Se x ua l Pol i t ics i n the

Wor k of T e n n essee
W i l l i ams
Desire Over Protest

M ichae l S . D. Ho ope r
 Ch apter 4

Emotional roots

Women have always been my deepest emotional root; anyone who’s

read my writings knows that.1
Williams often spoke effusively about women. He praised and struck up
a rapport with several actresses who appeared in his plays and in screen
adaptations of them; he frequently talked of his female characters with
affection, claiming that this or that one was close to his heart, was writ-
ten out of sympathy and/or an autobiographical honesty. Rather like
his homosexuality, he sought to explain such attachments through the
prism of his upbringing: the Freudian self-diagnosis that made his dis-
tance from masculine role models significant meant also that his affin-
ity with women was attributable to their company from a young age, to
being surrounded and cosseted by a mother, elder sister and housemaid.
Such sympathies can also have their flip side, though, as the tyrannical
and possessive mothers in his plays evince. Women operating without
husbands (and Williams’s own father was absent for long stretches of his
childhood) assume typically masculine qualities, over-compensate for an
absent male and subvert, or at least cast a shadow over, precisely those
qualities that make women attractive (for Williams at least) when defined
against men.
Many of Williams’s creations can be traced back to the mother/sister
bifurcation that seems so personal in The Glass Menagerie. Often, these
competing elements, represented as the loud and morally self-possessed
overpowering the soft and introverted, coexist with or replace expected
male/female binaries. Rose Williams, in particular, reappears as a never-
ending source of insecurities, ill adapted not just to womanhood but to
the adult experience. No doubt the actual emotional root that Williams
extends to all women, Rose is both fully formed, albeit nearer to child-
hood, and an essence. She is the warmth generated by his much-used
rose imagery; she is the touchstone for arrested physical development

173
174 Emotional roots
(Miss Rosemary McCool who has yet to menstruate at the start of the
story ‘Completed’) and sexual frustration (amongst others, Barbara in
‘Das Wasser Ist Kalt’).
Rose’s well-documented neuroses and troubled mental history risk
becoming representative of women’s inability to assert themselves. They
symbolize an internal retreat that leaves us still further removed from the
political collective; and, when the embodiment of oppression, the state
institution, threatens to incarcerate, the citizen’s only defence is mounted
by those who, by proxy, protest an innate goodness. Though the diagnosis
of women’s mental illness could be a powerful political weapon in their
disempowerment, we should remember that Williams also wrote about
male madness (In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and The Day on Which a Man
Dies), and that institutionalization is never identified as a purely male
sanction. The doctors in A Streetcar Named Desire, Portrait of a Madonna
and Suddenly Last Summer are all accompanied by, and therefore care-
fully balanced with, female nurses. In the screenplay Stopped Rocking,
two nurses, Sisters Grace and Grim, simply reflect two approaches to the
treatment of mental illness.
Like his men, Williams’s women can be the most brutalized but also
brutalizing figures in his canon; and it is this gulf between extremes
that we somehow need to make sense of. Their position at the forefront
of his drama has created the many memorable roles that have almost
become synonymous with the dramatist. But are they standard bearers
for an evolving feminist politics or ultimately objects of male control? Do
Williams’s women have anything to contribute to a political dialogue or
are they merely articulating their sexual needs within a larger dialectic
that they cannot hope to affect?
Criticism focused almost exclusively on Williams’s female characters has
tended to catalogue. Protagonists are labelled as types – faded Southern
belles, witches, etc. – that reappear in the major plays as if Williams is
resorting to similar templates each time. Consequently, the inference we
can draw from this line of thought is that the characters lack individu-
ality when considered collectively because the playwright is working to
a formula. Making a very similar observation about this critical trend,
Jacqueline O’Connor suggests that such an approach may result from
preconceived critical standpoints: ‘Their insights notwithstanding, these
essays share a tendency to reduce Williams’s characters to types, in order
to satisfy the particular pattern the critic wishes to construct.’2
Moreover, these types may then be placed in a developmental
sequence, so that, as with the theory mapping Williams’s treatment of
 Emotional roots 175
homosexuality from the mythical to the real, an intended shift is noted
in the attitudes of women that confirms evolution at different stages.3
For example, Jeanne M. McGlinn’s essay, ‘Tennessee Williams’ Women:
Illusion and Reality, Sexuality and Love’, is premised on the idea of a
noticeable shift within the period from 1940 to 1960 away from women’s
detachment and recourse to illusion to a more reassured engagement with
life which, correspondingly, makes their love less selfish.
Whilst McGlinn’s theory may hold up – she struggles with Orpheus
Descending, an anomaly in her argument which she somewhat uncon-
vincingly accounts for by claiming it is really a 1940s play  – it, like
other arguments searching for pattern and replication, tends to over-
look broader characteristics and the situations individual to the plays.
Exploring women in this way also means that only the main characters
(admittedly, there may be more than one) in each play tend to come
under scrutiny, since their fuller development seems the only way that
pattern can be established and tested. Lesser figures that might shed
light on the female protagonist’s values or suggest the group identity and
treatment of a broader community of women tend to go unnoticed. We
end up with a group of characters that espouses Williams’s purported
view of the world, which stands as a set of archetypes somewhat lifted
out of their immediate context. As this tendency persists, each critic
rethinks the categories that have gone before. Nancy Tischler’s ‘A Gallery
of Witches’ sets out to revise Signi Falk’s work of a decade earlier in light
of the then fashionable exploration of Williams’s work through myth;
McGlinn references Robert Emmet Jones’s essay ‘Tennessee Williams’
Early Heroines’ with its simple and outmoded classification of the play-
wright’s women.
More recently, John Timpane has found a plurality of responses pro-
voked by Williams’s women. In his short essay, ‘“Weak and Divided
People”: Tennessee Williams and the Written Woman’, he argues that
the playwright protects the ambiguity of his female characters, even if
this means an audience response is one of ‘ambivalence and repulsion’.4
Escaping closure and reduction, Williams’s women defy ‘standard
questions of gender expectation’ but, less promisingly (though not in
Timpane’s eyes), this means the plays are characterized by ‘an authentic
and authoritative depiction of female foolishness, limitations, and error’.5
More interesting for my own argument is his assertion that women are
undone by their own desires rather than by Williams’s ‘inert male pro-
tagonists’ (p. 175), and he cites Catharine Holly as his chief example of
both this and our inability to know a character completely.
176 Emotional roots
A different approach can be seen in Michael Schiavi’s somewhat quirky
examination of the women in Williams’s fiction. Revealing how a range
of female hungers is boldly explored by the writer, Schiavi concludes that
Williams is interested in ‘the politics of inadvertent performance’: the
way that women and their appetites become a subject of fascination, with
the result that their male onlookers fade into narrative insignificance.6
Like the gay characters of the short stories, these women, many of whom
would not have ‘stageworthy bodies’ in the eyes of Broadway producers,
are given an exposure normally denied them.7 Schiavi’s argument is com-
pelling in places but, when he looks beyond literal hungers, he encounters
‘plot-stopping spectacle’: a profusion of completely powerless male obser-
vers means that the number of really successful stories is limited.8
While Schiavi may have uncovered a strain in Williams’s work chal-
lenging conventional notions of size, beauty and desirability, he can only
claim a political strength for women in the private moments shared with
ineffectual men. There is no sense in which this power translates into a
more public affirmation of femaleness/difference. Crucially, his thesis is
founded on what Williams cannot do in the theatre and so ignores the
female roles that, rightly or wrongly, have become most closely identified
with the writer.
Understandably, much critical energy has been expended on the impli-
cations of the rape in A Streetcar Named Desire. Reluctant to view this
simply as a symbol of domination, the ultimate means of subjugating
women and reimposing a masculinity bruised by feminine discourse,
recent critics have bypassed the private act of violence itself and concen-
trated on its public significance or they have deconstructed the moment,
reading it less directly and literally. Thus, Ana Vlasopolos sees the ‘societal
victimization’ that takes place after the rape in scene eleven as crucial in
Blanche’s defeat, following as it does the debunking of her version of his-
tory and throwing the play into ‘sociopolitical crisis’.9 Anne Fleche notes
the strangely impersonal quality of a rape involving antagonists rather
than the characters who have dissolved in ‘an overwhelming mise-en-
scène that produces emotion as a landscape’.10 More provocatively, John
S. Bak reads the rape as ‘a sexual means to a spiritual end’, as an act that
leads to ‘a necessary fracturing’ of Blanche ‘not altogether undesirable for
her, for Williams or, ultimately, for us’.11
The rape in Streetcar is obviously emotive but it can occupy an unrep-
resentative position within Williams’s work. There are, as Bak itemizes in
the same article, other instances of sexual violence involving women, often
with their acquiescence. Moreover, the fact that any kind of violence is
 Emotional roots 177
commonplace in Williams’s writing should make us view that perpetrated
against Blanche as part of a pattern, not in isolation. My own approach
to the ways in which women are treated and the perceptions they come
to form of themselves focuses on the social and cultural milieus that
Williams creates around his female characters: the context of women’s
freedom or captivity, the expectations imposed by marriage or exclusion
from it. These should, I propose, replace the concentrated analysis of a
gallery of similar character traits and/or types. Equally, Williams’s fic-
tional women should corroborate or extend our understanding of their
dramatic counterparts, not replace them entirely if we are to construe an
overarching sexual politics. The texts I survey are from different points in
Williams’s career but there is no presumption that the women who come
later have moved on, that their reactions and the conditions in which
they find themselves are any more enlightened. It will no doubt seem as
if the well-trodden ground of Williams’s most celebrated plays and widely
recognized women has been deliberately avoided. This is only partly true:
I have targeted lesser-known texts in the belief that they indicate both
traditional discrimination against women and possibilities for resistance,
not because there is nothing left to contribute to the critical dialogue
about Amanda, Blanche and Maggie.
Textual analysis in this chapter begins with a consideration of Summer
and Smoke (1948) and accompanying remarks on its later incarnation, The
Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964) before shifting back to Spring Storm
(written in 1937, first performed in 1999). These are plays that explore the
stuffiness of small Southern towns, recreating the repression of desire and
the sharply designated roles for women in the early part of the twentieth
century. Just past the middle of that century, Williams, somewhat against
the grain, decides to continue the theme of sexual repression within two
troubled marriages, thus splitting the focus four ways and not privileging
one female character. Also surprising is that play’s (Period of Adjustment’s)
hybrid genre: serious comedy. As Palmer and Bray note, ‘the plot seems
more Neil Simon than Tennessee Williams’.12 Nevertheless, the play scru-
tinizes women (and men) against a serious background of idealized fam-
ily life and the impact of active service. My discussion leads on into the
often overlooked separatism claimed by Williams’s women – whether as
a deliberate choice or a form of consolation. Something Unspoken, ‘Happy
August the Tenth’ and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur reveal sexual and
economic fault lines in women’s cohabitation and generally hold back
from a lesbian aesthetic. In The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore and
The Day on Which a Man Dies, women are fighting for survival, either
178 Emotional roots
against Williams’s old adversaries, time and death, or the law which fails
to acknowledge the property rights of long-term partners. In both, sex-
ual desire has come to seem almost irrelevant, redundant even. Finally,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel examines the influence of Zelda Fitzgerald, a
woman who, in Williams’s reworking of real events, appears cruelly dis-
possessed of her co-dependent sanity and artistic creativity.

C om pl e t e prof l ig ac y
Summer and Smoke seems a very personal play in which the protagonist,
Alma Winemiller, experiences a sexual awakening akin to the author’s
own. Indeed, Williams has drawn attention to the parallel, describ-
ing a hard-won release: ‘I think the character I like most is Miss Alma,
though. You know she really had the greatest struggle … You see, Alma
went through the same thing that I went through  – from puritanical
shackles to, well, complete profligacy.’13 The magnitude of this change
and the extremes of pure spirit and body it encompasses are reflected
in a play with a highly symbolic set that some have accused of being
over-simplistic. Bigsby, for example, finds the demarcation of body and
spirit in a doctor’s surgery and a minister’s rectory the essence of a ‘riven
sensibility … now crudely externalised’, Williams’s approach containing
‘too much of the autodidact and the pedagogue to make it theatrically
compelling’.14 Written at about the same time as Streetcar, the play’s simi-
lar thematic preoccupations were always going to provoke comparisons
between the protagonists. With its turn-of-the-century time frame and
plot in which Alma’s high ideals about sex and relationships are grad-
ually eroded, it is also not surprising that so much critical response has
found a continuum, making Alma out to be a youthful Blanche. Boxill
goes so far as to state that the plays ‘form a diptych whose subject is
the fading belle’, splitting neatly into the character’s background and her
downfall.15 Both have been disappointed in love and Alma is, at the end
of Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, pursuing
the destructive casual relationships with men that have characterized
Blanche’s recent past.
