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Chapter Two Promiscuity and Penance: Sexual Outcasts in A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Confessional Catherine: They had devoured parts of him....Torn or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs. There wasn't a sound any more, there was nothing to see but Sebastian, what was left of him, that looked like a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses had been torn, thrown, crushed!--against that blank white wall.... (Williams, Suddenly Last Summer 92) * * * I used to be very jealous when I looked at actors' sex lives and looked at my own. Now, my sex life is really minimal and parenthetical. At most...An artist can put it in his work. After you've had a reasonably full experience with sex, you don't want to go on repeating it all your life. You want to concentrate your energies on your work. (Williams, qtd. in Haller 1) The Calvinist sexual prohibitions that influence many American theatre-goers make Williams's sexual outcasts the most interesting of his characters (Fritscher 6). Many of Williams's sexual outcasts are devoured, literally or figuratively, as punishment for sexual misconduct. Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Sebastian Venable and Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer, Valentine Xavier in Orpheus Descending, Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Leona in Confessional are particularly good examples of Williams's portrayal of sexual outcasts as martyrs. Possibly the most famous sexual outcast in a Tennessee Williams play is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche is figuratively consumed; her physical and psychological destruction at the hands of Stanley Kowalski marks the end of her existence in Williams's phenomenological world. She is figuratively strangled, illustrating what Anne Fleche calls her "role in which the performative, constrained enactment of gender is dramatized, along with its prohibitions, its failures, and its punishments" (262). Dan Isaac reports that Williams told director Elia Kazan that Blanche is a particularly difficult, tragic figure: I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche. Certainly pity. It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a catharsis of pity and terror, and in order to do that, Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley. (qtd. in Isaac 16) Isaac calls Blanche "a powerful engine for getting out expository information" (17). He finds her "defensive rhetoric" particularly relevant to Williams's positioning of Blanche as a sexual outcast. She is a vehicle for Williams's arguments (32). In an article in Louisiana Literature, Isaac claims: [M]ost of Blanche's rhetorical speeches contain a moral argument, coupled with compelling pleas for sympathy on the grounds of extenuating circumstances. At the same time, these speeches function subtextually as calculated, self-interested moves in a deadly game whose rules and goals are never openly expressed. Blanche and Stanley are joined in a battle to see who will win Stella and who will capture Mitch....A Streetcar Named Desire is a modern tragedy, and Blanche DuBois's tragic flaw is hubris--pride of intellect and pride of sexual prowess--as well as wanton disregard for the sexual mores of the world in which she lives. ("No Past to Think In" 26) In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois visits her sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, after she loses her family's home, Belle Reve (literally, "beautiful dream"), and is forced to leave the nearby town of Laurel by citizens who object to her worsening nymphomania. The play revolves around the association of Blanche with Stanley, who represents contemporary social values driven by male dominance. According to Allean Hale, "Williams always gives the theme of his plays in the first scene" (Address). The action in A Streetcar Named Desire begins with a hint of the violence that is to come. In the first scene we see Stanley, whom Williams later calls a "gaudy seed-bearer," tossing a bloody package of meat to his wife (A Streetcar Named Desire 4)1. He is violent and barbaric throughout this play, both in costuming (an element of spectacle) and in dialog (in this case, an expression of both diction and character)2. Stanley's violence is carried out in the middle of the play, when he brutalizes his pregnant wife, and at the end of the play, when he rapes his half-crazed sister-in-law. Yet his violence is not coupled with ignorance. Finding that Blanche has been told not to return to Laurel, he buys her a one-way ticket to the only place in the world she cannot go. Williams establishes, throughout the play, the idea that Stanley is deliberately cruel and domineering, not only toward the two principal women characters but toward his best friend Mitch, whom he informs of Blanche's sexual misdeeds, and his other male friends, whom he forces to obey his slightest whim3. Stanley's desire to dominate everyone around him finds its ultimate expression in relationship to Blanche. That desire is frustrated in Act I, first, when he discovers his attempts to frighten Blanche by exhibiting his physical prowess result in Blanche's flirtatious responses; and second, when he finds that physically intimidating Stella causes Blanche to try to take her away from him. In the course of the play he appears obsessed with finding Blanche's weakness; when he discovers that she has committed sexual indiscretions in Laurel and senses her feelings of guilt concerning them, he immediately acts. From our first introduction to Stanley, when he tosses the bloody package to Stella, to our last, when he fondles his wife's breasts4 as the doctor and nurse take Blanche away, we see this man as an expression of animalistic territoriality. In his first encounter with Blanche, for example, Stanley is irritated because he knows she has been drinking his liquor. He senses an invasion of his territory by Blanche, who has taken something that belongs to him. Stanley welcomes her into the Kowalski home; however, that acceptance requires that Blanche acknowledge his authority. When he removes his shirt in this scene, it is not so much to titillate Blanche as to intimidate her with his masculinity. In the second confrontation between Blanche and Stanley we see another territorial dispute. Ignoring Blanche's attempt to change the subject by flirting with him--and this is clearly her intention when she asks him to help button her dress, and when she takes a drag on his cigarette--Stanley interrogates her about the loss of Belle Reve. His anger is founded on his interpretation of the Napoleonic Code, "according to which whatever belongs to my wife is also mine" (41). The implication is clear; although Stanley has never seen Belle Reve it belongs to him, through his wife. He suspects that Blanche's extravagant lifestyle has caused the loss of the family estate; to verify the truth of his suspicions (and, at the same time, offend Blanche) he rummages through her trunk. Stanley finds a bundle of letters from Blanche's deceased husband; he appears unconcerned when this distresses Blanche, and does not admit to understanding why his touching the letters might make her want to burn them. The third confrontation occurs during the famous "Poker Night" in Scene Three; Stella and Mitch are the subjects of Stanley's territorial aggression. In the previous scene we find that Stella has prepared a "cold plate" for Stanley, so she can take Blanche out of the apartment during his poker game (29). When the women return, they attempt to break up the game (it is after 2:00 a.m.). As Mitch passes through the bedroom on the way to the bath, Blanche engages him in a conversation that takes him away from Stanley's poker game. After he returns to the game, the women begin to gossip and to play the radio. Stanley turns off their radio; Blanche turns it back on. Enraged, Stanley throws the radio out of the window and attacks Stella, striking her. When the couple continues to fight, the men restrain Stanley and drag him into the bedroom. Again Blanche defies Stanley; she takes Stella to a neighbor's apartment. When Stanley discovers Stella is gone, he exhibits emotions that are inconsistent with the image Williams has built--that Stanley is the epitome of the insensitive modern male. He sobs, whining into the phone in an attempt to persuade Eunice to let him speak to Stella. Then, regaining control of himself, he begins to bellow his wife's name (65-66). That ends the poker game. From Stanley's point of view, Blanche has simultaneously robbed him of his wife and his best friend. Although Stella returns to her husband that night, we find in the next scene the foundation for the fourth confrontation between Stanley and Blanche. Arriving unexpectedly, he overhears Blanche talking to Stella about him: Blanche: Suppose! You can't have forgotten that much of our bringing up, Stella, that you just suppose that any part of a gentleman's in his nature! Not one particle, no! Oh, if he was just--ordinary! Just plain--but good and wholesome, but--no. There's something downright bestial--about him! ... Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella--my sister--there has been some progress 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! (82-83) Stanley chooses to conceal the fact that he has overheard Blanche. He exacts his revenge in Scene Five, when he reveals what he has learned about Blanche's sexual indiscretions. Just as Blanche had robbed him of his wife and his best friend, Stanley seeks to damage Blanche's relationship with her sister and her prospective husband. He succeeds in the latter; however, Stella continues to love her sister. Stanley's territorial drive pushes him to greater and greater excess. When he discovers that his attempts to physically and emotionally dominate Blanche have failed to drive the sisters apart, he investigates Blanche's indiscretions and reveals them to Stella in Scene Seven. In an amazing display of hypocrisy, Stanley, who abuses and sexually dominates his wife, uses Blanche's sexual misconduct as an excuse to throw her out of the apartment. He tells Stella that he has purchased a bus ticket for Blanche; it is not until Scene Eight, however, that we discover that the bus ticket is from New Orleans to Laurel, Mississippi--absolutely useless to Blanche, who has been told never to return to that town. This cannot help but exacerbate the guilt she feels about the death of her husband and about her sexual indiscretions. Still, Stanley's more detailed revelation of Blanche's misconduct does not separate her from Stella. With a remarkable parsimony of venom, Stanley is able to use this information to destroy Blanche's relationship with Mitch. This prepares us for the final confrontation in Scene Ten--Stanley's violent rape of the hysterical Blanche. Stanley, having driven Blanche to the brink of insanity, having ruined her reputation in New Orleans and with her sister, finds himself still unable to destroy the relationship between Blanche and Stella. He takes the only remaining course to maintain his territory; by raping Blanche he establishes the physical domination he attempted, unsuccessfully, early in the play, and the psychological domination he attempted, later, by using Blanche's own guilt against her. Guilt is Blanche's great motivation in Streetcar. To understand how guilt serves as a destructive force in Williams's plays, it is useful to reiterate how his memory play structure assists him in developing his outcast characters. As Williams outlines in his production notes for his first successful play, The Glass Menagerie , and later, in his Introduction to The Rose Tattoo, his memory play is a three-part structure. First, the outcast character commits an act for which she or he experiences profound guilt. Second, that experience and the guilt it engenders causes an "arrest of time," a literal and figurative personal stasis ("The Timeless World of a Play" 52). And third, the character is forced to re-live the aforementioned profound experience, seeking redemption5. Blanche certainly proceeds through Williams' memory play structure; however, we do not discover whether or not she finds, in her insanity, psychological freedom from the tormenting memory of her husband's death. Williams allows his readers to deduce the logic of Blanche. A close reading of her dialog is not, however, enough; we must examine the phenomenon of Blanche in light of Williams's claim that Streetcar, as an expression of his poetics of tragedy, fits into his memory play structure. Does Blanche experience the three stages, or states, Williams outlines? Does she acknowledge an experience so profound that it causes an "arrest of time," and is then forced to re-live that experience? Blanche's progress through Williams's memory play structure begins with her marriage to Allan Grey, a sensitive young man whom she worshipped. One night, just before she and Allan are to leave home to attend a dance, she discovers Allan in a secret sexual dalliance with another man; her disgust shames Allan, causing him to commit suicide. This is the profound experience which Blanche must relive, and is signaled by Williams through the melody of the "Varsouviana," the music playing at the dance just before Allan kills himself. From the time of her husband's suicide, Blanche is haunted by this music, which is a recurring sound effect through which Williams melodically establishes the focus of his memory play. The "Varsouviana" music forces the audience to focus on Allan's death as the focal point in Blanche's life. Losing her beloved Allan to suicide, and her sister, Stella, to a man she believes (before meeting him) to be a dashing military officer, Blanche is then forced into the role of caretaker, overseeing the plantation home and nursing older family members as, one by one, they die. She suffers the loss of Belle Reve through what she calls her "improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers" who "exchanged the land for their epic fornications" (Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 44). Again and again, through the long years during which she loses her home and most of her family, she is forced to re-experience the guilt she feels for having caused her husband's suicide. Because she feels responsible for her husband's death, Blanche is tormented by this guilt. Her guilt causes time literally to stop; caught in a temporal loop, she is forced to relive the night of her husband's death. As the years pass, she conflates Allan's infidelity with her feelings of guilt, and begins to engage in self-destructive sexual acts of her own. These acts include what Isaac calls "gang bangs" with local army men (25) and conclude with her dismissal as a school teacher because she seduced a young male student. It is difficult to separate Blanche's obsession with sex from her habitual flirtation, the stereotypical activity of a Southern belle, with all men. Regardless of this, she is driven to commit acts that cause her to be excluded from her community, and which force her into the confrontational situation with Stanley. Blanche is the primary outcast character in A Streetcar Named Desire6. She is the "sensitive, non-conformist individual" (Letter, 1939, to Audrey Wood) who must suffer at the hands of conventional morality. She suffers at the hands of Stanley Kowalski; therefore, Stanley, however cruel and hypocritical, must represent Williams's notion of conventional morality7. We have here the juxtaposition of two extremes, two individuals who are so polarized in their positions that they are almost caricatures of themselves. The issue, for both Blanche and Stanley, is control, which Blanche maintains through flirtation and feminine wiles, and which Stanley maintains through a rigidly enforced hierarchy (with himself in the top position). These individuals represent the "certain moral values in violent juxtaposition" that Williams claims as the center of his poetics (Introduction to The Rose Tattoo 151). What strategies does Williams use to engage this violent juxtaposition, to force Blanche into his three-part memory play structure? Through Stanley, Blanche must be forced to 1) confess what she believes to be transgressions and 2) suffer, at her own hands or by placing herself in dangerous situations, in atonement for her nonconformity. Williams gives us a clue that Blanche is driven by emotion, rather than reason, early in the play--we find she is a heavy drinker, who feels guilty about her drinking and tries, ineffectively, to conceal it. Blanche's conversation with Stella about New Orleans streetcars (from Desire to Cemeteries) is further indication, through diction and character, that Blanche is traveling a dangerous psychological road. Further, the spectacle of Blanche herself, a creature dressed in moth-like, gossamer fabrics, who (unlike a moth) avoids bright lights, furthers Williams's desire to show her as ephemeral, nervously and fearfully awaiting her doom. The greatest spectacle in the play is the