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Chapter Three "For the Sins of the World": Religious Outcasts in The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, and Orpheus Descending For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfinished because the householder's funds were not sufficient -- these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of make-shift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as a war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby cleansing one's self of his guilt. (Williams, "Desire and the Black Masseur" 85) * * * Still obscured by glistening exhaltations, the angels of fructification had now begun to meet the tumescent phallus of the sun. Vastly the wheels of the earth sang Alleluia! And the seven foaming oceans billowed Oh! (Williams, "The Angels of Fructification" 34) * * * Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to--why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies. (Williams, "On a Streetcar Named Success" 21) * * * I prefer a play to be not a noose but a net with fairly wide meshes. So many of its instants of revelation are wayward flashes, not part of the plan of an author but struck accidentally off, and perhaps these are closest to being a true celebration of the inebriate god. (Williams, "The Meaning of The Rose Tattoo" 57) Williams's religious outcasts are no less martyred than are his sexual outcasts. There is, however, an element in these characters that is missing or obscured in his sexual outcasts. The suffering of Tom and Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in The Night of the Iguana, and Lady/Myra Torrence in Orpheus Descending/Battle of Angels is more abstract than that of the sexual outcasts I discuss in Chapter Two. Laura makes her physical handicap into a social one; Tom punishes himself for abandoning his mother and sister; Catherine sacrifices herself to her perception of truth; the Rev. Shannon agonizes over conventional interpretations of God; and Lady/Myra accepts the consequences of a loveless marriage. As they progress through Williams's memory play structure, these characters experience an isolation from conventional morality comparable to that of some pagan and Judeo-Christian religious figures. Judith Thompson argues that Williams uses memory as an allegory for the collective unconscious in his outcast characters, allowing them to explore philosophical issues through storytelling and contemplation (8). This is consistent with the playwright's claim that the agon between virtue and corruption is "the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole" ("The World I Live In" 91). She also argues that Williams's characters "are representatives of modern suffering humanity, victimized by their own conflicting drives and desires and existentially alienated from a world become a metaphysical Œheap of broken images'" (11). This is also consistent with Williams's poetics; he claims his plays were created as a release for his audiences' "increasing tensions, verging on the psychotic" ("The World I Live In" 89). The suffering of Williams's religious outcasts, as they progress through his memory play structure, is the outcome of a break between the outcast and her or his spirituality. As Thompson puts it: The climax of each play, then, resides in an anagnorisis or recognition scene: that moment when the protagonist is divested of mythic or godlike dimensions, stripped of illusions and delusions, and forced to acknowledge his or her inherently anti-heroic nature. This symbolic moment of demythication, or rite of divestiture, is generally dramatized by a gesture of breaking, rending, or otherwise shattering the concrete symbol....Thus, Jim's breaking of Laura's unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, Mitch's tearing of Blanche's paper lantern in A Streetcar Named Desire, Maggie's disposal of Brick's crutch and liquor bottles in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Shannon's breaking free from his roped-in situation in the canvas hammock as well as his cutting loose the similarly tied-up iguana in The Night of the Iguana, and the literal dismemberment of Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth and of Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer are all symbolic acts which divest the characters of their inflated dimensions...and force them to confront an existential reality devoid of transcendent redemption. (5) Thompson's claim that Williams's plays focus on "the defeat of the romantic imagination in a modern world inimical to transcendent ideal and aspiration" (6) is but a restatement of Williams's claim that "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). Further, her claim that the climax of Williams's plays is closely associated with anagnorisis is a very loose paraphrase of the first step in Williams's memory play structure; her use of recognition and anagnorisis represents the profound experience that initiates the "arrest of time" in the memory play. Williams's description of his memory plays, as outlined in Chapter Two, provides the foundation for Thompson's critical examination of The Glass Menagerie. In Williams's memory plays, she writes, a recounted memory in the first half of his plays causes an "arrest of time," in which a character is frozen in the act of looking back and the characters are static, rendered abnormal, neurotic, or otherwise disturbed (2). In the second half of the play, the memory recounted in the first half is reenacted; for example, Amanda's story about seventeen gentlemen callers is reenacted by Laura and Jim, and the memory of Mr. Wingfield's abandonment of the family is reenacted by Tom (2-3). The three-part memory play appears, upon first inspection, to be somewhat simplistic and limiting; however, Williams proves through his numerous plays--memory plays--that complex and varied themes and plots are possible within his structure. The memory play lends itself particularly well to plays with strong religious themes; just as ritual is intrinsic to Williams's concept of religion, so is the memory play inseparable from his notion of tragedy. The rites of Christianity are reflected in the rules of the memory play, even in its broadest application. The first stage of the memory play (the profound experience) reflects the act of Christian conversion or epiphany; the second stage (the arrest of time) mirrors Christian rituals such as communion and Passover, wherein the participants are encouraged to experience the happenings of an earlier time; and the third stage (the search for meaning) reflects, particularly in Catholic doctrine, the struggle to remain free from sin and the confession that brings absolution from sin. In recasting certain Christian rituals, "the rites of initiation, marriage, and sacrificial atonement," Thompson claims, Williams sought to reconcile society's images of man and religion. She continues to argue that: Williams constructs from the old myths and rituals new meanings relevant to an age and culture bereft of a commonly shared mythos. Seeking to restore symbolic meaning to the modern existential condition, Williams offers a dramatic experience in the plays that encourages our granting religious significance and value to merely human relationships, however limited and compensatory they may seem....In its sympathetic portrayal of his characters' romantic yearnings for transcendence, its ritualistic depiction of their inevitable confrontation with existential limitations, and its endowing with religious value transient acts of human kindness, Williams's drama imparts a mythic significance to modern secular experience. (7-8) This is consistent with Williams's claim, in a 1957 London Observer self-interview, that humans experience a "screaming" need "to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth" ("Tennessee Williams Interviews Himself" 90). Later in the interview he redefines guilt and original sin as "right or wrong ways that individuals have taken" (91). This, he argues, is the source material for writers. As he puts it: I'm inclined to think that most writers, and most other artists, too, are primarily motivated in their desperate vocation by a desire to find and to separate truth from the complex of lies and evasions they live in, and I think that this impulse is what makes their work not so much a profession as a vocation, a true "calling." ("Tennessee Williams Interviews Himself" 91) Playwrights function like priests, in Williams's view, telling stories and explaining mysteries that demonstrate moral lessons. I use the term mysteries, here, not as secret or unexplained but in its liturgical sense, as the methods and meanings--the dianoia--central to a religious belief. Jack Fritscher argues that all of Tennessee Williams's theatre is about liturgical mysteries. Concerning the playwright's secularization of Christian dogma, he writes: Eccentricities, Summer and Smoke, and Camino Real revolve around ritual fountains of Eternity. Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer are ritual re-enactments of events of salvation and damnation. The patio setting of Iguana is sanctuary-like, the characters making entrance from their isolated sacristy cells....Williams's metaphorical translation of the Episcopalian Mass is dark parody of institutionalized religion. (71) Although Fritscher argues that Williams's attitude toward God is ambivalent (73), his characters' persistent (even insistent) search for a God-concept seems to argue otherwise. Williams's plays reveal that the playwright was extremely interested in pursuing and promoting his concept of mankind's relationship to God. Williams would have us believe that his God-concept has always existed; the problem is that mankind has not recognized the evidence. As he puts it in his Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth: I would say that there is something much bigger in life and death than we have become aware of (or adequately recorded) in our living and dying. And, further, to compound this shameless romanticism, I would say that our serious theatre is a search for that something that is not yet successful but is still going on. (xii) The purpose of the playwright, in Williams's theology, is priestly; playwrights who express tragic intent in their plays are articulators of essential human morality. Playwrights, like Episcopalian and Catholic priests, represent the morality that mankind's creator instilled in them as part of the miracle of creation. In "The Timeless World of a Play," Williams writes: The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live as steadfastly as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeing is the great magic trick of human existence. (131) This is reminiscent of the opening remarks that Williams assigns to Tom in The Glass Menagerie: "But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (1522). Williams's theology calls into question the wisdom of labeling morality and guilt as separate, subjective things. These functions--identification of morality and incitement to confession--are, traditionally, the primary roles of priests in Western society. Williams accepts these roles, incorporating them into his list of the responsibilities of a playwright. This calls into question, again, Fritscher's claim that Williams was not interested in religion; on the contrary, it situates God and morality as the most important topics in his plays. The Glass Menagerie is rich in the connections between characters and religion, truths and evasions, that Thompson lists and Williams claims as the material of drama. The parallels between the characters and Christian religious figures--more specifically, between some of Williams's outcasts and Christian saints--are overt; in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie, the playwright combines spectacle and arrangement by insisting, through simile, that the light upon Laura should have "a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in early religious portraits of female saints or madonnas" (The Glass Menagerie 1521)1. From the beginning of the play, Williams seeks to establish for Laura the kind of morality that Wayne Booth, in the following passage, claims to be the obligation of narration to an ethical character: All stories, even the most seemingly neutral, depend, both in what they say and in their silences, on appeals to moral, political, and religious judgments--using the word "religious" in the broad sense found in anthropologists' discussions these days. Many an effort at a more scientific treatment of narrative since 1961 has foundered, for me, on this hard truth: in fictional forms most of the important facts are simultaneously values, and to ignore the values is to turn the object studied into something less than itself. (419) Through the spectacle of lighting, the gentle dialog between Laura and Tom, and the arrangement of Laura in reenactments of Christian art, Williams appeals to the moral and religious values of his audience. His appeals may be direct, as in the playwrights' mention of the Madonna and the Pieta, or subtle, through the generous and forgiving nature Laura reveals in her dialog. The connection Williams makes between Jim O'Connor and Christ depends on metaphor, not simile. The arrival of Jim represents one of the earliest examples of Williams's plastic theatre, a metafictive use of spectacle to illustrate "anarchy in juxtaposition with organized society" ("Something Wild..." 8). Jim's entrance is accompanied by a placard or projection of the word, Annunciation (1539), a traditional Christian term designating the appearance of the angel who tells the Virgin, Mary, that she is pregnant with Jesus. It is not like the Annunciation; Williams directs us to believe that it is an Annunciation. The playwright presents us with a sophisticated and subtle invention here; Jim is compared to an unborn Christ, a potential savior. Through this distinction between a potential rescuer and a guaranteed savior, Williams justifies himself in having Jim disappoint Laura. Thompson argues that Amanda's distress, when she discovers that Laura has failed at Rubicam Business College, suggests the "mater dolorosa" of Christian art (17). The final spectacle in the play bears this out; in a reenactment of the Pieta, a famous piece of Christian sculpture, Amanda serves as the silent, sad mother, comforting the wounded saint, Laura (1568). In Thompson's analysis of Christian imagery in The Glass Menagerie, she claims that the absent father represents God and that Tom Wingfield symbolizes both a priest and Cain (the Old Testament's "wandering Jew") (16). In order to make these associations between Williams's religious outcasts and Christian saints, we must posit a phenomenological world in which the Madonna, the Christ, and Cain have adversaries--saints and other religious nobility cannot exist if their behavior is conventional. T.E. Kalem finds such an agonistic relationship between Williams's religious outcasts and conventional morality; these characters, he writes, form the foundation for a contemporary form of morality play: Williams was also a moral symbolist. His earthy characters journey over a landscape that pulses with the strife torn [sic] dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal Abel. (2) This struggle between flesh and spirit is at the core of The Glass Menagerie. The entire play exists as Tom's memory of the pain he experienced when he abandoned his sister and mother; the story he tells involves the struggle between his spiritual goal--freedom--and Amanda's physical goal--the marriage of her daughter. It is important to note that the agon for these characters is abstract; they struggle, not against corruption as represented by individuals, but against the concept of sin. Tom's struggle, for example, is less involved with the individuals in his family than with