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Chapter One The Arbiter of Outcasts: An Introduction to Tennessee Williams I deal with the decadence of the South. I don't ever deal with the decadence of the North. It's too disgusting. But I'm writing about a South that is fast becoming a memory. (Williams, qtd. in Haller 60) * * * You can't mix sex and religion...but you can always write safely about mothers. (Williams, qtd. in Rasky 28) * * * ...plays in the tragic tradition offer us a view of certain moral values in violent juxtaposition. (Introduction to The Rose Tattoo 151) Although much less has been written about Tennessee Williams than about some other American playwrights, a fairly broad range of works is available to the scholar/researcher. That range has been increased by two recent events which have renewed interest in Williams's work. The first is the death in 1996 of Maria St. Just, who controlled the late playwright's papers1. The second is the publication, in that same year, of the first volume of Lyle Leverich's two-volume biography, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. Both events represent access to information about this playwright that has, until recently, been unavailable to scholars--an influx of so much new information that a reexamination of Williams's work is not only possible, but necessary. Of the existing scholarship the most thorough is Leverich's book. The first volume of Tom follows the fortunes of the Williams family for half a century, from 1900 to 1945. As Williams's official biographer, Leverich has been the only scholar to gain access to the playwright's notes and papers held by St. Just 2. Leverich is presently working on Volume II of Tom (originally planned for publication in 1997), with funding from a Guggenheim Foundation grant. That volume is supposed to trace Williams's life and work from the opening of his first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie, to his death in 1983. Harry Rasky's 1986 book, Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation, is a personalized and somewhat eccentric account of Williams's life. This work contains many previously unpublished and otherwise unavailable photographs of Williams in Key West and in New Orleans. While Rasky's anecdotes frequently focus on himself, rather than his subject, he occasionally sets aside his authorial voice and presents historically valuable block quotes from Williams. Yet another anecdote-based account of the playwright's life comes from his mother, Edwina Dakin Williams. Her Remember Me to Tom is a narrative about the youth and career of Tennessee Williams. The book presents stories told by the playwright's mother to Lucy Freeman, and includes some passages indicating Tennessee Williams's attitudes toward religion. Also included is a considerable collection of correspondence--from the playwright to his mother and brother, from his grandfather, and to and from several agents and critics. A very thorough critical work is Judith Thompson's 1989 book, Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. Thompson closely examines Williams's experiment with what the playwright calls his "memory play," and provides a consistent and clear outline of Williams's memory play structure3. She also examines the symbolism in his major plays, grouping them into religious, mythological, and existential symbols and imagery. Within her outline and examination, Thompson provides a clear and concise analysis of the characters in Williams's major plays. Published a year before Thompson's work, Roger Boxill's Tennessee Williams is an examination of the life and major works of the playwright. Using "new critical" methods, the critics in this collection provide textual analyses of selected Williams plays. The limitations of this text are those imposed by Boxill's version of new criticism, which insists upon examination of texts with minimal consideration of the author's biography or subsequent work. Nicholas Pagan's Rethinking Literary Biography: A Postmodern Approach to Tennessee Williams is the opposite of Boxill's book. In the spirit and style of postmodernism, Pagan delves into the symbolism and biographical significance of Williams's characters. Of particular note is his coverage of Camino Real, Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Pagan argues that characters such as Blanche DuBois are expressed beyond the play in which they appear, founding "a space of writing in which Tennessee Williams himself can be seen as living in a country of the blue, where he laments to the melancholy sound of the blues musicians" (126). Although Pagan appears well acquainted with Williams's critics, he admits his work is more concerned with the "connection between texts and author" (11) than with relationship between Williams's plays and the critical commentary on them. Published in 1996, George Crandell's The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams divides the playwright's life and work into three time periods: "From Catastrophe to Success (1940-1949)," "Dramatic Diversity (1950-1962)," and "Too Personal (1963-1982)." The focus of this book is the evolution of Williams's writing and production styles. Edited by Matthew C. Roudané, The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams was published in 1997 and contains 15 essays by Williams scholars. This collection is organized chronologically; the first essays deal with Williams's early work