final confrontation between Blanche and Stanley. In all the published versions of Streetcar, we are left to wonder whether or not Blanche is raped; however, in a handwritten revision8 Williams has Stella comment on Blanche's accusation, and he includes the following conversation between Stella and her neighbor, Eunice: STELLA: (Whispering) This--this couldn't be true, I know it couldn't be true, it's part of her madness. EUNICE: What? STELLA: What she accuses him of. And yet if it was true; if it turned out that it was--I never could touch him again. She says that he took her by force while I was in the hospital! EUNICE: You don't believe her! STELLA: I wouldn't dare believe her! But look at this! (REMOVES PYJAMA COAT FROM CLOSET. THE BACK OF THE COAT IS TORN TO SHREDS) STELLA: The coat of his pyjamas is torn to shreds and his shoulder and back are covered with scratches as if a wildcat had clawed him. (qtd. in Isaac 22) Why does this dialog not appear in the published versions of this play? What rhetorical argument was Williams trying to make--or avoid--by this deletion? Perhaps, if Williams had presented his audience with concrete evidence that Stanley had raped Blanche, then Stanley would have become a sexual outcast--he would have been directly condemned by the audience for his actions. By giving Stanley the benefit of his audience's doubt, Williams maintains Blanche's position as the main sexual outcast in the play. The play ends as Williams intended, with Blanche as the sensitive nonconformist who is overcome--dominated physically and destroyed emotionally--by a hypocritical representative of conventional morality. To understand the positioning of characters and arguments in Streetcar, we must understand its primary symbolism. Of particular interest, here, is Stanley as the representative of conventional morality. Like Jim O'Connor in The Glass Menagerie , Stanley Kowalski bears the external signs of Williams's all-American hero, the playwright's embodiment of the American dream. Stanley is an outgoing, physical, hard-working, hard-playing family man; in more contemporary terms, we see Stanley in most nationwide television commercials selling automobiles. Yet Stanley is corrupt and hypocritical; he represents Williams's interpretation of the all-American hero as embodiment of a cruel, conventional morality. In this role, he serves as a fitting foil for the introverted, ethereal, delicate, aristocratic, childless, and sensitive Blanche. Although she is Blanche's sister, Stella is Williams's characterization of the would-be all-American woman and mother who, like Stanley, is really Williams's interpretation of conventional womanhood. In this sense she is anti-ideal; in the playwright's scheme of things, representatives of conventional morality such as Stella are always a corruption or hypocrisy. She is brought up in the same genteel environment as Blanche; however, Stella chooses to leave the plantation and to become the dutiful, conventional housewife. Here we find another sexual perversion: Stanley claims that Stella likes his abuse, his total domination of her, in the following confrontation with his wife: STANLEY: When we first met, me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it, having them colored lights going! And wasn't we happy together, wasn't it all okay till she showed here? (137) Stella has rehabilitated herself through her rejection of the other-ness of Southern aristocracy. Blanche embraces this other-ness, though it causes her to suffer at the hands of Williams's all-American male. We see Stella's acceptance of her conventional role in her reaction to Stanley's statement, above: Stanley's words cause her to focus "inward as if some interior voice had called her name" (137). Stanley and Stella are flawed, hypocritical representatives of conventional morality. Through these characters we find Williams's opinion of all-American values--since the individuals who represent these values are corrupt, the values themselves are flawed. The playwright's portrayal of conventional moralists as the destroyers of sensitive individuals such as Blanche is consistent in Williams's work. The Stanleys and Stellas of the world create a society in which nonconformists are outcast; they act aggressively, as with Stanley's physical and psychological domination of Blanche, or passively, as with Stella's desire to degrade herself and to believe her husband's version of the confrontation between Stanley and Blanche, to destroy nonconformists. Blanche's position as outcast, and her progression through Williams's designs for outcasts, is clear. The knowledge that she caused the suicide of her husband consumes her. Her husband's transgression is sexual, a violation of his marriage vows; Blanche, then, transfers her guilt into sexual feelings, and those feelings into acts that are just as aberrant, in the eyes of conventional moralists, as those she ascribes to her late husband. Having thoroughly degraded herself sexually, she places herself in a position to reveal her transgressions--both in the death of her husband and in her subsequent nymphomania--to her sister and, particularly, to her brother-in-law, who would otherwise not have known. Blanche's confession, her acceptance of guilt in response to Stanley's accusations, causes a severe punishment; Mitch rejects her (after he tries to assault her) and Stanley (who, like Mitch, has come to believe she is a tramp) rapes her. According to Jack Fritscher, Blanche is the device through which Williams combines sex and religion into a single allegory, drawing parallels between the two: Streetcar's people in a deftly choreographed ritual move from the introit of scene one, played appropriately on the steps of the house, to Stella's offertory to Blanche, to Blanche's repetitious ritual cleansings in white tubs of water, to the ritual of The Poker Night played around an altar of a table by men whom Williams's stage directions place in ritual vestments of primary colors. Blanche, Host-white as a victim should traditionally be, knows Stanley to be her executioner....This story next told by Stella does not convert Stanley, who by scene ten vests himself in the ritualistic pajamas of his wedding night and protrudes his tongue between his teeth to rape-consume Host-Blanche in an inverse ritual of communion become cannibalization. The remainder of the play is concerned with cleansing and collecting: Blanche bathes herself, a used communion dish, and collects her things together, the victim doing the ablutions and straightening proper to the executing priest. Eunice gives Stella a credo to live by ("You've got to keep going") and Blanche, attended by Doctor and Matron, proceeds out past a congregation of Williams's characters. (71) Here we find another argument that Blanche is compelled to confess her transgressions. In Fritscher's allegory she is part of a ritual communion; as such, the necessities of the rite of communion control her behavior. She behaves as she does because doing otherwise would violate the rules of the liturgy9--an heretical act. Ritualistic martyrdom is the major theme in Suddenly Last Summer. Refusing to accept the possibility that her deceased son, Sebastian, was a homosexual, Mrs. Venable tries to silence her niece, Catherine, who insists upon telling the story of Sebastian's sexual misconduct and murder. Catherine is haunted, having witnessed Sebastian being cannibalized by Mexican youth (whom he has sexually victimized). She feels compelled to tell the story of Sebastian's death, despite Mrs. Venable's threat to have her lobotomized and even though no one believes Catherine's story. On the surface the plot of Suddenly Last Summer is quite linear. Mrs. Venable calls for Dr. Cukrowicz, a leading experimental psychiatrist, to examine her niece, Catherine Holly, and determine if Catherine is a candidate for Dr. Cukrowicz's experimental lobotomy procedure. Mrs. Venable's argument is that Catherine is delusional and has a disorder that causes her to slander the deceased Sebastian Venable. Dr. Cukrowicz is moved by Catherine's story, and is inclined to believe it; however, Mrs. Venable offers to fund the doctor's research if he will give Catherine the lobotomy. Although the lobotomy does not take place during the play, and though Williams convinces us that Catherine is telling the truth, we leave the play with the certainty that Catherine will be lobotomized. At the core of Mrs. Venable's desire to have Catherine lobotomized is her worship of the memory of her son, Sebastian. Mrs. Venable relates