Tennessee Williams
LIFE IN ART
DR. LISA WILDE
Masterpiece of American theater
 Tennessee Williams, whose innovative drama and sense of
lyricism were a major force in the post-war American theater,
was the author of more than 24 full-length plays, including
The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof. He had a profound effect on the American
theater and on American playwrights and actors. He wrote
with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in
our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a
poet of the human heart.
 His basic premise, he said, was “the need for understanding
and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by
circumstance.'' The most successful serious playwright of his
time, he did not write for success but, as one friend said, as a
“biological necessity.''
 Mel Gussow
The Glass Menagerie
 four versions:
 “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (1943) in Collected
Stories
 “The Gentleman Caller” an unproduced screenplay
written while Williams was under contract at MGM
to write for Lana Turner
 The published/literary version (1944)
 The acting/produced version (1945 on Broadway)
Semi-autobiographical
 Bildungsroman: “A novel whose principal subject is
the moral, psychological, and intellectual
development of a usually youthful main character”
 Kunstlerroman: chronicling the artist’s growth to
maturity; central character is an artist
 American family drama
Realism?
 Recognizable family dynamic
 Fourth wall set of a St. Louis tenement apartment
 Time setting in the recent past
Non-realism?
 Narrator providing perspective: “I am the narrator
of the play and also a character in it”
 Memory: “Memory takes a lot of license. It omits
some details; others are exaggerated according to
the emotional value of the articles it touches, for
memory is seated predominantly in the heart.
 In literary version, titles and images projected on a
screen; most famously images of the jolly roger
pirate ship and blue roses
 Heavy use of symbolism
 “a new plastic theater which must take the place of
the exhausted theater of realistic conventions if
theater is to resume vitality as a part of our culture”
 Consummate playwright: set, costumes, lighting,
music
 Meta-theatrical
 The need for beauty and illusion in the industrial
post-Depression world
The characters
 Amanda Wingfield
 Laura Wingfield
 Tom Wingfield
 Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller
The family
 Cornelius Williams (1879-1957)
 Edwina Dakin Williams (1884-1980)
 Rose Williams (1909-1996)
 Thomas (Tennessee) Lanier Williams (1911-1983)
 Walter Dakin Williams (1919-)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47j0A_5VSvg&f
eature=related
Setting
“based on the conditions of my life in St. Louis. The
apartment where we lived wasn’t as dingy and
poverty-stricken as that in the play, but I can’t say
much more for it, even so. It was a rented, furnished
apartment, all overstuffed furniture, and the only
nice room in it was my sister’s room. “
“I have a poet’s weakness for symbols”
 “That room was painted white and she had put up a
lot of shelves and filled them with little glass
animals. When I’d come home from the shoe place
where I worked, I would go in and sit in her room.
She was the member of the family with whom I was
most in sympathy and, looking back, her glass
menagerie had a meaning for me. Nostalgia helped–
it makes the little flat in the play more attractive
really than our apartment was – and as I thought
about it the glass animals came to represent the
fragile, delicate ties that must be broken, that you
inevitably break, when you try to fulfill yourself.”
“My father was a telephone man who fell in love
with long distance”
 Travelling salesman during children’s early
childhood when they and their mother lived with the
grandparents in Mississippi
 Moved the family to St. Louis where he ran the shoe
company where Tom worked
 Violent alcoholic
 Disgraced during a bar brawl that left him disfigured
“One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain , your mother
received seventeen gentleman callers”
 Daughter of a Southern Episcopalian minister
 Many gentleman callers but still unmarried at 21 because
perhaps, of the nervous even hysterical nature of her
speech
 “That underlying hysteria gave her great eloquence. I still
find her totally mystifying– and frightening. It’s best if
we stay away from our mothers.”
 Extreme and puritanical outlooks on clothing, sex and
alcohol; Rose was trying to experience the Jazz Age
 Both families had histories of mental illness and
institutionalization which they kept from each other
Edwina, Rose
and Tom
Circa 1917
Rose at the time of her
failed debut 1927
The gentleman caller
 “A tragic love affair”
 A young executive from an Ivy League school who
was ambitious and courting Rose because her father
had an executive position with a shoe company
during the Depression
 Young man stopped calling on Rose after the scandal
and humiliation with the father’s bar brawl
 Tom then brought home his friend Jim O’Connor
 Contributed to her decline?
Inspiration for plays
 “ A play just seems to materialize, like an apparition, it gets clearer
and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague, at first, as in the case of
Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a
woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair, all alone by a
window, with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and
she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry. I believe I
was thinking of my sister because she was madly in love with some
young man at the International Shoe Company who paid her court.
He was extremely handsome, and she was profoundly in love with
him. Whenever the phone would ring, she’d nearly faint. She’d think
it was he, calling for a date, you know? They saw each other every
other night, and then one time he just didn’t call any more. That was
when Rose started to go into a mental decline. From that vision,
Streetcar evolved. I called it at the time, Blanche’s Chair in the
Moon, which is a very bad title, but it was from that image, of a
woman sitting by a window, that Streetcar came to me.”
“just say he had an operation to remove his
horn to make him less freakish”
 “I had a very special feeling for my sister Rose, but
she had been a total schizophrenic since she was 27
years old. She was a beautiful, warm person but
eventually she became convinced that everyone was
trying to poison her.”
 Several members of the family thought her speech
was obscene
 Treated with one of the first prefrontal lobotomies:
“Of course that destroyed any possibility of recovery,
but she’s peaceful now.”
“The year was 1937. In Spain, there
was Guernica”
 The same year as Rose’s lobotomy according to Williams;
in fact, did not occur until 1943
 Lobotomy (from the Greek lobos, meaning lobes of the
brain, and tomos, meaning cut) is a psychosurgical
procedure in which the connections the prefrontal cortex
and underlying structures are severed, or the frontal
cortical tissue is destroyed, the theory being that this
leads to the uncoupling of the brain's emotional centres
and the seat of intellect (in the subcortical structures and
the frontal cortex, respectively). (Neurophilosophy)
 In the 1940s and 50s, performed on 10,000 patients in
the U.S.
“I feel I must provide for
Laura, and so I do”
Lyle Leverich, the
playwright's authorized
biographer, wrote,
''Throughout his life,
Tennessee Williams had
two overriding
devotions: his career as a
writer and his sister,
Rose.”
Picture from the early
1930s in front of St.
Louis tenement
“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you
behind me, but I am more faithful than I
intended to be!'' blow out your candles ,
Laura, and so goodbye”
 ''You couldn't ask for a sweeter or more benign
monarch than Rose, or, in my opinion, one that's
more of a lady. After all, high station in life is earned
by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are
survived with grace.'‘
 Williams left her the bulk of his estate in trust; she
outlived him by 13 years
More information
 http://www.repstage.org/Productions/GlassMenage
rie/index.html
 Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle
Leverich. 1995.
 Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Ed. Albert
J. Devlin. 1986.