the spiritual confinement they represent. Amanda's struggle is not with Tom, but with the notion of abandonment and exclusion that he represents. Roger Stein claims that Amanda wants to be part of Christian ceremony, but is denied; he notes that, in the acting version of Menagerie, Amanda is refused a seat in the "Northern" Episcopalian Church because she could not afford to rent a pew (18). Amanda's stories all take place on Sunday, Thompson notes, adding that her resemblance to Eve evokes the Biblical myth of the Fall of Man (17). Roger Boxill outlines a path for Amanda that he calls a "Christian geography"; her youth was spent in the paradisical Eden of the South, her disappointments and maturity occurred during the Purgatory of the Great Depression, and her present recoils from the Hell of World War II (71). Several critics note that, as far as Christian symbolism is concerned, the absent father is the most important character in The Glass Menagerie. Through dialog and stage directions, Williams indicates the importance of the absent father; in Tom's opening monologue he lists his father as "a fifth character in the play" (1523). Williams's stage directions have his audience meeting the father, through the spectacle of a photograph, before meeting any other character: A blown-up photograph of the father hangs on the wall of the living room, to the left of the archway. It is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy's First World War cap. He is gallantly smiling, ineluctably smiling, as if to say "I will be smiling forever." (1545) Thompson compares the absent father to the "God of the modern world, absent and incommunicado" (16). Susan Koprince ranks the father with other absent figures in Williams's plays, noting that these characters are "worshipped like deities" (94). In The Glass Menagerie, the father exists only as a larger-than-life photograph enshrined over the mantel (1523). His influence, although indirect, is nevertheless profound. The preponderance of Christian symbolism in The Glass Menagerie establishes this as an important theme for Williams. Of primary interest, relative to the playwright's theology, is the idea that God does not communicate directly with the characters, but nevertheless influences them. He negatively portrays those who maintain that a direct connection exists; Amanda, for example, is depicted as an ogress who calls her magazine subscribers "Christian martyrs" (1530) and who suggests that a certain church was struck by lightning because "the Episcopalians gave card parties" (1555). Christian artwork, recreated in this play, represents elements of suffering and faith that Williams believes to be important. Although Tom imitates his God-like father, absenting himself from his family, images of his suffering sister haunt him. Because he is not God, his abandonment of Laura and Amanda is a sin against them. Tom is forced to confess his transgression--his abandonment of his mother and sister--to the audience, because of these haunting images. His self-imposed exile, in the role of the "wandering Jew" (Thompson 20), is his punishment for violating the conventions of morality. Acting for her idea of conventional morality, Amanda places Laura in a position that demands she confess her transgression--her embarrassment concerning her limp--to Jim. Laura's self-imposed exile, in the role of the spinster daughter, is the punishment she demands for herself. Through their exile, their defiance of conventional morality, Tom and Laura find their way into our hearts. Williams's rhetoric here is consistent with Wayne Booth's description of morality in fiction. Booth writes: ...characters earn our moral approval whenever they choose to do something we think they should do, even if their deed is conventionally judged to be im-moral. Indeed, we love them especially if they act against the conventionally moral, so long as we approve of their reasons. The effect is even stronger if they pursue their "immorality" at great cost to themselves. (417) Williams's rhetoric fits neatly into Booth's. Tom and Laura suffer horribly, as do all the outcasts--religious or otherwise--in Williams's plays. Amanda, Tom, and Laura represent a nonconformity that is intrinsic to them; on psychological and social levels, even in their relationships with one another, they act against what Booth calls the "conventionally moral" (417). Jim O'Connor, whom we are supposed to recognize as a less sensitive character, is the opposite--Jim represents conventional morality, from his views on self-improvement and his contemporary chivalrous behavior towards Amanda and Laura, through his camaraderie with Tom (and his naive acceptance of Laura's presence at what he believed to be a casual dinner with a co-worker), to his devotion to his absent girlfriend. The agon is created in the relationships between Laura, Tom, and Amanda (the struggle of nonconformist siblings against an antique or outmoded concept of the nuclear family); Laura, Jim, and Amanda (a complex conflict involving friendship, courtship, and isolation); and Tom, Laura, and Amanda (a sister's futile struggle to preserve family unity, to reconcile Tom's wander-lust with Amanda's parental control). Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer represents a concatenation of the suffering of Amanda, Tom, and Laura. Like Tom, Sebastian searches for spiritual meaning; like Laura, he struggles against a social handicap (his concealed homosexuality); and like Amanda, he despairs of his lost youth. Although I discuss Sebastian as a sexual outcast in Chapter Two, I also note that he is a religious outcast in 1) his similarly to Christianity's St. Sebastian and 2) the connections we can establish between Sebastian and the religious ideas of transgression and atonement. The similarity of Sebastian Venable to St. Sebastian goes beyond the nature of their deaths. Williams forces us, through dialog, to accept this parallel; he has Catherine tell us that the Mexican beach where her cousin used her to attract young men is "named for Sebastian's name saint...La Playa San Sebastian" (Suddenly Last Summer 78)2. Gilbert Debusscher notes that Sebastian's homosexuality is another common denominator; he writes that St. Sebastian is "traditionally considered the lover of Emperor Diocletian" ("Tennessee Williams as Hagiographer" 451). In addition, as Thompson points out, Violet Venable's claim that her son was chaste and saintly is paralleled by contemporary revelations from religious scholars, who consider the story of St. Sebastian to be a pious myth (103). One cannot help but perceive religious overtones in Violet's treatment of his books of poetry, and in what Gross calls Sebastian's Eucharist-like end (239). Gross continues: The range of religious meaning assumed by Sebastian in his role as sacrifice is expressed in the rich multivalent word the children chant as they pursue their victim, "Pan." As Catherine explains, the word means "bread," which quickly moves from its literal meaning in this context to a Eucharistic reference. It is also, of course, the name of the highly sexed Arcadian god (referred to in some accounts as the result of his mother's multiple copulations with various suitors) who was known for his "sudden sexual forays against boys and girls alike." (238-240) Fritscher argues that Williams is attempting, through Sebastian's mother, to portray the poet as a priest (75). Like the playwright-priest, Sebastian attempts to iterate the mysteries of God. Thompson has uncovered evidence that Williams believed the story of St. Sebastian to be about sex and death. She writes that: In his 1948 poem "San Sebastiano de Sodoma," Williams similarly equates the martyrdom of St. Sebastian with the sexual acts of fellatio and sodomy. The poem's St. Sebastian is also pierced with phallic arrows in "throat and thigh," as Mary plays the role of voyeur, raising "a corner / of a cloud through which to spy." In the