her experiences with Sebastian as a prophet would relate her or his contact with a Christ-figure or saint10. In his stage directions, Williams describes Mrs. Venable holding up a bound collection of Sebastian's poetry: "She lifts a thin gilt-edged volume from the patio table as if elevating the Host before the altar....Her face suddenly has a different look, the look of a visionary, an exalted religieuse" (Williams, Suddenly Last Summer 13)11. She maintains the relics of her saintly son: his incomplete book of poetry and two photographs of him. The book represents the sacred words of her son; the photographs help her establish his divinity (she shows the photos to Dr. Cukrowicz as proof that her son did not age). Mr. Venable's threat to have Catherine lobotomized is meant to further her truth about Sebastian (12); she appears to see truth as relative, determined by the privileged and powerful. She says of her forthcoming confrontation with Catherine, "I won't collapse! She'll collapse! I mean her lies will collapse--not my truth--not the truth...." (12). Mrs. Venable's motivation is similar to Blanche's in Streetcar. Both women are profoundly affected by their contact with a homosexual man. Unlike Blanche, however, Mrs. Venable is spared the profound, guilt-engendering experience of precipitating a man's death. According to Mrs. Venable, Sebastian spent his summers in search of the image of God. Her identification of that image is the picture of a vengeful God, the God of Lex Talionis (the just God, who exacts an eye for an eye): Mrs. Venable tells Dr. Cukrowicz that "God shows a savage face to people and shouts some fierce things at them, it's all we see or hear of Him. Isn't it all we ever really see and hear of Him, now?--Nobody seems to know why...." (20). Convinced that the doctor will understand her son, and that her son would have liked the doctor, Mrs. Venable tells him about Sebastian's God-hunt. She gives him an account of how her son, a socialite and an unpublished poet, found God's image during a sea voyage to the Encantadas. In an emotional speech to the doctor, Mrs. Venable recounts the story of how she and her son observed the scene: Over the narrow black beach of the Encantadas as the just hatched sea-turtles scrambled out of the sand-pits and started their race to the sea....To escape the flesh-eating birds that made the sky almost as black as the beach! [She gazes up again: we hear the wild, ravenous, harsh cries of the birds. The sound comes in rhythmic waves like a savage chant.] And the sand all alive, all alive, as the hatched sea turtles made their dash for the sea, while the birds hovered and swooped to attack and hovered and--swooped to attack! They were diving down on the hatched sea-turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh. Sebastian guessed that possibly only a hundredth of one percent of their number would escape to the sea....(16-17) During this spectacle, she says, Sebastian found what he sought: Yes, well, now, I can tell you without hesitation that my son was looking for God, I mean for a clear image of him. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow's-nest of the schooner watching this thing on the beach till it was too dark to see it, and when he came down the rigging he said "Well, now I've seen Him!," and he meant God.--And for several weeks after that he had a fever, he was delirious with it. (19) This event--Sebastian's recognition of the nature of God--sets in motion the acts, committed by Sebastian, that end in his death. According to Mrs. Venable, after Sebastian recovered from his fever in the Encantadas he tried to enter a Buddhist monastery, attempting to give up his wealth and live in poverty with a mendicant Himalayan order. Abandoning her dying husband, Violet chooses to remain near her son, and after a month of privation she persuades Sebastian to give up the monastery and return with her to social life (21). Mrs. Venable is the first to discuss the notion of expiation, of becoming a sacrifice, when referring to her niece: We put the bread in her mouth and the clothes on her back. People that like you for that or even forgive you for it are--hen's teeth, Doctor. The role of the benefactor is worse than thankless, it's the role of a victim, Doctor, a sacrificial victim, yes, they want your blood, Doctor, they want your blood on the altar steps of their outraged, outrageous egos! (27) According to Judith Thompson, Catherine Holly resembles St. Catherine of Bologna, "a fifteenth-century virgin martyr," who kept a diary, had visions in which the living flesh of Christ was consumed during the sacrament of communion, and was shut away in a convent because of those visions (121). In Catholic theology, St. Catherine is the patron saint of artists--as Catherine Holly was the emotional patroness of Sebastian. And, like St. Catherine, Williams's Catherine is placed in the keeping of nuns. After Mrs. Venable has a stroke, Catherine accompanies Sebastian on his final summer journey. Their trek ends in Mexico, where Sebastian begins to shun Catherine because she has fallen in love with him (even though, as she states, she has been procuring young men for him). Tormented by young beggars in a small restaurant, Sebastian escapes into the street, is pursued by the beggars, and is devoured. Catherine sees Sebastian's murder and consumption by the young beggars as the completion of Sebastian's designs. Her dialog on this topic is particularly revealing: Catherine. [Sebastian was] Completing--a sort of!--image! --he had of himself as a sort of!--sacrifice to a!--Terrible sort of a-- Doctor. --God? Catherine. Yes, a--cruel one, Doctor! (64) The events that Catherine recounts add a macabre bit of Williamsian humor to Sebastian's death. Having established himself as a parallel to St. Sebastian, revered early Christian martyr who was killed by arrows, Sebastian Venable ends his life in a figurative parallel -- he is, literally and figuratively, pricked to death. Like St. Sebastian, Sebastian Venable resists his pursuers until he is exhausted, then submits to his execution. Williams presents a direct series of events leading to Sebastian's death. First, Sebastian recognizes God in the Encantadas. This recognition affects him profoundly, temporarily incapacitating him with brain fever. Second, having come to understand God as a punisher of sins, he tries to atone for his sexual misconduct by entering a monastery (with its denotative meaning, sexless place, and its connotative meaning, place where only homosexual sex is practiced); however, his mother persuades him to leave. Third, journeying without his mother, he sacrifices himself in a small Mexican town. Catherine reports that Sebastian carries out his plan by attempting "to correct a human situation!--I think perhaps that that was his fatal error...." (89). Most critics seem to agree that Sebastian pays with his life for his crimes against humanity. Foster Hirsch calls him "the consumer who is finally consumed, the cannibal who is eaten alive" (55). Arthur Gantz writes that "Sebastian's sin lay not in perceiving the world as, in Williams' darkest vision, it is, but in his believing, with a pride bordering on hubris, that he could exalt himself above his kind, could feed upon people like one of the devouring birds of the Encantadas" (106). These critics focus upon Sebastian as sinner or as pervert; they agree that he is punished for his transgressions but appear to have neglected the idea that Sebastian chooses his own punishment, sacrificing himself to the cannibalistic boys he has sexually abused. As Sister Felicity tells Catherine, "Disobedience has to be paid for later" (35); Sebastian accepts this mandate of conventional morality. To bring about his own death, he places himself in a vulnerable position; he changes his habits, deliberately choosing the less genteel public beach instead of the fashionable private establishments that Mrs. Venable states were his accustomed haunts (78-79). Robert Gross finds similar mythic roles in his analysis of Sebastian Venable. As he puts it: In its dismemberment, Sebastian's body has clear mythic overtones: the rending of Dionysus, Pentheus, Orpheus, and Hippolytus all immediately come to mind. In its inability to be fully reconstructed, however, it most closely approximates the dismemberment of Osiris by Typhon, who cut the god into fourteen pieces and scattered them about. His sister and consort, Isis, is able to find thirteen of the pieces, but the fourteenth piece, his genitals, has been devoured by