of his sexuality and his acceptance of it.

Williams also draws upon the socio-political past and present for A Streetcar Named Desire. The American Dream and its idealisms motivate Stanley Kowalski, who wishes to embody a perfect American household. Once again, the American Civil War and the Old South's decay is another key factor within the play, as it is what pushes all of the characters together.

A Streetcar Named Desire has many themes, but these are central to the core of the play:

• Illusions and reality
• Mental health
• The unachievable American Dream
• Loss of the Old South
• Memory
• Violence
• Abandonment
• Family conflict
• Sexual desire and sexuality
• The feminine vs the masculine
• Social class
• Alcohol dependency

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

A married couple returns to their family plantation for the birthday of Big Daddy Pollitt, who is dying, along with the rest of the family. But the moment they all unite together, the family begins to compete with one another in the hope of gaining the inheritance.

This is another Southern Gothic production that looks at the decay of the Old South due to the American Civil War. Williams wrote two endings for this production: the original and one better suited for the director and friend, Elia Kazan.

This quote is from the closing lines of the play. It shows how Maggie's awareness, both of herself and the world around her. Throughout the play, she refers to herself as a cat on a tin roof in her relationship with Brick, and yet she continues to stay on the roof and in the relationship showing her determination.

Williams draws from his own life for inspiration for some of his plays. It is theorised that the character of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is actually based on Kip Kiernan, Williams' first male lover, in the way that the two are prematurely decaying, talented individuals.

The main socio-political influence for the production is the combination of the American Civil war and the Civil Rights movement because it is set in the Old South. There are also questions that Williams raises (and leaves in ambiguity) around Brick's relationship with his friend Skipper. The play was released in the 50s in the wake of the APA (American Psychiatric Association) defining homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. Thus, by bringing the topic of sexuality to the stage, even as a taboo, he brings the discussion to the public eye.

There are numerous themes within this play, but these are particularly prominent throughout:

• Family conflict,
• Loss of the Old South,
• Sexuality and sexual desire,
• Missed opportunities,
• Greed and societal desires,
• Decay,
• Exterior presentation,
• Memory, nostalgia and regret
• Alcohol dependency

Tennessee Williams' significance

It would be difficult to argue that Williams' influence on American theatre wasn't significant, considering all of the feats he achieved. He introduced a 'darker, more violent side to our stage imaginings, brought the unconscious to prominence'¹ that forced an audience to witness unpleasant yet nonetheless engaging performances.

His plays largely explore the unpleasantries and fragilities of humanity in order to notify his audiences of the truth, or his own subjective perception of the truth, of human imperfections. These explorations help his productions to stand the test of time as they are eternally prevalent in humanity, allowing them to inspire others to take up similar explorations.

Tennessee Williams and the Southern Gothic

Many of Tennessee Williams' writings place themselves as a part of the Southern Gothic genre. He idolises the decay of the Old South within his plays as charming and mourns for it as a place with less materialisation and commercialisation than the New South. This is particularly evident through his characters (particularly Blanche DuBois, who symbolises the Old South in A Streetcar Named Desire).

The genre of Southern Gothic was further explored by later writers and their classic novels, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Donna Tart's The Little Friend (2002), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Tennessee Williams was a key player within the Southern Gothic genre and American modernist drama during the 20th century.

Tennessee Williams' influence on tackling the taboos on sexuality is also an important influence on other literary figures. For example, Tony Kushner, the writer of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991), commends the courage with which Williams brought the discussion of homosexuality to the theatre (even if he disagrees with Williams' depictions of these characters).²

Awards received

To truly highlight how influential Tennessee Williams was to drama in the 20th century, it is helpful to look at the recognition he received in both his lifetime and afterwards. Here is a shortlist of the prestigious awards he was given for his efforts in drama.

¹ Richard Gilman. 'Theatre; Williams shocked American theatre to maturity.' The New York Times, 1990.

² Tony Kushner. 'Q and A: Playwright Tony Kushner speaks about the influence of Tennessee Williams.' Ransom Centre Magazine, The University of Texas at Austin, 2011.