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Chapter Five "Certain Moral Values": Toward Identifying Williams's Rhetoric of Outcasts Poem for Paul I think the strange, the crazed, the queer will have their holiday this year, I think for just a little while there will be pity for the wild. I think in places known as gay, in secret clubs and private bars, the damned will serenade the damned with frantic drums and wild guitars. I think, for some uncertain reason, mercy will be shown this season to the lonely and misfit, to the brilliant and deformed-- I think they will be housed and warmed and fed and comforted for a while before, with such a tender smile, the earth destroys her crooked child. (Williams, qtd. in Leverich 419) * * * Our theatre has to cry out to be heard at all... (Williams, The Notebook of Trigorin xxiii) * * * Men pity and love each other more deeply than they permit themselves to know. (Williams, "The Timeless World of a Play" 53) * * * So many things to regret. But there are, I believe, so very few things that one can change in one's life. There are very few acts of volition. I don't believe in individual guilt. I don't think people are responsible for what they do. We are products of circumstances that determine what we do ....sometimes I wonder whether I even believe in collective guilt. And yet I do believe that the intelligent person, the moral individual, must avoid evil and cruelty and dishonesties. One can try to pursue a path of virtue. That remains to us, I hope. (Williams, qtd. in Devlin 357) It is clear that Williams's outcast characters do not suffer because of the acts or situations that make them outcasts--in other words, because they are immoral or evil. They suffer at the hands of individuals who represent conventional morality because they represent a threat to social orthodoxy. The conflict between nonconformists and representatives of conventional morality is at the heart of all of Williams's major plays; this agonistic relationship Williams calls "certain moral values in violent juxtaposition" (Introduction to The Rose Tattoo 151). The violent and ultimately futile struggle by nonconformists to live among people of conventional morality is unavoidable. This is, I believe, what Williams means when he writes that "there is something much bigger in life and death than we have become aware of (or adequately recorded) in our living and dying" (Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth xii). In claiming that a juxtaposition of moral values can exist, and is revealed in the conflict between nonconformists and representatives of conventional morality, Williams implies that both groups have values that must be weighed on the stage of human existence. To determine the extent of Williams's implications we turn, then, to a rhetorical analysis of the outcast characters presented in this dissertation. What values do these characters possess that, as the heroes of Williams's tragedies, they encourage us to emulate? For this determination we should consider the context in which these outcasts exist; for, as Booth puts it: Even if there are permanent, universal responses embodied in the work, then, they are unlikely to move us strongly and they may be unclear--without the author's rhetoric. What is more troublesome is that fiction, in its very drive for reality, is inclined to deal with a great number of mere conventions, meaningless except in context. (113) We must examine the context, circumstances, behavior, and motivation of Williams's outcasts to determine which of the traditional Aristotelian appellations--"the worthy (dignitas)," "the good (bonum)," and/or "the advantageous or expedient or useful (utilitas)"--apply (Corbett 133). From this examination of Williams's outcasts as presented in this dissertation comes the matériel of the playwright's arguments. Drama is, in classical argumentative terms, primarily a form of ceremonial discourse, which presents arguments in the form of characters and separates the dignitas or bonum--that which is good--from the less admirable qualities of human behavior. Edward P.J. Corbett points out, however, that ceremonial discourse often "shades off" into deliberative or judicial discourse (139). As he puts it: [I]n praising someone, they [Aristotelian rhetors] were suggesting, indirectly at least, that the audience go and do likewise; and in thus suggesting a course of action, they were moving over into the realm of deliberative discourse. Likewise, when they praised or censured someone, they encroached on the province of judicial discourse, because like the lawyer in the courtroom, they seemed to be engaged in exonerating or discrediting someone. (139) In presenting his outcasts as saints, martyrs, and noble fugitives, Williams is praising them, while exhorting his audience to imitate their good qualities and condemning the behavior of those who attack them. He is performing a rhetorical act that, as Corbett points out, unites deliberative and judicial with the primarily ceremonial discourse of the play. Perhaps the best way to present Williams's rhetoric, considering that I have so far presented his outcasts in Neo-Aristotelian terms, is through the classical