and later essays comment on the evolution of his poetry, prose, and plays. Included in this work are essays by scholars whose longer works appear in this review of literature--Allean Hale, Albert J. Devlin, and Nancy Tischler--as well as scholars whose other essays are cited in this dissertation. The most recent biographical/critical work on Tennessee Williams is Allean Hale's introduction to the playwright's recently-discovered play, Not About Nightingales. Along with Tischler, Devlin, and Kenneth Holditch, Hale is among the most frequently cited Williams scholars. Williams's brother, Dakin, is a resource that, although not bound by St. Just's restrictions, has remained largely untapped. According to Dakin, his book, Nails of Protest: A Critical Comparison of Modern Protestant and Catholic Beliefs, was extremely influential in the playwright's conversion to Catholicism. Nails of Protest is a polemic, a criticism of Protestantism that Dakin generated while studying law and church history. "I have always believed that my brother was murdered," Dakin Williams told me in a personal interview. Because of this belief, he has produced a web page on the internet "to collect credible testimony and other evidence about the murder of the late great American author" (Dakin Williams, web page 1). This page includes transcripts, medical examiner's reports, and other documents which Dakin claims support his theory that his brother was murdered by two individuals whom he calls "Epstein and The Lady" (Dakin Williams, web page 2). Searching the internet and texts relative to Williams's death, I find no other individuals who claim that the playwright was murdered. Dakin Williams's theories are widely regarded as suspect, partly because of his other eccentricities. Mimi Read, writing of the New Orleans Tennessee Williams Festival, offers a particularly colorful description of the playwright's brother: Several, shall we say, quirky souls also showed up, none quirkier than Dakin Williams, Tennessee's crazy-eyed 79-year-old brother, whose fashion statements included ruby and emerald crucifixes and a royal purple sports coat...he broke into Blanche DuBois monologues, delivered in a raving falsetto. In a more official capacity, he sat on panels and gave a dramatic reading of his brother's poetry. Between events, I noticed him carousing at Antoine's and Galatoire's with mesmerized entourages. (1) Dan Isaac has written the forward to a new edition of Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth, expected to appear in 1999 from New Directions Books. A long-time drama critic for the New York performing arts magazine, Back Stage, Isaac has written numerous articles and academic essays on Williams. Nancy Tischler and Albert J. Devlin are collaborating in a study of numerous archives of correspondence to produce a comprehensive annotated collection of Williams's correspondence, scheduled for publication by New Directions Books in 1999. Although Tischler reports that some of the playwright's correspondence is still unavailable, held by individuals who refuse access to academics, this work will be the first comprehensive collection of Williams's other correspondence. The compilation of existing materials and research concerning Williams has been facilitated by the internet, where two outstanding sites bring together criticism, biography, and reviews of the playwright's work. The most comprehensive of these sites is maintained by the English Department at the University of Mississippi; at this site are materials ranging from reviews and criticism of Williams's plays to reproductions of handbills and movie posters. The second site, established by the Department of English at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, focuses on biography and criticism of The Glass Menagerie. Both sites include links to other materials relating to Williams4. Because these two sites are maintained by universities, they are likely to continue to be accessible. Even among these few sources, we find critics who use a variety of critical approaches. My examination of Tennessee Williams's outcast characters will be along Neo-Aristotelian lines, stipulating that the elements of plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle, and melody (the six parts of Aristotle's approach to tragedy in The Poetics) in a text can be examined for persuasive content. From Aristotle's On Rhetoric come the traditional canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, memory, style, and delivery, which I will incorporate as elements that can be examined to reveal Williams's persuasive messages. Aristotle's dramatic taxonomy expresses elements that overlap; for example, plot, invention, arrangement, style, and thought are closely related, and are useful in the context of my examination of Williams's intentions and stage directions. Character is an expression of thought, in that certain characters further one of the playwright's arguments (as an element separate from the plot) and others further the plot without relating to that argument. Diction includes the characters' lines, stage and set directions--indeed, everything the playwright has written; spectacle relates to character action but also includes set design and lighting; and melody includes all sounds, including the melodies of speech. All the above are expressions of the playwright's style and delivery; all can be examined to determine the playwright's purpose, or