Tennessee Williams - Research Paper Example

Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams was an American playwright. He was born as Thomas Lanier William on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His father, Cornelius Williams, was a traveling salesman and his mother Edwina Dakin Williams, was the daughter of a minister. He was the second of three children. In 1929, he joined the University of Missouri but his education was interrupted when he was forced by his father to leave college. He returned to school in 1937 and in 1938, he graduated from the University of Iowa. He failed to get a job in Chicago and moved to New Orleans where he changed his name from "Tom" to "Tennessee" which happened to be the state of his father's birth. In 1939, he became the youngest playwright to receive the $1,000 Rockefeller Grant. In 1944, his play The Glass Menagerie had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later in Broadway. This first major critical success was followed by many other Broadway hits such as plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, and A Rose Tattoo. In 1948 he received his first Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1955, his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. In 1950 and 1951 his works The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. This made him reach out to a worldwide audience. His association with movie legends, according to, Darryl E. Haley, “establishes the playwright as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century drama”. Tennessee Williams fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947. She was a steadying influence in Williams' rather disordered life. However in 1961, she died of lung cancer and Williams went into a deep depression that lasted for ten years. According to Mel Gussow (1983), “it, was 1955, and after ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' there was a noticeable decline in his work. To keep going, he began relying on a ritualistic combination of ingredients -strong coffee, cigarettes, drugs and alcohol”. In 1983, on February 24, Tennessee Williams choked to death. According to reports he choked on an eye drop bottle cap at the Hotel Elysee in New York. However, the police report suggested that it was his use of drugs and alcohol that contributed to his death. He was buried in St. Louis, Missouri. On his death, Marlon Brando said, ‘‘I always felt like Tennessee and I were compatriots. He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death.'' Williams in his life time wrote twenty-five full length plays, dozens of short plays and screenplays, sixty short stories, more than hundred poems, two novels, a novella and an autobiography. He won two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Elia Kazan said of Tennessee: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." Tennessee Williams is known for his psychologically complex dramas that deal with misfits and loners, isolation and miscommunication within families. Two of his most famous plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) have all these features. These plays are set in the American South and represent a powerful study of the complexities of family such as violence, emotional abuse and sexual relations. A Streetcar Named Desire is set in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The play is about and Blanche Dubois and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski who are drawn into a dangerous, antagonistic relationship. Blanche, after the suicide of her husband and dissipation of her family estate comes to the house of Stanley and her sister, Stella. There are conflicts between Blanche and Stanley which soon escalate because of Blanche's flirtations and her condescending treatment of Stanley. The tension between them ends when Stanley rapes Blanche. After this event Blanche is sent to a sanitarium. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is set in the Mississippi River delta and all the happenings take place in the plantation of Big Daddy, who is a wealthy cotton farmer. His family has assembled to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday and the news, though false, that his cancer is lessening. The plot centers on Brick Pollitt, who drowns himself in alcohol as he is afraid to face the actual nature of his relationship with Skipper who was a high school friend. Brick's wife, Maggie, suspects a homosexual relationship between her husband and Skipper and confronts Skipper with the "truth" about his feelings for Brick. When Big Daddy asks Brick to explain his addiction to drink, Brick reveals that Skipper had telephoned him before his death and made a drunken confession but that he had cut him short. Big Daddy accuses Brick of causing Skipper's death and Brick in return reveals to Big Daddy that his cancer is in fact terminal. In the end, it is Maggie’s cunning and sheer tenacity that saves the marriage and the family. She lies to the family that she is pregnant with Brick's child in order regain the family’s favor. . The plays are similar in many aspects. However one difference is that while, A Streetcar Named Desire is about fallen aristocracy and a new industrial order, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about the family dynamics of the nouveau riche. Many of the themes of A Streetcar Named Desire bring to life the history and culture of New Orleans. The setting of the French Quarter is alive with streetcars, bars, jazz and blues music and forms a background for the emotional events that take place in the play. The setting is also symbolic of the changes that were taking place in American society then. The play is about the decline of the aristocratic families who were once influential but had lost their importance with industrialization. On the other hand Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is set in Big Daddy’s plantation house. Here Big Daddy represents the nouveau rich and the American Dream, and through him Williams shows how the American society has sacrificed all values for the sake of money. To Big Daddy money is everything and values himself and other human beings with money. Here he says, “Y’know how much I’m worth? Guess Brick! Guess how much I’m worth!”