Aristotelian dispositio (or arrangement), the second of Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric. The earlier chapters of this dissertation form the inventio , or discovery of facts about Williams's outcast characters. I have set aside the third through fifth canons--elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and pronuntiatio (delivery), respectively--as they are directed more toward oratory; however, as Corbett notes, elocutio and pronuntiatio can be considered, in written rhetoric, as elements of style (26-27), used throughout the dispositio. We have already begun the web, as the Latins called the beginning of the dispositio (Corbett 282), in presenting the exordium, or the background and object of our discourse (a discussion of Williams's outcasts and the over-arching theme he claims for his work). In this chapter we will continue to follow the classical persuasive model, restating the playwright's thesis before proceeding through narratio, the gleaning of facts from the material already presented; through confirmatio, or "arguments of co-ordinate value" (Corbett 301); to refutatio, considering the arguments that deny the nobility of Williams's outcasts; and ending in the recapitulatio, or peroratio, with the conclusions and implications of the playwright's rhetoric of outcasts. The suffering of Williams's outcast characters--the central message-bearers in his plays and the main topic of this dissertation--bears out his claim that "I have only one major theme for my work that is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual" (Letter, 1939, to Audrey Wood). The main argument in this dissertation is, then, complete; and that argument becomes the core of our investigation of Williams's rhetoric of outcasts. We can proceed to examine his rhetoric, organize its elements, and reveal its implications. Williams introduces us to his rhetoric of outcasts through a strategy that Richard Whately calls introduction paradoxical, "to show that although the points we are trying to establish seem improbable, they must after all be admitted" (Corbett 284). Williams's outcasts are devoured, literally or figuratively, because of wrongs they believe themselves to have committed; thus, it seems unlikely, at first, that these characters represent dignitas or bonum. Tom Wingfield is consumed by the memory of the family he abandoned; Sebastian Venable allows himself to be dismembered and devoured by the young men he has sexually abused; the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon is maddened by his own horrific God-concept. These are punishments that appear, at first light, just, from the standpoint of conventional morality. How, then, can we come to see these characters as worthy of emulation, or as saints who are, in and of themselves, good? First, if we examine the physical punishments inflicted upon Williams's outcast characters, we see an illustration of the difference between divine retribution or poetic irony and what is commonly called vigilante justice. This is a qualitative distinction in our society: while we tend to applaud individuals whom we select to punish wrong-doers, we frown upon individuals who take it upon themselves to punish others. Furthermore, our society is legalistic; we claim that rightful punishments are set by law, and usually consider individuals who act outside the law--even for reasons we may believe to be good--to be outlaws themselves. The physical punishments meted out to many of Williams's outcasts are inflicted upon them by the violent and the ignorant. Jabe's coarse friends burn Val Xavier to death. Sebastian Venable is cut to pieces by Sicilian peasant boys. A blue-collar roughneck harasses and rapes Blanche DuBois. Chance Wayne is castrated by the young men in a hick Southern town. These characters immolate themselves, knowing that the usual operations of law do not apply to their unique crimes. We may abhor Val's promiscuity, Sebastian's pedophilia, and Chance's prostitution; however, we recognize a worse evil in the individuals who punish them. Indeed, one of Val's persecutors is the sheriff, who, nevertheless, acts outside the law when he helps murder the young man. This is another argument that we must include in Williams's rhetoric of outcasts: the law enforcement officers in his major plays are among his most hypocritical, most violent or arbitrary characters. Second, if we examine the emotional or psychological punishments suffered by many of Williams's outcast characters, we find validation of many of our own notions of divine retribution. These characters struggle, as did the Biblical Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, to define their relationship to God. Sebastian's self-immolation comes after he finds, in the rending of sea turtles by gulls, a vision of a vicious God. Shannon's God-concept, the God of retribution or Lex Talionis, drives him from his church and, nearly, from the company of the sane. Nonno Coffin suffers the life of a wandering monk, searching for a message from God. Blanche DuBois destroys herself, physically and emotionally, in atonement for having caused her husband's death. Third, we see that the motives behind the actions