Of course, Alma is not, in the strictest sense, a Southern belle since she
is not the daughter of a plantation owner. However, if we put this to one
side and view her behaviour in the same light, her moral transformation
could be illustrative of a comparable alteration in the character of the
belle in Southern fiction. Kathryn Lee Seidel, basing her observations on
some 150 novels, notes a metamorphosis between 1914 and 1939 in which
 Complete profligacy 179
the woman idealized in the nineteenth century ‘discarded her cloak of
gentility and purity to reveal depravity, destructiveness, rebellion, or
neurosis’.16 The sexual repression required of the antebellum aristocratic
woman could not be sustained indefinitely. Though Alma’s story takes
place slightly before 1914, it symbolizes this shift, making her an arche-
type of the fictional Southern woman at a crossroads. Because Williams
identifies himself so closely with Alma, his own unshackling is also quint-
essentially Southern and sensitive to the way that women’s behaviour can
be viewed very differently.
Referencing Blanche DuBois, a fallen belle of the later type, when we
try to come to terms with Alma Winemiller is both a help and a hindrance.
Blanche’s many contradictions, her Old South principles stretched thinly
over the promiscuity used to buy her security and time and obliterate the
disappointment of the one love she wanted so much to succeed, roughly
correspond to Alma’s journey. However, Alma’s background is not identi-
cal to Blanche’s; the small rectory in Glorious Hill is not Belle Reve and
Moon Lake Casino, Alma’s final destination, is not quite the infamous
Flamingo Hotel in Laurel. Alma’s actions are informed by a stronger reli-
gious background and a mother who herself needs mothering.
The play begins with a prologue that shows the closeness and entwined
destiny of its central characters, Alma Winemiller and John Buchanan,
the son of the local physician. As children, they meet at a fountain,
shaped like a stone angel and symbolic of eternity, in the local park in
Glorious Hill, Mississippi. Alma, already bearing ‘the dignity of an adult’
and an ‘extraordinary delicacy and tenderness or spirituality’ is instantly
addressed – half-mockingly, we suspect – as ‘preacher’s daughter’ by John,
her tenderness to whom is as a result of an early attraction.17
When we see both characters again in the play proper, Alma, lovingly
known as ‘The Nightingale of the Delta’, has become inured to a life of
dull church entertainments that have robbed her of her youth. With her
mother’s reversion to a child-like mentality, she has assumed the role of
chief hostess. By contrast, John Buchanan has become ‘a Promethean fig-
ure, brilliantly and restlessly alive in a stagnant society’ (p. 105), popular with
the local girls and unsuited to the rigours of a medical career. John clings
to a desire to escape, ideally to South America, and this seems likely when
he takes up with Rosa Gonzales, the passionate daughter of the owner of
Moon Lake Casino. The prospect of a marriage that would clear his debts
is being celebrated noisily when John’s father returns home and orders the
girl’s father to ‘get your – swine out of – my house’ (p. 152). In the ensuing
mêlée, John’s father is shot.
180 Emotional roots
His plan to marry Rosa abandoned, John finishes the work his father
started at a fever clinic in Lyon, ‘redeeming myself with good works’
(p.  165). He has come to accept what he assumes to be Alma’s view of
life, a belief that we are more than just the parts of the body represented
on an anatomy chart, that there is ‘an immaterial something – as thin as
smoke – which all of those ugly machines combine to produce and that’s
their whole reason for being’ (p. 168). In the meantime, Alma has been ill;
she has always suffered from a weak heart and anxiety attacks, but now
she is pale and exhausted, walking out in the early hours of the morning
and complaining of insomnia. She also becomes conscious of both an
alteration within herself and change around her. She goes to tell John that
he no longer needs to be a gentleman with her, that the need for phys-
ical passion has gripped her, only to discover the double disappointment
of his new-found spirituality and his engagement to Nellie Ewell, one of
Alma’s vocal pupils who has long had a crush on him. In the play’s final
scene, Alma is once more back at the fountain, striking up conversation
with a travelling salesman, Archie Kramer. When he inquires what there
is to do in Glorious Hill after dark, she mentions Moon Lake Casino and
the two of them depart, though not before Alma makes her last salute to
the stone angel.
Like Blanche, Alma comes to understand the value of strangers.
Rejection paves the way for casual encounters, so much easier since so
little is invested in them. Yet Alma knows the scorn she is likely to face
from the community, having told John that Nellie Ewell’s mother, ‘the
merry widow of Glorious Hill’, is ‘ostracized by all but a few of her own
type of women in town’ (p. 115) for going to the train depot to meet trav-
elling salesmen. Alma is not so brazen, though: her meeting with a stran-
ger seems unsolicited, the fountain in the park being a place associated
with John and, therefore, a site of consolation after the disappointment of
the previous scene. Additionally, the salesman’s decision to take Alma in
a taxi to the casino, obviously an echo of the end of part one when John
hails a taxi following his unsuccessful attempt to get Alma to share a
room with him above the casino, is resisted, if somewhat feebly.
Alma depicts her transformation in terms of death and so rules out
any balance between spirituality and physicality within a life. Her former
self is ‘suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her’ (p. 167),
the still heat of a very hot summer being both the incendiary for desire
but also a reason offered for confused emotions (the two parts of the play
are labelled ‘A Summer’ and ‘A Winter’). She even presents this as a sort
of deathbed dialogue with her previous self, the implication being that
 Complete profligacy 181
Alma can only be one type of woman at any given time. This is not just
an oversimplification in which character is sacrificed to allegory; Alma
has assimilated the rigid classifications of the community. Women are
openly sexual and promiscuous or they are puritanical, in closed ranks
of disapproval, engaged in cultural meetings alongside men who are inef-
fectual and sexless. The sexual threat to this rather sterile world is linked
to outsiders: the travelling salesmen who pass through are not part of
the community and seek only fun; similarly, the Mexicans who run the
casino have different mores by virtue of their foreignness.
The play implies that desire can be extinguished or reignited but that,
either way, this requires a complete transformation. John Buchanan dis-
ingenuously attempts to rewrite what, for Alma, seems a lewd proposal at
the end of part one, claiming that he did not want the physical woman
since she could not give that to him anyway. This is surely a lie: her old
self was desirable because unattainable; the way that he deals with her
physical attractiveness now is to disconnect or fragment it, so that her
eyes and voice are extolled as the warmest and most beautiful things he
has known, ‘although they don’t seem to be set in your body at all’ (p. 169).
Isolating her physical virtues is an act of containment required by his new
position, including his engagement to Nellie Ewell. Nellie, who openly
admits to having had crushes on both Alma and John, joins her future
husband in celebrating Alma, knowing that she will not be a sexual threat.
She is keen to share John’s vision of Alma as ‘an angel of mercy’ (p. 163), a
selfless woman who helped him to get through difficult times. Yet Nellie
is ignorant of the communication that is shared behind her back, the tor-
ment that affects both Alma and John in the play’s penultimate scene.
In marrying someone so much younger than himself, someone who has
looked up to him, John further protects himself from the dissipated life
he led before; he will be a father figure as well as Nellie’s husband, her
immaturity being only too obvious when she hugs her fiancé with ‘child-
ish squeals’ (p. 170) and he remarks apologetically that ‘Nellie’s still such
a child’ (p. 171).
In essence, Summer and Smoke is the familiar story of two people whose
shared backgrounds ought to keep them together but whose futures seem
destined to diverge. Instead of finding themselves separated by some tra-
gic, unpredictable circumstance, though, their fates partly turn on their
own attitudes to spirit and body, irreconcilable because they never coin-
cide, and partly on Alma’s convalescence at a crucial time. John Buchanan
is the object of the characters’ gaze, watched by Alma, even when she just
regards him affectionately rather than sexually, and the young girls of
182 Emotional roots
Glorious Hill who perhaps sense his latent power as much as the ‘ fresh
and shining look of an epic hero’ (p. 105) still intact at the start of the play.
Whilst the excitement that surrounds him is not shared by his disapprov-
ing elders, John’s rebellion merely has consequences for his professional
life. As his father tells him, ‘there is no room in the medical profession for
wasters – drunkards – lechers’ (p. 106). By contrast, women who choose
not to conform by exploring their sexuality are pushed to the margins
of society from where there seems to be no obvious progression, no rosy
future.
What is to happen to Alma? Will the profligacy that Williams seems
to admire mean that she drifts further away from the ultra-conservative
centre of Glorious Hill? Alma is not escaping death and economic loss in
the way that Blanche DuBois is but rejecting a barren spinsterhood or an
equally unappealing, compromised monogamy, any husband likely to be
an unsatisfactory substitute for John. She turns her back on family life
and so, by the definition she gives John towards the end of part one, can
never aspire to be a respectable lady. However, she clings to her name –
Spanish for soul – even when she introduces herself to the salesman, as if
her old self can never be entirely unseated, the rectory upbringing never
completely forgotten.
Alma’s relative confidence after her tearful scene with John and
Nellie – she is hesitant and barely audible but she initiates the conver-
sation with the salesman and permits herself to look at him ‘a little sug-
gestively’ (p. 173) – begins to mark a change from her earlier insistence
that she is a weak and divided person. Just as Blanche draws attention
to Stanley’s strength on more than one occasion, so Alma has admired
John’s single-mindedness, his power. Love has been an ‘affliction’ (p. 169)
for her, the very thought of it making her frail constitution weaker.
Ironically, then, she gains strength only to find herself supplanted.
It is fairly characteristic of the play that women appear vulnerable,
disempowered, even non-existent. John’s mother is already dead, survives
only as a memory of the body made frighteningly ugly by an unspecified
disease. As if to balance this absence, Alma’s mother has been crushed
by the thought of a rector’s wife’s duties and has reverted to a child-
hood that always looms as a terrifying prospect for Alma. Even Rosa
Gonzales, seemingly confident that a combination of her body and her
father’s ability to discharge John’s debts will make her desirable, feels
she has to score her lover’s body with bite and scratch marks to keep
him beyond his initial infatuation.18 These instances of illness and despe­
ration speak volumes about women’s vulnerability, the internalization of
 Complete profligacy 183
self-doubt and their brittleness in a society where male power is not overt
but quietly sensed.
The lack of positive female role models further emphasizes Alma’s pre-
dicament. Just when she thinks she has overcome her aversions to the
body, slowed her accelerated progress through youth and rid herself of
the silences that have been a feature of her few courtships to date, she is
denied the fulfilling relationship she craves. Free of her repressed self, it
seems she can only contemplate life with John Buchanan or a succession
of temporary men. Viewed positively, this amounts to a bold refutation
of marriage for the sake of respectability; more negatively, Alma will cut
herself off from other women, be the subject of their malicious gossip.
In an earlier play, Spring Storm, set in a later era (the Great Depression
rather than the years leading up to World War I), Williams shows just
how far-reaching, hateful and restrictive rumour of this nature can
become. Furthermore, it is circulated by women about women. The
play’s significant male characters are either absent or inadequate in some
way, escaping the direct focus of accusations of fornication. Heavenly
Critchfield, the protagonist of Spring Storm, is scorned for giving into
both her desires and the man, Richard (Dick) Miles, who is desperate to
leave behind the conservatism of Port Tyler, Mississippi. Virginity would
normally be a prized commodity for all young women in this society,
a prerequisite for any respectable marriage. When Heavenly flouts this
convention, she jeopardizes a married future and the improved economic
circumstances that seem (in the eyes of her mother at least) hers to claim
with the distinction of a surname listed in Southern genealogies. The
family’s struggle  – Mr Critchfield has been made ill with worry over
a faltering business that could force a claim for welfare relief  – makes
Heavenly’s position doubly perilous but it is secondary to the decisions
she is able to make as a woman.
Her choices appear to give Heavenly power. She becomes Dick’s lover
because her desire is stronger than the convention it breaks; and, in tak-
ing this step, she knowingly becomes a subject of discussion. Her beauty
and the past and present position of her family matter little compared to
her sexual availability, confirmed by reports that she and Dick have been
seen coming out of a cabin on Moon Lake in the early hours of the morn-
ing. Of course, being talked about makes Heavenly more conspicuous,
the question of her marriage still more urgent; and, as Michel Foucault
points out in The History of Sexuality, attempts to curb sexual desire only
succeed in creating discourse about it, so producing the opposite effect
of perpetuating its influence.19 The town’s censorship of premarital sex
184 Emotional roots
generates a fascination with it. As Dick Miles is told, he cannot restore
Heavenly’s respectability by marrying her; he can only ‘make her talked
about’.20
Williams demonstrates that the resulting atmosphere is insufferable for
those women who lack Heavenly’s temerity. Hertha Neilson, a librarian
and children’s storyteller, is expected to help police the community – she
stops courting couples in the library who are then abusive to her – when
her own desires are barely containable: ‘I can’t go on living much longer
in this vacuum’ (p. 116). However, her melodramatic suicide towards the
end of the play is not a consequence of the prohibition on her speaking
her desire but of rejection by a man who is confused about what he wants
her to be. Arthur Shannon, whose family is the wealthiest in the delta,
is the opposite of the robust Dick Miles. By his own admission, he has
failed to form proper relations with anyone and when, in a drunken state,
he forces himself on Hertha, he seems paradoxically appalled by both the
limpness of her reaction and (quickly trying to reclaim a moral position)
her impropriety. Anticipating Blanche DuBois, he utters the unambigu-
ous ‘you disgust me’ (p. 123) and sets in motion a closing cycle of events
that will profoundly affect Heavenly’s future.