rhetorical intent. The structure of the playwright's argument may be found within these overlapping foci. Using information from the Poetics and the Rhetoric is entirely appropriate to a study of Tennessee Williams, who wrote frequently on issues of dramatic structure and rhetoric from a classical perspective. In his foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth, for example, Williams addresses his notion of the tragic impulse as a form of Aristotelian catharsis: [I]f there is any truth in the Aristotelian idea that violence is purged by its poetic representation on a stage, then it may be that my cycle of violent plays have [sic] had a moral justification after all. I know that I have felt it. I have always felt a release from the sense of meaninglessness and death when a work of tragic intention has seemed to me to have achieved that intention, even if only approximately, nearly. (xii) In a 1971 interview with Jeane Fayard, Williams states that his work "is always a struggle to achieve cathartic purity" (210). Although I find no other mention of Aristotle's name in Williams's essays, in every essay in which he discusses his poetics, Williams uses many of the Aristotelian terms I have listed, above5. Further, in a 1955 essay for the New York Times, Williams calls his belief in the intimate relationship between playwright and audience a "rhetorical statement" ("Person--To--Person" 78). In his essay, "The Timeless World of a Play," Williams admits his admiration of and desire to imitate the effectiveness of Greek tragedies (the italics are his): If the world of a play did not offer us the occasion to view its characters under that special condition of a world without time, then, indeed, the characters and occurrences of drama would become equally pointless....The classic tragedies of Greece had tremendous nobility. The actors wore great masks, movements were formal, dance-like, and the speeches had an epic quality which doubtless was as removed from the normal conversation of their temporary society as they seem today. Yet they did not seem false to the Greek audiences....And I wonder if this was not because the Greek audiences knew, instinctively or by training, that the created world of a play is removed from that element which makes people little and their emotions fairly inconsequential. (50-51) In a 1960 interview with Edward Morrow, Williams claims his plays are an extension of Greek drama, adding that "the ancient Greek people had the same amount of terror of life" as the modern, violent persons he characterizes (77). Although my examination of the sometimes-violent outcast characters in Williams's plays uses terminology that is primarily Aristotelian, I have chosen a Neo-Aristotelian (rather than Aristotelian) critical approach. Neo-Aristotelian literary criticism allows me to rely on Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics for terminology and, unlike most "new criticism," encourages examination of authorial intent and biography. It does not, however, insist that my examination exist solely within the framework for drama conceived by Aristotle. For additional terminology I turn to the glossary provided by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism. Based on his study of Aristotle and Cicero, Frye's glossary of literary criticism is a reduction of the jargon that twentieth century literary critics use to describe texts in Aristotelian terms. It is a reduction, in that Frye lists only terms that might be confused with their synonyms in other critical modes. One example of this is displacement, a term that critics writing in post-structuralist mode might use to describe an emotion commonly associated with alienation. In Neo-Aristotelian mode, however, displacement is "the adaptation of myth and metaphor to canons of morality or plausibility" (365)--an important element of Williams's poetics. Another example is the term archetype, which in psychoanalytic criticism refers to an image or ideal that has an accepted meaning in society at large. For the Neo-Aristotelian this term has a much narrower definition, describing an image "which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience as a whole" (365). Yet another example is auto, a term Frye extracts from Calderon's Autos Sacramentales. In new critical or post-structuralist modes, auto refers to texts that are intensely personal; for Neo-Aristotelians, however, auto describes "a form of drama in which the main subject is sacred or sacrosanct legend...solemn and processional in form but not strictly tragic" (365). Frye excludes terms such as melody, diction, and spectacle, which he assumes (as do I) to have proximate definitions among Neo-Aristotelian and other critical modes. Kenneth Burke first used the term Neo-Aristotelian in the 1920s to describe the work of a group of academicians at the University of Chicago, who had studied Aristotle together and who were working toward a set of theories of literary criticism6. While their approaches to criticism do not strictly follow Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, they share with that ancient rhetor some common ideas: the "Chicago Neo-Aristotelians" believed 1) that a systematic approach to literary criticism was possible; 2) that elements of Aristotle's Poetics and other works could help describe such a system; and 3) that elements of any approach to literary criticism should be used or discarded, depending on whether or