of Williams's outcasts are noble; they embody the principles of freedom that we commonly hold as good. After a life of dissipation, Val Xavier tries to find a place where he can put down roots. The Boy from Iowa wanders the country, looking for love. Tom Wingfield flees his family in search of spiritual freedom. Catherine Holly fights a losing battle, suffering a lobotomy and institutionalization rather than lie about her cousin's death. Having become addicted to the sweet wine of polite company, Chance leaves St. Cloud in search of a place where his past will not be held against him. These outcasts are not searching for wealth or power, or for control over others; they are motivated by a desire to be left alone. As representatives of the American dream they are unsuccessful, as they pursue only a relief from the oppression of conventional morality. Fourth, in examining the actions of Williams's outcasts, we see intense, internal, extenuating circumstances behind their behavior. Tom's wander-lust is painful because his family is poor; abandoning his mother and sister will leave them destitute. Amanda Wingfield creates a fantastic illusion of her family as solidly middle-class. Had the Wingfields truly been middle-class, however, Tom's disappearance would not have created such misery. Chance Wayne's background, his coming from a poor family that encouraged him to associate with his wealthier neighbors, drives him to prostitution as a means of financing his affair with Heavenly Finley, whose family is wealthy. Like Amanda, Chance is unable to maintain the illusion of middle-class status; embarrassment drives him from St. Cloud. Having soiled himself by becoming a gigolo, he continues to prostitute himself to finance his return. Although Sebastian Venable does not suffer the poverty of Tom or Chance, he, too, is driven by something outside of the control of his will--his homosexuality. He is an outcast because of genetic chance, that gave him a sexual preference misunderstood or forbidden by society. Unable to demonstrate his sexual feelings in the class to which he was born, he turns to poor, lower-class young men for sexual solace. And, unable to discuss his sexual orientation in Violet's polite society, he turns at last to the physical act of self-immolation as a desperate statement about his situation. Like Sebastian, Skipper is motivated by a sexual orientation that is unacceptable to his athlete peers; unlike Sebastian, Skipper cannot bring himself to express his sexual nature to anyone who knows him--not even to his closest female friend, Maggie. He does not have the wealth that, for a time, protects Sebastian from the punishment meted out by conventional moralists to nonconformists. Blanche's motivation is even farther removed from herself. She is controlled by the homosexuality of her dead husband--his sexual orientation drives her to an unkind comment, which precipitates his suicide and her compensating nymphomania. It is important to note, here, the source of Blanche's early punishments. F.M.O. Hitchcock notes that Blanche is not punished by the soldiers and young men she has slept with, but by the representatives of conventional morality. As Hitchcock puts it: Actually, however, Stanley's evidence [against Blanche] is rather ambiguous, for it implies that these strangers are extremely willing to participate in intimacies with Blanche, and that it is, instead, the figures of authority--the camp commander, the hotel manager, the school superintendent--who feel compelled to prohibit those frequent visits to a woman whom they now consider to be a social outcast. This suggests, then, that Blanche's sexual promiscuity is both a punishment...and a penance... (84-85) Catherine's motivation is likewise removed; she is controlled by both Sebastian's homosexuality and the nature of his death--a sexual orientation that forces her into the role of purveyor, and a death that makes an open, emotional statement about her complicity in Sebastian's self-immolation. The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon's motivation is, perhaps, the most removed from personal choice of all Williams's outcasts. He is torn by a dichotomy: the God his parishioners want him to promote to them is not the God his heart and intellect reveal to him. He is outcast because of the very role assigned him by conventional morality--a priest is expected to study the nature of God, and to reveal the results of his study to his parishioners. He is unable to cope with the hypocrisy of the Church, which enforces a condition that a priest's revelations always be orthodox. Considering the above sample of Williams's outcast characters, we can see the operation of Aristotelian pisteis, or artistic proofs (39); although the strategies vary from character to character, Williams engages the three types of proof, or appeals--ethos, logos, and pathos--to establish his characters' authority. In Tom Wingfield, for example, we find a character primarily motivated by ethos; in supporting his mother and sister, and in his tender concern for them, he demonstrates behavior that is fair-minded and trustworthy. Catherine Holly is motivated by logos, in her desire to present a true or