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Chapter Four Following their Kind: Fugitive Outcasts in The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, and Confessional As for Mr. Brick Pollitt, I can remember seeing him only once after the Greys left town, for my time there was also of brief duration. The last time that I saw him was a brilliant fall morning. It was a Saturday morning in October. Brick's driver's license had been revoked again for some misadventure on the highway due to insufficient control of the wheel, and it was his legal wife, Margaret, who sat in the driver's seat of the Pierce Arrow touring car. Brick did not sit beside her....Margaret blew the car's silver trumpet at every intersection. She leaned this way and that way, elevating or thrusting an arm as she shouted gay greetings to people on porches, merchants beside store entrances, people she barely knew along the walks, calling them all by their familiar names, as if she were running for office in the town, while Brick nodded and grinned with senseless amiability behind her. It was exactly the way that some ancient conqueror, such as Caesar or Alexander the Great or Hannibal, might have led in chains through a capital city the prince of a state newly conquered. (Williams, "Three Players of a Summer Game" 43-44) * * * When summer had passed, he joined the southern migration. He lived in Miami a while....Then one night he got drunk on a broker's yacht in the harbor at Palm Beach and, for no reason that was afterward sure to him, he struck the man's inclined head eight times with a copper book-end, the final stroke splitting the skull. He swam to shore, collected his things and beat it out of the State....From that time on he moved for protection in less conspicuous channels, losing himself in the swarm of his fugitive kind wherever a town was large enough for such traffic to pass without too much attention. (Williams, "One Arm" 10-11) * * * It was a rare sort of moral anarchy, doubtless, that held them together, a really fearful shared hatred of everything that was restrictive and which they felt to be false in the society they lived in and against the grain of which they continually operated. They did not dislike what they called "squares." They loathed and despised them, and for the best of reasons....But hotel clerks and house dicks and people in adjoining hotel bedrooms, the...various people involved in the niggardly control of funds, almost everybody that you passed when you were drunk and hilariously gay on the street, especially all those bull-like middle-aged couples that stood off sharply and glared at you as you swept through a hotel lobby with your blushing trade--all, all, all of those were natural enemies to them, as well as the one great terrible, worst of all enemies, which is the fork-tailed, cloven-hoofed, pitchfork-bearing devil of Time! (Williams, "Two on a Party" 61-62) A third perspective from which we can examine the outcast characters in Williams's plays is that of those whom he calls the "fugitive kind" (Williams, Orpheus Descending 144)1. Williams's fugitive outcasts may be sexually dysfunctional, as with Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire; they may agonize over religious issues, as with the Rev. Shannon in The Night of the Iguana; however, they need do neither but may, like Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, simply flee from situations that torture them. This perspective reveals important autobiographical aspects of Williams's outcasts. Like them, the playwright was driven to frequent, often unexplained, changes in location. Since the biographical connection between Williams and his fugitive outcasts is important in understanding these characters, I want to discuss, briefly, the playwright's own feelings about this connection. Williams considered his work partially, but not completely, biographical. He acknowledges that the connection between his life and the lives of his outcast characters is more one of the circumstances, the acts involving his characters, than of physical or exact psychological makeup. In Williams's words: My answer is that every word [in my plays] is autobiographical and no word is autobiographical. You can't do creative work and adhere to facts. For instance, in my new play [Vieux Carré] there is a boy who is living in a house that I lived in, and undergoing some of the experiences that I underwent as a young writer. But his personality is totally different from mine. He talks quite differently from the way that I talk, so I say the play is not autobiographical. And yet the events in the house did actually take place. (qtd. in Grauerholz 300) Applying this notion of autobiography to Williams's outcast characters gives us a great deal of freedom. The characters need not be completely honest mirrors of Williams's experiences; they may portray a single facet of his personality or suffer through one experience similar to Williams's. The fugitive outcasts in Williams's plays each represent facets of the playwright's "back is to the wall" attitude toward his life and experiences (Sweet Bird of Youth ix). That attitude expresses itself, in the life of the playwright and in the fugitive outcasts he creates, as an intense desire to flee from dangerous people or uncomfortable situations. Some of Williams's outcasts are so fugitive that they never appear as characters, yet their absence strongly influences the behavior of the characters he places on stage. Williams establishes his absent outcasts as the agents of his memory play, as the symbols of other characters' mistakes, and as the cause of their progress through the memory play structure. As Susan Koprince puts it: Worshipped like deities, Williams's unseen characters initially bring happiness and love into the lives of his protagonists....But when that transcendent love is lost, as it inevitably is, the same unseen characters produce pain and confusion, driving Williams's protagonists to irrational behavior and even to the brink of insanity....It is the tragic sense of loss--comparable to the loss of one's religious faith--which Williams often movingly portrays. (94) Williams develops his absent outcasts primarily through direct dialog, accented by spectacle and melody (Koprince 88). Because they are not physically present, the absent outcasts are revealed by Williams through other strategies. Examples include the larger-than-life photograph of Mr. Wingfield, which establishes him as a fifth character in The Glass Menagerie; the newspaper boy whom Blanche refrains from seducing, who stands in for the absent Allan Grey in A Streetcar Named Desire; and Brick Pollitt, as a washed-up image of the young athlete, Skipper, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (88-89). For Koprince, these absent outcasts are dangerous charmers; she writes: Through these sundry techniques [dialog, melody, spectacle] Williams not only manages to paint a clear picture of his unseen characters, but he creates a consistent dramatic type....they are male, they are young (or at least perceived as young); they are sexually aberrant, tending to be either homosexuals or philanderers; and they are frequently victims of violent death. But the most salient feature of such characters is their charm--their ability to inspire an almost religious devotion in other people. (90) Mr. Wingfield, Allan Grey, and Skipper are particularly good examples of the God-like, absent outcasts in Williams's plays. As the facets of a crystal reflect and refract light, so do these characters reflect stylizations of the playwright's personal life. Like Williams, these three characters