not they work for the individual critic. This group--among them R.S. Crane, Elder Olson, and Bernard Weinberg--used their collaborative study of Aristotle to produce their own, individual approaches to literary criticism. These approaches vary; however, they all operate out of the three beliefs listed above. Aristotle divides poetry into three genres--epic, dramatic, and lyric--and, in his Rhetoric, makes a similar tripartite division of oratory (judicial, epidiectic, and ceremonial). These classifications, and the notion that such classification will suffice as a general approach to literature, are incorporated when useful by the Neo-Aristotelian into an analytical approach tailored to meet his or her needs relative to a particular work or series of works. These elements, the critic argues, can be examined to enrich our understanding of literature. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I apply Aristotle's method for persuasive ceremonial discourse to the elements of Williams's argument, which I identify in Chapters Two, Three, and Four. For a contemporary iteration of Neo-Aristotelian method, I rely on the second edition of Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth calls for an approach to literary criticism that goes beyond the author's use of language: Unfortunately, our contemporary tendency to reduce all questions to questions of language frequently has the effect of turning this distinction into one of content as opposed to form, or of raw events as opposed to language or discourse. This suggests that the events somehow remain unchanged, while the language is being doctored to surround them with something either less real or more important. But what a novelist does in transforming chronologies--playing up some moments and telescoping entire decades, suppressing some motives and playing up others--is to transform one kind of event into another kind: the characters and actions that emerge from the process of "realizing" a plot, a full "narrative," are not the same as the characters and events that much more vaguely "exist" in the raw chronology. (438) Booth writes that this distinction between story and narrative, between the actions of characters and the purpose of the author, is nothing new. "In fact," he claims, "the distinction is important in both Aristotle and Plato" (438). Although Booth is referring, in the above quote, to prose fiction, the same principles of narration and characterization apply to drama. Williams's claims for his own poetics appear to agree with Booth. In his foreword to Camino Real he calls the actions of his characters symbolic, which is "the natural speech of drama" (66). Further, he argues that these symbolic actions help him avoid "page after tedious page of exposition to put across an idea that can be said with an object or a gesture on the lighted stage" (66). Some existing rhetorical analyses of Williams's work focus on stage directions and other emblems of the playwright's authority; however, most of these analyses have taken a narrow approach, examining individual plays or specific types of directions. An example is Thomas Adler's essay, "Culture, Power, and the (En)Gendering of Community: Tennessee Williams and Politics," which uses a single play, The Night of the Iguana, as source material for an argument which connects Williams to political issues. While this essay, which appeared in the Fall, 1995, issue of The Mississippi Quarterly, touches on a few of Williams's other plays, Adler relies primarily on Iguana for material to use in his argument that Williams is a "political" playwright (649). Other recent works have produced critical arguments in favor of a more comprehensive, Neo-Aristotelian examination of Williams's work. One such is Edith Baker's 1997 dissertation, Stage Directions as Narrative: A Rhetorical Analysis of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," in which she argues that "for this play, at least, stage directions function as narration, supplying essential background and details about character, scene, plot, action, point-of-view, tone, and theme" (1). The existing research I have outlined indicates that Tennessee Williams was exposed to religious ideas that shaped his life. The synoptic nature of my approach to Williams's outcast characters is extremely important here; from a body of examples and biographical information, I will draw out similarities and differences to determine the arguments the playwright expresses through his outcast characters. Williams's rhetoric of outcasts--his arguments about the suffering of nonconformists in a nation that glorifies conventionality--can be identified if we examine both the playwright's biography and a representative sample of his plays. Williams argues that what traditional Christians identify as the conventional morality ordered by God is actually a critical function of human nature. The need Williams imposes on his characters to sacrifice themselves in expiation of sin is not a judgment from God, but is an expression of something intrinsic to human nature. And, because this need sometimes forces Williams's outcasts to bring about their own deaths, those who believe expiation to be forced upon them by a deity often look upon that deity as savage and cruel. Dan Isaac uses what he calls "quadrangles" to describe the conflicts between Williams's outcasts and his perception of conventional morality (Address). At each corner of Isaac's quad is a