probable argument about Sebastian, against all odds. The Rev. Shannon, in his painfully rendered description of his psychological trama, reveals himself to be primarily motivated by pathos, the speaker's awakening of an audience's emotion. Arguing from their primary motivation, these characters make liberal use of the other pisteis as well. Tom's ethos, for example, is tempered by his argument, logical and clear, that abandoning his family is his only means of achieving personal freedom; Catherine's logos is accented by pathos--her fear of mutilation; and Shannon's pathos is blended with elements of logic, as we see in his clear philosophical discussion of the nature of God. Through these outcast characters Williams argues that his outcasts are torn between their desire to express their true natures and their human social drives. C.W.E. Bigsby's comments on The Glass Menagerie apply as well to Williams's other works; as Bigsby notes: All the key words of Williams's work are to be found in these introductory notes: paranoia, tenderness, illusions, illness, fragile, delicate, poetic, transformation, emotion, nostalgia, desperation, trap. These defining elements are to be projected not merely through character and dialogue. He envisages a production in which all elements will serve his central concern with those who are the victims of social circumstance, of impervious national myths, of fate and of time as the agent of that fate. He envisages the projection of magic-lantern slides which will amplify elements of a scene. He calls for music to give "emotional emphasis," music which is to be "the lightest, most delicate music in the world" emphasizing "emotion, nostalgia, which is the first condition of the play." (33) The "first condition of the play" (33) is tragic; Bigsby's reduction of Williams's production notes, above, defines more than the emotion the playwright hopes to generate in his plays. It defines, in addition, the character of Williams's lonely, oppressed, nonconformist outcasts. "Life--life--how uncomprehendably brutal you can be," Williams writes, after witnessing one of Rose's particularly perverse psychological dislocations. "Why?--That question is much too old. It does no good to repeat these old questions--except in art, when we can give them, possibly, some kind of poetic expression" (qtd. in Leverich 335). In these outcast characters we find the playwright engaged in that art, that consideration of the senseless brutality that conventional moralists inflict upon nonconformists. Senseless brutality is the source of Williams's alienation from conventional morality, that which forces his isolation while underscoring his angst. In choosing to resist the brutality of conventional moralists, he acknowledges that life became "something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages" (Where I Live viii). Like his outcast characters, Williams felt both isolation from conventional persons and the freedom that nonconformity can bring; however, he sensed that his isolation had removed something important from his life. The same force drives his outcasts from polite society and compels those characters to notice that something is missing in their lives--an added cruelty. As Williams puts it: I've always regarded myself as an incomplete person, and consequently I've always been more interested in my own kind of people, you know, people that have problems, people that have to fight for their reason, people for whom the impact of life and experience from day to day, night to night, is difficult, people who come close to cracking. That's my world, those are my people. And I must write about the people I know. Perhaps that limits me, I'm sure it must limit me as an artist, but nevertheless I couldn't create believable characters if I moved outside of that world. (qtd. in Terkel 83) F.M.O. Hitchcock notes that Williams's "search for wholeness is what actually defines his work" (164). She adds that Williams's outcasts "are wounded halves, desperately seeking an end to their fragmentation, their alienation, their existential angst" (164). Tischler, too, notes this driving need for Williams's outcasts to find wholeness. As she puts it: Like the Wandering Jew or the Ancient Mariner, the Williams hero is the lonely stranger who bears a mark setting him apart from other men--a special hunger, an unsatisfied need. Handsome and cursed, he dominates the stage as he does the community. He is the sun to their moons of desire ("One Arm"). A non-conformist, he must speak his outrageous Truth, facing turmoil, expulsion, and death. ("Romantic Textures" 155) Out of this conflict, this driving need for acceptance and understanding, Williams's outcasts experience a compulsion to hurt themselves, to pay for something they enjoy but feel to be wrong. These characters express Williams's feelings about the struggle between conventional morality and nonconformist individuals, and between human, animal nature and society's struggle to control both nature and the individuals in it. In Aristotelian terms, Williams makes these arguments about his outcast characters through the topoi of genus (comparable type) and sequi (or consequence). Through dialog and