Though urged to form a relationship with Arthur for the sake of the
family, Heavenly has resisted on the simple grounds that he has hitherto
appeared asexual. When, in his second act of sexual aggression, Arthur
grabs Heavenly and showers her with kisses, her reaction proves that desire
itself, and not its objects, is of greatest importance to her. As Dan Isaac
puts it, ‘desire is located in her body and not in the mystical ­in-between
area of a relationship’.21 Arthur has come alive for her as someone who
might be able to fulfil her needs and is quickly, but only temporarily,
substituted for Miles. Both men contribute to the demise that Heavenly
has been keenest to avoid: passively waiting on the front porch for one of
them to return. Dick eschews a conventional marriage, says that he wants
merely a companion to follow him on his outdoor adventures when he
could (as Heavenly suspects) be throwing her over; Arthur is overcome
with guilt at his part in what has happened to Hertha and is forced to
leave Port Tyler.
As Heavenly has previously noted when talking about one of the town’s
spinsters, Agnes Peabody, sitting on the porch guarantees nothing but
‘getting to be an old maid’ (p. 103). Though expected, it seems to be an
unlikely course of action for someone driven by, and unashamed of, her
desire, someone who has blithely conducted a social rebellion of sorts.
Heavenly becomes just another spinster, now, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
 Complete profligacy 185
Hester Prynne, not talked about so much as clearly visible within the
community, the vitality of her youth burnt out. Williams’s unsubtle use
of imagery from nature  – the storm of the title, the rising waters that
threaten to smash the levee – to suggest the destructive but inevitable tide
of sexual feeling serves to expose the vulnerability of civilization. Even
Mr Critchfield must concede that the conflicts unleashed when desire is
repressed are ‘sort of natural phenomena’ (pp. 80–1) that can be accounted
for only as necessary parts of a wider cycle of human behaviour. The title
of an earlier draft of the play, April Is the Cruelest Month, borrowed from
the opening line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, conveys more directly
the sense of wanton cruelty and death (including the death in life that
awaits Heavenly) that is a re-evaluation of traditional notions of seasonal
fertility.
Though the portrait of a notable forebear, the civil war hero Colonel
Wayne, hangs ominously in the Critchfield household as a symbol of past
glories and patriarchal might, Heavenly’s actions are not determined by
ancestral respectability or, until the end, directly by men. Like both ver-
sions of Alma Winemiller, she follows her instincts and remains strong
for as long as she defies society’s norms. Hers is a personal struggle in
which men, at least the ones she encounters romantically, prove flawed
but are somehow worth waiting for. She is weakened as a character by
this inconsistency, perhaps telegraphed in the description Williams gives
at the outset of a woman who is ‘frankly sensuous without being coarse,
fiery-tempered and yet disarmingly sweet’ (p. 5). Such carefully balanced
epithets imply that order will prevail and that Heavenly’s actions will not
be allowed to upset the status quo. They also denote the restraints she
places on her own behaviour: her passion is strong but she is ready to be
subdued. The already mentioned scene in which Arthur forces himself
on her is problematic in the way that unsolicited male force is suddenly
authorized as desired masculinity.
Summer and Smoke, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale and Spring Storm
offer a commentary on the conservative sexual values of small Southern
communities and the restricted destinies of women. These protagonists
face disappointment, the sidelining of their personal visions, a life closed
down. There is poignancy in their frustration, an emptiness that is caught
in endings of resignation and defeat. The plays do not touch on wider
issues of town governance, federal concerns, political ideology or the role
of women beyond sexual politics, and it is interesting to note that Spring
Storm, written in the apprentice phase when Williams was experimenting
with social themes, uses the Depression as a backdrop that helps to propel
186 Emotional roots
the plot without itself becoming a subject of much scrutiny. The little
economies of the Critchfield family, the illness of Mr Critchfield and
the demographic trend in which all but the very rich migrate north or
east in search of work make marriage to a patrician like Arthur Shannon
almost a social obligation for Heavenly. Once this is established, though,
the family’s hardship is forgotten and Mr Critchfield makes no further
appearance after the second act. Williams even touted the play’s lack of
‘social propaganda’ to his mother, anticipating that this could help make
it a commercial success.22
As we have seen, the bourgeois model of marriage cannot contain the
woman led towards it by her sexual instincts. These are plays where the
forfeiture of marriage leads to the extremes of either abstinence, in which
the sexual commitment already made is put on hold, or promiscuity/
prostitution. Though the Alma of Eccentricities is mocked by some indis-
tinct figures in the epilogue, she is finally more confident than her pre-
decessor in Summer and Smoke, knowing perhaps that, unlike Heavenly
Critchfield, her activities are now as barely visible as the myriad ­living
organisms on John Buchanan’s microscope slide. She has joined an
amorphous mass of discarded womanhood.
Both Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale mine
a bygone era, the prescriptions of which could only have survived as dim
memories from Williams’s early childhood in Columbus, Mississippi.
Though Blanche DuBois brings some of this world to bear on New
Orleans, Williams also moved with the times in exploring the life of the
young married woman living in a postwar urban environment of freer
morals. Once again, sex, not matters relating to employment or house-
hold management, would be the measure of women’s liberation. We have
already noted in earlier chapters, from the perspectives of race and homo-
sexuality, that this emphasis on sexual power struggles, on the integra-
tion or non-integration of deviant possibilities, continues throughout the
fifties in plays like The Rose Tattoo and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It remains
to be seen whether this seemingly inexhaustible source of material would
be transformed by a greater understanding of women’s social roles as
Williams faced a new, perhaps more challenging, epoch.

Pa r l ou r g a m e s
By 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national
parlor game. Whole issues of magazines, newspaper columns, books learned
and frivolous, educational conferences and television panels were devoted to the
problem.23
 Parlour games 187
Betty Friedan’s landmark study, The Feminine Mystique, first published
in 1963, points to a growing frustration amongst middle-class white
women in postwar America. Living under a new mystique of ‘feminine
fulfillment’ that had become ‘the cherished and self-perpetuating core of
American culture’ (p. 18), many women Friedan interviewed (she was a
journalist) apparently felt disconnected and experienced ‘a strange stir-
ring’ (p. 15) that could not be named. In tandem with campaigns against
communism and sexual dissidence, the conventional suburban family
had been officially made an aspirational model of stability. Both factors
combined to create a more inward-looking society, one in which the ideal
place for women was widely considered the home.
However, running counter to this were rising levels of employment for
women, particularly but not exclusively older women, higher divorce rates
and a budding interest in the working woman reflected in popular maga-
zines like the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. In fact, as
S. J. Kleinberg points out, the Ladies’ Home Journal even published part
of The Feminine Mystique accompanied by the headline question ‘Have
American housewives traded brains for brooms?’ 24 In recent years, his­
torians have questioned what they see as Friedan’s simplistic picture of
postwar America and its conservative ideology. Joanne Jay Meyerowitz
alludes to studies that have emphasized women’s activism in both the
workplace and various social movements, revising a stereotype of the
‘domestic and quiescent’ wife and mother and implying that, for certain
women at least, the image of the frustrated housewife had already become
something more than just a parlour game.25
When Tennessee Williams chose to parallel two heterosexual couples in
his 1960 play Period of Adjustment, he could draw on a decade of conflict-
ing social messages. To the issues surrounding women can be added ques-
tions about male identity. For some, America’s involvement in World War II
and Korea led to a form of male bonding that, as we see in the play, can
disrupt heterosexual relations without being homosexual. Furthermore,
widespread poverty by the end of the 1950s threatened to derail an escal-
ating consumerism, and an increasingly disaffected youth, expressing
itself through the beat generation, was starting to question mainstream
values. Williams’s title captures some of this flux. It is repeated several
times in the course of the play to suggest that marital discord can be
temporary, that people need time to settle together, but also, by exten-
sion, that the times the characters are living through are transitional. The
play’s alternative title, High Point over a Cavern, A Serious Comedy, draws
on the single setting of a Spanish-style bungalow in Memphis, part of
188 Emotional roots
a cheap, uniform development which is gradually sinking into a cavern,
perhaps another reference to a crumbling social fabric or even a nation
that no longer appears so inviolable. The disagreements between the
­couples, often centring on sex, appear comic but mask deeper concerns
about compatibility, long-term prospects, financial security, even neuro-
logical conditions associated with active service. The position of women is
also called into question.
Setting the play on Christmas Eve, Williams is once more able to draw
ironic parallels between modern life and Christian festivals. Here, cele-
bration, the giving and receiving of gifts, the provision of shelter are given
a modern twist. The only birth is that of a quiet, non-sexual together-
ness, a cooling of hostilities in the marriages of Ralph and Dorothea
Bates and George and Isabel Haverstick that tentatively allows the audi-
ence to believe that the marital adjustment has been made. George and
Isabel are on their honeymoon, having first met when George was a
patient at Barnes Hospital (where Williams would later be committed
by his brother, Dakin) in St Louis and Isabel was his nurse. Suffering
from a form of palsy, George had been placed in Barnes to prevent his
claiming compensation as a war veteran; his shakes have almost certainly
been caused by the trauma of serving in the Korean War. Their first night
together as a married couple has been disastrous, Isabel having sat up in
a chair all night in their room in the Old Man River Motel to avoid any
sexual contact. Ralph Bates has both split up from Dorothea and quit his
job, finally surrendering any chances of inheriting her father’s lucrative
business, Regal Dairy Products, where he was first employed as an incen-
tive to marry a rather plain Dorothea. He has already sought an evalu-
ation of their property’s contents in preparation for selling up and leaving
the area the next day, but Dorothea’s parents, the McGillicuddys, send
over a black maid to rescue their daughter’s share of the possessions prior
to their own appearance later on.
The first of the play’s three acts is essentially a duologue. George drops
Isabel off, fails to give her the overnight bag she has requested and then
drives away. Isabel fears that she has been abandoned, especially after
events of the previous night, but George has only gone to buy a bottle of
champagne to celebrate meeting up with his friend.
Ralph is sympathetic to Isabel’s concerns, but, when George returns,
the two men tend to exclude her and talk about women disrespectfully.
George tells Ralph of a dream he has of returning to his home state of
Texas and rearing longhorn cattle, not to slaughter and sell on but for
use in films. Ralph, already with plans of his own to go to Hong Kong,
 Parlour games 189
is initially resistant but finally warms to the project, partly swayed by the
inadequate-looking cattle depicted in a western on the television.
After the bitter confrontation with the McGillicuddys in act three,
Dorothea, who has accompanied her parents but remained in the car,
enters and demands her son’s Christmas presents. She is mellowed by the
gift of a fur coat, a clear sign of Ralph’s love in spite of all that has passed,
and decides to stay against her parents’ wishes. Isabel warms to her almost
immediately and Dorothea insists that the other couple must sleep on
the sofa rather than look for a hotel at this late hour. As they settle into
the bedroom and living room, we cut cinematically from one couple to
the other patching up their differences. The play ends understatedly with
both finding physical closeness at last.
Period of Adjustment questions the 1950s ideal of family life from the
outset. Ralph may live in ‘a sweet little house’, but his wife and child are
conspicuously absent, their desertion symbolized by the presents under
the Christmas tree.26 Ralph’s decision to give up his menial position at
Regal Dairy, provoked by a sense of frustration at Mr McGillicuddy’s
continued good health and unwillingness to hand the business over
to him, amounts to a desertion of responsibility in Dorothea’s eyes  – a
betrayal of her father’s generosity and Ralph’s commitment to being the
family’s breadwinner. Yet Ralph had to be lured into family life, Dorothea
being unattractive, slightly older and reputedly frigid. Though Williams
describes him as ‘one of those rare people that have the capacity of heart
to truly care, and care deeply, about other people’ (p. 12), and though his
early conversation with Isabel bears this out, Ralph quickly discards his
wife and child as if they were faulty consumer products – and this after
Dorothea has had her appearance surgically improved and her frigidity
mysteriously transformed into nymphomania.