concept; an example is from Streetcar, with Blanche (the Old South), Stanley (contemporary morality), Stella (the New South), and Mitch (the Old North). Further, Isaac argues, among the four points Williams builds tension in triangles (i.e., Stanley-Stella-Mitch, Mitch-Blanche-Stella, Blanche-Stella-Stanley). To describe Williams's poetics of conflict, I will apply Isaac's formula to a body of the playwright's work. The four points in the quad are (1) conventional morality and (2-4) three basic "types" of outcast characters. I agree with Isaac, also, that Williams saw his outcasts as elements of his personal outcast state--Isaac reports a fragment from the playwright's 1943 journal: GOD! I SEE! THE APE'S FACE! I'VE STOPPED WRITING. If I am careful this moment and from now on, I can maybe save myself from madness. It is worth doing anything to do that. (30) In Isaac's interpretation, this entry indicates that Williams claims for himself the outcast state of characters such as Blanche, Laura Wingfield, and the Rev. Shannon: I regard this entry as a shorthand description of a defining religious experience in which the ape's face represents a subjectively perceived demonic presence. Surviving this experience led to Williams finding the personal strength to continue and achieve great things--despite his sense that malevolent forces both inside and outside himself threatened to destroy his sanity. A simple, self-evident conclusion can be drawn: Williams himself overcame these forces, while his sister, Rose, and his fictive creation, Blanche, did not. (30) In the next three chapters I will examine three broadly defined types of outcast characters--sexual, religious, and fugitive--in Williams's work. These three types are not all-inclusive, but are templates from which Williams draws elements for all his outcast characters. There is bound to be some overlap--for example, Blanche DuBois in Streetcar is primarily a sexual outcast, but we shall see that she is also a fugitive; Shannon in The Night of the Iguana is both a religious and a sexual outcast; and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer is primarily a sexual outcast, but is also treated by the playwright in both fugitive and religious terms. These three categories of outcast characters represent elements of the playwright's own life; Williams struggles to understand his life by projecting facets of it upon the outcast characters in his plays. Through his sexual outcasts, Williams attempts to address the conflict between his homosexuality and the society in which he lives--a society that rejects homosexuality at times and ignores it at others. He attempts, through his religious outcasts, to understand how even the most disreputable of individuals can behave morally and be perceived as saintly. Through his fugitive outcasts Williams struggles with the issue of fear, as it is experienced by individuals who do not fit neatly into the molds society provides. Thus, understanding Williams's alienation from conventional society--the foundation for his outcast characters--requires that we investigate his biography. The playwright claims that it is "a combination of Puritan and Cavalier strains in my blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write about" (Where I Live vii). Born to Cornelius and Edwina Dakin Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams joined a family rife with class conflict. The Puritan/Cavalier dichotomy he mentions in his essays manifested itself in conflicts between his father's upbringing, as a descendant of a rough-and-tumble Tennessee pioneer family; and his mother's upbringing, as a member of a family that traced its genealogy to the outcast Tories of pre-American Revolution society (Where I Live vii). Williams's family and early experiences amply prepared him for writing about society's outcasts. His mother was an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living. His father, a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, was at turns distant and abusive. His older sister, Rose, was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions. He remained aloof from his younger brother, Dakin, whom his father repeatedly favored over both of the older children. For the psychologically and physically delicate Tennessee Williams, whose homosexuality began to manifest itself at an early age, the Williams family chaos left him alienated and lonely. Leverich reports that Edwina attempted to assuage her son's loneliness, filling the void caused by her husband's absence with stories about the South: Over and over again, she would tell Tom [Tennessee Williams] about garden parties and cotillions and her gentlemen callers, until he could recite the stories by rote. She said that in those days she saw only "the charming, gallant, cheerful side" of the smiling bridegroom who had been a telephone man "in love with long distance." In Tom's mind, these images of his mother--once upon a time a young and pretty southern belle whose venturesome husband had deserted her to go on the road--eventually became entangled with perpetually dark apartments, with Rose's tragic turns, and with his own desperate attempt to free himself from the web of family. (49) To the young Tennessee Williams, his family's seemingly constant moves must have made them all seem fugitives. Before his birth his parents had lived in Gulfport and Columbus, Mississippi (where both Rose and Tennessee Williams were