melody, but most particularly through setting and thought, the playwright compares his outcasts to saints, martyrs, and mythological heroes--an argument from genus. If we can see the wandering Jew in Tom, Jesus Christ in Shannon, or a martyred saint in Sebastian Venable, we are forced, rhetorically, to consider the dignitas and the bonum of these outcasts. Our society accepts these figures--the saints and heroes to whom Williams compares his outcasts--as good in and of themselves (dignitas) and, through the examples of their lives, good in a didactic sense (bonum). The playwright's argument from sequi is much more subtle. Certainly, his outcast characters suffer as a consequence of their need for the understanding of and acceptance by representatives of conventional morality. I cannot underscore this argument too strongly--in a concrete sense, demonstrated in the earlier chapters of this dissertation, Williams's outcasts are not punished for the peculiarities of character that isolate them from conventional people. Sebastian and Skipper are not punished because they are homosexual, but because they choose to destroy themselves as a statement of the brutality that has been inflicted upon them them by society. Shannon does not suffer because his God-concept is different from that of his parishioners; he is forced out of his church by officials who refuse to understand a priest's lack of orthodoxy and his need to understand God and be understood by Him. We must place the onus for their punishment where it belongs, not on acts such as homosexuality or heresy but on people, individuals who take upon themselves the responsibility of maintaining their perceptions of truth. With the blame placed where it belongs, upon the characters whom Williams creates as representatives of a hypocritical conventional morality, his argument from sequi emerges clearly. It is entirely appropriate, when arguing from consequence, to show that a punishment is unjust because it is not, or should not be, the rightful outcome of an action. Some of us may believe that Sebastian and Skipper should be punished for their homosexuality; however, I believe that few of us would argue that the punishment for homosexuality should be dismemberment or fatal drug overdose. Further, society would not delegate, by law, the responsibility for punishing homosexuality to a group of peasant boys or a jealous spouse. If we believe that homosexuals or heretics should be punished, we tend to make our God the arbiter of the dispute--what punishment Sebastian, Skipper, or Shannon receives, then, should come through a divine agency, or not at all. In taking a divine responsibility upon themselves, the individuals who punish Williams's outcasts commit a greater heresy and constitute a more significant wrong than those committed by the outcasts themselves. If we would consider refuting this claim that the onus for the punishment of Williams's outcasts should be placed on hypocrites who usurp divine authority, we should have to demonstrate that the individuals who punish the outcasts behave justly. For example, we would have to show that Jabe behaves ethically when he shoots and kills his wife and unborn child, and when he places the blame for her death on Val Xavier. This is a difficult argument to refute, considering the actions of Val and Lady/Myra. In a society such as ours, whose courts refuse to severely punish a woman who mutilated her husband because, she claims, his oppression of her forced her to remove his penis while he slept1, how can we deny Jabe his revenge against the woman who betrayed him and the man who impregnated his wife? As long as our discourse remains in the realm of this terminology--revenge, betrayal, righteous indignation--we can hardly blame Jabe for his rash behavior. We must, however, leave that realm and appeal to reason, if we are to truly understand Jabe's motivation in the murder of his wife, her unborn child, and her lover. Had Williams intended us to blame Val and Lady/Myra for their own deaths, he would not have given us the sort of background information about Jabe that he clearly does. We would not find out, for example, that Jabe is a member of the bigoted and violent Mystic Crew, or that he had a hand in the murder of Lady/Myra's father and the destruction of her Edenic winegarden. This information lights our way into another realm--that of bitterness, frustration, and hate--and we can see that Jabe's actions are not those of an angry husband, but of an abusive slave-holder whose human property has been sullied by the touch of another man. His actions are neither just nor appropriate to the crimes of his victims. A defense of Sebastian Venable is equally difficult, for who would deny the sexually abused young men their righteous indignation, their desire for revenge against a man who made them feel less than men? I am reminded of another recent court case--a case that is still being tried--wherein B.J. Gaither, a young homosexual from Alabama was beaten and burned to death by two young men who claim that he made undesirable sexual advances toward them2. For months, a number of our television talk shows and ministries have featured individuals who cry for the