George, too, is seeking to dispose of his wife, if not by running out
on her as Isabel fears, then by nullifying her presence in the company
of his Korean War buddies. Isabel explains somewhat despairingly that
George looked up another veteran in Cape Girardeau the previous night
and would have happily continued to drink beer and reminisce about
Korea were it not for the veteran’s wife who summarily broke up the male
reunion by directing the Haversticks to an out-of-town motel. At the start
of act two, Isabel is silenced by a series of male greetings that culminate
in Ralph’s outright rejection of his wife, an object that George recom-
mends beating off with a stick were she ever to try to come back. Already
upset by what she regards as aggressive sexual behaviour by George on
their wedding night, Isabel feels angry and alienated: ‘I might as well
190 Emotional roots
not be present! For all the attention I have been paid since you and your
buddy had this tender reunion’ (p. 40).
Interestingly, George’s desire for reunions with his male friends is dir-
ectly fuelled by his anxieties over his heterosexual relationship. Ralph tells
Isabel that ‘I been beggin’ that boy ever since we got out of the service to
come to Memphis’ (p. 15) and that he had almost given up all hope of its
ever happening. Visiting Ralph and the other veteran in Cape Girardeau
was never a priority when he was on his own, but now he needs a but-
tress, something to keep him from feeling bound to a permanent and
monogamous heterosexuality. He wants to render Isabel invisible, not
least because their miserable first night together reflects badly on him too,
there being strong suggestions of impotence later on. The re-forming of
homosocial bonds is not just manifest in the bonhomie of manly hugs and
pet names, though. George actually makes a gift of his wife; she is a piece
of merchandise or luggage he leaves temporarily in his friend’s care. At
this early stage, both Isabel and the relationship are dead to him, a point
made symbolically in the use of George’s Cadillac. Formerly a funeral
limousine, it bears Isabel’s body in a grim and, as it turns out, premature
comment on both their marriage and the woman who nursed George
through the worst phase of his condition on his return from Korea. Isabel
acknowledges that she is an unwanted body, telling Ralph ‘he’s deposited
me on your hands and driven away’ (p. 15, Williams’s italics) before fully
registering the implications of this with hysterical laughter.
Ralph’s repeated defence of George’s character is possible because of a
shared military history that represents a commitment to each other and
to their country. Having been offered Isabel, Ralph does no more than
make regular appraisals of her body, seemingly out of an aesthetic appre-
ciation rather than sexual desire. When he brushes sparks from the fire off
her skirt in just one of several intimate moments they share, Ralph imme-
diately compares the touch of her body favourably to that of Dorothea,
a momentary sexual comparison but one that he can control because he
‘would never make a play for the bride of a buddy’ (p. 31). Though George
doubts him in this respect – the hypocrisy of a man who rejects his wife
only to accuse his friend of secretly desiring her – Ralph’s integrity is only
called into question in his dealings with his own wife and the women he
disrespectfully labels ‘gash’ – prostitutes out in the Far East. The two are,
in fact, linked in that Ralph despises both but for different reasons. By
his own admission, he has ‘done a despicable thing’ (p. 44) in marrying
Dorothea, a woman he finds unattractive, who has to be replaced in his
imagination by ‘any one of a list of a thousand or so lovely lays’ (ibid.)
 Parlour games 191
before he can have sex with her. This despicableness does not lie in his
behaviour towards Dorothea, however, but the way he feels he has let
himself down; his pride, closely linked to his air force background, has
been besmirched by accepting an inferior wife and a low-paid job with
the promise that he will take over the family business sooner rather than
later. With no respect for a woman who is simply a means to a fortune, it
is not surprising that Ralph’s son is also a figure of abuse, virtually writ-
ten off because he has spent too much time being nurtured by a woman
unwilling to give him boys’ toys.
Unlike George, Ralph refuses to see prostitutes as women at all. Though
providers of the best sexual experiences and, it would seem, his main
motivation for wishing to return to Hong Kong, they are ‘used’ (p. 45)
and do not have to be treated with respect. By contrast, Isabel, a virgin, is
likely to want sex if she is handled gently. Because of his own experience
with Dorothea and a strong sense of sexual competition, Ralph is inclined
to dismiss frigidity and a woman’s right not to want intercourse. At dif-
ferent points, and separately, he encourages George and Isabel to make
up by having sex in his house, a proposition that may excite him voyeur-
istically (given that he cannot act on his attraction to Isabel) but may also
have the advantage of further distancing him from the homely surround-
ings he is seeking to escape; he would happily make his home a hotel.
When Dorothea returns to the bungalow part-way through the final
act, it is as if she is returning to a shared space but also somewhere resem-
bling a hotel where she no longer enjoys permanent residence. The bed-
room, reclaimed by Dorothea as a site of discussion and reconciliation,
nevertheless contains twin beds labelled ‘his and hers’ and Dorothea has
none of the clothes that have been removed by her parents. The presence
of George and Isabel in the living room further undermines the possibil-
ity of a proper resolution. The couples find it hard not to be distracted
by each other and Ralph and George both present their plan to go into
partnership in Texas as a fait accompli. Though the women have the final
lines and begin to direct their husbands sexually, their futures will be
decided for them.
Ralph and George are desperately searching for a sense of identity
which their working and domestic lives have denied them. Period of
Adjustment undoubtedly raises political and social issues  – the govern-
ment’s refusal to look after its psychologically scarred soldiers, homeown-
ers’ dishonesty in trying to sell on their subsidence-hit properties – but
these are not kept before the audience as large issues requiring urgent
debate. Instead, George’s palpitations are viewed mainly in psycho-sexual
192 Emotional roots
terms, connected to impotence, the fear of it and, paradoxically, both an
over-aggressive attitude to women and a Freudian dread of castration. His
inability to work at the airfield in St Louis (like Ralph, his war service
has not prepared him for a steady civilian job) almost certainly aggravates
his condition, but it is the more general malaise of the war hero having
to accept a diminished role, perhaps alongside men who have not served
their country, that makes holding down a position so difficult. George’s
plan to rear longhorn cattle in Texas is a potentially lucrative business
venture capitalizing on the ‘national obsessional’ (p. 65), the coun-
try’s fascination with westerns, ‘a national homesickness in the American
heart for the old wild frontiers’ (ibid.), even on Christmas Eve. It is also
one which rescues a family name (‘My folks staked out West Texas’, p. 57)
going back to the Alamo and revives a more dignified agrarian existence
that the American Dream has largely ignored.
Television, a common fixture in many American homes when the play
was written, provides important images of both masculinity and woman-
hood. Its seemingly constant schedule of westerns sandwiched between
adverts means the nostalgia for frontier life has become a form of propa-
ganda, instructing men to remember the importance of protecting their
own homesteads and make the most of their native land. While this rep-
resents a far simpler picture of manhood than the neuroses and displace-
ment of the modern fighting man, it is just a fiction: George and Ralph
will play their part in creating one large film set, not actually reliving
their ancestors’ experiences. Moreover, the adverts remind us of consumer
demand, the development and marketing of products designed to improve
lives, not keep them as they once were. The play begins with a commer-
cial for a labour-saving cleaning product promising an end to ‘the old
horse-and-buggy type of cleanser’ (p. 11). Its phrasing demonstrates how
adverts swiftly restore the viewer to the convenience of 1950s life. Women,
domestic slaves in both worlds, acquire the grateful smile demanded of
them in the modern era because the same task has required less effort.
Their cheery demeanour, an endorsement of their servitude, is as important
as the domestic chores they carry out.
What does this mean for the women in the play? Though Dorothea
is never seen performing domestic duties, she has plainly been a success-
ful homemaker in spite of the precarious construction of the bungalow.
The decision to leave Ralph has been prompted by the double frustra-
tion that he has ceased to be a provider and has let her father down; and
yet Mr McGillicuddy has, with Dorothea’s knowledge, effectively sold his
daughter, understandably a transaction of which, along with her cosmetic
 Parlour games 193
improvements, Dorothea would not wish to be reminded. Both Isabel
and Dorothea expect their husbands to have jobs as a matter of principle,
without making too many allowances for the psychological bruises of war
duty. However, it is not any promise that their husbands will be gainfully
employed that lures them back. As we have seen, George and Ralph have
already negotiated their joint venture in the expectation that they will be
living apart from their wives. Dorothea allows herself to be bought again,
this time with the coat, imagining her market value to reflect the under-
lying extent to which Ralph cares for her, little knowing that the garment
has been offered elsewhere at a cut price as part of a verbal deed of sale
and that Isabel has been encouraged to accept it as a wedding present.
Isabel’s own reasons for returning to George seem rather harder to pin-
point. Prior to the arrival of the McGillicuddys, she has accepted Ralph’s
offer to drive her to a downtown hotel and has allowed herself to be ush-
ered into the bedroom to wait, albeit ‘with dignity’ (p. 72). The interference
of Dorothea’s parents seems to bring out her loyalty to her husband – she
comments on his distinguished war record – and make her realize that
both couples need space and time to resolve their problems. Following
their departure, she indicates a willingness to stay by offering to make
coffee, and, when she feels her presence might be rudely invasive, her plan
to go to a hotel has been revised to include George. She becomes more
optimistic about relationships, spouting Ralph’s judgement on her own
marriage before appearing scantily clad in a see-through nightie in front
of the fire and inviting George to join her. It dawns on her that moods,
rather than entrenched opinions, affect the behaviour of men and women
and that these can change rapidly. Like so many of Williams’s characters,
she also understands the daunting challenge of long-term cohabitation:
‘Two people living together, two, two – different worlds! – attempting –
existence – together!’ (p. 90).
Certainly, Isabel moves the furthest, shrugging off some of her strict
upbringing and excessive devotion to a father who even tried to prevent
her from becoming a nurse because it might expose her to too many men.
Gulshan Rai Kataria regards her as the saviour of Ralph and Dorothea’s
marriage and, consequently, the character with the most depth in the
play.27 It seems, though, that both women willingly accept the role of
peacemaker, that the greatest concessions have to come from them in the
form of sexual advances. They back down, accede to the men’s demands,
in doing so reinforce patriarchal control and, in the case of Isabel, give
the impression that frigidity has been a defence mechanism, possibly
even a tease. For Williams, this realignment is complicated by the men’s
194 Emotional roots
perception that they are in a form of limbo, almost dead to society and
unable to grasp a Cold War mentality. Ralph explains his closeness to
George in terms of multiple shared deaths and a similar interment in sub-
urbs called High Point (or Hi-Point in George’s case); everything since
their Korean War exploits has been an anti-climax, a death in life. Used
to being fêted as heroes, they find, as Mr McGillicuddy takes pleasure in
pointing out, that in a Cold War stalemate there is ‘not such a hero, at
least not in the newspapers’ (p. 77).
Williams recognizes the invidious position of veterans whose adjust-
ment is not simply from bachelordom to married life. He also compre-
hends the way male bonds between American service personnel can
exclude women or make them little more than exchangeable objects.
Active in resolving situations, Isabel and Dorothea nevertheless con-
cede ground and accept relationships in which they will not be decision-
­makers. Like Alma Winemiller, they have liberated themselves from
repressive backgrounds in which sex is distrusted, resisted as something
fearful; unlike her, this has not deterred them from marriage and finally
from a determination to work through their problems and explore their
sexuality. Though Dorothea’s six years of married life have not been har-
monious, her frustration lies in what she sees as Ralph’s desertion of duty,
not the emptiness Betty Friedan’s housewives reported feeling.

R e t ic e nc e
MRS TILFOR D … This – this thing is your own. Go away with it. I don’t under-
stand it and I don’t want any part of it. Take it out of here.28
C ORNELIA Is nothing like me but silence?
[Clock ticks loudly.]
Am I sentenced to silence for a lifetime? 29
Like Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), Williams’s writing deal-
ing almost exclusively with female relationships and communities is char-
acterized by avoidance of same-sex desire and its articulation. It cannot
be named or imagined. Unlike both Hellman and his own exploration of
male homosexuality, Williams does not allow inference to become hys-
teria. The characters’ motivations are kept to themselves; their positions
are not compromised and no public lie impugns them. In fact, though its
presence is hinted at, lesbian desire is secondary to the economic factors
requiring women to live together.30 Thus their strength is broadly meas-
ured by women’s ability to cope within a system unerringly preserving
heterosexual marriage as the only desired outcome of their lives.
 Reticence 195
In Something Unspoken, ‘Happy August the Tenth’ and A Lovely Sunday
for Creve Coeur, Williams indicates both women’s reliance on heterosex-
ual relationships and marriage to secure their future and the way in which
they have constructed their own same-sex living arrangements against the
possibility of spinsterhood or simply because they and the society of other
women come to seem preferable.31 The plight of Southern women compelled
to sit on their porches in the hope that a gentleman caller will rescue them
from loneliness and destitution, so painfully depicted in Spring Storm, now
assumes a more urban setting against the background of increasing employ-
ment for women. As women seek to form support networks in towns and
cities, communication and social class take on greater significance than ever
before.