born). After three years in Columbus, the family moved first to Nashville, Tennessee, then back to Mississippi, first to Canton, then to Clarksdale (Edwina Williams 23). In Clarksdale, the five-year-old Williams contracted diphtheria and nearly died. Although he survived the illness, for the next two years he was unable to walk. During those years his father was usually absent, and Tom's disability precluded association with most other children. In 1923 Cornelius Williams was promoted to a desk job at the Friedman-Shelby subsidiary of the International Shoe Company. He promptly moved his wife, daughter, and the 11-year-old Williams to St. Louis, Missouri7. Edwina Williams writes that her son's life before St. Louis was happy, compared to life in that city with Cornelius Williams always at home (26). Thin and pale after his years of disease and disability, accustomed to the company of two slight women and an occasional maid, Williams was frightened by the sudden intrusion of his large-boned, loud father. "[H]e looked awfully big," Williams writes. "And it was not a benign bigness" (qtd. in Edwina Williams 26). Considering his father's constant verbal abuse, his mother's eccentricity, and the physical isolation imposed by his childhood illnesses, it is not surprising that Tennessee Williams drew closer to his older sister, Rose. Despite her mental instability, Rose was outgoing where Tennessee was shy, intelligent where Tennessee seemed dull. She became the only other strong female figure in the playwright's life (Leverich 40). Edwina and Rose are the foundation for two characters, Amanda and Laura, respectively, in The Glass Menagerie. Like Tom Wingfield in Menagerie, Tom Williams spent most of his life struggling with his feelings for his mother and sister. Rose Williams, who died in 1996, was arguably the playwright's closest female companion. During his lonely years, when his mother's fantasy world became increasingly difficult to accept and his illnesses isolated him from other children, Williams clung to his sister and to the make-believe worlds they created. Rose's mental collapse and subsequent lobotomy haunted the playwright; Edwina Williams writes that her daughter's madness left Tom more isolated than ever: He [Tennessee Williams] had lost Rose, in a measure, when she grew into woman-hood, but now he lost her in a more final way. Tom's sense of loss and loneliness, first, when Rose started to have delusions of being murdered, and then after the lobotomy was performed, must have been devastating, although he never talked much about it. I think his was a grief beyond words, as he saw his beautiful, imaginative sister whom he had always idolized, partially destroyed. (87) Williams's relationship with his father was always strained. This may explain why the most significant male figure in the playwright's early life was his grandfather, an Episcopalian priest with whom Williams spent several years in Clarksdale8. According to Leverich, Williams was "more a minister's son than the son of a traveling salesman" (37). Jack Fritscher argues that the relationship between Williams and his father encouraged the playwright to explore the relationship between God and man, between outcast individuals and the religious expression of the dominant culture: The indirect point of this [the relationship between the playwright and his father] is what it did to Williams's personality; the direct point has to do with the displacement of his artistic ego as the displacement influences his plays' dual concept of God....delineated in terms of the father-image as experienced in early childhood. The God-father projection on God is colored by the father-son relationship established by the son's father. Thus as a personal unresolved Oedipus complex becomes, in a national-religious culture of Calvinism, projected on the word God, it is small wonder that the world receives angry connotations of alienation and violence. (74) Williams addresses his alienation from Cornelius in his foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth. He claims that his father tormented him because, at age 14, he "would rather read books in [his] grandfather's large and classical library than play marbles and baseball and other normal kid games" ("Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth" 106). The playwright credits his grandfather with instilling in him a love of books, which led to writing as escape from the torment of his heterosexist peers (Leverich 37). His grandfather's classical library is bound to have influenced Williams's early feelings about homosexuality as well. Leverich writes that Williams "made every effort to keep the knowledge [of his homosexuality] from his mother in particular"; however, he shared this knowledge with his grandfather, who not only accepted his grandson's homosexuality but also "enjoyed the gay life peripherally and was especially fond and approving of Williams's companion, Frank Merlo" (368-369). That Williams so feared his mother's rejection, and confided so freely in his grandfather, emphasizes that these two persons were important influences in his life. Having the acceptance of his grandfather, a dynamic representative of Christianity, certainly had to have influenced Tennessee Williams's theology. The attraction to his grandfather is understandable in light of the interest in God forced upon Williams by the absence of his father (Fritscher 74). In both Episcopalian and