poem's climax, the Eucharistic chalice becomes the desecrated anal "cup," which, when pierced in an erotic act, releases its "sweet, intemperate wine," a profane analog to the communal rite. (104) Thompson addresses the issue of atonement; by surrendering to "the primal violence he perceives as universal order, Sebastian Venable achieves ironic atonement (at-one-ment) or ultimate reconciliation with ŒGod' in a demonic epiphany" (104). Just as Blanche's connection to the rite of communion and absolution forces her down a path toward destruction, so Sebastian's God-concept forces him to accept the punishment of a vengeful God and Mrs. Venable's God-concept gives her the authority to insist upon Catherine's figurative excommunication and her literal punishment of Dr. Cukrowicz's scalpel. As Fritscher puts it: It is typical Williams irony that Sebastian finds God, well-toothed, in the company of his ravenous mother immediately after the female-dominated act of the turtles' birth....the Venables' image of God is the eschatological deity of the Old Testament. While all that Mrs. Venable says must be read with a mirror, she does try to make Sebastian into the poet-priest; she emphasizes to the play's confessor, Doctor Sugar3, who is (Williams's not Mrs. Venable's) God-figure-arbiter (to perform lobotomy or not), Sebastian's virtues of chastity, discipline and abstinence. She is like Saint Genet in her twisting to positive virtue the glories of the inverted. She sees the Venables' role of benefactor as one of sacrificial victim. (Fritscher 76) Fritscher compares Mrs. Venable to Saint Genet, a spiritual Pollyanna; however, in her behavior toward her deceased son she appears more like Saint Paul, the first Pope in Catholic reckoning. She is a religious "press agent," extolling and embellishing the virtues of her dead son and establishing a sort of church to promote his image and to persecute his detractors (such as Catherine Holly). In Chapter Two I mention Catherine's resemblance to Christianity's St. Catherine of Bologna; the parallel between her life and that of the martyr/saint gives credence to the idea that she is a religious outcast. Certainly she is a more noble character than Mrs. Venable; Catherine suffers because she feels compelled to tell the truth as an eye-witness to Sebastian's murder--a more noble endeavor than Violet Venable's myth-making. Although Catherine struggles against her oppressors, her drive to tell the truth about Sebastian's death makes her willing to suffer the punishment she knows she will receive. Williams continues his exploration of confession and punishment in The Night of the Iguana. Foster Hirsch succinctly describes this play as typical of Williams's "confession dramas" (70). He writes that "the play is basically a series of monologues: Shannon on the nature of God; Hannah on art; Maxine on sex" (70). He also claims that this play "dramatizes Williams's belief in the transforming and healing powers of art and of confession, for Nonno's poem, like the confessions of the other characters, is therapeutic" (69). Thompson says the play expresses "desire for absolution from a transcendent authority" (158). The central character in The Night of the Iguana is the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, an Episcopalian priest who, charged with sacrilege and sexual promiscuity, has been expelled from his Virginia church and reduced to conducting tours of Mexico for a living. He suffers a mental collapse (the last in a series) at Maxine Faulk's run-down Mexican hotel, where he strands his tour group while he explores his beliefs about God, the Church, sex, and humanity. In Foster Hirsch's A Portrait of the Artist: The Plays of Tennessee Williams, the playwright comments on his main theme for this play: The alternative title, Two Acts of Grace...referred to a pair of desperate people who had the humble nobility of each putting the other's desperation, during the course of a night, above his own. Being an unregenerate romanticist, even now I can still think of nothing that gives more meaning to life. (69) Through dialog, Williams establishes Shannon's desperate, outcast state early in the play. As his story unfolds, we discover that, like Sebastian, Shannon has experienced an epiphany in which he perceives his God-concept and his sexual mores to be at variance with that of his parishioners. Thus he, like Sebastian, enters Williams's memory play structure, and is forced to relive that epiphany and to confess his nonconformist beliefs. As in Suddenly Last Summer, the setting of Iguana is tropical: "the Costa Verde, which, as its name implies, sits on a jungle-covered hilltop overlooking the Œcaleta,' or Œmorning beach' of Puerto Barrio in Mexico" (Williams, The Night of the Iguana 5)4. The setting of these two plays offers powerful insights into the thought behind them. Sebastian's jungle-garden in Suddenly Last Summer represents an island of violence in a sea of civilization; Maxine's hotel in Iguana represents an island of civilization in a sea of violence. In Sebastian's violent garden, Williams situates and describes the bloody punishment of a distant and vengeful God. Williams directs our attention, first, to the spectacle of violent colors, and second, to the melody of bird cries (9). In Maxine's quiet hotel, he explores the philosophical relationship between God and humanity. Williams directs us, in the first sentence of Act I, to the melodious cacophony of "sounds of a party of excited female tourists," which we hear before the stage lights rise to reveal the spectacle of tropical palms and the rustic verandah of the Costa Verde Hotel (9). Trapped at the hotel for the duration of his breakdown, Shannon examines choices that confuse and torment him. He is torn, emotionally shattered by conflicting drives: his desire to return to the Church; his inclination to succumb to the dependent relationship described by Maxine Faulk; his physical, sexual desire for the sixteen-year-old Charlotte Goodall; and his intellectual attraction to Hannah Jelkes (a spinster who is traveling in poverty with her grandfather, an aged minor poet named Nonno or Jonathan Coffin). His sexual liaison with Charlotte is an expression of his desire to be punished, to "do worse" (32) in order to incite the wrath of God. He is also foiled by Miss Fellowes5, whom he calls a "butch vocal teacher" (16), and whose threats to have Shannon fired precipitate his breakdown. Miss Fellowes is motivated by a desire to protect Charlotte; she gives herself that authority, as the girl's instructor at the Baptist Teachers College in Blowing Rock, Texas. An interesting spiritual geography exists within the plot in The Night of the Iguana. Above the hill is God; the hill is Shannon's Golgotha; and below is the captured iguana, a beast to be fattened and slaughtered. Shannon comes to his place of suffering as what Williams calls an "exile from the place and time of his heart's fulfillment" ("A Summer of Discovery" 146). We find that he has fled to Maxine's hotel for a previous breakdown; Shannon tells us he seeks mediation between the God of the tempest and the bound iguana that, like him, is at the "end of its rope" (110). A secular geography exists as well, in the configuration of the set. From doors to rooms that symbolize the isolated, interior lives of the occupants, the characters enter the hotel verandah, which is most of the stage. Thompson writes that the set "simultaneously reflects the inherent isolation of its inhabitants and offers the possibility of their communion, or, at least, communication" (154). I find another, more significant, parallel--the set is the interior of a church, in which communion is taking place. The verandah represents the place of communion, even to the presence of the hammock (the apex of Golgotha) in its center. In the presence of the place of Christ's crucifixion, the characters take communion from the Christ-figure, Shannon, just as