The one-act play Something Unspoken, produced in conjunction with
Suddenly Last Summer in 1958 under the umbrella title of Garden District,
foregrounds both these themes. The very title of the play suggests an
ongoing silence, an awkward reticence behind the chatter of two women
who have lived together for fifteen years purportedly as just employer and
secretary/paid companion. However, the professionalism that should be
second nature after so long has become blurred by personal attachments
that cannot be admitted, both because they would complicate the busi-
ness relationship and because of society’s taboo on same-sex desire. The
hesitancy and tension that have crept into relations between Cornelia
Scott, a genteel Southern spinster, and Grace Lancaster, the secretary
some twenty years her junior, are compounded by the former’s expect-
ation of being elected Regent of the local chapter of a women’s society, the
Daughters of the Confederacy. Though wealthy and imposing – she has
‘Roman grandeur’ and is likened to Tiberius – Cornelia is unpopular with
what she insists is only a clique of the society, a band of younger members
already mobilized in a movement against her and unlikely to support her
election.32 Never explaining the hostility (something else unspoken), the
play leaves open the possibility that Cornelia’s unpopularity is as a result
of her relationship with Grace, though it could equally be attributable to
her hauteur or envy of her wealth. The situation between Cornelia and
Grace is similarly unresolved, the secretary giving ‘a slight, equivocal smile’
as she gets up to fetch a notebook and pencil that is ‘not quite malicious,
but not really sympathetic’ (p. 112). Does Grace’s failure to sympathize
with her employer over the election of a rival signify Cornelia’s further
isolation?
Grace fails to respond to Cornelia’s attempts to address their situation
throughout the play. While the election may be on the older woman’s
196 Emotional roots
mind, it is the problem of confronting Grace that has caused her a sleep-
less night. When we see Cornelia at the very start of the play, she is act-
ing the roles of employer and secretary, symbolically rendering both as
one, Grace having failed to wake up. Before the secretary’s vacant place
at the table is a rose, one of fifteen that Cornelia has bought for her to
commemorate their years together. It is an obvious act of love, not just
a reward for loyalty, yet Grace appears obtuse and then coldly grateful,
the hand she eventually places on Cornelia’s being empty of real affec-
tion. The older woman has come to require tenderness and ‘a little out-
spokenness’ (p. 107) from her companion, but what she gets when she
confronts the issue of their silences is a terrified expression followed by
another image of obstruction: an impenetrable wall. In an uncharacter-
istic outpouring of emotion, Grace explains that the figurative wall has
been erected because she is powerless to remove the differences between
them. Though ageing unites the women, their greyness is palpably dif-
ferent: Cornelia is iron grey, unyielding, wise, shored up by her property
and shares; Grace is, more poignantly, ‘something white getting soiled,
the grey of something forgotten’ (p. 109). There is reason to celebrate the
longevity of their relationship but equally for Grace the regret that she
has become an appendage, the best years of her life having slipped away
almost imperceptibly.
If the play’s unstated lesbianism is really starting to impinge on
Cornelia’s social position, it is perhaps appropriate that her last words, the
instruction that she wants to dictate a letter, are businesslike. However,
the play does not end here, for it is Grace who has the last line and,
whether ironic or not, her double exclamation  – ‘What lovely roses! One
for every year!’ (p. 112) – returns the audience to the play’s central symbol
of love, inseparable from the painful passage of time. Society’s suspicions
about two women cohabiting prevent any definite articulation of desire,
and yet lesbianism has not, historically, been as roundly stigmatized as
male homosexuality.
As Joe Falocco asserts, ‘lesbianism has often been seen as less offen-
sive by mainstream heterosexual culture and, if discreet, has more often
and more easily been allowed to flourish at the periphery of society than
has male homosexuality’.33 This holds true in a plausible connection he
makes between Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer: gar-
dens. Falocco rightly argues that more than one critic has made the hasty
assumption that the first play is set in the affluent Garden District of New
Orleans, so making their pairing more obvious. Yet, when talking about
the chapters of the Confederate Daughters, Cornelia clearly explains that
 Reticence 197
they are in the city of Meridian. She nonetheless has a garden which she
is adamant will not be open to a group called the Pilgrims who defiled
it the previous spring, and it would seem that the garden is also part of
her history with Grace since her gift is probably taken from the rosebush
and Cornelia cherishes the memory of raking leaves in her garden when
Grace first arrived. For Falocco, then, this well-ordered space, kept away
from the public, precisely denotes the discretion of lesbianism compared
to the wild extravagance of Sebastian Venable’s predatory homosexuality
symbolized by his untamed and prehistoric foliage.
There is, though, another important link to be made between Mrs
Violet Venable and Cornelia. Both women are dictatorial, used to being
at the centre of things and commanding the respect of others, but Violet
wants to silence, knowing that words will be the undoing of her son’s
memory. Cornelia, as we have seen, values frankness, even believes
that music is dishonest because it smoothes over discord. Yet, Williams
presents two different gardens that can be identified with dissident sexu-
alities, but he also provides two contrasting images of women who are the
stewards of those gardens.
Just as Violet is unable to prevent Catharine telling her story, so
Cornelia cannot force anything out of Grace or effect a meaningful
semantic distinction (‘companion’ for ‘secretary’, p. 105), the passing of
time being used as an excuse for withdrawal not increased familiarity.
Denied an outlet, Cornelia’s desire is sublimated, partially transformed
into a political drive towards unrivalled power and the highest office.
If the opposition to Cornelia is based on assumptions about her sexual
preferences, this chapter of the Confederate Daughters can be seen as a
political microcosm, registering its disapproval at the faintest whiff of
deviance. It is, after all, ‘a patriotic society’ (p. 102) as Grace reminds
Cornelia. The resulting pressure is taking its toll. Like the women of
Glorious Hill, Cornelia and Grace display symptoms of mental and emo-
tional strain, the evidence of their restriction.
In the short story ‘Happy August the Tenth’ (1971), well-tended gardens
are replaced by skyscrapers, nature by man-made edifices that resemble ‘a
lot of illuminated tombstones in a necropolis’.34 One big graveyard, the
city (in this case New York) forces the characters to confront their mor-
tality, not in the form of a death wish but with the realization that human
relationships do not have long to fend off death’s advance. With this in
mind, the date of the title is both meaningless and significant: no anni-
versary is being celebrated but the characters have survived another day,
both of their relationship and their individual lives.
198 Emotional roots
The story concerns two professional women, Elphinstone and Horne,
sharing a brownstone apartment on East Sixty-First Street. Elphinstone
is a self-employed genealogical consultant undergoing psychotherapy;
Horne works for the National Journal of Social Commentary and, though
not undergoing analysis, is troubled by death – not only in the form of the
city’s tombstone buildings, but also in the condition of her cousin Alfie,
confined to an iron lung after an attack of polio, only his head protrud-
ing ‘wasted like a death’s head’ (p. 471). The couple seem ill-suited, either
romantically or as two people sharing an apartment out of economic con-
venience. Their backgrounds are very different and surface in arguments
over Elphinstone’s ‘colonial heritage’ (p. 470) and privileged education and
Horne’s ‘intellectually vital’ (p. 468) circle of bohemian friends. When
the women’s tensions reach a head, Elphinstone’s ‘defecting companion’
(p. 470) half packs a bag, a gesture towards a split that neither really wants,
but then leaves for work without it. On returning to the apartment after
visits to her analyst and her ailing mother, Elphinstone expects Horne to
be hosting a noisy party for her friends. What she finds instead is silence
but for the static of the television. Horne has fallen asleep, drunk, on the
love seat that was symbolically stained by Horne’s coffee earlier when the
argument was taking place.
Like Something Unspoken, ‘Happy August the Tenth’ contains one
moment of physical contact. Unlike the play, where Cornelia withdraws
her hand suddenly believing Grace’s gesture to be insincere, Elphinstone
‘gently pressed a cheek to Horne’s bony kneecaps and encircled her thin
calves with an arm’ (p. 475) in a tender moment of reconciliation, an
acknowledgement of the other woman’s loneliness. As Elphinstone comes
to share Horne’s vision of the city from this position, she resolves to have
some polio injections that she had previously dismissed as unnecessary
and whispers ‘Happy August the Eleventh’ to Horne in ‘a tone of con-
dolence’ (p. 476). A private determination to survive immediately follows
commiseration. Whether this is over time’s swift progress or the prospect
of having to face another day, the story does not make clear.
‘Happy August the Tenth’ also resembles Something Unspoken in
being centred on the two women and only hinting at judgemental out-
side perspectives. Elphinstone’s analyst, Dr Schreiber, thinks the rela-
tionship is over but offers no further comment before terminating their
session. His use of the phrase ‘washed up’ (p. 471) loosely implies that
they have had more than a friendship or convenient living arrangement.
Elphinstone’s mother is unable to contemplate her daughter’s living with
another woman but stops short of stating any impropriety beyond ‘I don’t
 Reticence 199
know what to imagine’ (p. 472). Here the inability to convert suspicions
or gaps in communication into clear statement lies outside the relation-
ship. Unlike Cornelia and Grace, Elphinstone and Horne have a lot to
say to each other, though not about any latent feelings. Their underlying
affection for each other is demonstrable, intuitive, foregrounded by the
antipathy between the personified city and the morning light starting to
illuminate it at the conclusion of the story. Human beings find affection
in a world starved of beauty; the nature of that affection is immaterial.
Williams is interested in exploring the emotions of two people, rec-
ognizably women with women’s concerns, without the morality of their
living together being something the reader is invited to question unduly.
After all, what objections could there be to same-sex desire in a world,
like that described in the story, where death and illness are so prevalent?
This, though, is not an overly dark tale. The careful balancing of the
cartoon humour that characterizes some of Williams’s later stories with
the pathos of detachment and death ensures that the moments of sedate
reflection have their full effect and the domestic bickering is not taken
too seriously.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979), Williams’s final treatment of
women’s cohabitation, moves closer to slapstick in its lighter moments,
whilst also emphasizing the pain of rejection from heterosexual relation-
ships in which women seem especially vulnerable. With its backward
look at St Louis in the 1930s, the play draws on Williams’s experiences
of social class and the large German community that had settled in the
city. Additionally, it shows how premarital sex, openly acknowledged and
talked about after the sexual revolution when the play was produced,
could be contained by middle-class scruples designed to protect men
from marrying ‘loose’ women and simultaneously protect women from
losing their value in the marriage market. The play’s central character,
Dorothea, has allowed her desire to run free of these restraints, so much
so that on the evening of the seduction planned by her lover, the principal
at the school where she is a civics teacher, she ‘desired Ralph Ellis, possibly
even more than he did me’.35 Her stipulation that she must have romance,
not just stability and the domesticity anticipated by many women of the
time, tries to mask the fact that she has broken with her own principles:
‘I’ve always drawn a strict line with a man till this occasion’ (p. 129).
Dorothea shares a cramped, downmarket apartment with Bodey, a
woman of German ancestry (her name being a shortening of her sur-
name, Bodenhafer) who is rather hard of hearing and who works in the
office of International Shoe. As with The Glass Menagerie, Williams tries
200 Emotional roots
to capture some of the pitiful uniformity of a shabby residential area in
his mise-en-scène, suggesting a perspective of endless apartments that
have ‘the dried-blood horror of lower middle-class American neighborhoods’
(p. 119). The depressing reality of the women’s ‘efficiency apartment’ (ibid.) is
compounded by vulgar interior decoration, something that is emphasized
when Helena Brookmire, one of Dorothea’s colleagues at school, calls to
obtain Dorothea’s down payment on an apartment, Westmoreland Place,
in a much more salubrious part of St Louis. Helena’s motives are never
fully made clear. Does she just need someone of comparable respectabil-
ity to help her share a more expensive apartment, or is she trying to pull
Dorothea away from the heterosexual world that she suspects has already
used her?
When Dorothea discovers the announcement of Ralph Ellis’s engage-
ment (another echo of The Glass Menagerie), torn out of the local paper
and put in the waste bin by the considerate Bodey, she decides against
living with Helena. It may be that disappointment over Ralph, himself a
figure in polite society, has convinced her that the more supportive lower-
middle-class neighbourhood is where she should be after all. Alternatively,
Helena’s dismissal of Ralph’s interest in Dorothea as ‘little attentions
which you magnified in your imagination’ (p. 197) is hurtful, and the
card parties and teas that they have obviously talked about already now
seem stale and socially restrictive.