fishes....Sebastian resembles both Osiris and Attis in his dismemberment, as well as his almost incestuous dependence on his powerful female consort. (238) Although Gross finds the Osiris myth closest in symbolism to the dismemberment of Sebastian, because the dismembered martyr is not reconstructed, I find a closer similarity in the Catholic/Episcopalian ritual of communion. Sebastian is consumed by the boys who, because they have allowed themselves to be used sexually by Sebastian, have also sinned. After the boys turn against him, a parallel to the act of betrayal central to the Catholic/Episcopalian communion rite, Sebastian gives up his body in payment for both his sins and theirs. The "almost incestuous" female relationship Gross points out, between Sebastian and Violet, parallels the relationship between Jesus and his mother so poignantly illustrated in the Pieta, as well as the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (the former prostitute who expressed, as Catherine does for Sebastian, a physical love for Jesus). We cannot, therefore, omit the possibility that Mrs. Venable feels guilt concerning her improper relationship with her son. She might also feel guilty about her son's sexual preference (as Sigmund Freud, among others, blamed male homosexuality on over-aggressive mothers), and might feel, perhaps subconsciously, guilty about procuring young men for Sebastian's pleasure. Catherine tells Sister Felicity that "Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!'" (40). God and truth are separate, and truth remains a constant--as Catherine announces to her assembled relatives: "I can't change truth, I'm not God! I'm not even sure that He could, I don't think God can change truth!" (58). Mrs. Venable believes her son suffered because he was too generous--that is her perception of truth; Catherine believes he was cruelly murdered by the boys he victimized--a perception of truth separate from, though perhaps superior to, Mrs. Venable's. Both Catherine and Mrs. Venable reject the idea that Sebastian sacrificed himself for wrongs he knew he had committed. Sebastian's is a savage God, who allows human beings to abuse one another and who drives the abusers to martyr themselves. Recognizing the nature of God, and feeling guilty because he has used his mother and cousin to procure young men for his sexual pleasure, Sebastian first attempts to atone for his sin by entering a monastery. That sacrifice is not enough; he discovers that he can not bring himself to his proper sacrificial status in the presence of his mother. Driven to expiate his sin, but aware that atonement also requires confession (and a witness to that confession), he uses his mother's stroke as an excuse to abandon her and to have his cousin, a stronger woman, serve as witness to his martyrdom. He ends, as the sea-turtles in the Encantadas, a sacrifice to the God of Lex Talionis. What can we learn from a Neo-Aristotelian analysis of Sebastian Venable and Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer? As befits a dramatic tragedy, we can begin with Aristotelian notions of thought and spectacle, brought out early in the play by Williams's stage directions and the dialog he gives Mrs. Venable. The play begins in a garden that has been outfitted to resemble a jungle, full of violent color (9). Mrs. Venable and Dr. Cukrowicz, walking through this wild and dangerous Eden, discuss the violence of nature as embodied in the Venus flytrap. There is an interesting parallel between Sebastian and the flytrap; Mrs. Venable tells us she plans to allow the plant to die because of the trouble and expense of feeding it. So, too, does Sebastian die when he has grown too old to easily procure the objects of his desire. One assumes that the insects, which the Venus flytrap consumed, will feast on the dead plant--another parallel to Sebastian. Through the dialog between Violet and Dr. Cukrowicz and the spectacle of the jungle-garden, Williams prepares us for a play about violence, about the conflict between Christian non-violence and Darwinian notions of survival of the fittest. Sebastian Venable is connected to this violence; it is his garden (10), and within the first four pages of dialog Williams adds the presentation of Sebastian's poetry by Mrs. Venable "as if elevating the Host before the altar" (13). Soon after, as Mrs. Venable describes Sebastian's trip to the Encantadas, we read in Williams's stage directions that "wild, ravenous, harsh cries of birds" (16) are to accompany her discussion. Thus the stage is set, literally, through the spectacle of the jungle and the melody of the bird cries, for the violent story that is to come. In the film version of this play (written by Gore Vidal, with Williams's approval) Mrs. Venable is put forth as a Moses-figure; our first encounter with her comes as she tells Dr. Cukrowicz about her son. This conversation takes place with the doctor standing in the foyer of the Venable home, watching Mrs. Venable descend in a wrought-iron elevator. As she descends, he hears her monologue on the elevation of popes and emperors. Through diction and spectacle we find Sebastian as a saint-figure for Mrs. Venable and, in keeping with the Biblical story of Christ, Sebastian's story is one of sacrifice and consumption. This ties in with the reference to the sacramental Host early in the play; as Christ is consumed in the Catholic/Episcopalian Mass, so is Sebastian consumed by those he has victimized. We can see another bit of complex symbolism here -- the Mexican youths who kill Sebastian were earlier consumed by him; they are both Christ-figures and forces of nature that resolve the problem of Sebastian. In connecting Sebastian's sacrifice, his consumption by those he has victimized, to Christ's sacrifice and ritual consumption, we have a powerful comment on the playwright's notion of Christianity. And, as Christ is forced by God to submit to his execution (after, in the Biblical account, he requests that God "remove this cup" from him, and is denied), so Sebastian is forced by his notion of God to confront and commit himself to the wrath of the children who consume him. Sebastian acknowledges the God of Lex Talionis, and offers his body in payment for the bodies he has abused. Catherine is likewise consumed, first by the violent and aggressive Mrs. Venable, then by her desire to please Sebastian, and finally, as we discover in the course of the play, by the surgical knife that is to lobotomize her. The complication/crisis of this plot arranges for her a fate similar to that of St. Catherine--she attempts to tell an unacceptable truth (or, at least, her perception of the truth) and is brutalized at the hands of Mrs. Venable and Dr. Cukrowicz. She is cast out of society: first, she is temporarily excommunicated in the form of internment in an asylum, and later, she is permanently excluded in the form of her impending lobotomy. We cannot ignore the parallels between Catherine's fate and the fate of Williams's sister, Rose. Both are subjected to the whims of an aggressive woman; both experience an almost incestuous love for a family member (in Rose's case, her brother Tom); and both are lobotomized. An even closer parallel can be drawn. According to Dakin Williams, Edwina threatened to have her daughter lobotomized, and later carried out that threat, because Rose repeatedly accused her father of raping her (personal interview). Like Catherine, Rose seems to have been driven to a self-destructive revelation; she refused to recant her story even though she knew she would be lobotomized for telling it. Both Sebastian and Catherine appear to be driven to acts of self-destruction. Sebastian submits to the will of his God; Catherine insists on telling the truth about how Sebastian died. Catherine's destruction is brought about by Mrs. Venable, who is eager to establish the myth of her son as a saint. Sebastian's submission is saintly; he surrenders his life, a penitent to his concept of the will of God. In a sense he, too, is destroyed by Mrs. Venable--the devouring mother, who prefers a non-traditional relationship with her son to a traditional, nurturing role. Surrender of the sexual outcast to the destructive will of conventional moralists is also a strong theme in Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending12. Certainly Valentine Xavier is a sexual outcast before the play begins; we find he has given himself sexually in much the same way as Blanche. And, at the end of the play, he submits to the murderous townspeople. Lady, however, an outcast long