Catholics and Episcopalians take communion from their priests, who are also Christ-figures during this rite. Jesus exists in Christian mythology as a more-than-man, who comes to articulate a new God-concept. Like Jesus, and like Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, Shannon attempts to articulate his image of God, which is at variance with the "senile delinquent" God of Western theology (61). The most relevant dialog is between Shannon and Hannah, beginning when Shannon tells her how he came to lose his congregation: Shannon. So the next Sunday when I climbed into the pulpit and looked down over all of those smug, disapproving, accusing faces uplifted, I had an impulse to shake them -- so I shook them. I had a prepared sermon -- meek, apologetic -- I threw it away, tossed it into the chancel. Look here, I said, I shouted, I'm tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent -- yeah, that's what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this, this...this.... Hannah. [quietly] Senile delinquent? Shannon. Yeah, this angry, petulant old man. I mean he's represented like a bad-tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man -- I mean like the sort of old man in a nursing home that's putting together a jigsaw puzzle and can't put it together and gets furious at it and kicks over the table. Yes, I tell you they do that, all our theologies do it -- accuse God of being a cruel, senile delinquent, blaming the world and brutally punishing all he created for his own faults in construction, and then, ha-ha, yeah -- a thunderstorm broke that Sunday.... (59-60) This investigation of the nature of God makes Shannon a religious outcast, what Fritscher calls "a dispossessed wanderer" (72). After being shut out of his church, Shannon says, Church officials put him in a "nice little private asylum to recuperate from a complete nervous breakdown as they preferred to regard it" (60). Leaving the asylum, he began "collecting evidence" of the truth of his God-image (60). Shannon finds his God in the tempest: Shannon. It's going to storm tonight -- a terrific electric storm. Then you will see the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon's conception of God Almighty paying a visit to the world he created. I want to go back to the Church and preach the gospel of God as Lightning and Thunder...and also stray dogs vivisected and...and...and.... [He points out suddenly toward the sea.] That's him! There he is now! [He is pointing out at a blaze, a majestic apocalypse of gold light, shafting the sky as the sun drops into the Pacific.] His oblivious majesty -- and here I am on this...dilapidated verandah of a cheap hotel, out of season, in a country caught and destroyed in its flesh and corrupted in its spirit by its gold-hungry Conquistadors that bore the flag of the Inquisition along with the Cross of Christ. (61) While Hannah appears to function as a compassionate listener, encouraging Shannon to confess to his Bishop and return to the Church, Maxine serves as a temptress, preferring to use information about Shannon to lure him, dependent, into a long-term sexual relationship with her. She torments him with his guilt, recounting intelligence she received by eavesdropping on conversations between Shannon and his former confessor, her deceased husband: Maxine. You was explaining to him how your problems first started. You told him that Mama, your Mama, used to send you to bed before you was ready to sleep -- so you practiced the little boy's vice, you amused yourself with yourself. And once she caught you at it and whaled your backside with the back side of a hairbrush because she said she had to punish you for it because it made God mad as much as it did Mama, and she had to punish you for it so God wouldn't punish you for it harder than she would....You said you loved God and Mama and so you quit it to please them, but it was your secret pleasure and you harbored a secret resentment against Mama and God for making you give it up. And so you got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons, and you got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls. (86) In the moment of his greatest mental anguish (the scene in which he breaks down and is restrained upon a hammock), Shannon acknowledges Maxine's accusation as the truth behind his bad behavior; he calls it "the infantile expression of rage at Mama and rage at God and rage at the goddamn crib, and rage at the everything, rage at the...everything....Regression to infantilism...." (98). This is his darkest moment and, fortunately for him, Hannah is there to help him make sense of his anguish. Hirsch claims that Shannon has made more of his pain than actually exists: "Shannon is not equal to his ideal of a rapacious and vengeful God because he is merely an overaged delinquent who rebels against a conservative family background and a tame middle-class concept of God" (66). While I agree with the sense of Hirsch's claim, I take exception to the word merely in it. Shannon is more than "merely an over-aged delinquent"--he is a highly trained priest who, though immature in his personal behavior, makes an adult decision in rebelling against conventional morality. This is a more serious crisis than the word merely would imply. We may consider Shannon's behavior childish; however, we must consider the possibility that this very childishness--not his rebellion, but the symptom of it--is the reason he is treated with so little sympathy. Miss Fellowes is, like Maxine, unsympathetic toward Shannon. Even though he confesses his breakdown to her, she responds by asking how his explanation compensates her tour group for their spoiled vacation. Shannon, apparently unable to see beyond his need for sympathy, is incredulous: I mean I've just confessed to you that I'm at the end of my rope, and you say, ŒHow does that compensate us?' Please, Miss Fellowes. Don't make me feel that any adult human being puts personal compensation before the dreadful, bare fact of a man at the end of his rope who still has to try to go on, to continue, as if he'd never been better or stronger in his whole existence. No, don't do that... (26) But Miss Fellowes does claim compensation from Blake Tours, Shannon's employer, and is offered a refund of half of the tour price (91). Even this is not enough for Miss Fellowes; she destroys Shannon's reputation by telling Latta, the new head of the tour, that Shannon "got plenty of money out of this young girl [Shannon] seduced" (91). On her word, and without consulting either Shannon or Charlotte, Blake Tours fires Shannon without severance pay. Miss Fellowes's accusations and harsh verbal treatment of Shannon increase his emotional distress, exacerbated later by the taunts of the German tourists. Miss Fellowes is a Philistine to Shannon's Jesus. Just as the Philistines charge Jesus with sacrilege and bring about his rejection from the church of Israel, so does Miss Fellowes charge Shannon with prostitution and rape, bringing about his dismissal from Blake Tours6. Throughout the play Williams portrays her as cold, abusive, and hypocritical. Indeed, her manner is very much like Stanley Kowalski's in Streetcar; in her desire to dominate Charlotte and discredit Shannon, she escalates her attack on the latter until she triumphs over him. Both Stanley and Miss Fellowes represent Williams's perception of conventional morality: Stanley punishes Blanche for her sexual misconduct, although he sexually abuses and dominates his wife; Miss Fellowes punishes Shannon for his sexual misdeed, though Williams leads us to believe that she is a lesbian or, at least, a self-righteous woman who takes on inappropriate male territoriality. There is another interesting connection between Miss Fellowes and Stanley Kowalski. Both build their verbal assaults, seeking the psychological breaking points of their adversaries--and the response of the adversaries is nearly identical. Blanche