Running counter to Dorothea’s dogged faith in Ralph’s phoning the
apartment, and thus her determination throughout most of the play
that she should be close to the phone and not let anything cover up its
ring, is Bodey’s plan to have a picnic at Creve Coeur. Bodey has a twin
brother, Buddy, who is physically unattractive and seemingly unable
to offer ­anything beyond the holy trinity of ‘Kirche, Küche und Kinder’
(p. 133, literally, church, kitchen and children, also the title of a late play
by Williams) expected of a German wife. However, Bodey is convinced
that Dorothea and Buddy will be a good match and she is using the picnic
as an excuse to bring them together again. Dorothea resists the idea and
allows Bodey to go off on her own to meet her brother until, at the end
of the play, she feels defeated by the failure of her plans with both Ralph
and Helena and phones through a message to say she will join Bodey
and her brother after all. Before she leaves, Dorothea promises Sophie
Gluck, a German neighbour responsible for many of the comic interludes
in the play, that ‘we’ll be back before dark’ (p. 200), perhaps indicating to
the audience that she will give Buddy a chance without overstepping the
moral line on sex she had previously drawn.
 Reticence 201
Though men feature in this play, none makes an actual appearance.
This is telling because they exert an influence unfelt in either Something
Unspoken or ‘Happy August the Tenth’ where men seem almost irrele-
vant. Dorothea is prepared to sacrifice her relationships with women.
She would desert Bodey, about whom she feels embarrassed in Helena’s
company; she would break her commitment to Helena, before and after
the discovery of Ralph’s engagement, in pursuit of the illusive bourgeois
dream of romance, only, in all likelihood, to settle finally for some-
thing more practical. Dorothea appears strong at the end of the play. She
is decisive, acting in a way that ‘suffices to discharge her sense of defeat’
(p. 199) and soldiering on with a greater control over her own fate. Yet her
power does not come from rejecting the patriarchy but from casting off
social aspirations and proudly accepting the lower-middle-class existence
she has sought to escape. It is not sisterhood she turns to but a social and
cultural level with which she is familiar.
Dorothea’s disappointment over Ralph Ellis conflates the sexual and
the social. Unable to control her desire, to keep it within the bounds of
a heterosexual economy that dictates chastity outside the marriage con-
tract, she has surrendered any chance she might have had of gaining
access to country-club society, a rare opportunity given that someone of
Ralph Ellis’s social profile is not normally working in education. Bodey,
realizing that she will never marry and have children herself, is desperate
for her brother to settle down with Dorothea. Her own desire for family
is lived through the more desirable Dorothea and, with this end in mind,
she seeks to reveal and conceal her friend’s night of passion. Bodey tends
to see men as both predatory and unscrupulous or, in the case of Buddy,
fundamentally decent but capable of improvement under her guidance.
She is happy to keep Dorothea’s experience from her brother, believing
that she was a victim of ‘Valentino sheik tricks’ (p. 132) and incapable of
the active participation she claims, but she immediately wants to report
what she considers to be Ralph’s misconduct to the board of education.
That Bodey’s determination to both conceal and reveal is motivated by
a desire to protect her friend and the family she will one day have can be
confirmed by her attitude to Helena Brookmire. Helena’s snobbery takes
in Bodey and Sophie, not just the apartment and neighbourhood, but
Bodey seems less upset by this than by Helena’s determination to utilize
Dorothea in her social climbing. Bodey believes that Helena has come to
obtain money from Dorothea because she has no way of financing the
new apartment on her own. The world of business, of financial transac-
tions, makes an unwelcome intrusion on a Sunday and contrasts sharply
202 Emotional roots
with Bodey’s planned picnic  – a family affair, respectful of the day of
rest. Helena remarks that ‘the sanctity of a Sunday must sometimes be
profaned by business transactions’ (p. 149) but she miscalculates, mak-
ing demands where Dorothea and Bodey have already established sound
weekday practices, keeping ‘good books on expenses’ (p. 123).
Though Helena’s behaviour is divisive and her dream of upper-middle-
class respectability is unlikely to bring either woman fulfilment, she, like
the other characters, is desperately trying to stave off loneliness. A firm
believer in social Darwinism, she can claim to be ‘fortified and protected’
(p. 161) by loss and despair, but Sophie’s anxieties about being friendless
after the death of her mother spark fear in her own eyes and provoke a
telling, if rather short, monologue. Helena reveals that she dreads dining
alone, especially in a restaurant where she feels humiliated, but this is
sometimes the only alternative to being drawn into a ‘middle-aged gaggle
of preposterously vulgar old maids’ (p. 162).
It is this fear of being isolated and adrift that is particularly real for
Tennessee Williams’s women. The economics of survival appear to hit
them hardest and, though able to exist apart from men, disagreements and
unspoken desires persist. Dorothea, in many ways a collection of clichéd
neuroses  – obsessed with exercise, acutely anxious and taking mebaral
tablets when she can no longer cope  – is nevertheless able to overcome
disappointment and break her passive reliance on men. In doing so, she
sadly compromises the expectation of romance she once took as much for
granted as the ability to breathe, and relinquishes the desire that inten-
sified and consummated that romance. Her freedom to act comes at a
heavy price.

R e c or di ng wom e n’s h i s t or y ?
Of course, some of Williams’s more thick-skinned matriarchs deliberately
choose seclusion because they have outlived their husbands and now want
to guard their material assets. Rarely do they lose their sexual appetite
entirely – Mrs Stone still makes demands of her lovers and Mrs Venable
openly flirts with Dr Cuckrowicz – but these desires have no long-term
destabilizing consequence. Such women have learnt to live without the
company of men and, in doing so, have assimilated typically masculine
aspirations like a desire for ownership and control. They are often consid-
ered monsters or ‘Terrible Mothers’, as Nancy Tischler has labelled them –
exaggerated versions of Amanda Wingfield and the other women loosely
modelled on Edwina and diametrically opposed to Williams’s somewhat
 Recording women’s history? 203
sexist view of a soft and gentle femininity.36 Flora Goforth, the protag-
onist of the commercially unsuccessful The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here
Anymore (1963) and the short story ‘Man Bring This Up Road’ (1959) is,
perhaps, foremost among them, a woman who even Williams described
in her prototypal form as ‘sort of a composite of various vampires I have
known’.37
Like a vampire, the Flora Goforth of the short story periodically draws
on new blood, a youthful gaggle of sycophants shipped to her island retreat
on the Divina Costiera, ostensibly to soften the blow of so many of her
lifelong acquaintances dying. The prospect of death is so unimaginable
that the old woman allows herself to be courted by youth, even though she
has immured herself in a fortress intended to deter unsolicited visitors. In
the play, a pack of dogs, or ‘lupos’ (wolves) as they are described, handled
by the brutal watchman, Rudy, helps to create a menacing world where
non-conformists face attack; it is all strongly reminiscent of Gutman’s
gratuitous violence in Camino Real, just a female version of the fascism
normally fronted by men.
Indeed, at times, Flora’s island retreat seems to have been constructed
along gender lines. Males are either henchmen, locals employed for their
brutality and quiet loyalty like Rudy, or the impersonators of male writ-
ers who have plagued Flora in the past. When Chris Flanders, a one-time
poet who has shifted his artistic energies into creating mobiles, makes
the perilous and seemingly impossible ascent to Flora’s villas, his mas-
culine endeavours amount to an intrusion and his simple needs (he is
famished) are ignored. The only thing preventing his immediate eviction
is his sexual potential: he is another object of desire, delineated as such by
Flora’s gaze through her field glasses. Since her financially prudent society
marriages, particularly that to Harlon Goforth, Flora only needs men for
sexual renewal – pleasurable in itself but also functional in resisting time
and death. Installed in the pink villa with its numerous images of Cupid,
Chris is granted rest solely to build up his sexual stamina.
Flora Goforth is undoubtedly a loner, an autonomous figure hardened
to a world she senses is trying to exploit her fame and wealth and dismayed
by the approach of death, which has already claimed some of her oldest
female acquaintances. Equally, she relies on other women: Blackie, the
secretary who is helping her record her memoirs, and Connie, the Witch
of Capri – by no means a close friend but called upon to verify Chris’s
background. This triangle is hardly representative of a self-supporting
community of women. Flora plainly expects Connie to leave once she has
supplied the necessary information, the space occupied by the two women
204 Emotional roots
clearly being one of contested egos. Blackie, not part of the original story,
is treated like a dogsbody. The property even has a sophisticated intercom
system to ensure that she can fulfil her vital role as amanuensis.
Williams could have written a very different play in which women
fashion their own refuge and advance the kind of gentleness he had
long admired as a feminine quality. If not a hugely significant political
statement about women’s readiness to withdraw from an unequal world,
this would at least make Flora Goforth a more sympathetic character.
Moreover, her memoirs, overplayed by their author as literature, could
have celebrated her life as a woman struggling against adversity. Instead,
they are a rags-to-riches story of material gain and sexual titillation. Like
Williams’s own memoirs (presciently) at the start of the next decade, they
expose intimate moments that should have been kept private – the embar-
rassing costume ball at Cannes where Flora appeared as Lady Godiva, for
example, or the accounts of nights spent with Alex, her fourth and last
husband and the only one she desired.
There are aspects of Flora’s life to admire but these are usually in rela-
tion to male achievement or are measured by attitudes to age. Thus, when
she survived the Wall Street Crash by investing in utilities, Flora drew on
the kind of instinct she knows is exceptional or unheard of in women.
This shrewdness, further evidence of her ability to rise from inauspicious
beginnings – ‘Hell, I was born between a swamp and the wrong side of
the tracks in One Street, Georgia’  – is not just a means of protecting
her fortune but, more negatively, a principle for dealing with people in
any context.38 As she warns Chris, ‘I give away nothing, I sell and buy
in my life, and I’ve always wound up with a profit, one way or another’
(p. 200). Her paranoia about being robbed (she dismisses some of her
staff, thinking the island has been ‘pillaged’, p. 208) indicates that she
clings unreasonably to material possessions at a time when, nearing death,
she should be thinking about relinquishing them. Even Flora’s seemingly
positive comment attacking the worship of youth in America, ‘this idea
that at a certain age a woman ought to resign herself to being a sweet old
thing in a rocker’ (p. 196), fails as a declaration of older women’s abilities
to lead vital, fulfilling lives because it is immediately illustrated with an
example of a recent sexual encounter with a young man. The unjust rejec-
tion of older women can only be opposed by sex, preferably by outlasting
a young partner, rather than by an enduring achievement.
Independent and strong, Flora almost revels in abusing what she under-
stands as a callow femininity. She enjoys labelling herself the ‘swamp-bitch’
(p. 197) and, whilst she repeats her husband Alex’s convenient philosophy
 Recording women’s history? 205
that evil is not part of a person’s make-up but ‘a mean intruder’ (p. 198),
there is no pretence of kindness in her behaviour. This is left to Blackie.
Unlike the much bullied Miss Foxhill in Suddenly Last Summer, a secre-
tary who merely heightens Mrs Venable’s unreasonable authority, Blackie
embodies a humanity diametrically opposed to Flora’s hardheartedness.
It is she who makes a connection with Chris Flanders and who shares a
potentially romantic tableau with him at play’s end.
Not part of the original story, Blackie performs a crucial role of medi-
ation in Milk Train which has often been overlooked. She is unques-
tionably at her mistress’s beck and call, expected to be available to take
dictation at all hours of the day and night, but Blackie has principles that
she is not frightened to voice. She frequently intervenes on Chris’s behalf,
making every effort to provide him with food, even though no author-
ization has been given to unlock the ‘bank vault’ (p. 176) that is Mrs
Goforth’s kitchen. Blackie will not be party to stealing and searching his
bag and she respectfully refers to Chris as ‘the visitor’, not ‘the beatnik
trespasser’ (p. 157). In addition, she encourages Mrs Goforth to display his
mobiles as works of art rather than accept them as bribes.
Just as he hardens Mrs Goforth’s image from ‘Man Bring This Up
Road’, so Williams also mellows the hostile atmosphere on the island
through Blackie’s altruism. Her treatment of Chris highlights his import-
ance as an agent in Mrs Goforth’s conveyance to the next world (he has
been assigned the symbolic roles of Christ, St Christopher, Bodhisattva),
and also invites an alternative reading of womanhood. Blackie is all that
Mrs Goforth is not. She desires escape from an island that is Flora’s last
retreat, onto which the dying woman has projected a megalomania bor-
dering on a God delusion; she is protective of the memory of her only
husband and she cannot entertain the idea of casual lovers. Mrs Goforth
attributes her secretary’s firm morals to a privileged Vassar College
education, but Blackie’s monogamy comes to seem dignified rather than
self-righteous in relation to the former’s empty and desperate sexuality.