do not conform to society's rules concerning a man's correct relationship to women--two find heterosexual love incompatible with their hidden homosexuality and one succumbs to his uncontrollable wander-lust. Mr. Wingfield, the absent father in The Glass Menagerie, whom his son, Tom, calls "a telephone man who fell in love with long distances," is "a fifth character in the play" (Williams, The Glass Menagerie 1547)2. Indulging in a wander-lust that his son imitates, Mr. Wingfield "skipped the light fantastic out of town," abandoning his wife, Amanda, and his two children. His last message to his family, on a postcard from Mazatlan, contained only two words: "ŒHello--Goodbye!' and no address" (1547). Amanda, who fears that Tom will imitate her husband, is driven to recollections of a past that was without the pain of financial hardship. In the following synopsis of her words to Tom in Scene Four, Amanda makes this clear: There's so many things in my heart that I cannot describe to you. I never told you but I--loved your father....And you--when I see you taking after his ways! Staying out late--and--well, you had been drinking the night you were in that--terrifying condition....why--why, Tom--are you always so restless?....Oh, I can see the handwriting on the wall as plain as I see the nose in front of my face! It's terrifying! More and more you remind me of your father! He was out all hours without explanation!--Then left! Goodbye! And me with the bag to hold. I saw that letter you got from the Merchant Marine. I know what you're dreaming of. I'm not standing here blindfolded. [She pauses.] Very well, then. Then do it! But not till there's somebody to take your place. (1558-59) The image of Amanda revealed in this passage is at variance with Signi Lenea Falk's description of her as "insensitive"(74), "a nagging mother" (72) who represents "the conflict between normal emotions and the repressive ideals of the Puritan tradition" (70). Eric Levy agrees with Falk's assessment, claiming that Amanda holds her children in a "prison of self-consciousness" (529) Adding the above dialog to the rest of the plot, however, we see an entirely different Amanda. She is a woman paralyzed by the prospect of being abandoned a second time, her fear exacerbated by the presence of an unemployable, crippled daughter. At the root of this fear is her absent husband; her verbal harassment of Tom and pathetic encouragement of Laura stem from a desire to provide, emotionally and financially, for her dysfunctional family. We must take into account Amanda's upbringing, as an attractive Southern belle, when assessing her state of mind in Menagerie. Reduced to poverty by a wayward husband, it is no surprise that she finds, in his abandonment of her, a motive to fantasize and even exaggerate about her popular, pampered youth. It is also unsurprising that Tom, forced into a paternal role by his family's financial distress, idolizes and covets the freedom his father represents. At the end of the play, when Tom relates his abandonment of Amanda and Laura, we find the absent father as the root of his profound experience--what, for Tom, forces a progress through Williams's memory play structure. If Amanda and Tom are driven into this structure by the actions of Mr. Wingfield, can we say the same of Laura3? Although she is shy and fearful she is also intelligent; her consolation of Tom in Scene Five--an attempt to hold her family together--reveals this. An application of our common sense to Laura's condition forces us to consider the impact her father's abandonment of her must have had on her self-esteem. It is Mr. Wingfield, not Amanda, who is ultimately to blame for Laura's seclusion from the world of physically ordinary people. Falk and Levy ignore this connection, choosing to blame Amanda's criticism of Laura--what Levy calls a "judgment" designed "to provide, by contrast, a flattering self image for Amanda" (530)--for the girl's hermit-like behavior. As with Amanda, Laura is forced by the actions of Mr. Wingfield into a world where she is as fragile as her menagerie of glass animals. In Chapter One I discuss Williams's own physical and emotional fragility, conditions that isolated him from most other children, and how his father's criticism and taunts increased his feelings of alienation. This and other similarities between the Williams and Wingfield families is ground that has been covered by a number of researchers. I can add to their work a notion of the subtle difference between Tom and Tennessee: the former is encouraged to follow the example set by his father, to abandon his family, while the latter fled a home life in which his father, like a combination of Mr. Wingfield and Amanda, vacillated between brooding indifference and loud criticism. Setting aside the differences in motivation, we can say that Tom and Tennessee fled their families in search of something ineffable. Tom's final soliloquy in The Glass Menagerie could be a repeat of Williams's account of his own wanderings. Tom says: I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. (1588-89) The character, Tom, tells us he is pursued by the memory of his sister, to whom he was "more faithful than I intended to be" (1589). The playwright, Tom, fled his family in pursuit of something that, while just as desperate as the character's flight from family responsibility, was much more fulfilling to him. In an essay titled "The Past, The Present, and the Perhaps," Williams writes about one of his flights, in the summer of 1939, during which he met and had a relationship with a "young clarinet player" (85). As he tells it: We lived all summer on the $100 from the Group Theatre and I think it was the happiest summer of my life. All the days were pure gold, the nights were starry, and I looked so young, or carefree, that they would sometimes refuse to sell me a drink because I did not appear to have reached twenty-one. But toward the end of the summer, maybe only because it was the end of the summer as well as the end of the $100, the clarinet player became very moody and disappeared without warning into the San Bernardino Mountains to commune with his soul in solitude, and there was nothing left in the cabin in the canyon but a bag of dried peas. (86) Williams's retreats from family and friends offered him opportunities to explore his sexuality in ways not appropriate in their company. The connection between his flight and his sexual relationship with the clarinet player is clear; only a week after their relationship ended, Williams accepted money from his grandmother to pay for a bus ticket to St. Louis ("The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps" 86-87). "Flight could be called Tennessee Williams's natural existence," Leverich writes. "Whenever he alighted in new or familiar environs, he would soon feel only discontent among the earthbound and would suddenly fly off. As he had told Joe Hazan, ŒI'm always the fugitive--will be till I make my last escape--out of life altogether'" (Leverich 370). Because of the similarities between Williams and Tom Wingfield, we are left to speculate about the latter's real drive to wander, to "follow in his father's footsteps" (The Glass Menagerie 1588). Although the playwright is not known to have made this connection to Tom, the biographical connections I discuss in Chapter One force us to wonder, like Amanda, just what Tom was doing when he said he was at the movies (The Glass Menagerie 1554). Was Tom, like Tennessee, engaging in clandestine sexual encounters? Secret sexual experiences lie at the center of A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Tom and Mr. Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Allan Grey in A Streetcar Named Desire flees from family responsibility; his suicide, however, represents a much more gruesome and final flight than the wandering of his counterparts in Menagerie. His wife, Blanche, is the impetus for his suicide; having discovered Allan in a compromising situation with an older man, she first ignores it and then, during a dance with her charming and attractive husband, tells him, "I saw! I know! You disgust me..." (Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 115)4. Just as Amanda's marriage to Mr. Wingfield, and his abandonment of her, are the acts that force her through Williams's memory play structure, so is Blanche's marriage to Allan Grey, and his abandonment through suicide, the tragic mistake that forces her through that structure. Although Stella tells Stanley that Allan was a "degenerate," she also notes that he was "beautiful and talented," and that Blanche "[a]dored him and worshipped the ground he walked on" (124). Stella seems to be saying (either because she believes it or because she thinks Stanley will) that her sister fell in love with someone whom Stella thinks is morally deficient. Certainly, Blanche's description of her late husband reveals a sympathy, even empathy, lacking in her sister. As she describes him to Mitch: He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl....There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn't like a man's, although he wasn't the least bit effeminate looking--still--that thing was there....He came to me for help. I didn't know that. I didn't find out anything till after our marriage when we'd run away and come back and all I knew was I'd failed him in some mysterious way and wasn't able to give the help he needed but couldn't speak of! He was in the quicksands and clutching at me--but I wasn't holding him out, I was slipping in with him! I didn't know that. I didn't know anything except I loved him unendurably but without being able to help him or help myself. (114) Note the number of times Blanche repeats the phrase, I didn't know, in this passage, and her repetition of the word, help. She seems to feel that it was her obligation to help Allan, because she loved him; however, because he "couldn't speak of" his problem, she could not give him what he needed. The implication is that, had she found out about Allen's homosexuality in a less shocking way, she would have tried to accept, or at least understand, his situation. We must set aside, here, any righteous indignation concerning the marriage of a homosexual to an innocent Southern girl. Williams forces us to do this; he makes it clear through both Stella's and Blanche's dialog that Allan was "just a boy" (114), seeking to understand himself and, possibly, attempting to reject an aspect of his sexuality that he found difficult to bear. In this light, Allan's sexual liaison with his older male friend is an act of desperation, not of the calculated unfaithfulness that marked the "epic fornications" (44) of Blanche's heterosexual ancestors. Unable to cope with desires he doesn't want and can't understand, he succumbs to his sexuality at a most inappropriate time--just before he and Blanche are to go to a dance (115). Williams leaves us to speculate whether or not Allan had engaged in previous indiscretions with his older male friend or other men. We must also speculate how the boy must have felt when, after his wife finds him in the arms of his male companion, Blanche "pretended that nothing had been discovered" (115). Apparently the couple dressed to go out, and drove to Moon Lake Casino, without mentioning the incident. How great Allan's anguish must have been when, thinking that his wife had decided to ignore what might have been his first instance of infidelity, he holds her in his arms and, on the crowded dance floor, hears her say that he disgusts her. It is certain that Blanche regrets her words to Allan, that her love for him was stronger than her disgust over his behavior. His death marks the turning point for Blanche, the experience that stops time and that, through hearing the music she heard when he died, forces her to progress through Williams's memory play. All that follows--Blanche's nymphomania, her alcoholism, her flight from Laurel--stems from her mistake, the spiteful comment that ended the life of her one great love. For Blanche, "the searchlight which had been turned on the world"--love, as reflected in her husband, Allan, was extinguished (115). From the moment Allan puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, Blanche is broken. She begins to destroy herself, escalating her self-destructive behavior in ways that make her rape seem almost anticlimactic. There is, indeed, a parallel between the two acts--Allan's suicide and Blanche's rape--in a comment Blanche makes to Stanley: "I hurt him the way that you would like to hurt me" (42). Although many critics and admirers of Williams (among them Dan Isaac, Lyle Leverich, and Nancy Tischler) have noted the parallels between the playwright and Blanche, I find an equally interesting parallel between Williams and Allan Grey. Both were poets. Like Allan, Williams led a closeted early life and experimented with heterosexual relationships (Leverich 82). And, like Allan, Williams must have known that most of his early acquaintances, and many of his later ones, were disgusted by the idea of homosexuality. Although the playwright never resorted to what is politely referred to as a cover marriage--the union of a gay man with a woman who, at worst, is unaware of her husband's sexual preference or, at best, allows him to engage in sex with men--we know that he was intensely worried that his mother would discover his homosexuality (Leverich 368). The main differences between Williams and Allan involve fortitude and choice. Both the playwright and his character fled from the society of persons who did not, or could not, understand their sexuality. Williams, however, chose a more literal escape--through frequent peregrinations he escaped the notice of his family and friends, an indication that traveling was, for him, escape enough from the painful realization of his difference, sexually, from most people. Allan's flight is more final; his suicide tells us that, in the immediacy of distress concerning Blanche's discovery, he feels death to be preferable to the pain of living. Perhaps Williams is telling us that, had he chosen to conceal his sexuality more carefully, he could easily have ended up as Allen--a suicide. As Allan Grey in A Streetcar Named Desire is to Blanche DuBois, Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the center around which Brick Pollitt's self-destructive behavior revolves. And, like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, Brick Pollitt in Cat is haunted by a mistake that causes a loved one's death. Felicia Hardison Londré notes similarities between A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, including such elements of spectacle as the bed, as "a central figure in the settings of both plays, and the bathroom functions as a place of refuge for both Blanche and Brick" (47). She notes other similarities: Blanche is like Brick in wishing to deny the passage of time....Both loved someone who was probably homosexual and who committed suicide after his implicit pleas for help met rejection....Both turn to drink, Brick drinking until he hears the click in his head that makes him peaceful, just as Blanche in Scene 9 remains gripped by the polka tune in her head until she hears "the shot! It always stops after that." Blanche and Maggie the Cat regard