makes hysterical and irrational attempts to contact Shep Huntleigh, from whom she used to receive emotional support. Stella and Stanley stop her. Shannon, at the beginning of Act Three, tries to send a letter to the Dean of the Divinity School at Sewanee, seeking spiritual comfort and a reinstatement into the Church that he knows is impossible (85). Maxine and Miss Fellowes stop him. At the end of both plays, the religious outcast is driven into a psychologically and physically dependent position--Blanche is institutionalized and Shannon is drawn into Maxine's sexual and emotional control. Shannon, like Blanche, indulges in highly dramatic behavior. We find that in the past he has succumbed to this "spooked" behavior only in the presence of Maxine's husband, Fred, now deceased, because Shannon knew that Fred would protect him (85). On this trip he makes the mistake of expecting the same sort of support from Maxine who, instead of supporting him, uses his indulgence in emotional distress to control him. Hannah Jelkes points out Shannon's self-indulgence, claiming that he enjoys his breakdowns too much for them to serve as proper expiation. She says: Hannah. Who wouldn't like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world, if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that's so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon? There's something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock -- no nails, no blood, no death. Isn't that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon....I'd like to untie you right now, but let me wait until you've passed through your present disturbance. You're still indulging yourself in your...your Passion Play performance. I can't help observing this self-indulgence in you." (99-100) Shannon's "voluptuous" suffering, described here in sensual terms, as well as his dalliance with women in his congregation, could allow us to place him in the category of sexual outcasts. I prefer to deal with him as a religious outcast, however, because of the obvious symbolism of his profession. I agree with Thompson, who argues that "Shannon has enacted the role of an ironic Christ throughout the play" (164). Unlike Thompson, however, I believe that Shannon is a noble character; she calls him a "demonic son" of God because he takes his tour group to unpleasant places (164). Shannon is no more demonic than Christ, who, through parables and direct confrontation, often placed his disciples in uncomfortable, even painful, emotional states. Both characters suffer for their actions. Hannah tells Shannon that his suffering is a by-product of "the need to believe in something or in someone" (106). She recommends that Shannon accept his need to confess his sin--his rebellion. The source of his rebellion is his own impotence, his inability to reconcile his human self-esteem and the notion of an all-powerful God; he has expressed his rebellion by seducing young women and engaging in verbal attacks against the Church. In Hannah's comment is the seed of another comparison--that of the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon to St. Lawrence (c 250 CE) who, in his desire to believe in Pope Sixtus II's claim that, like Christ, he would rise in three days, sold many of the Church's possessions in Rome and donated the proceeds to the poor. As John J. Delaney relates the story: When the prefect of Rome heard of his actions, he had Lawrence brought before him and demanded all the Church's treasures for the Emperor. Lawrence said he would need three days to collect them and then presented the blind, the crippled, the poor, the orphans, and other unfortunates to the prefect and told him they were the Church's treasures. Furious, the prefect prepared a red-hot griddle and bound Lawrence to it; Lawrence bore the agony and in the midst of his torment instructed the executioner to turn him over, as he was broiled enough on one side. (349) Thompson notes this similarity, also; she compares the auto-da-fé of St. Lawrence to the scene in Act Three, when Shannon chokes on the smoke from a lighted cigarette and drops it into the hammock on which he is bound (164). I find other parallels, as well: Shannon is bound and verbally roasted by the German tourists; throughout the play, he jokes about his physical and emotional helplessness; and this binding takes place after Miss Fellowes demands that he turn over his treasures--the keys to the bus, and the tourists who are his only remaining congregation--to her. Earlier in the play, Shannon tells Charlotte that "the helpless can't help the helpless." (54) Williams's point, however, seems to be that the helpless must help one another. Shannon must come to realize that God is neither Mama nor the God of Lex Talionis, but is a synthesis of the two. He tells Hannah that "we -- live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really...." (74). Hannah suggests that both are real -- the God that is Mama and the God that is fantastic. Hannah tells Shannon, "Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind, violent." (117). Her acceptance of Shannon, despite his self-indulgent and childish behavior, is decidedly more altruistic than Maxine's. Just as Hannah encourages Shannon to descend from his Golgotha to release the suffering iguana, so she also encourages him to accept his image of God without robbing his needy parishioners of theirs (62). "I know people torture each other many times like devils," she says, "but sometimes they do see and know each other, you know, and then, if they're decent, they do want to help each other all they can" (81). Jack Fritscher sees Williams's portrayal of Shannon as an avenue for Williams to explore the priestly nature of the playwright: Williams's metaphorical translation of the Episcopalian Mass is dark parody of institutionalized religion. With Emerson, Williams feels that prayers and dogma simply mark the height to which religious translation point up the lack of the old economy The validity of listening to artists in areas of interpersonal relationships (which includes man's relation to God) is that historically artists have pre-known and pre-sung for ages the kerygma that the institutions have arrived at only latterly. (71) Thus, according to Fritscher, expression of man's propensity for religious dogma -- rituals and other liturgy -- is the natural province of the playwright. The religious overtones in The Night of the Iguana and in Suddenly Last Summer represent Williams's attempt to investigate what he believed to be a natural human impulse. At the end of the play, after Shannon confesses to Maxine that he has freed the iguana, she invites him to descend the hill to the beach (a second descent into the hell of human life, and one with ominous connections to the Encantadas story from Suddenly Last Summer); Shannon tells her that he can make it down the hill, "but not back up" (126). His descent symbolizes his spiritual death; in choosing to go with Maxine he trades the possibility of a rich spiritual life for the reality of business and sex. Shannon's descent parallels the Biblical account of Christ's temptation by the devil. In that story, the devil takes Christ to a high place and shows him the world below. The devil tells him that he can possess that world and all its pleasures, if he will but descend to it. Christ refuses--unlike Shannon, whose faith is shaken by his perception of an angry God. Here, Maxine offers him a means of escape, as her partner, tempting him with the promise that he'll "take care of" the women who accompany her middle-aged male guests (126). He looks at Hannah for what he says is the last time; Williams tells us he "chuckles happily" as he descends the path with Maxine "half-leading, half-supporting him" (126). As they disappear, Nonno dies in the presence of his granddaughter, and Williams gives the final spectacle in the play to them. He writes: Hannah: Oh, God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It's