So Blackie’s puritanism is quickly glossed over, lost amidst the qualities
that set her apart from Flora Goforth and which implicitly question the
latter’s right to be a woman:
C HRIS … You’re the kindest person I’ve met in a long, long time …
BLAC K IE (drawing a sheet over him) This sort of thing is just automatic in
women. (p. 156)
Blackie knows full well that consideration for others is not ‘automatic’ in
her employer, and Chris hints that it is equally not a reflex response in
206 Emotional roots
the women he normally encounters: a coterie of rich but bitter widows on
whom death has stolen up.
As Michael Paller points out, this is not to be a play in which sex-
ual desire presents solutions, or even in which the desirer’s advances will
be reciprocated.39 Williams largely bypasses the power struggle that saw
Jimmy Dobyne evicted from the island in ‘Man Bring This Up Road’ as a
direct consequence of his refusal to fulfil Mrs Goforth’s sexual demands.
Instead, Milk Train more gently dips into the resignation of its protag-
onist who orders Chris to leave because his philosophizing has exhausted
her, only to retract this when blood stains the tissue she presses to her
mouth. At her least powerful – the expensive rings drawn from her fin-
gers by Chris  – Mrs Goforth is, of course, most sympathetic  – more
human than monster and more simply a human being than a specific
gender.
Paller’s reading of the play is so persuasive because it is grounded in
Eastern philosophy. He contends that we should ditch Aristotle’s premise
of conflict and accept that the play’s long and static speeches are typical
of Nō theatre, a form that Williams gained some familiarity with in his
friendship with the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. According to Paller,
Williams not only imported the Kabuki stage assistants but gave the
drama the Buddhist tenets normally underpinning Nō. This is why the
play has been so misunderstood by both audiences and critics. To view
its action as containing ‘the message of Zen – rejection of personal ego
and all earthly conflict and craving’ – as Paller reminds us, a consolatory
message for Williams at the time of Frank Merlo’s terminal cancer – is to
accept a different attitude to both sex and materialism.40 Williams was
not only writing a new kind of play, but also revising his views on prepar-
ing for death.
Of course, this would seem to detract from the whole issue of gender
and gender-appropriate behaviour, but Paller does not entirely overlook
this. The play stresses the ‘egotistical nature of desire’, one of its ‘gro-
tesque elements’, and this might be enhanced, Paller argues, by a male
actor playing Flora (also known as Sissy).41 He cites the example of Rupert
Everett taking the part in Glasgow and London only to then concede that
this kind of role change can (and did in the eyes of the reviewers) des-
cend into camp. He also refers us to Williams’s interest in Kabuki female
impersonators and the possibility of a more serious role reversal: making
Chris a woman and Sissy a man reconfigures the drama as ‘a gentle, artis-
tic woman nurturing a deeply pained man mired in spiritual crisis’, along
the lines of Hannah and Shannon in Iguana.42
 Recording women’s history? 207
In this sense, gender has become fluid and, in the terminology of queer
theory, is a performance, further highlighted by the bizarre costumes
donned by Flora and Connie. But, if Flora/Sissy and Chris are so freely
drawn that traditional male and female characteristics can be exchanged,
we cannot ignore the typicality of the widow and her survival instincts
within the Williams canon. Nor, if we credit Williams with knowledge of
the history of Kabuki, can we suggest that the question of female perform-
ance and desire is negligible. The very first performers (Kabuki has always
encompassed dance and music as well as drama) in the seventeenth cen-
tury were women, many of whom were prostitutes who attracted so much
attention from their male audience that they were eventually banned.
Williams’s most concentrated experiment in the Japanese form is a play
in which genders cannot plausibly be switched. The two-scene The Day
on Which a Man Dies (probably written in 1960 but not produced until
2008), actually labelled ‘An Occidental Noh Play’, sets the dilemma of
women’s legal claims against the crisis of the male artist struggling with a
new, increasingly anarchic technique of painting and the prospect of sui-
cide in a culture that approves it as a practical course of action. The male/
female split is signalled in the mise-en-scène. The set consists of two ori-
ginally identical hotel rooms: one, the woman’s, still neatly ordered; the
other, the man’s, transformed into a messy artist’s studio – a place of chaos
and some violence, reflected in the numerous canvases stacked against the
walls ‘that seem to utter panicky cries’.43 The aggression of the man (both
characters are referred to generically) is further emphasized by his use of a
spray-gun, the creative tool/weapon used in the latest, combative phase of
his art: ‘He is breathing as heavily as if he had been in fierce physical combat
with the demon inhabiting the canvas beneath’ (p. 16). The artist appears
out of control, unable to accept that the hotel room is not actually his
studio and tormented by an artistic form that is both a symptom of his
incipient madness and also a catalyst for further despair. Conversely, the
woman is, as the stage directions repeatedly indicate, serene and self-
possessed, even ‘beautiful, cool: a queen’ (p. 24) at one point in their dispute
over her influence on his talent.
However, the self-control is an attempt to compensate for her actual
powerlessness. The plot of the play is the deterioration of an artist to a
point where suicide, apparently contemplated previously, either singly or
as part of a joint pact, suddenly becomes inviting. Simultaneously, the
woman is trying to establish her rights based on the longevity of their rela-
tionship, employing a Japanese law student known as the Oriental (also
with other roles as the First Stage Assistant and chorus in the spirit of
208 Emotional roots
Noh) to press her claims. When this proves futile, she resolves to become
pregnant. This is a decision made in isolation, ironically at a point after
the audience has witnessed the man imbibing Lysol, a deadly disinfect-
ant when drunk neat. Thus creation, or at least the decision to permit
insemination, runs counter to self-destruction, just as the woman’s desire
is reignited only to be stifled by death.
At her most angry and frustrated, the woman taunts her lover with his
failure to kill himself; he can cut up his canvases but lacks the nerve to
cut his throat. In her eyes, the eleven years that they have been together
amount to a sacrifice that should be handsomely rewarded, for her life
has been subordinated to his artistry. She is in no doubt that, without
him, she could have forged ‘a very good life … with independence, with
self-respect, with a little happiness, even’ (p. 37). This resentment at being
used is also revealed in her fear that the man resorts to Japanese prosti-
tutes, as if her fidelity (also in doubt because she has casual lovers), and
women’s loyalty generally, matters little. Not only will he fail to grant her
any financial recognition, but he will also not remain monogamous.
The woman’s accusations remain unproven within the course of the play.
Her claim on him is nullified by his marriage to a woman who has been
institutionalized. The man explains that he cannot, legally, divorce his
insane wife; the woman contends that he is using Catholicism as an excuse
when he is really an atheist. The resulting impasse seems to suggest that they
have used each other, that their relationship has become one of conveni-
ence, hope and self-interest on both sides. Certainly, the woman’s decision
to conceive is not made out of love or a burning desire for motherhood.
There is a knowingness about the woman which again offsets her lack
of status. Like the oriental chorus, she is privileged with foresight and
knows that the man will initiate reconciliation after their rancorous
exchanges come to an end before the close of the first scene. We sus-
pect that the man backs down because prolonged arguments are a dis-
traction, a further drain on his creativity, and because he is eager to prove
he can still be a lover. In truth, the woman’s presence has castrated him,
rendering him sexually impotent and sapping his artistic energies. The
spray-gun, an obvious substitute for the detumescent phallus, introduces
a false note: it denotes neither sexual nor artistic power and is alien to
Japanese art. Perhaps Williams wishes to suggest the readiness with which
Americans take up arms in place of dialogue and culture, but, if this is to
be a political point, it seems still more muted than the handful of refer-
ences to unjust incursions into another country in the play that deals with
a broadly similar subject matter, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969).
 Recording women’s history? 209
Initially, the man redirects the gun to the woman’s dress, making her
both a target for his frustration and a new canvas that he wants to imprint.
Marking her with red paint confirms the boldness of his new venture whilst
also recognizing the danger she presents. Yet both canvas and woman will
be rejected in favour of death. Unlike Vee Talbot in Orpheus Descending,
who is able to make ‘some beauty out of this dark country’ from a succes-
sion of visions, the man’s inspiration has dried up.44 Just before he swal-
lows the Lysol, he is pathetically whistling for his lost visions ‘as if they were
dogs’ (The Day … Dies, p. 40) that he can round up, finally understanding
that a painter reliant on a spray-gun is not a bona fide artist.
The familiar interdependence of sexual and creative urges is only
too apparent, but the man has sought to compartmentalize his life.
Unsurprisingly, he guards the privacy of his ‘studio’ while using the wom-
an’s room as storage space for his baggage, literal and emotional. The set,
then, suggests both the professional/private division in his life and, in
Freudian terms, the imbalance of his id and superego (male and female
here), though it is through his work rather than his sexual relations that
liberation from repression is pursued.
Williams does not use the expressionistic devices that marked his earl-
ier efforts at psychological realism in A Streetcar Named Desire. The man’s
state of mind is partly explained by the chorus, particularly the way it has
been influenced by Japanese philosophy, but, in any case, the play does
not attempt to explore the root causes of the man’s madness and creative
stasis. The past is not relived in the present; the present is a given, a tem-
porary staging post before death can be admitted as something reassur-
ingly unexceptional. The title expresses this matter-of-factly, at the same
time giving the man sovereignty as protagonist and taker of his own life.
Consistent with Japanese cultural assumptions, this, nevertheless, con-
ceals the significance of the woman. Tied to the man’s fortunes for so
long, the woman makes the final part of the play her own. The choices
she makes show that she will not honour the man’s memory blindly or
be cowed by nature with its indifference to death. By this point, we have
already been told about her Mediterranean island upbringing and so it
comes as little surprise that her mourning is both dignified and moving.
However, the stage directions inform us that she makes only ‘token’ (p. 45)
gestures and that her thoughts are impenetrable; the Oriental explains
that her crying is interrupted to apply make-up, as if grief cannot be
allowed to intrude for too long.
In a seemingly spontaneous reflection, the Oriental remarks in the
second scene: ‘I suppose this play is really about the difference between the
210 Emotional roots
Oriental and Occidental forms of self-destruction’ (p. 39). Whilst he has
not taken the trouble to learn Japanese (the woman jokes that the man can
only say ‘sayonara’ because it is the title of a film), the man has assimilated
this foreign culture’s attitude to suicide and he has the stage assistant to
facilitate his final actions. The ritual that follows the drinking of the Lysol
unites oriental art and its performance with the woman: the man breaks
through screens bearing ever larger images of the woman’s naked body.
Though he struggles with the last – a representation some three times her
actual size – he finally penetrates her, symbolically completing the sexual
act that he has lately found so difficult.45 Thus, the woman’s image, her
position as partner and/or adversary, is never fully removed from the East/
West debate.
Williams almost certainly draws on his autobiography in The Day on
Which a Man Dies: the influence of Yukio Mishima, his own experi-
ments with new dramatic forms and, once again, the protracted sparring
with Frank Merlo. Then there is also the life and work of the American
painter Jackson Pollock, an acquaintance since their first meeting in
Provincetown in 1940, and his wife Lee Krasner. However, none of this
properly explains Williams’s decision to foreground heterosexual tensions
within a vehicle outwardly bridging Japanese and Western dramatic con-
ventions and about the failure of new artistic styles. For, whilst the play-
wright barely raises the profile of women beyond a localized relationship
in which, at best, ‘love is need’ (p. 42), he is at pains to retain lines of
sexual difference and the woman’s dignity, even as she presses her self-
interested claims so desperately. She is his superior and outlasts him.
The question of women’s ability to survive without men is not addressed
at the conclusion of this play, though perhaps it is instructive to look at the
end of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel where the character Miriam, doubtful
of her capacity to mourn the death of her husband Mark, must neverthe-
less concede that ‘I have no plans. I have nowhere to go.’ 46 The Oriental
directs us to observe the woman, but it is only to note the simultaneity of
her truthfulness and simplicity and the fact that she is unmoved by the
indifference of the world. Unlike the man, she clings to a Western view of
the sacredness of life and the cathartic benefits of mourning.

‘R e a l’ wom e n a n d t h e p ol i t ic s of a n dro g y n y
Z EL DA I think that to write well about women, there’s got to be that, a part of
that, in the writer, oh, not too much, not so much that he flits about like a –
S C OTT Fairy?47
 ‘Real’ women and the politics of androgyny 211
For all her self-control, the woman in The Day on Which a Man Dies has
merely occupied a space around the all-consuming artist, been beholden
to his talent and its failings. She is at least more visible than the man’s
wife, though, who exists as an absence, a glib and convenient reason for the
man’s inability to commit. We have already seen that several of Williams’s
later plays – Something Cloudy, Something Clear, Vieux Carré – return to
earlier periods in the writer’s life through a non-chronological intersect-
ing of memory scenes peopled by the ghostly creations approximating to
real figures. Philip Kolin has shown that this reveals a postmodern sens-
ibility in which structure and landscape are constantly shifting and in
which identity also becomes remarkably fluid.48 This is no less true of
Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), Williams’s last Broadway play, about
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though the shadows of Williams and Rose
lurk behind the spectral Fitzgeralds  – as they seem to do in any work
touching on madness – this drama uses a fictional visit by Scott to the
mental asylum in North Carolina, where Zelda spent the final years of
her life before dying in a fire, as a loose framework for the discussion of
several relationships. The circumstances which have brought Scott from a
balmier Hollywood (unprepared in the attire of the title) and those which
seem to impinge on the literary reputations of both husband and wife
are of immediate concern. Zelda’s affair with a French aviator, Edouard,
and the triangle of Scott, Zelda and Ernest Hemingway are subsequently
explored in scenes that transform the asylum setting, recreating a party
on its lawn or adding a hotel room downstage.