themselves as once-soft people who have become hardened in the process of survival....Both plays include interrupted birthday festivities, and both move metaphorically from desire to death, balanced by the birth of the Kowalski baby and the promise of a new life in the body of Maggie. (47) In the created time before the play, Brick and Skipper lived like Alexander and Hephastian, Hercules and Iolas, as God-like athletic heroes. They experience a friendship so close that friends and family began to suspect a deeper attraction (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 916)5. When Maggie, out of love and compassion for both these men, tries to persuade Skipper to confess his love to Brick, Skipper denies the attraction and forces the not altogether unwilling Maggie to have sexual intercourse with him (903). Both Skipper and Maggie tell Brick about the affair, after which Brick rejects Skipper and marries Maggie. Skipper begins to drink even more heavily and, soon after, dies of an overdose. Even Big Daddy, whose relationship with Brick had been distant and strained, recognizes that his son's life fell apart after Skipper's suicide (916). He has heard, through the spying and scheming of his other son, Gooper, and daughter-in-law, Mae, that Brick refuses to have sex--or, even, to sleep in the same bed--with Maggie. "In his abstinence from sexual activity and his inability to love," Thompson writes, "Brick resembles several of those mythological figures who reject the call to sexual maturity and remain in thrall to an idealized and impossible concept..." (64). While Brick's behavior is often childish, it seems facile to simply blame his anguish on immature histrionics. The resemblance Thompson notes does not take into account another parallel, that of Brick and Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer. Yet, because Sebastian is a single man, a stereotypical effete snob who travels with his mother, we are able to entertain a suspicion--validated in the course of the play--that he is not the "chaste" holy man his mother makes him out to be (Suddenly Last Summer 24). In his stage directions for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams encourages us to speculate in much the same way about Brick; in the middle of the play he inserts the following comment: The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important....Some mystery should be left in the revelation of characters in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. (916) Here Williams seems to be leaving the decision to us, allowing us to speculate as freely as we want about the depth and degree of intimacy between Brick and Skipper. We should keep in mind Maggie's admission that she is sexually attracted to Brick's "indifference," his "rare sort of charm that usually only happens in very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated" (896), and that, when Big Daddy tells his son that he still has "desire for women," Williams tells us that "Brick's smile fades a little..." (911). It is important, too, that the word mendacity--for which the character Big Daddy is so famous--is introduced by Brick, who tries to tell his father about the pretense and evasion that has driven him to drink (194-195). Encouraged by his son's openness, Big Daddy engages him in a compassionate conversation on the topic of male love. He shows a remarkable understanding of the relationship he suspects may have existed between Brick and Skipper, and admits that he, too, has "knocked around" a bit (196). Further, he reminds his son that he worked closely with Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, the homosexual couple from whom he acquired his plantation. Brick's response is an almost stereotypical denial; he tells Big Daddy:>/P> Big Daddy, you shock me....--Don't you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted they are by things like that? Why, at Ole Miss when it was discovered a pledge to our fraternity, Skipper's and mine, did a, attempted to do a, unnatural thing with-- We not only dropped him like a hot rock!--We told him to git off the campus, and he did, he got! (917) This is a denial that is also an evasion; Brick resists denying outright that a sexual relationship existed. Still, Big Daddy tries to draw the truth out of Brick, assuring his son that he will understand. He says, "One thing you can grow on a big place more important than cotton!-- is tolerance!--I grown it" (917). Brick remains adamant in his denial, although he does tell his father that he and Skipper occasionally touched and "one or two times we--" (917). Mae interrupts at this point in their conversation, and we are left to speculate what Brick and Skipper did "one or two times." Brick tells Big Daddy that, jealous of the friendship between Brick and Skipper, Maggie convinced Skipper of "the dirty, false idea that what we were, him and me, was a frustrated case of that ole pair of sisters that lived in this room, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello" (918). This is the closest he comes to a flat denial that he and Skipper were sexually attracted to one another. According to Brick, Maggie is responsible for Skipper's suicide; he refuses to acknowledge any connection between Skipper's death and Brick's rejection. Big Daddy is not convinced by his son's evasive denial; he realizes, and tells Brick, that "[s]omething's left out of that story" (918). Cornered by his perceptive father, Brick then admits that he left out of his story "a long-distance call which I had from Skipper--....In which he made a drunken confession to me and on which I hung up!" (918). Big Daddy is satisfied that he has found the source of Brick's alcoholism; the following dialog is reminiscent of Violet Venable's words in Suddenly Last Summer: Big Daddy: "You!--dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!--before you'd face the truth with him! Brick: His truth, not mine! Big Daddy: His truth, okay! But you wouldn't face it with him! Brick: Who can face truth? Can you? Big Daddy: Now don't start passin' the rotten buck again, boy! (918) In Suddenly Last Summer, Violet attempts to force a truth forged by her own will, an idea of her son that has no basis in fact. Like Violet, who attempts to change the truth in order to escape guilty feelings about her son's homosexuality (and about her procurement of young men for him), Brick attempts to will away his emotional attachment to Skipper and his guilt concerning Skipper's death. He, like Violet, is deeply afraid of the truth--so afraid, in fact, that he changes the subject of their conversation, verbally attacking his father and revealing the seriousness of Big Daddy's illness. The subject is, indeed, changed, and Big Daddy finally experiences the mendacity that Brick has tried to define for him. Brick punishes himself for causing Skipper's suicide by imitating his friend, killing himself physically with alcohol and emotionally by frustrating and tormenting Maggie. Thompson calls Maggie the "dea ex machina" who resolves the problem of the play (81), allowing us to make another parallel between Brick and Sebastian. Sebastian is devoured, literally, by the young men he has used; Brick, too, is devoured--and he has used Maggie, his devourer, as a shield between himself and reality6. Just as we find a certain justice in the punishment Sebastian receives, so do we see ethical motives behind Maggie's desire to overcome Brick's sexual dysfunction. She loves him and, now that Skipper is dead and no obstacle, in her opinion, to Brick's heterosexuality, she fights to secure a conventional marriage to her husband. Even Maggie, who we might expect to be least sympathetic to the idea of a homosexual relationship existing between Brick and Skipper, acknowledges the beauty of their relationship. She tells her husband that she and Skipper "made love, if you could call it, because it made both of us feel a little bit closer to you" (902). Skipper's love for Brick, she adds, was good because it was pure. The dialog, here, is revealing: Brick: One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true!