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A Streetcar Named Desire:
Tennessee Williams’ Life and Influence
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams III, was one of the more prominent playwrights of the 20th Century. He was born March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, and spent 53 years of his life actively contributing to the literary world. He lived all over the South in his youth, including Knoxville, Tennessee, which is when he changed his name. In 1939 Williams moved to New Orleans which would be the setting for one of his most well-known works, Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams’ family influenced his writing, as well as his changing social status and environment when he was a child, and this influence reflected through the characters of Stanley, Blanche, and Stella (Boxill 2).
Williams’ father, Cornelius Williams, was a traveling salesman who was also a violent alcoholic. In A Streetcar Named Desire Stanley Kowalski personifies Cornelius Williams through his drunken and brutish behavior. Elia Kazan, directed the award-winning 1947 screenplay, in which Marlon Brando portrayed Stanley: “There’s something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the stone age, bearing raw meat home from the kill in the jungle” (Williams 72). In his introduction, Williams describes how writing A Streetcar Named Desire healed him:
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable (3).
In addition to Cornelius Williams’ influence for Stanley’s character, Williams’ best friend and coworker’s name was Stanley Kowalski. The friend of Williams was also attractive to women.
Williams’ mother, Edwina, was reportedly “repressed and genteel, very much the southern belle in her youth” (Baym 2334). Alcoholic rage was prevalent in Williams’ youth, and as a drunken Stanley would beat Stella, Cornelius would beat Edwina. As a result, Williams suffered and would turn to his older, emotionally fragile sister, Rose. Edwina inspired both female characters of Blanche and Stella--Stella, the nurturing co-dependent, enabling wife, and Blanche, who bounced back and forth between fantasy and reality. Rose was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age and ultimately institutionalized. Shortly after being committed, her parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy. Tennessee never forgave his parents (2334), nor did he forgive himself. He suffered from paranoia, guilt, and depression (Eisen).
Williams endured a painful childhood with the emotional loss of support from his sister and damaging atmosphere of living with an alcoholic. In addition to the dysfunction in his family, “the decline of the Williams family from prominence among the early settlers of Tennessee mirrors the fate of the South. The playwright’s own upbringing seemed to him a still greater fall” (Boxill 2). Writing saved Tennessee from plunging into madness and always seemed to reflect “[the] sadness of life inherent in the course of eroding time…” (3). Blanche’s character represented Tennessee’s fall from the nostalgic Old South, such as when the reader learns that there is no longer a Belle Reve. His own grandfather “squandered the family fortune in unsuccessful campaigns for governor, and the old Williams residence in Knoxville was turned into an orphanage” (7).
According to critic Harold Bloom, A Streetcar Named Desire “is the secret dynamic of what is surely Williams's masterwork… It is, inevitably, more remarkable on the stage than in the study, but the fusion of Williams's lyrical and dramatic talents in it has prevailed over time, at least so far” (Bloom). He further illustrates “that Blanche's only strengths are ‘nostalgia and hope,’ that she is the desperate exceptional woman,’ and that her fall is a parable, rather than an isolated squalor” (Bloom). Blanche demonstrates her remarkable strengths in her confrontation to Stella about Stanley:
Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night!--you call it--this party of apes! Somebody growls--some creature snatches at something--the fight is on! God! Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella--my sister--there has been some progress since then! Such things as art--as poetry and music--such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching. . . . Don't--don't hang back with the brutes! (Williams).
Williams died February 24, 1983, at the age of 71. Despite his dysfunctional upbringing, he was able to express, with poetic style, the realism which many Americans would find. Williams’ timeless artistry speaks to everyone when he speaks of “compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims” (Williams 4).
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. “Tennessee Williams: 1911-1983.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 2008. 2334-2336.
Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams. Ed. Harold Bloom Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 1-8. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter and Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999. 1-8. Literature Resource Center. Gale. 20 Nov. 2008
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=sier28590.
Boxill, Roger. Modern Dramatists: Tennessee Williams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc. 1987. 2-20.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1975. 1-4, 72.
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