Catholic theology, a priest is the representative of Christ on earth; Williams was accepted by Christ's representative, his surrogate father, but felt rejected by other practitioners of Christianity. The conflicts between sexuality, society, and Christianity, so much a part of Williams's drama, played themselves out in his life as well. Having spent almost all of his life as a wanderer--a sexual and religious outcast--Williams died on February 23, 1983. It is a curious coincidence that Williams's life ended in a place that shared the name of the apartment building in which one of his best-known characters, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, met her figurative end. He died in the Elysee Hotel in New York; the name of the apartment building in Streetcar is Elysian Fields. It is perhaps appropriate that Williams died in a hotel--the traditional bivouac of wanderers and outcasts--rather than in his home at Key West or in New Orleans. He was buried in St. Louis, in a Catholic ceremony, at the request of his brother. Williams's connection to Catholic/Episcopalian ideas is important--the notion of priest as intercessor, or buffer between the sins of humanity and the forgiveness of God, is profoundly expressed in his work. "Of course, God exists," Williams writes. "I don't understand Him. But He exists. How can there be a creation without a creator? Still, I don't think there is an afterlife. At least I'm afraid there isn't" (qtd. in Rasky 10). However, Williams rejects the traditional Christian notion of God as personal intercessor, and expresses doubts concerning the existence of heaven and hell (though he acknowledged the Christian concept of a devil). In the playwright's philosophy, God and the devil exist in a mysterious relationship: "Do they work together, God and the devil? I sometimes suspect there's a sort of understanding between them, which we won't understand until Doomsday" (qtd. in Tischler, "The Glass Menagerie" 301). Williams's concept of guilt is markedly Christian: Guilt is universal. I mean a strong sense of guilt. If there exists any area in which a man can rise above his moral condition, imposed upon him at birth and long before birth, by the nature of his breed, then I think that at least below the conscious level, we all face it. Hence the guilty feelings, and hence defiant aggressions, and hence the deep dark of despair that haunts our dreams, our creative work, and makes us distrust each other. (qtd. in Tischler, "The Glass Menagerie" 264) Here we have Williams's acceptance of God, acknowledgment of the existence of a Christian-style devil, and description of moral guilt. In a short story, "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio," the playwright explores the origins of this guilt: It was his theory, the theory of most immoralists, that the soul becomes intolerably burdened with lies that have to be told to the world in order to be permitted to live in the world, and that unless this burden is relieved by entire honesty with some one person, who is trusted and adored, the soul will finally collapse beneath its weight of falsity. (208)9 Williams credits religious feelings as primary motivators of human activities, and expresses his belief that discovery of such motivators is within the purview of the playwright. We can, then, proceed with examination of Williams's outcast characters for evidence of the playwright's ideas about the relationship among God, humanity, guilt, and his own homosexuality. Many other critics have argued that Williams's outcasts represent facets of his own life. What I will demonstrate is the validity of Williams's own argument: "I have only one major theme for my work which is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual" (Letter, 1939, to Audrey Wood). To understand these outcast characters is to understand Williams's attitude toward the society in which he lived. The positioning of these characters and the circumstances of their lives are the most important elements in the plays of Tennessee Williams. The importance of Williams's outcast characters is clear; the playwright acknowledges that his characters are facets of himself, narrators of his experiences. Through these characters he creates what Booth calls "the persona, the second self" that makes the author's arguments through a form of impersonal narration (83). This persona, Booth argues, allows the author to make arguments about characters that evoke feelings that may be contrary to those the audience or reader would normally experience about those characters (116). Williams does not have to intrude personally upon the plot of his plays to express personal views through his characters. The intrusion of the persona, Booth argues, is inevitable: Though some characters and events may speak by themselves their artistic message to the reader, and thus carry in a weak form their own rhetoric, none will do so with proper clarity and force until the author brings all his powers to bear on the problem of making the reader see what they really are. The author cannot choose whether to use rhetorical heightening. His only choice is of the kind of rhetoric he will use. (116) For Williams, the "kind of rhetoric" is Aristotelian; the method of presentation is drama; and the vehicle of presentation is his outcast characters. This is consistent with Booth's description of the purpose of art: We can admit, of course, that the choice of evocative "situations and