release of the murderers, on the grounds that their reaction was natural and appropriate. Are the young men who murder Sebastian any less just, their behavior any less natural or appropriate? After all, Sebastian actually touched those young men; Gaither is alleged to have merely looked at the men who murdered him. We must resort to the same argument as the Alabama prosecutors, who call for severe punishment of the murderers because, although their anger may have been appropriate, their violent behavior was not. Also, we have information in Suddenly Last Summer along lines that have not, so far, developed in the real-life court case. Who, indeed, is responsible for the situation wherein a wealthy homosexual can procure and satisfy his sexual needs upon young men? Sebastian's murderers are as much victims of their society--the Hispanic culture allows young males to engage in carefully proscribed homosexual acts (Lumsden 28; Whitam 4)--as of Sebastian's lust. Further, the young men are moved to violence after Sebastian's initial refusal to give them food and money; their motivation is as much greed as revenge. The responsibility for punishing Sebastian remains, as it must in a civilized society, with the representatives of the law--in other words, with the agents of a society that created the situation in the first place. If Sicilian society is to blame for Sebastian's murder, is Southern U.S. society to blame for the suicide of Allan Grey and the psychological destruction of Blanche DuBois? Can society take the blame for a young homosexual's decision to marry, or for the nymphomania of a guilt-ridden woman? Is a culture's morality suspect, when that young man is unfaithful to his wife through a homosexual encounter? We must appeal to reason again, if we are to understand how this can be. Inconsistencies in Southern mores create the entire situation. The same culture that forces Blanche to conceal her husband's homosexuality from the public forces her to privately confess her disgust to him; that confession drives Allan, whose culture has forced him into a marriage that is contrary to his sexual nature, to the genteel Southern cure for extreme embarrassment: suicide. When her husband's homosexuality is revealed, Blanche's culture denies her the right to continue loving him; she is forced to go outside her circle of friends in search of understanding and love, and finds that in leaving polite society she can only find sex and substance abuse. It is easy to paint Blanche as a snob; certainly her comments about Stanley Kowalski's appearance and behavior are uncharitable at best, malicious at worst. During the course of A Streetcar Named Desire, she vacillates between flirting with Stanley and verbally abusing him. Is it any wonder that, discovering that Blanche is trying to persuade Stella to leave him, Stanley reacts rashly and brutally? Can we blame this frightened and ignorant man for lashing out in the only way he knows how, in the manner of reaction his society has inculcated in him? Setting aside the illegality of rape and physical abuse, the same emotional configuration that allows the court decisions I mention, above, tell us that rape and abuse are wrong, always and in every situation. Stanley's anger may be just; his reaction is not. Were he a well-mannered, loving husband, we might find more justice in his physical mistreatment of Blanche; however, we find that he has delivered his own measure of emotional abuse upon this psychologically unstable woman, and that he has tried to control her throughout the play. Stanley could have thrown Blanche out of his and Stella's apartment at any time; indeed, his lack of emotional control might easily have excused this action, in his wife's eyes and in ours. He does not evict Blanche, however; out of a desire to control everything in his wife's life, and to avenge the loss of Belle Reve, Stanley keeps Blanche as a dependent and, when he is unable to intimidate her physically or emotionally, resorts to the brutality of rape. His actions are neither just nor appropriate to the situation. In their usurpation of the divine right of retribution, Jabe, Stanley, Maggie, and the Sicilian youth represent Williams's idea of conventional morality, the values of a hypocritical culture founded on marriage, home, and children. These characters take upon themselves the responsibilities Williams would assign to God. In Williams's scheme of things the family is a form of church, exacting punishments and demanding penance as a church might. It is an institution that polices itself as diligently as in any inquisition, in its ritualization of emotion, its insistence that heretics reveal themselves and submit to remarkably brutal punishments. Unlike Christianity, however, Williams's conventional morality--his family-as-church-- makes no provision for individuals who are outcasts to ever return. Likewise, it addresses love in a narrowly proscribed context, and permits any number of hypocrisies and violent reactions designed to maintain orthodoxy. In an Aristotelian sense this is a question of the greater wrong (105); the conduct of conventional moralists is worse than that of Williams's outcasts, because it is not proportional