before the play begins, has redeemed herself through a loveless marriage. She becomes a sexual outcast a second time, through her interaction with Val, and as a consequence of her actions is killed by her husband, Jabe. Both Val and Lady are martyred, consumed by representatives of conventional morality. A third outcast, Carol Cutrere, has, like Blanche, been forced to leave her home town; in Orpheus Descending she acts as a temptress to Val, attempting through the persuasion of sexual attraction and of their shared outcast state to prevent his relationship with Lady. The rhetorical thought behind this play requires some knowledge of the Greek myth of Orpheus, who enters the underworld to search for his dead wife, Euridice. In most versions of the tale, the gods have allowed Euridice to die because her marriage to Orpheus is not blessed by the goddess Hymen. Orpheus uses his musical talent--his ability to enchant those who hear his lyre--to persuade the rulers of Hades to allow him to return with Euridice. However, he is commanded to leave Hades without looking back. Desiring to see Euridice, who walks behind him, he turns to look at her, and she is reclaimed by Hades. Having lost Euridice a second time, Orpheus flees into the mountains and vows to reject all women. Such is the beauty of Orpheus that the mountain women all desire him; angered at his rejection of them, the women stone Orpheus to death. In death, Orpheus returns to Hades and is reunited with Euridice. The parallels between the myth and the plot of Orpheus Descending are clear. Having lost a love, Valentine Xavier (as Orpheus) flees to a small town where love is rekindled (with some assistance from his trusty guitar). From that love, Val and Lady (as Euridice) create a child. Because their union is not blessed, Lady and her unborn child are murdered. Rejecting both authority and other women, expressed in Carol's attempt to take him out of town, Val is gruesomely tortured to death. Like the myth of Orpheus, this play is about consequences. This relates directly to my argument about the fate Williams plans for his outcast characters. His sexual outcasts are martyred--the consequence of deviating from conventional society's rules about sex. The significance of the sexual acts in Orpheus Descending is clearly outlined by Thomas Adler: In the present action, as Jabe lies dying of cancer upstairs, the childless Lady Myra conceives a love child by Val Xavier, a fugitive guitar player. Together, as Val says, they break free from humankind's "lifelong sentence to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on this earth!" On Good Friday in Angels, on the Saturday before Easter [Holy Saturday] in Orpheus, Jabe rises from his bed, shoots and kills Myra and the unborn baby, thus ending generativity, and sets fire to the orchard-like confectionery that Myra and Val have built. As his punishment, Val--like the black man accused of rape--is lynched from the cottonwood tree and blowtorched by Jabe's henchmen. In Williams's version of the American myth, faith in a recoverable Edenic innocence has been rooted out by an ethic of material success and cultural domination constructed upon a rejection of difference and an exploitation of the weaker. Violence has invaded the garden. (Adler, "Culture, Power" 651) Both Val and Lady die at the end of the play. Which, then, is the primary sexual outcast? Lady appears to be more a religious outcast than a sexual one; in this I agree with Joan Wylie Hall, who places Lady among the Williams characters whose motivation is primarily religious: I want to turn to the desperate Madonnas whose urge to bear attains such a religious intensity that Williams portrays them through imagery of the mother of Christ....Yearning to carry new and redemptive life in their wombs, they are participants, or frustrated bystanders, in the critical race lightly described by Reverend Tooker in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: 'The Stork and the Reaper are running neck and neck!" (7). Hall groups Lady Torrence with three other characters in Williams's plays: Heavenly Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Maggie Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This places her in a secondary position, relative to Blanche in Streetcar and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, and suggests that Val is the primary outcast character in Orpheus Descending. Just as Valentine Xavier is mutilated in Orpheus Descending, Chance Wayne is emasculated and murdered in Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth. Here we have another telling of the Orpheus myth: Chance, as Orpheus, engages in illicit sex with Heavenly Finley and is punished by yet another corrupt champion of conventional morality, Boss Finley. Heavenly is also punished; her womb is mutilated in an attempt to rid her body of the sexually transmitted disease she contracted from Chance. Having sold his body to wealthy women, in order to fund his romance with Heavenly, Chance finds himself a social outcast and leaves town for a time. The play opens with Chance, again in the role of gigolo, returning to St. Cloud, with the once-famous actress, Alexandra Del Lago. As the play progresses, Chance is compelled by circumstances to tell his story--to confess his sexual misdeeds--to Alexandra Del Lago. Just as Carol Cutrere tries to rescue Val, so Alexandra, at the end of the play, gives Chance an opportunity to escape St. Cloud. He refuses, choosing instead to remain in their hotel room to await the castration he knows he will suffer. Chance is driven to confess, by his humane feelings toward Alexandra and his need to justify his absence from St. Cloud to Heavenly's brother. It is interesting that both of his confessors are already aware of his transgressions. This adds weight to my argument that Chance is compelled to confess the transgressions that make him outcast. The play ends when Chance turns to the audience and says, "I don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding--not even that--no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all" (124). These lines are often omitted from productions of Sweet Bird of Youth13. Allean Hale agrees with Isaac, that directors omit these lines because they create unwarranted sympathy for Chance (Address). Yet it is precisely that sympathy that I believe makes the argument in favor of Chance as a sexual outcast, one of Williams's sensitive fugitives who suffer at the hands of conventional morality. This dianoia in Sweet Bird of Youth argues that Chance is a victim--as much a victim as Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending. Chance in Sweet Bird of Youth can be compared to Streetcar's Stanley in several interesting ways. We find that Chance, like Stanley, grew up fairly poor, that he was nevertheless loved by his community, and that his charm allowed him to interact with persons of greater social status. Unlike Stanley, however, Chance's sexual misconduct (with Heavenly and with the rich women he services) makes him an outcast. Stanley's sexual misconduct is hidden; Blanche is incapable of revealing, in a believable way, that Stanley has raped her14. Chance's misconduct is revealed in the most shocking way; Heavenly Finley cannot help but reveal her sexual relationship with Chance, because of the disease which was the result of those encounters. Like Val in Orpheus Descending, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, Chance in Sweet Bird of Youth martyrs himself as payment for his sexual misdeeds. These characters--Williams's sexual outcasts--place themselves in positions that require that they confess their misdeeds and are placed in situations wherein expiation is possible. Williams's one-act play, Confessional, focuses on sexual outcasts in the act of confession. All the characters in this play are sexual outcasts; they meet in a bar, aptly named "Monk's Place," to share their stories. Williams's directions for Confessional call for an area of the stage to be set aside for his characters' confessions; he writes that this area "is used by everyone in the bar at some time in the course of the play" (Williams, Confessional 153)15. With the exception of a briefly-seen policeman, the cast are all sexual outcasts; Leona confuses her maternal and sexual instincts, and is driven to spend her dead brother's birthday getting drunk; Doc is an unlicensed practitioner of abortions; Bill is a male prostitute living temporarily with Leona; Violet is a mentally unbalanced woman who obsessively fondles the genitals