The interplay of memory land/dreamscapes corresponds to an indis-
tinctness of character. These are ghosts, admittedly, but finding a central
consciousness for the play is problematic. Scott is the character exhausted
from his journey and waiting for his wife to appear at the start, and he
is the figure stumbling, reaching out, asking ‘a silent question’ (Clothes,
p. 280) with his eyes at its conclusion; his words end the play and yet
the final word is ‘Zelda’ (ibid.). Her purported remission is his reason
for being there, and her scene in the hotel Reve Bleu at the start of the
second act partly documents her life away from Scott, as if she is escaping
his presence to become the central character. Such freedom is not easy,
however. When Edouard tells her that his passion for flight will always
take him away from her, Zelda admits, metatheatrically, that ‘I must
resume the part created for me. Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (p. 248). Zelda is
Scott’s creation, the monument he will build with ‘his carefully arranged
words’ (ibid.). Earlier, Zelda accuses him of wanting ‘to absorb and devour’
(p. 215, Williams’s italics), as if her separateness, a threat, cannot be
212 Emotional roots
allowed to continue. Professionally jealous, Scott quashes Zelda’s creativ-
ity and, when she objects, he blames it on her paranoia, a state of agita-
tion that needs to be controlled by the asylum more than ever. So Zelda is
an instance of feminine madness locked away and silenced to allow Scott
his sovereignty, to permit male reason to prevail. Even Edouard seems to
want to refuse Zelda freedom of expression, trying unsuccessfully to hush
up their sex because her wild cries disturb him personally as much as they
betray the adultery.
Zelda is more than an inconvenient artistic impulse, though. She, or
the femininity she embodies, creeps into Scott’s writing, not as the tribute
referred to earlier but in the sketching of credible female characters, in style
itself. Scott can write convincingly about women because he has Zelda as a
model and, more importantly, because there is something feminine in him,
extending from his girlish good looks to the control and poise of his prose.
Zelda can barely comprehend it – not the writing itself but the manner in
which it is achieved. She tells Edouard: ‘It is controlled – desperately. Very
beautifully, often … sometimes classic’ (p. 247). Her pauses and ellipses
communicate its rarefied quality, her inability to account for its origin or
touch its beauty. Scott has already told one of his friends, Gerald Murphy,
that Zelda’s own writing, the novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), uses material
similar to his own that makes it ‘a beautiful but cloudy, indistinct mirror’
(p. 209) of Tender is the Night.
Scott’s effeminacy, increasingly his androgyny, becomes more of an issue
in the second half of act two, scene one. As if to reintroduce the subject,
an exotically camp black entertainer from the Moulin Rouge performs at
a party where Scott seems initially preoccupied with the death of Joseph
Conrad, ‘our only writer with a great tragic sense’ (p. 256), and Zelda is
searching for Edouard, unperturbed by the impression she could be creat-
ing (her affair is by now an open secret but Scott is still anxious to keep it
private). The scene narrows to a duologue between Scott and Hemingway
after the former has questioned the sexual preference of the entertainer.
Both writers are homophobic but drawn to each other. Whilst Hemingway
would never write, or conceive of writing, like Fitzgerald with his ‘duality
of gender’ (p. 268), he has found his fellow writer’s androgyny beguilingly
attractive.49 Recalling a trip through France on which Scott caught pneu-
monia, Hemingway is quick to mention the way that Scott’s appearance
and manner suddenly suggested a ‘touchingly vulnerable’ (Clothes, p. 270)
girl. His delicate, feminine features ‘solicited attention’ (ibid.) in ways which
proved disturbing rather than repulsive.
 ‘Real’ women and the politics of androgyny 213
Inevitably, Scott’s remembered vulnerability has created a correspond-
ing exposure of Hemingway simply through its articulation. His ambiva-
lence towards Scott and his own behaviour means that he is reluctant
to analyse anything, even privately. Perhaps Hemingway’s confusion is
compounded by Fitzgerald’s perceived youth, his immaturity, his girlish-
ness rather than his womanliness. When accused of writing about gay
relationships in his stories, Hemingway responds that ‘it’s my profession
to observe and interpret all kinds of human relations’ (p. 271); he seem-
ingly will not equate his work, ironically remembered for its swaggering
masculinity, with private homoerotic moments in his life.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway have ousted Zelda, appropriating her gen-
der in the process. Both have hated her at different times, but, whilst
Hemingway just wants to dismiss her, Fitzgerald can never finally let her
go. By the end of the scene, after the real solitariness of Hemingway’s life
is exposed, Scott is calling for her, seeking a few moments alone with her
and restating that she is ‘still Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’ (p. 279). He wants
to believe that she is sane and, for him, a measure of that sanity is making
her wear his identity.
The question of androgyny, raised by both Zelda and Hemingway,
was an important one for Williams himself. In an interview with Jeanne
Fayard in 1971, he stated that ‘the androgynous is the truest human
being’, a mythic ideal that always escapes us.50 A volume of his poetry
is entitled Androgyne Mon Amour (1977), and, in I Rise in Flame, Cried
the Phoenix, his play about the death of D. H. Lawrence, he shows the
writer’s characteristically split personality in a war with itself, the mas-
culine fighting back against the negatively construed feminine: ‘I’ve still
got a bit of the male left in me and that’s the part that I’m going to meet
death with.’51 Williams’s veneration of Lawrence is tempered by a realiza-
tion that he had unacceptable views of women’s subservience, one of the
‘tangent obsessions’ that ‘distorted’ his work.52 As Lawrence strives to face
the end of his life with what he regards as dignity, he brushes aside the
women present, his wife Frieda and Bertha (Dorothy Brett), in the same
way that he has dismissed and insulted them thus far.
The fictional Lawrence’s androgyny is clearly different in spirit to that
of the fictional Fitzgerald. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald still wants control, if
chiefly to maintain the artist’s ego, and it would appear that Williams’s
version of androgyny starts from a male rather than a female base, too.
The desired androgyne is always a male with female characteristics rather
than the other way round. When he refers, in the interview comment at
214 Emotional roots
the start of this chapter, to women being his ‘emotional root’, Williams
stereotypically assigns feelings to the feminine, so that gender hierarchies
are bound to emerge. If not as apparently simplistic as the ‘women com-
fort you in winter’ and ‘Men are made of rock and thunder’53 binary of
his poem ‘Winter Smoke is Blue and Bitter’, it would at least appear that
the female’s incorporation in the male attains little more than an emo-
tional level, the surprising ‘tenderness’ (Clothes, p. 270) of Hemingway.
Androgyny will not be a universal ideal if the feminine serves the mas-
culine, if, as with Fitzgerald, it merely enhances both attractiveness and
talent.
Finally ushered back through the imposing iron gates of the asylum,
Zelda Fitzgerald is dignified in her determined break with past assump-
tions: ‘I’m not your book! Anymore!’ (p. 280). Her resolve compares
favourably (and ironically) with Scott’s uneven responses, his angry
­declaration one minute that their marriage has been a ‘monumental error’
(p. 277) and his need to establish a ‘covenant with the past’ (p. 280) the
next. It is Zelda who speaks of both the convergence and divergence of
insanity and creativity, by first telling us early on that Scott also occu-
pies a madhouse, Hollywood; and then later explaining that of the two
avenues of egress from the inexorably dull course of our existence – ‘we
escape into madness or into acts of creation’ (p. 274) – one has been denied
her by a man: Scott.
In aiming to ‘penetrate into character more deeply’ (p. 204, so import-
ant that the intention is explained in both an ‘Author’s Note’ and the
description of the set), Williams has prioritized Zelda’s situation as one of
a series of withheld freedoms: the ability to leave the asylum, to compete
with male authors, even to enjoy a relationship with her lover that holds
something more than the need for evasion. Peter L. Hays regards this as
a logical extension of Williams’s previous treatment of women: ‘Given
Williams’s compassion for abused or oppressed women, the main thrust
of the play is sympathy for Zelda.’54 Annette Saddik goes further, arguing
that Williams’s Zelda amounts to no less than a celebration of ‘the fire of
the madwoman – the uncontrollable, the unstable, the chaotic, the play-
ful, all that would disrupt and disorient the fantasy of disciplined mascu-
linity’.55 Whatever power or presence she possesses, we should remember
that Williams has taken considerable liberties with his biographical
sources, that Zelda is a creation. The real Fitzgerald visited Zelda more
often than is implied in the play, took her away for family holidays when
possible, and she consistently expressed her gratitude for his care in her
letters.56 Almost certainly, in spite of the ‘enormous documentation’ that
 Occupying positions 215
had been required in its preparation, Williams could not help but skew
some of the material towards his own relationship with his institutional-
ized sister.57

Occ u p y i ng p o s i t ions
I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren’t prepared to
occupy a position.58
Zelda joins a sizeable list of female characters broken in mind and spirit,
holding our attention with nuggets of philosophy and shimmering poetic
truth after their passing. We think of the prominent ones in the canon –
Laura Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, Alma Winemiller, Catharine Holly –
but also those who exit, or linger in, their dramatic and narrative worlds
more understatedly, more prosaically, like Heavenly Critchfield, Grace
Lancaster, Bertha (Hello from Bertha), Willie (This Property is Condemned ),
Edith Jelkes (‘The Night of the Iguana’) and the mothering Rachel (‘The
Vine’). In spite of hardship, dependence on ‘the crust of humility’, few are
so insignificant that their influence has been unfelt; few make us indiffer-
ent to their projected futures.59 By contrast, the Hopperesque woman in
Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen … only disappears on a flight
of fancy, growing old and alone in an imagined life in a hotel by the sea
before returning to her equally lonely city existence and the man from
whom she seems to have become disconnected.
Williams understood the potential for cruelty within women  – the
tyranny of mothers steadfastly protective of their sons or mindful of the
short lease of their daughters’ youths, the resentful landladies patrolling
prison houses for the down-at-heel, the cutting and prudish spinsters
intent on spreading their own misery. Equally, he comprehended their
many acts of tenderness with each other and the men who, usually in the
short term, become the agents of their rejuvenation. Though surrounded
by those who ultimately let her down (her own husband, Tom and the
gentleman caller), Amanda Wingfield, Williams is anxious to stress in the
character notes for The Glass Menagerie, has ‘endurance’, ‘a kind of heroism’,
‘tenderness in her slight person’ as well as the more obvious absurdity and
confusion.60
There are stereotypes and recurring patterns, characters who possess a
reductive one-dimensionality or who, stopping short of impersonation,
assume their places in relationships that could equally well be same-
sex, where the pragmatics of survival make feminist politics secondary.
There are protean women like Maggie Pollitt: child-like but aware that
216 Emotional roots
men desire their womanly figures; a ruthless survivor who boasts of her
transforming cruelty ‘almost tenderly’.61 There are those with an unenvi-
able track-record of personal misery like Leona in Small Craft Warnings
who longs for her heart to be able to expel the romantic disappointments
of her lifetime like just so much undigested food, who is strong but leading
‘a derelict kind of existence’.62
In liberating women from their traditional positions as objects of desire
and making them would-be consumers of the male image, Williams has
isolated their womanhood, narrowed its focus to a point where wider con-
trols and inequalities and, by contrast, progress in subverting patriarchal
authority, lose some of their immediate relevance. In other words, their
new-found freedom of expression proudly serves sexual ends and does not
significantly affect or call into question a wider social condition. Williams
only presents us with fragments – of women’s madness, their hypochon-
dria, their stunted growth, their reassuring and fascinating amplitude,
their ability to boss and their willingness to be bossed  – not a more
consistent, joined-up sense of evolution.
The women considered in this chapter, a heterogeneous mix reflective
of societal attitudes to women and sex at different points in the twentieth
century, have no obvious desire to bring about social change, no affiliation
with women’s liberation. Though their presence is disproportionately
great and felt continually, their responses are mainly reactive, working
with and not against marriage, heterosexual desire and traditional work
patterns. As a consequence, no doubt, disappointment, ostracism and
death underscore their leave-takings.