to the outcasts' offenses. It is the lack of an expansive, inclusive, enduring love that Williams's outcast characters feel; this is the incompletion that makes them outcasts. Love completes them, for a brief while, after which their excommunication from the family-as-church creates another incompletion that they strive to resolve. Concerning this absence of love, Williams writes: Now you know in America, and in sophisticated circles, love is beginning to be a somewhat disreputable subject at least in the theatre, because it's been exploited to excess. There was a recent article in Partisan Review, our big, intellectual, boring weekly, but which is really intellectual and important, but boring, I think. There was an article called "Love, Love, Love," saying that we in the theatre are talking too much about love and using it as an expedient to end our plays upon a note of uplift and as a very expedient solution to problems which are far from expediently solved. [Gore Vidal, "Love, Love, Love," Partisan Review, 26 (1959), 613-620--Editor] This I buy, but I think we could go too far in disavowing love as the thing that the human race must depend upon finally. (qtd. in Morrow 72-73) For Williams, love is the foundation upon which society should rest. It is the family-as-church that is the heresy, and the representatives of that conventional morality who are, themselves, the most immoral. The violence that these individuals represent goes beyond their destruction of nonconformists; it threatens the existence of the human race. As Williams puts it: We show both the light and the shadow, and the shadow is the violence which we live threatened by. I mean we're threatened with world extinction through violence. In our lives violence, not physical violence but emotional violence, is so much a part of us. I have seen so much depicted of people's longing to meet each other tenderly with love, and violence is represented because it's the obstacle, it's the other side of the coin, it's the dark side of the moon, however you want to put it, but the dark side of the moon is in the sky and we want to show both sides of the moon you know. (qtd. in Murrow 77) Williams acknowledges this violence, which he calls a "love-hatred, and it hails from the pit. Well there's that kind of love," he continues, "but there's also a benign love and a love that involves tenderness" (qtd. in Morrow 72-73). It is that benign love that Williams portrays, in Nonno's relationship with his niece, and in Tom's love for Laura. Williams writes, in his notes for Sweet Bird of Youth, that "our serious theatre is a search for something that is not yet successful but is still going on" (xii). That "something" is, I believe, both a rhetorical and an intensely personal act--the achievement of compassion between human beings who are vastly different. It is rhetorical, primarily, because we must be persuaded to it; the playwright must consistently encourage understanding between his or her audience, who represent conventional morality in their particular location, and the nonconformists, whose self is naked on the stage but concealed among the audience. It is personal, for playwrights like Williams experience, in their relations with society at large, the lack of compassion and understanding that is often the nonconformist's lot. It is also personal because it is autobiographical. As Lyle Leverich puts it: At the center of [Williams's] existence, there was the pull of his family: his love for his mother, intertwined with the more intense, guilt-ridden attachment for his sister, further bound in by his love-hatred toward his father. Homosexuality, despite its being fraught with the dangers of police entrapment and public revelation, nevertheless offered Tom the deepening appeal of nonconformist exploration and the illusion of escape from the imprisonment of family. (351) Although a playwright's discourse is generally ceremonial, his or her purpose is didactic. For Williams, who preaches love and understanding, and who denounces the heresy of the family-as-church, there can be no more profound accomplishment than the encouragement of sympathy for those whom society casts out. His rhetoric of outcasts teaches us about more than the situational conflicts he presents; it instructs us in perspective, and in examining our occasions of indignation for their underlying prejudices. As Booth puts it, investigations along these rhetorical lines are entirely appropriate: Rhetorical study is study of use, of purposes pursued, targets hit or missed, practices illuminated for the sake not of pure knowledge but of further (and improved) practice. We can use--indeed we depend on--the findings of all genuine sciences of language, of signs, of story. But we cheerfully raid the scientist's territory, hauling back the loot that we then turn to the ends of rhetoric. We want to know why one story or technique works better than another, because we know that, whichever theory may stand or fall, our practices as tellers and listeners can always be improved. (441) If we can begin to understand why we feel compassion for Val Xavier, or Chance Wayne, or Blanche DuBois, we can incorporate their experiences into our own