--I had friendship with Skipper.--You are naming it dirty! Margaret: I'm not naming it dirty! I am naming it clean. Brick: Not love with you, Maggie, but friendship with Skipper was that one great true thing, and you are naming it dirty! Margaret: Then you haven't been listenin', not understood what I'm saying! I'm naming it so damn clean that it killed poor Skipper!--You two had something that had to be kept on ice, yes, incorruptible, yes!--and death was the only ice-box where you could keep it.... Brick: I married you, Maggie. Why would I marry you, Maggie, if I was--? Margaret: Brick, let me finish!--I know, believe me I know....I destroyed him, by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told... (903) In Maggie's opinion her husband's relationship with Skipper was "one of those beautiful, ideal things, they tell about in the Greek legends" (902). Brick seems to agree. Judith Thompson finds a classical philosophy in Brick's feelings for Skipper; as she puts it: Like the Athenians of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. who believed that homosexual love alone is capable of satisfying a man's highest and noblest aspirations, and, conversely, that heterosexual love is altogether inferior...Brick clearly regards his relationship with Skipper as vastly superior to the earthy love offered him by Maggie. Even the very adjectives used by Brick to describe that relationship--"the one," "good," "true"--suggest the moral and philosophical terms of the Platonic absolutes or Ideas of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. (62) Whether we consider the relationship between Brick and Skipper a frustrated homosexual love, a friendship warped by a jealous woman, or a one-sided physical love of Skipper for Brick, clearly the relationship between these two men ran deep. Otherwise, Skipper's death would not have caused the physical and emotional breakdown that functions, through Brick and Big Daddy, as the central theme of the play. Unlike Brick and Skipper, Tennessee Williams was no athlete; he had no physically-inspired glory days to regret. By all accounts, however, he was considered a charming and attractive young man--so, perhaps, he could sympathize with these characters' lionization. Certainly, in the homosexual milieu of the 1940s and 1950s as much as today, the charming intellectual and the athlete were both highly sought after. As the playwright grew older, he experienced more and more often the rejection of the washed-up athlete, the graying and hackneyed wit. "I'm old and rotten," Williams said to one young man who, in 1977, declined to have sex with him. "You could make me happy, you know....Just wait till you're old and gray" (Rawley 1). The closest parallel between the playwright and Cat's Brick and Skipper is also the saddest. Suffering bouts of depression that alternated with wild abandon, tormented at times by his slipping career and faded looks, Williams became, once more, a fugitive outcast, turning to pills and alcohol as a means of escape. Eventually, as I relate in Chapter One, the combination killed him. He lived his memory play structure, was forced into it by some of the same experiences that destroy his characters. On the "moral values" he tried to express in Cat, Williams says: I meant for the audience to discover how people erect false values by not facing what is true in their natures, by having to live a lie, and I hoped the audience would admire the heroic persistence of life and vitality; and I hoped they would feel the thwarted desire of people to reach each other through this fog, this screen of incomprehension. (qtd. in Ross 40) Like Brick and Skipper, Williams sensed something incomplete in his life; as he grew older, even his habitual traveling did not ease his feelings of alienation and exile. Escape--through traveling, drugs, and alcohol--became the driving force in his life. Williams's absent, fugitive outcasts catalyze the action, forcing other characters into his memory play structure. The Glass Menagerie offers another catalyst--the entire play is a construction of Tom Wingfield's memory of the profound experience that made him a fugitive outcast. Tom's soliloquies determine the extent to which the other characters in The Glass Menagerie exist; Williams presents the other characters as memories of Tom's escape from "the quasi-incestuous and doomed love between Tom Wingfield and his crippled, Œexquisitely fragile,' ultimately schizophrenic sister Laura" (Bloom 3). According to Harold Bloom, Tom flees a situation in which he is tormented: What pursues Tom is what pursues the Shelleyan Poet of Alastor, an avenging daimon or shadow of rejected, sisterly eros that manifests itself in a further Shelleyan metaphor, the shattered, colored transparencies of Shelley's dome of many-colored glass....The key sentence, dramatically, is: "Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!" In his descriptive list of the characters, Williams says of his surrogate, Wingfield: "His nature is not remorseless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity." What would pity have been? And in what sense is Wingfield more faithful, after all, than he attempted to be? (4-5) To answer Bloom's questions, we need only look at the playwright's own life. Pity, in that context, would have forced Tom to remain with Amanda and Laura, abandoning his desire for freedom. Yet, like Williams, Tom is "not remorseless"--the guilt generated by his abandonment of his mother and sister circumscribes his freedom. He gets his freedom but cannot use it, cannot free himself from the haunting memory of his missing family. Thompson uses Jungian psychoanalytic theory to argue that the photograph of Mr. Wingfield is the objective correlative to Tom's wander-lust. Eric Levy agrees, writing that the photograph of Mr. Wingfield is "Tom's mirror" of self-image and self-esteem (530). According to Thompson, "Williams's belief in Œa great vocabulary of images' that derive from the unconscious closely resembles the fundamental assumption of Jungian psychology of a Œcollective unconscious'85;" (8). Williams demonstrates, through Tom's recollections, how powerful memories revolve around characters whose actions reflect the inner turmoil of the person doing the remembering. These individuals form the constituency of Tom's consciousness; the suffering in each of them is a reflection of Tom's pain. Although Tom imitates his God-like father, by absenting himself from his family, images of his suffering mother and sister haunt him because, not being God, his abandonment of Laura and Amanda is a sin against them. Like Tom, Tennessee was haunted by familial memories. His plays are informed by those memories. In this sense he cannot help but write, again and again, about his cruel father, his sad and disturbed sister, his consuming and controlling mother. He discovers what Tom realizes--that physically removing one's self from a painful situation is not enough to escape it. As long as the memory of pain exists, the situation that caused the pain can be remembered; in the mind, it's as if the memory causes the situation to recur. The security of escape is illusion only. As C.W.E. Bigsby puts it: On the face of it [Williams's] insistence that security can be equated with death would seem a curious observation when applied to The Glass Menagerie, a play set during the Depression. What Amanda needs more than anything else, both for herself and her daughter, is, arguably, precisely security. It was what the Depression had destroyed. His own sense of self-disgust, however, leads him to celebrate the insecurity which had characterized his own earlier life. Yet in a sense if Tom, his alter ego in the play, had settled for what he had got, if he had offered his mother and sister the security they needed, he would have destroyed himself as a poet. The Glass Menagerie, then, is concerned with the insecurity which on the one hand drives some to a lonely desperation, redeemed only by hermetic fantasies and myths, and on the other creates poets scarred by guilt but elevated by their avocation. (33) What Bigsby does not seem to realize, here, is that Tom's insecurity has destroyed him, as surely as his pity would have. We see Tom, at the beginning of Menagerie (in a time that is actually later than the events in the play), dressed as a Merchant Marine (1545). He has, apparently, escaped from his family, yet is no more a poet than he was in his mother's home. We can easily imagine him writing his poetry on the back of old customs forms, substituting these for the shoe boxes on which he wrote at his former place of employment. Like Tom Wingfield, Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth and the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in The Night of the Iguana come to realize the futility of the actions that make them fugitive outcasts. Unlike Tom, however, these two characters undergo profound changes in order to secure, if not freedom, at least a life that is free from the constant torment of remembered guilt. Chance faces the source of his guilt--the town of St. Cloud and his wronged ex-lover, Heavenly Finley--and accepts the consequences of that confrontation; Shannon surrenders the freedom he sought, and enters into a dependent relationship with Maxine Faulk. Although I have already discussed Chance as a sexual outcast (Chapter Two) and Shannon as a religious outcast (Chapter Three), the fugitive nature of their outcast states deserves some brief mention here. In the first paragraph of his foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams writes that "[m]y back is to the wall and has been to the wall for so long that the pressure of my back on the wall has started to crumble the plaster that covers the bricks and mortar" (ix). The topic of the forward, as of the play, is the importance of guilt in motivating civilized behavior. This "strong sense of guilt" is universal, according to Williams, who adds that the willingness to face his guilt is the "area in which a man can rise above his moral condition" (xii). Thus does Chance Wayne prove himself a superior man. Having fled St. Cloud after infecting Heavenly Finley with the sexually transmitted disease that caused her to lose her womb, he surrenders to the gigolo lifestyle; however, his guilt causes him to flee from that lifestyle as well, returning to St. Cloud for the punishment he believes he deserves. At the end of the play, as he faces the men who have come to castrate him, he turns to the audience and insists that they--we--understand that he accepts his fate. At best this is a figurative death; at worst, a literal one. All he asks is our "recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all" (124). Chance's last lines, so jarring to many directors and audiences, were written to do just that--they are a metafictive device through which Williams embraces his audience. Like the Catholic Rite of Penance, they encourage us to participate in Chance's sin and in his expiation of that sin. As the Catholic Missal points out, "through shared prayer, a reading from scripture....communal celebrations of penance show more clearly the reality of penance as a happening of the Church community" (Worship II 966). Chance's last lines, read from the secular scripture of Williams's play, include the audience as a congregation in the "happening" of his expiation. Shannon in The Night of the Iguana takes a different approach to expiation, one that is less final than Chance's chosen penance. Instead of returning to his congregation to accept the punishment of the women he has wronged and the parishioners he has alienated, and from whom he as fled, he submits his will to a power that, for him, is higher than that of the Church. Progressing like Christ through a passion, Shannon, as a Jesus figure, communes directly with God. His dialog in Iguana is a discourse with and about his reconciliation to his supreme deity. Thomas Adler notes this similarity between Shannon and Christ, particularly in their symbolic struggle against evil. He writes: Shannon's problem has always been an obsession with darkness and evil, a too-vivid sense of his fallen humanity, an excess of guilt, and an inability to forgive himself or believe in himself as redeemed. Being human means to be flawed, but not so flawed as to despair, which may be the worst evil of all--the unforgivable sin. ("Before the Fall" 123) A fugitive from his Church and from his congregation's conformist notions about God, Shannon seeks a place where he can reconcile his religious convictions with his human passions. At the end of the play he discovers that the priesthood is incompatible with his notion of God; however, he still needs to be forgiven for his actions against both the Church and the female parishioners he seduced. Maxine Faulk is to be the vehicle by which Shannon travels toward absolution; by resigning his will in favor of hers, giving up his priesthood and his emotional freedom, he expiates his sin. The parallels between Williams and these two characters are figurative ones. Like Shannon, Williams managed to maintain his religious beliefs and even his membership in the Church, without accepting conventional notions of orthodoxy. "I was born a Catholic, really," Williams says, though he calls the tenets of the Church "ridiculous" (Rader 333). Thomas P. Adler draws our attention to Shannon's "unforgivable sin"--despair ("Before the Fall"122); I note that this is the difference between Williams and Shannon. Having experienced a vision of God that is at variance with conventional interpretations of the supreme deity, Shannon despairs of ever communicating that vision to a suffering humanity. Williams, on the other hand, does not despair of his ability to show us his image of God and, indeed, seems unconcerned about whether we accept, or even acknowledge, that image. He presents his plays, full of religious symbols, and allows us to decide upon their interpretation. In a 1981 interview with Dotson Rader, Williams says: And yet my work is full of Christian symbols. Deeply, deeply Christian. But it's the image of Christ, His beauty and purity, and His teachings, yes...but I've never subscribed to the idea that life as we know it, what we're living now, is resumed after our death. No. I think we're absorbed back into, what do they call it? The eternal flux? The eternal shit, that's what I was thinking. (334) Through Shannon and Chance, Williams gives us the image of Christ, teaches us about humility and dignity, and shows us the beauty that is at the center of the Christian passion mystery. He does not, however, suggest a wholesale acceptance of Christian myth or dogma. These two characters live spiritual lives resembling Williams's own, lives that acknowledge a higher power but do not accept oppressive interpretations of the wishes of