so quiet here, now. [She starts to put the shawl about Nonno, but at the same moment his head drops to the side. With a soft intake of breath, she extends a hand before his mouth to see if he is still breathing. He isn't. In a panicky moment, she looks right and left for someone to call to. There's no one. Then she bends to press her head to the crown of Nonno's and the curtain starts to descend.] Why does The Night of the Iguana end with a focus on Hannah and Nonno, who are obviously not central characters? We know that Shannon has rejected Hannah; throughout the play he has paid little attention to the ailing Nonno. Thompson claims that freeing the iguana and surrendering to Maxine--Shannon's acts that immediately precede Nonno's death--represent Shannon's release of his "sexual" and "instinctual" nature (175). Is there a connection between Shannon's acts and Nonno's death? The key to the connection between Shannon and Nonno lies in the latter's name. While Thompson notes that Nonno's first name, Jonathan, means "ŒJehovah has given' or Œthe Lord's gift,'" and his initials, J.C., call for a comparison to Jesus Christ (168), she ignores the poet's last name, Coffin. If we consider Nonno's full name, two possibilities exist. First, if we equate coffin with the idea of death, then the poet's name can be translated, roughly, into the Lord's gift: death. Second, remembering that Williams's father's full name is Cornelius Coffin Williams, we can explore the possibility of a biographical connection between Williams and Nonno. These are important possibilities, as Nonno (as well as Hannah) fit what the playwright claims as his over-arching theme, even though neither character fits into the protagonist role prescribed by the Williams's memory play structure. Thompson's argument that Nonno is a Christ-figure is as interesting as it is obvious; however, I find a more interesting parallel between the Jonathan Coffin and St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407 CE). Both were poets; both traveled extensively; and both died during a period of exile. St. John earned the appellation Chrysostom, meaning "golden-mouthed," because he was an excellent orator (Delaney 319); Nonno earns his living by reading his poems (Night of the Iguana 39). The saint died during his exile, due to what John Delaney calls "exhaustion brought on by long forced marches on foot in the stifling heat" (319); the poet, Nonno, is confined to a wheelchair because of the exhaustion of old age, suffers from the stifling heat referred to at numerous points in the play, and dies in his tropical exile. St. John Chrysostom lived for a time as a hermit of St. Basil's order; Nonno, as a wandering mendicant, shares this monastic trait. Nonno dies soon after dictating his last poem to Hannah. She tells him that the poem was worth the wait; he responds, "Yes, I'd like to pray now" (125). As if she were giving Nonno absolution, the crying Hannah places a shroud-like shawl on him and says, "Sleep now, Grandfather. You've finished your loveliest poem" (125). The poem, in which Hannah finds such beauty, is about Nonno's search for the courage to face death. Williams gives Hannah the authority to grant her grandfather the absolution he needs; his description of her is particularly revealing: Hannah is remarkable-looking--ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated. She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking--almost timeless. (21) A living saint, Hannah acts as "spiritual guide" to both Nonno and Shannon (Thompson 167). She records Nonno's testament--his final, most beautiful poem--and asks God to end his exile (127). She administers absolution to Shannon; after he releases the iguana, a sort of penance assigned by Hannah, he is free to begin a new life with Maxine. She also convinces Shannon, through every conversation she has with him, that he is worthy of the respect of a person as saintly as she. Thompson writes that Hannah "embodies the saintly attributes of selflessness, compassion, tolerance, asceticism, an a stoical fortitude in the face of adversity" (167); through her living example, Shannon finds enough self-respect to end his "voluptuous crucifixion" (The Night of the Iguana 99). In the character of Lady/Myra Torrence, in Orpheus Descending, we find another example of sensual martyrdom. In Chapter Two, I touched briefly on Williams's portrayal of Lady/Myra Torrence as a religious outcast; Williams establishes this through dialog, in the story of her father's Edenic garden (which she and Val recreate in her store); through plot, in her position complementary to Val, the Christ figure, whose child she is to bear; and through spectacle, in her saintly suffering at the hands of her cruel and crippled husband. Although Lady dies for her sexual transgressions with Val, she does not confess them to the other characters in the play. This is further argument that Lady is a secondary outcast among Williams's characters. Lady furthers Williams's plot, however, by confessing to Val her loveless marriage to the cruel bigot, Jabe. The development of Lady/Myra in Battle of Angels most clearly reveals her resemblance to the Biblical character, Eve. Her father and his beautiful winegarden are destroyed by fire, set by a "Mystic Crew" of which the avenging angel is her future husband, Jabe; she is cast out of her Eden. Rejected by David Cutriere, who had been her beau in the winegarden, she "sells herself" into a loveless marriage to Jabe (Thompson 91). Once cast out of the garden, Lady/Myra discovers the pain of rejection by her neighbors, the agony of childbirth, and the physical death which God promised Adam and Eve as punishment for consuming the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. With the help of Valentine (Val) Xavier, Lady/Myra tries to recreate her father's Eden in her bed-ridden husband's store. While Jabe sleeps uneasily, upstairs, Val and Lady/Myra create a confectionery festooned with artificial foliage--the shadow of her lost paradise. Unfortunately, as Thompson points out, her desire for past beauty is the source of her destruction as well as Val's (92). Her feelings of guilt are assuaged when, to her horror, she hears Jabe tell Miss Porter that he is a member of the "Mystic Crew" and is directly responsible for her father's death: Jabe says that Lady/Myra's father "made a bad mistake, one time, selling liquor to niggers. We burned him out. We burned him out, house and orchard and vines and ŒThe Wop' was burned up trying to fight the fire" (111). Jabe is the Biblical angel who, with swords of fire, is stationed by God to keep Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden of Eden. Although Val--the charming and attractive tramp who suffers a gruesome death--beguiles every female character in the play and appears to be the center of attention, it is Lady/Myra who proceeds through Williams's memory play structure and who is, therefore, the central character in Orpheus Descending. In fact, she experiences two events that cause Williams's "arrest of time": first, she experiences the fire that kills her father and destroys her Eden (49-50); and second, she is spurned by her rich beau, David Cutriere, whose baby she carried until she had an abortion (78-79). She relives this experience with Val, in creating both a confectionery and a pregnancy. In the two creations, Val represents both her father and her first lover. Both efforts are futile; Jabe murders Lady/Myra (and her unborn baby) and causes the townspeople to pursue Val and brutally burn him to death, just as her first child was aborted as an outcome of the fire that killed her father and which was set by Jabe. In his relationship to Lady/Myra, Val is what Thompson calls an ironic savior (87). The irony is obvious--he is merely a potential savior, as the salvation Lady/Myra seeks in him comes to nothing at the end of the play. His association with Vee