of the men around her; Steve is a 47-year-old short-order cook and Violet's regular sexual partner; and the Young Man and Boy from Iowa are homosexuals who remain in the bar even though Monk tries to send them to a gay bar down the street. The bar owner, Monk, is also attracted to Violet despite her deplorable hygiene and her sexual dalliances with sailors; at the end of the play, we find that Violet has moved in with him. The introduction of the two homosexuals in Act I gives Williams the opportunity to have Monk express his reasons for allowing the other eccentric characters in his bar. Monk acknowledges that he could make more money running a gay bar (182); however, the satisfaction he experiences as bar owner comes from sharing his patrons' lives: I'm fond of, I've got an affection for, a sincere interest in my regular customers here....These things, these people, take the place of a family in my life. I love to come down those steps from my room to open the place for the evening, and when I've closed for the night, I love climbing back up those steps with my can of Ballantine's ale, and the stories, the jokes, the confidences and confessions I've heard that night, it makes me feel not alone. (182-183) The resemblance of Monk to a priest is inescapable. He is the only character in this play who does not talk about sex; he protects Doc in much the same way a priest might protect an errant parishioner; he maintains a place for confessions (his bar); and, as the above quote makes clear, he has an insatiable desire to hear the confessions of his customers. His customers are his family, and he is their father/confessor. Williams's argument in Confessional is that homosexuals reside at the top of his hierarchy of sexual outcasts. Homosexuality affects all the major characters in this --Leona drinks herself into oblivion each anniversary of the death of her gay brother; Bill represses his own homosexual feelings, compensating for them by victimizing the gay men whom he hustles. The Young Man is a jaded homosexual, who has sex only with men who loathe him. The Boy from Iowa is just beginning his homosexual experiences. Monk, though apparently celibate, considers and rejects the idea of hearing the confessions of homosexuals, preferring the confessions of his publicly heterosexual customers. This focus on homosexuality draws attention to the Young Man and the Boy from Iowa, two openly gay men who otherwise might be considered secondary characters in Confessional because they aren't regulars customers at Monk's Place. Just as the issue of homosexuality touches each of the other characters, so do these two characters reflect aspects of the other characters' lives. Leona finds in the Boy a semblance of her lost brother; Bill sees the Young Man as a potential victim; Monk sees the two men as bothersome reminders of confessions he does not want to hear. What sort of argument can we construct through these two characters? The relationship between the Young Man and the Boy from Iowa is an interesting one, as it weaves in and out of relationship to the other characters. We find during the play that the Boy had been riding his bicycle, escaping from Iowa, when the Young Man picked him up and seduced him. We also discover that the Young Man does this sort of thing regularly, and that he prefers transient experiences with primarily heterosexual men, whom he believes will give him sex because they need the money. The Boy from Iowa disappoints the Young Man by revealing that he enjoyed his first homosexual experience; the two are in the bar because the Young Man is trying to get rid of the Boy. As the Young Man tells Leona and Monk, his view of homosexual love is more realistic than the Boy's: There's a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they're addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise. This lack of variation and surprise in their--"love life"--[He smiles harshly.] -- spreads into other areas of--"sensibility?"--[He smiles again.] .... [He turns back; the "Confessional light" fades out and the bar is re-lighted. He returns to the table and adjusts his neck-scarf as he speaks to the boy.] --Your bicycle's still in my car. Shall I put it on the sidewalk? (178-179) The wonder expressed by the Boy after his first sexual experience has awakened something ugly in the Young Man, something so painful that he must reject the Boy's association of sex and love. The Boy from Iowa sees himself as a new breed of homosexual, one that is capable of combining sex and love. He tells Leona and Monk that the Young Man reminds him of a man he has heard about in his home town, a man who owned a flower shop "decorated Chinese with incense and naked pictures" (181). This man was a homosexual who tried to conceal his sexual preference, and who was forced to leave town because his sexual repression found an outlet in "immoral relations" with a grade school boy (181). We find that the flower shop man is the reason the Boy has left Goldenfield, Iowa--the Boy from Iowa wishes to escape both the conventional morality of the town and the repressed attitudes toward sex that homosexuals in that town express. In his confession, the Boy from Iowa reveals his quest for knowledge of homosexual love: That's all I've known of that world until tonight. Tonight was--initiation. It scares me because I liked it, and liked him, too. I'll never turn into the bad-word flower shop man, but I'll probably have an experience like that again, and next time I won't make the mistake of showing any excitement and pleasure. --I think I'll ride my bike all night tonight, I've got a lot to think over... (181) Both the Boy from Iowa and the Young Man reveal portions of Williams's life. Like the Boy from Iowa, Williams escaped at times from his small-town environment by hitch-hiking across the country. Like the Young Man, Williams was forced to conceal his homosexuality from the conventional members of his family and his home town. What, then, are we to make of the Boy's quote above, wherein he seems to be saying that he is being punished for enjoying having sex with another man? It appears to be a commentary on secret vice. Williams, who had to conceal his first sexual experiences from his family and friends, must have made a psychological connection between the desire to have homosexual experiences and the shame of concealment--an understandable, if terrible, association that would drive the playwright, eventually, to drugs and alcohol. The Boy's tragic flaw is his innocent acceptance of his homosexuality. His punishment is to wander the country in search of the love and acceptance he suspects to be impossible. The Young Man's flaw is the opposite--a jaded, guarded, unsurprised attitude toward gay sex. He does penance in the form of isolation from individuals who could love him. As Leona tells the Boy: He wants to pay you, it's part of his sad routine. It's like doing penance--penitence.... [She turns to the Young Man.] Do you like being alone except for vicious pickups? The kind you go for? If I understood you correctly? --Christ, you have terrible eyes, the expression in them! (176) Williams may himself have been trapped between these two poles, having been taught to guard his feelings in a small Southern town and then traveling in more accepting cosmopolitan circles. Certainly Leona sees the two men as aspects of her dead brother. She tells the Young Man about this, and his reply is equally revealing: Leona: Naw, I know the gay scene. I learned it from my kid brother. He came out early, younger than this boy here. I know the gay scene and I know the language of it and I know how full it is of sickness and sadness; it's so full of sadness and sickness, I could almost be glad that my little brother died before he had time to be infected with all that sadness and sickness in the heart of a gay boy. This kid from Iowa, here, reminds me a little of how my brother was, and you, you remind me of how he might have become if he'd lived. Young Man: Yes, you should be relieved he's dead, then. (173) Leona's brother, an absent character in this play, serves as a reminder to the characters (and the audience) of the destructive effect of conventional morality on sensitive persons. According to Leona, "He was too beautiful to live and so he died" (168). Her brother is a saint; this notion is supported by Leona's description of her brother in church, "standing under the light through the stained glass window" (167). Like Allan in Streetcar and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, Leona's