that power. In Orpheus Descending, the Southern family becomes a sort of Church, and Carol Cutrere plays the role of rebellious outcast. Like Shannon in The Night of the Iguana, Carol is in no physical danger. John Clum notes that "Carol's wildness is no threat to the Southern patriarchal order. She is a remittance relative, paid to get out of town, but not in danger when she breaks her contract and appears" (136). Just as representatives of the Christianity expel Shannon from his Church, representatives of the Southern family force Carol to leave town. In keeping with the Church-as-family theme she represents, Carol becomes an outcast through a ritualization of her fugitive state; in a very real sense her family has excommunicated her and, as with Catholic excommunication, its punishment is an emotional and physical separation of the individual from the group. Unlike Shannon, but very much like Chance Wayne, Carol Cutrere accepts her outcast state as punishment for being different from the other Cutreres in Two River County. When we first meet her, we find that she has returned to her home in order to "blackmail" her relatives into reinstating her allowance (23). In the Torrence Mercantile Store, she makes a telephone call in which she reveals the following coercion: I had to blackmail them a little. I came to dinner with my eyes made up and my little black sequin jacket and Betsy Boo, my brother's wife, said, "Carol, you going out to a fancy dress ball?" I said, "Oh, no, I'm just going jooking tonight up and down the Dixie Highway between here and Memphis like I used to when I lived here." Why, honey, she flew so fast you couldn't see her passing and came back in with the ink still wet on the check! And this will be done once a month as long as I stay away from Two River County...." (23) Because Carol, unlike Chance Wayne, is in no physical danger from her family, she can afford to joke about her outcast state. She tells Val, "I'm showing the ŒS.O.B.S.' how lewd a Œlewd vagrant' can be if she puts her whole heart in it like I do mine" (40). She revels in her nonconformist behavior, thoroughly enjoying pranks such as blackmailing her family or frightening the local ladies by encouraging the old black conjure-man, Uncle Pleasant, to give his "Choctaw cry" (25). However enjoyable she makes it, Carol remains a fugitive outcast and, as such, recognizes a kindred spirit in Val Xavier. She knows that he is in danger, that he does not enjoy the protected status she has as a member of a rich family. After her telephone call she leaves town; however, she returns the following day to offer Val her "tender protection" (74). "You're in danger here, Snakeskin," she tells him. "The message I came here to give you was a warning of danger! I hoped you'd hear me and let me take you away before it's--too late" (76). As a fellow fugitive, she knows that he will be punished because, as Clum puts it, he is "a threat to other men because the sexual free agent is a magnet, drawing women outside the boundaries of patriarchal authority and marriage" (136). Although he has taken the vestments of normalcy, what Carol calls "the nice blue uniform of a convict" (76), she knows he is a heretic in the eyes of the family-as-Church. Like the mythic Cassandra, whose fate was to know the future but to be unable to change it, Carol finds that Val ignores her warning. Even worse, Val denies that he is still a fugitive; he tells her that his recent thirtieth birthday has reformed him, adding that "I'm done with the crowd you run with and the places you run to" (75). Carol sees what Val does not--that putting on a uniform and working at the Torrence Mercantile Store, taking protective coloration from his environment, will not change the way the men in Two Rivers County perceive him. He is a danger to them, and she knows how they will deal with the threat he poses. At the end of the play, when Carol's prophecy comes true and the townsmen pursue Val to his death, she remains behind to collect, from the conjure-man, Val's snakeskin jacket. She waits until she hears his death-cry, then "nods with understanding" and gives the following soliloquy: Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind.... (144) This dialog reminds us of an earlier speech that Carol gives to the conjure-man, who has presented her with the breast-bone of a bird, the rotting flesh still clinging to it. She rejects the offering, telling the conjure-man to leave the bone "on a bare rock in the rain and the sun till every sign of corruption is burned and washed away from it, and then it will be a good charm, a white charm, but now it's a black charm" (25). Like the conjure-man's talisman, Val's snakeskin jacket becomes an acceptable charm for Carol after the townsmen have burned Val to death. Carol's soliloquy is a reminder, too, that Val has called Carol a "little bird" (75) and that he tells Lady/Myra about "a kind of bird that don't have legs so it can't light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky" (55). Like the legless birds, Val and Carol are fugitive outcasts who must keep moving, keep struggling to find a place where they can live, free from fear. Val makes a fine distinction in types of outcasts, which separates him from Carol. He tells Lady/Myra that "there's just two kinds of people, the ones that are bought and the buyers. No--there's one other kind....The kind that's never been branded" (55). Lady is a buyer, in Val's scheme of things; she buys his company with her feminine charms and her offer of a job and a place to stay. Carol is bought, as we have already discovered in her dialog about her allowance. Val, a stranger in this town and a life-long fugitive outcast, has never been branded. Here we see a foreshadowing of Val's fate--the townsmen use a blowtorch to brand him to death at the end of the play. The parallels between Williams and Val, and between the playwright and Carol, are subtle. Like Val, Williams spent most of his adult life as a traveler and an experimenter with sex and drugs. And, though his family was not as rich as the Cutreres, he used money from his mother and grandmother to travel far away from his family and home town. Where else but in the South, where family eccentricities are not only accepted, but often cherished, could Williams, like Carol, enjoy a protected status approaching that of a Southern belle? Having the countenance of his grandfather--the head of his family and his family's church--must have helped. His grandfather could not, however, shield him from the scalding criticism of his cruel father. In Val and Carol, Williams explores a dichotomy in his own family life. He was the protected, intellectual son, in his mother's eyes, and the emasculated, embarrassing burden in his father's. To Cornelius Williams, it must have seemed that his son's effeminacy made him less than a man; to Tennessee, however, his father's verbal abuse--the use of such pejoratives as "Miss Nancy" ("Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth" 106)--must have made him feel like a figurative Val or Chance, emasculated by Cornelius's burning words. Williams inspects another dichotomy of character in Confessional. Through the two openly homosexual characters in this play, the Boy from Iowa and the Young Man, he explores his fugitive, outcast state from the perspectives of himself as a young man, and as an older, established writer. Like the Boy, Williams was raised in an idealistic environment and did not experience sex with another man until he left that milieu. Earlier in this chapter I relate the story of Williams's relationship with a young clarinet player during his travels. It