chains of events" is the writer's most important gift--or, as Aristotle put a similar point, the "most important of all is the structure of the incidents." The gift of choosing the right "object" is indispensable, whether that object is a thought, a gesture, a descriptive detail, or a great character involved in a significant action. (97) The key to Williams's choices of characters and plot lines is ambiguity. His problem, as Booth points out, above, lies in making the characters and situations convincing; however, his poetics requires that he also leave the audience wondering about his characters' futures. Williams's outcasts experience situations that are both structured and unpredictable, clear and yet open to interpretation. As he puts it: You may prefer to be told precisely what to believe about every character in a play; you may prefer to know precisely what will be the future course of their lives, happy or disastrous or anywhere in between. Then I am not your playwright. My characters make my play. I always start with them, they take spirit and body in my mind. Nothing that they say or do is arbitrary or invented. They build the play about them like spiders weaving their webs, sea creatures making their shells....But still they must have that quality of life which is shadowy. ("Critic Says ŒEvasion'" 72) In the chapters that follow, I will examine these aspects of Williams's outcast characters to determine what arguments the playwright makes through the personas--the second selves--they represent. If we accept Williams's outcast characters as personas we can also accept that any categorization of those characters must allow for some overlap among the categories. These characters exist as parts of the author and are intrinsically connected both to the author and to each another. Thus, a character that embodies primarily a single aspect of William's personality is bound to contain elements of other aspects, too. The categories I have created exist as a framework to discuss Williams's outcasts from three perspectives easily demonstrated to be at cross purposes with conventional morality; to group his major plays in a way that I believe to be consistent with his developing ideas about the conflict between conventional morality and the sensitive individual; and to reflect the biographical origins of these characters. I have established three broad areas of connection between Williams and his outcast characters: the persona as sexual, religious, and fugitive outcast. Keeping in mind, then, that these three divisions of Williams's outcast characters exist in this dissertation as a way to approach his overall concept of outcast vs. conventional morality, we can proceed to discussion of the most vividly painted of Williams's characters--his sexual outcasts. Notes: 1 "St. Just's death meant that her choke hold on the Williams estate had been relinquished, and there was reason for many to rejoice....access to material such as biographical data, journals, and unpublished letters had been so jealously guarded by St. Just that many Williams scholars were dissuaged of purpose" (Bray 121). 2 Leverich was chosen by Tennessee Williams, with whom he enjoyed an acquaintance, as his official biographer. Because the playwright chose Leverich, St. Just gave him access to letters, diaries, journals, unpublished manuscripts, and family documents not available to other researchers. 3 In Chapter Two I will discuss Williams's memory play in greater detail. It is sufficient to note here that the memory play is a structure created by Williams and applied, he claims, to many of his plays. 4 The site addresses are, respectively, http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/williams_tennessee and http://www.susqu.edu/ac_depts/arts_sci/ english/lharris/class/WILLIAMS. The importance of these sites can be measured by my own experience; in the month after establishing my own Tennessee Williams web page I received more than a dozen requests for information from college students in China, Taiwan, Norway, Great Britain, and the United States. 5 Williams's use of Aristotelian terms is particularly evident in his collection of essays, Where I Live, and in Albert J. Devlin's collection of interviews, Conversations with Tennessee Williams. 6 Kenneth Burke did not consider himself to be a Neo-Aristotelian critic. However, the Neo-Aristotelians themselves rejected, mildly, the name. R.S. Crane, a founder of the Neo-Aristotelian movement, writes that the name describes the activity only in the way that "Neo-Mendelian" could be used to describe twentieth-century biologists. 7 Although Williams is buried in St. Louis, his mother relates that nine years' experience of that city left him with a "psychological hangover" that prevented him from visiting his family there (32). 8 According to Edwina Williams, Cornelius "never paid much attention to the children, anyhow; my father was more like a father to them" (Edwina Williams 25). This seems to indicate an habitual distance on the part of Williams's father, who ignored all his children. Early signs of the playwright's homosexuality played little part in the father-son estrangement; for Cornelius, it appears to have been a convenient excuse. 9 Note particularly Williams's use of "lies" and "permitted" here. These notions will appear later in this dissertation, in discussion of the importance of conventional morality in forcing Williams's outcasts to punish themselves.