(Williams, 1955) Both the plays display women as helpless and dependent on men. They are about women who are weak and gradually fall apart because of the men in their lives. Blanche, the main character of A Streetcar, and Maggie, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, exemplify Williams’ view of women’s dependence on men. Williams’s protagonists in the two plays whether it is the delicate Blanche or the dynamic Maggie, or the virile Stanley or the impotent Brick are clearly different in temperament. Blanche represents the typical woman of the Old South, genteel, educated and obsolete. “Blanche DuBois is not only a recognizable human being but an abstraction- the abstraction of decadent aristocracy as a painter’s inner eye sees it” (Harold Bloom, 1999). Stanley represents the New South, crude, primitive and ambitious. Blanche uses her charm and her soft southern ways to attract men whereas Stanley "sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications" to "determine the way he smiles at them" (Williams, 1947). Brick struggles with impotence, alcoholism, the death of a loved one, and not the least his sexual identity. Maggie exemplifies the most headstrong of all William’s female characters. In the face of adversity instead of wallowing in nostalgia, she “claws and scratches” her way out of obscurity and poverty. According to Wade Bradford, “She conveys unbridled sexuality, yet we learn that she is ultimately a faithful wife who lures her husband back to the marriage bed by the play’s end”. Then we have Big Daddy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof who is the wealthy and powerful patriarch of the Pollitt family. He is callous, gruff and verbally abusive. Yet he gains the viewers’ sympathy when they learn that is about to that he is ready to live bravely the remainder of his life. In both the plays Williams uses symbolism, imagery and allegory. In fact both the plays tend to use the same kinds of symbols to achieve the same meaning. A prominent symbol that is used in both the plays is that of alcohol as a means of escape. One common theme in both the plays is the use of lies. Williams shows us how lies can destroy lives of his character and how they always have a negative effect on their lives. In both the plays the lies told result in the destruction of the characters as also the destruction of everyone around them. Brick is the one, who sets off the chain of lies in the play. The biggest lie told is at the end of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when Maggie tells everyone that she is pregnant in an attempt to retain both Brick and Big Daddy’s wealth. The most repulsive lie is told by Stanley when after raping Blanche lies to both Mitch and Stella that he has never touched Blanche. The two plays use symbolism, imagery and allegory to achieve the same meaning. A prominent symbol used in the both plays is that of alcohol as a means to escape. Brick turns to liquor after the death of his good friend. Liquor was Bricks way of escaping from the family tensions. Blanche also drinks because of her many problems. Stanley drinks heavily to forget his brutal actions. All the characters turn to alcohol in order to escape from their problems. As for the success of the two plays, both the plays were big hits. A Street which opened in December, 1947, was an even bigger hit than The Glass Menagerie and Williams won his first Pulitzer Prize and his second Drama Critics' award for it. A Streetcar had 855 performances. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that followed A Streetcar too was a huge commercial success and had 694 performances on Broadway. In conclusion it can be said that in life everyone suffers the consequences of the choices he has made or suffers because of some outside forces that are beyond his control. In both the play Tennessee Williams finds and examines the link of past and present created by man's choices. The characters in the two plays suffer because of the choices they have made. References 1. Bradford Wade, Top 5 Plays by Tennessee Williams http://plays.about.com/od/plays/a/williamsPlays_2.htm 2. Brando Marlon, Quote retrieved from http://www.shmoop.com/tennessee-williams/depression-death.html on 1/5/10 3.Harold., Bloom, Tennessee Williams (Bloom’s Major Dramatists: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide). New York: Chelsea House Publications, 1999. 4. Haley Darryl , Thomas Lanier Williams, March 26, 1911 to February 23, 1983, http://www.etsu.edu/haleyd/twbio.html 5. Gussow Mel(1983), Tennessee Williams Is Dead at 71 http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-obit.html 6. Kazan Elia, Quote retrieved from http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc9.htm on 1/5/10 7. Williams, Tennessee (1947), A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1986. 8. Williams, Tennessee (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (29 Nov 2001) Read More