is fairly clear from his telling of the story that, like the Boy from Iowa, he began that relationship with idealistic notions of love and ended it with a suspicion that the clarinet player had stayed with him because he had money. As the playwright grew older, finding himself more and more attached to the financial side of drama, we see the picture of him related by Donald Rawley. At times he may have felt, like the Young Man in Confessional, a prostitute to the financiers of his craft--reduced, like the Young Man, to rewriting "[p]olitely bitchy remarks between smartly gowned ladies" (Williams, Confessional 175)7. In a 1981 interview with Dotson Rader, Williams reveals another parallel to the Young Man: he tells a story about how he liked to "cruise" with Donald Windham, and tells of a couple of sailors he and Windham picked up (345), who beat and robbed him. This has overtones of the Young Man's comment to Leona, that "I only go for straight trade" (175). In the Rader interview, Williams discusses the episodic nature of his life. As the playwright puts it: I now look back at periods of my life, and I think, Was that really me? Was I doing those things? I don't feel any continuity in my life. It is as if my life were segments that are separate and do not connect. From one period to another it has all happened behind the curtain of work. And I just peek out from behind the curtain now and then and find myself on totally different terrain. (qtd. in Rader 332) The first period Williams identifies, "from the age of eleven until I left the university" (Rader 332), provides a common background for the Boy from Iowa and the Young Man. His second period, which Williams says was "happy....after I came out in the gay world" (Rader 332), represents the period the Boy is entering, but that the Young Man has left behind. The Young Man is in Williams's third period, beginning in the late 1960s, when the playwright began to feel jaded, a downward spiral that ended when he was committed by his brother to a mental institution (Rader 333). Through the Boy from Iowa, Williams allows himself to reminisce about his naive youth; through the Young Man, he weighs what he has gained in reputation with what he has lost in idealism. The scales are tipped in favor of the Young Man, whose cynicism the Boy imitates at the end of Confessional. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these fugitive outcasts is that they all sense that something important is missing in their lives. They try to imagine what that something could be, and wander about in search of it. "The use of imagination, resorting to dreams for the loftier purpose of art," Williams tells us, "is a mask [a man] devises to cover his incompletion" ("Desire and the Black Masseur" 85). Through the playwright's imagination and his art--his creation of these fugitive outcast characters and his placement of them in dramatic juxtaposition with conventional morality--we come upon a single common denominator: the playwright, like his outcast characters, feels, because of the situations that made him outcast, that something is missing in his life. That is a pretty fair description of what we commonly call angst. Through his fugitive outcasts, Williams gives us a glimpse of the most powerful driving forces in his life. It is the culmination of a cause-and-effect chain; his upbringing made it difficult for him to cope with his homosexuality, making him a sexual outcast; his outcast state caused him to closely examine religion, both because of his grandfather's influence and because religious prohibitions of homosexuality are society's most powerful tool in creating sexual outcasts; his examination of this phenomenon creates a form of monomania, causing him to wander the world as a fugitive outcast in search of answers to his questions; and, finding irreconcilable differences, between himself and conventional morality and between conventional morality and its Christian roots, he seeks to resolve--or at least express--those differences in his plays. Williams's life, and his art, encompasses his struggle for completion, his desire to express the angst he feels as an outcast. In reading his plays, we find the reflection of the cause-and-effect chain I discuss, above, and we are compelled to pay attention. We desire to see the end product of Williams's search for completion. This is consistent with Booth's comments about the audience's/reader's need for closure. As Booth puts it: Most imaginative works, even those of a kind that might seem to be cognitive or didactic in the sense of being built only on speculative or intellectual interests, rely in part on interests very different from intellectual curiosity....When we see a causal chain started, we demand--and demand in a way that is only indirectly related to mere curiosity--to see the result....This kind of sequence, so strongly stressed by Aristotle in his discussion of plot, is, as we have seen, often underplayed or even deplored by modern critics and novelists. Yet our desire for causal completion is one of the strongest of interests available to the author. Not only do we believe that certain causes do in life produce certain effects; in literature be believe that they should. (Booth 127) Williams relies on our demand for completion as the primary focus of his plays. Through his outcast characters he creates a need for the causal completion that Booth mentions--in other words, we demand to discover if the playwright's outcasts find what they seek. Having examined in these chapters three of the most striking perspectives from which Williams's outcasts can be examined, we can proceed to determine whether the playwright has, as Booth puts it, "weighed his characters on dishonest scales" (79). In the next chapter I will return to Williams's argument, 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). Does he, through these outcast characters and the dramatic structures in which they exist, live up to this promise? If so, can we identify elements of Williams's rhetoric of outcasts? Notes: 1 Williams, T., Orpheus Descending. In Tennessee Williams: Four Plays (New York: Penguin, 1976). Subsequent references to the play come from this edition. 2 Williams, T. The Glass Menagerie. In Literature: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1995). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition. 3 I want to mention that the Laura of Menagerie and the Laura of Williams's short story, "A Portrait of a Girl in Glass," are very different. In the play, Laura's instability is generated by her fear of socializing; in the short story, Laura, a closer parallel to Williams's sister, Rose, is mentally incapable of the intelligent conciliation of the character in Menagerie (Falk 70). Had Williams portrayed Menagerie's Laura as profoundly mentally ill, her desolation at the end of the play might have been less meaningful. 4 Williams, T., A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1980). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition of the play. 5 Williams, T., Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In Stages of Drama (Bedford, 1999). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition of the play. 6 Albert Devlin notes that, of the revisions to the Broadway version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof allegedly urged by director Elia Kazan, Williams least liked Kazan's demand that Maggie be given more sympathetic treatment (39). 7 Williams, T. Confessional. In The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. VII (New York: New Directions, 1971). Subsequent references to this play come from this edition.