Talbot assists in this comparison, if we associate Vee, who tells us she was "born with a caul....like a veil....over my eyes" (83), with St. Veronica who, according to Thompson, "gave Christ her veil to wipe his forehead on the road to Calvary" (87). A greater parallel exists in Val's comparison to St. Valentine, whose symbol in early Christian art was the red heart. Twice, Val Xavier leads Vee Talbot to safety; the first time is after Vee blinds herself by looking into the sun (81), and the second is after she is blinded by a vision of the eyes of Jesus (113-14). St. Valentine is said to have performed a similar miracle, giving sight to the blind daughter of his jailer (Thompson 87). And, like St. Valentine, Val Xavier is martyred7. By focusing on the similarities between Williams's religious outcasts and Christian saints--revealed particularly through plot, character, melody, and spectacle--a developing Williamsian theology emerges. God exists in this theology, but does not directly intervene in human affairs. What traditional Christians have attributed to the direct intervention of God are actually functions of human nature -- safeguards, if you will, which may have been incorporated into the human psyche by God but that, nevertheless, operate independently of Him. The need that Williams sees for persons to sacrifice themselves in expiation of sin is not the fault of God but is an expression of something intrinsic to human nature. Because this need sometimes forces individuals 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. Among the religious outcasts I have presented in this chapter are an emotionally disturbed girl, a young man who abandons his destitute family, a pedophile, a defrocked priest, and an adulterous woman. Put in these terms, I think the average reader would find it difficult to consider those characters as morally acceptable. Yet Williams must make a connection between his outcasts and our concept of good, if he is to convince us that they are heroic, noble, or pure. It is a sign of his greatness that he succeeds, and an indication of his talent that he chooses such diverse means of successfully connecting his outcasts to our notions of nobility, martyrdom, and purity. Wayne Booth associates this kind of moral discernment with an indication of good writing; as he puts it: We may refuse assent when an author tries to manipulate us too obviously or cheaply with a casual bestowal of goodness or intellectual brilliance or beauty or charm. We all have use for epithets like "melodramatic" to apply against abuses of this kind. But this does not mean that human interest in itself is cheap....Our current neglect of moral terms like "good man" and "bad man" is really unfortunate if it leads us to overlook the role that moral judgment plays in most of our worthwhile reading....Try as we will to avoid terms like "moral" and "good"--and despite the mounting chorus against relativism, many still do try--we cannot avoid judging the characters we know as morally admirable or contemptible, any more than we can avoid judgments on their intellectual ability. We may tell ourselves that we do not condemn stupidity and viciousness, but we believe that men ought not to be stupid and vicious nonetheless. We may explain the villain's behavior by relating him to his environment, but even to explain away is to admit that something requires excuse. (130-31) Despite our negative feelings about individuals who embody the pejorative terms I used at the beginning of this paragraph, our ability to see beyond those terms, to the nobility of Williams's religious outcasts, assigns to his work Booth's title, "worthwhile reading" (130). Williams's religious outcasts possess, through the playwright's association of those characters to Christian saints and martyrs, a nobility that transcends the conventional connotations we attach to ideas such as crazy woman, con man, pervert, heretic, and adulterer. Williams's religious outcasts explore the relationship between God and man--more specifically, the relationship between the self-righteousness of conventional morality and the "sensitive individual" (Letter, 1939, to Audrey Wood) who, in the playwright's world, is estranged from, and punished by, representatives of that morality. Like his sexual outcasts, Williams has his religious outcasts engage the place/placement I discussed at the end of Chapter Two. Tom Wingfield's inner struggle forces him to confess his feelings about abandoning his sister and mother; he willingly addresses his painful memories to the audience at the beginning and end of the play. Laura Wingfield is placed in the company of Jim O'Connor, to whom she must confess her girlhood attraction, and is placed in a situation of abandonment by her brother8. Catherine Holly insists on telling her story to an audience she knows to be hostile to it, and is placed by her listeners in a mental institution. The Rev. Shannon places himself at the mercy of Hannah and Maxine, after being labeled a heretic, and is placed by Maxine in a dependent relationship. Lady Myra freely associates with Val, to whom she confesses her unholy marriage to Jabe, and is consumed by the wrath of her dying husband. Because of religious conflicts, sexual indiscretions, or physical handicaps, Williams's outcasts often flee from society and from representatives of conventional morality. These fugitive outcasts are torn between an instinctive fear-flight response and their drive toward confession and expiation. The great irony, and often the central theme, of Williams's plays is that his fugitive outcasts run from the scene of their immorality into the arms of the representatives of conventional morality--the individuals who destroy them. In Chapter Four I explore this phenomenon, a powerful driving force behind Williams's memory plays and an effective means of generating the conflict central to his main theme: the destructive effects of conventional morality on his protagonists. Notes 1 Williams, T. The Glass Menagerie (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995). Subsequent references come from this edition of the play. 2 Williams, T., Suddenly Last Summer. In Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New York: Penguin, 1976). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition. 3 Dr. Cukrowicz and Dr. Sugar are the same person; early in the play, the doctor tells Mrs. Venable that the name Cukrowicz means sugar. 4 Williams, T. The Night of the Iguana. In Three by Tennessee (New York: Penguin, 1976). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition. 5 In addition to her name, Shannon's reference to her as "butch," and her obviously masculine behavior creates an image of Miss Fellowes as, possibly, a lesbian, and, certainly, a woman who exerts over her group the territorial authority of a Stanley Kowalski. 6 Thompson also notes that Miss Fellowes's first name, Judith, "suggests her role as Judas and combined with her last name reinforces her role as an ironic or traitorous disciple of Shannon's ministry" (164). While I agree about the connection between Miss Fellowes and Judas, I find a more compelling parallel between this character and the Biblical Philistines. 7 Although it does not relate directly to my argument, I want to mention a possible pun using the name Valentine. Williams is likely to have known about the Valentine Treatment that, until the 1950s, was the only cure for some forms of venereal disease. That treatment consisted of inserting a catheter into the man's penis and forcing a caustic fluid, containing arsenic, through his urethra and into his bladder. 8 An interesting note, here: In the earliest film version of The Glass Menagerie, with a script by Gore Vidal, Laura and Jim visit the dance hall where the latter teaches the former a lesson in self-confidence. This self-confidence pays off‹at the end of the film, Laura and Amanda watch from the landing as a gentleman caller approaches.