brother inspires a quasi-religious devotion in the woman to whom he turned for understanding and protection. Leona appears to represent a balance between the poles revealed by the stories of the Boy from Iowa and the Young Man. She is neither surprised nor jaded, guarded nor unmindful of the attitudes of people around her. She is, however, goaded by the memory of her brother's death to wander from town to town, trying to forget him, yet drawn to gay bars, where she is bound to be reminded of him. The anniversary of his death reminds her that she must move on, to keep life interesting and to avoid loneliness (165). Her answer to the rhetorical question posed by the Boy from Iowa and the Young Man is that beauty transcends fear and repression. She attempts to explain this to Bill, the hustler with whom she has shared her trailer for six months: Remember this, Bill, if your brain can remember. Everyone needs! One beautiful thing! In the course of a lifetime!....Without one beautiful thing in the course of a lifetime, it's all a death-time. A woman turns to a slob that lives with a slob, and life is disgusting to her and she's disgusting to life... (168) These are echoes of Blanche's words to Mitch in Streetcar; speaking of the aftermath of her husband's suicide, Blanche says, "And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this--kitchen--candle" (115). Leona mourns the loss of her brother, who was her "beautiful thing." The memory of losing him, of seeing beauty leave the world, torments her. On each anniversary of his death, she is forced to punish herself with "a little human emotion" (175). Leona, Monk, Bill, the Young Man and the Boy from Iowa deliberately remain in the environment of Monk's Place. They consciously choose to place themselves in the position to confess their transgressions against conventional morality. Further, they consciously choose punishments for those transgressions: Leona chooses the life of a wandering alcoholic, ministering to men who seem to need motherly protection (180); Bill prostitutes himself; the Young Man rejects offers of love in favor of emotionless sex with male prostitutes; and the Boy from Iowa chooses to wander the west coast, searching for acceptance and love. Williams brings these sexual outcasts together to present two disparate notions of homosexual love. On the one hand is the Young Man's rejection of love in a coarse and unfeeling world. On the other is the Boy's embrace of the wonder of experience and of love. Maintaining a tenuous position in the middle is Leona, whose experience with her brother has taught her that homosexuals can be worth loving, but whose encounters with emotionally needy men have convinced her that frequent changes in geographical location are the only means for her to continue experiencing the wonder of life. Leona makes the tragedy of Bill's and the Young Man's lives clear: Y'know, I look at you and I ask myself a question. How does it feel to've never had anything beautiful in your life and not even know you've missed it? [She crosses toward the multi-selector.] Walking home with you some night, I've said, Bill, look at the sky, will you look at that sky? You never looked up, just grunted. In your life you've had no experiation--experience! Appreciation!--of the beauty of God in the sky, so what is your life but a bottle of, can of, glass of--one two three! (166) This is the bitter state of affairs for the Young Man; this is why he tells Leona that her brother is fortunate to be dead. In his confession, addressed to Leona and Monk, the Young Man relates his sad reaction to the Boy's wonder: And this excitement of his reminded me of my having lost the ability to say: "My God!" instead of just: "Oh, well." I've asked all the questions, shouted them at deaf heaven, till I was hoarse in the voice box and blue in the face, and gotten no answer, not the whisper of one, nothing at all, you see, but the sun coming up each morning and going down that night, and the galaxies of the night sky trooping on stage like chorines, robot chorines: one, two, three, kick, one two, three, kick.... (179) At the beginning of the play Monk attempts to direct the Young Man to a nearby gay bar. The Young Man remains at Monk's Place because he is driven to seek a place where he can confess his transgressions against a small-town idea of love. He deliberately places himself in a position wherein he can unburden himself to the other characters and, lest we forget the artificial world of Williams's plastic theatre, to the audience as well. In this chapter I have established this place/placement as a staple in Williams's dramatic repertoire, from the perspective of characters who are outcast because of sexual acts. These outcasts are destroyed, which is consistent with Williams's claim that conventional morality destroys sensitive persons. As we will see in the next chapter, this place/placement applies to outcasts whose motivations are other than sexual. Williams's outcast characters can be, and often are, motivated by identifiable religious impulses. Notes: 1 Williams, T., A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1980). Subsequent references Streetcar come from this edition of the play. 2 Although it is not central to my argument, it is worth pointing out that the highly stylized dialog of many of Williams's characters exists in sharp contrast to the standard American English dialect of his intended audience (New York theatre-goers). In this sense, then, dialog is a feature of melody as well as diction and character. 3 I am referring, here, to the scene in which Stanley forces his bowling partners to use a different bowling alley, because he's had problems at the one they recommend and because he is the captain of their team. This idea is expressed at several other points in the play; for example, Stanley's total control of his guests in the "Poker Night" scene and his advocacy of the Napoleonic Code in Act I. 4 Stanley's final action, in Williams's stage directions for the play, inform us that "[h]e kneels beside her and his fingers find the opening of her blouse" (179). 5 The term memory play is often used to describe plays in which most of the plot occurs within a character's memory. This colloquialism is, as my description here makes clear, quite different from Williams's model. 6 This is an important distinction to make, considering potential arguments that Stella is the central outcast character in Streetcar. Her removal from Belle Reve is voluntary, however, as is her association with Stanley 7 I discuss Stanley as a representative of conventional morality in greater detail in Chapters Four and Five of this dissertation. 8 The conversation between Blanche and Eunice appears in the typed 1947 version of Streetcar; however, the physical evidence exists only in Williams's handwritten revision. 9 The reader should remember that the word liturgy is translated in both Catholic and Episcopalian rites as work of the people.; Here is an intersection of religion and drama--one that I will explore in Chapter 3. 10 Although they do not relate directly to my argument, I want to mention three possible puns on Violet Venable's name. First, there is a close homonymic relationship between the name, Violet, and the word violent. Second, Venable sounds a great deal like venerable, a title given to certain saints. And, third, Venable is a close approximation of venial, meaning spiteful or lesser sin. 11 Williams, T., Suddenly Last Summer, In Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New York: Penguin, 1976). Subsequent references to this play come from the edition cited here. 12 I consider these two plays essentially the same; Williams is notorious for revising and republishing his plays, and the differences between Orpheus and Battle do not change the status of Val and Lady/Myra Torrence as sexual outcasts. 13 Aileen Hale tells me that these lines have been left out of almost every production of Sweet Bird of Youth she has seen. I have seen two productions; in the first, the director had Chance recite these lines to the men who had come to castrate him, and in the second, the lines were omitte 14 Rape is Stanley's only instance of sexual misconduct. His sexual, verbal, and psychological abuse of Stella, because it is condoned by the society in which Stanley lives, does not constitute misconduct as understood here. 15 Williams, T., Confessional. In The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New York: New Directions, 1971). All references to this play are from this edition. BR>