rhetoric, our social responsibility. In this dissertation I have presented these and others of Williams's outcasts from new perspectives, in a rhetorical analysis that spans several centuries and methods, with the goal of proving the playwright's own thesis and of expanding our knowledge concerning his intent. I am not arguing that Williams comes to any conclusions, or that the evidence points to some specific, hidden moral agenda on his part. I argue that the evidence reveals questions for which Williams sought answers. The most important of these is the reason outcasts feel compelled, or are forced, to confess the situations that make them exiles from conventional morality and to atone for transgressions against that system of values. "Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeing" (Williams, "The Timeless World of a Play" 131) is the end-product of the conflict between the values systems I have examined. Williams's nonconformist characters are the desperately fleeing, struggling against the oppression of conformists; what is eternal is the concept of that struggle, and the "certain moral values" (Introduction to The Rose Tattoo 151) that it reveals. This is reminiscent of Tom Wingfield's remarks: "But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (Williams, The Glass Menagerie 1521). In conclusion, I want to return briefly to the autobiographical nature of Williams's outcast characters, considering the 1941 "Poem for Paul" that appears as an epigraph to this chapter. Had we any doubt that Williams considered himself an outcast, this poem, written more than forty years before his death, dispels it. Before Battle of Angels, and before the fame that came with The Glass Menagerie, the playwright sends us an announcement of his purpose; like his plays, "Poem for Paul" demonstrates Williams's profound sadness and isolation. If we examine the predictions in "Poem for Paul," we see a world in which homosexuals lead truly pathetic lives. In the first stanza Williams predicts a year of holiday for nonconformists; however, as the other stanzas unfold, we find that what the poet/playwright considers a holiday is judged against truly cruel daily treatment. How else can we find "pity" and "mercy" for homosexuals in the simple act of allowing them to congregate, where "the damned will serenade the damned" (line 7), in bars and other "places known as gay" (line 5)? In the final stanza, Williams has the year of holiday culminate in a mercy-killing, a "tender" (line 15) euthanasia. That final stanza is such an accurate description of Williams's outcast characters that I feel it appropriate to repeat, here: I think they will be housed and warmed and fed and comforted for a while before, with such a tender smile, the earth destroys her crooked child. (qtd. in Leverich 419) In this stanza we find Val's fate, and Skipper's, and Blanche's--each of these, and others of Williams's outcasts, experience the classical tragedy of devolution from happiness to ruin. Val is allowed the illusion that his life is changing before he is destroyed; Carol demonstrates the earth's tenderness when she retrieves his jacket. Skipper enjoys the popularity of a professional athlete before his secret urges drive him to his destruction; Maggie cherishes his memory, tenderly urging Brick to remember the friendship he shared with Skipper. Blanche has her season as a Southern belle before the society that creates and maintains belles corrupts and destroys her; Stella keeps Blanche's memory, although she chooses her husband's truth over her sister's. When we read the plays of Tennessee Williams, we must recognize that the playwright suffered in much the same way as his nonconformist outcasts. His tragic plays touch us so firmly, move us so profoundly, because they contain the sad experiences of a real person--Thomas Lanier Williams. Indeed, a rhetorical analysis of his work that does not take into consideration the biographical aspects of Williams's characters cannot hope to demonstrate the fullness of those characters, nor can it expect to accurately determine the message that the playwright sends us through those characters. To completely describe a glass of water requires that we know the well from which it was drawn--and the hands that shaped the glass. From the well of Tennessee Williams's talent come characters who are so intense that their names have entered common parlance as clichés: Blanche as the faded, sex-starved belle; Stanley as the undershirt-wearing, uncouth barbarian; Laura as the shy, attention-starved girl; Amanda as the crazy mother. They are the nonconformists who are destroyed by conventional morality, the sensitive persons who live on the dark side of the moon. Because we desire to see that dark side, Williams illuminates it in his plays. Then these nonconformists sparkle in the glass of our society, shaped by the same forces that destroy them. Notes: 1 I am referring, here, to the 1994 case of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt (Sachs 1). 2 This is the B.J. Gaither murder, applauded by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas (³WBC to Picket² 1), as reported by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.