Thomas Lanier Williams III - Assignment Example

Running Head Thomas Lanier Williams III Thomas Lanier Williams III Tennessee Williams is one of the most [popular play of the20th century who wrote such works as the Glass Menagerie and the Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in the house of his grandfather. His grandfather was an Episcopal rector in whose house he spent his early years. He is also the inheritor of a Southern religious tradition which includes writers like Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Again and again in his plays he comes back to the world of Christian symbolism to describe his individuals "trapped by circumstance." (Adler 1979). Thesis religions education and values of his grandfather had a great impact on themes and motifs used by Williams in his plays. The religious dimension is appeared in his early plays and portrayed as an important part of characters life. One of his best early one-act plays, Portrait of a Madonna, is at once a pathetic portrait of a deranged Southern spinster, precursor of Blanche DuBois of Streetcar, and a grotesque parody of the immaculate conception. Miss Collins both believes and denies belief. She has been brought up in the shadow of the Episcopal church but feels she has been abandoned by the church. Her walk in the scorching, merciless sunlight is a kind of passion, punctuated with cries to God, Jesus, and a "merciful Christ in Heaven" who show her no mercy. The recluse who believes herself pregnant wants to educate her imagined child privately, "to make sure that it doesn't grow up in the shadow of the cross and then have to walk along blocks that scorch you with terrible sunlight" (Bigsby 2004). The collapse of her belief turns her life into nightmare, as Williams makes amply clear through the tightly woven pattern of Christian reference turned into parody and developed through imagery of light and shadow (Bigsby 2004). In Summer and Smoke the rectory is the home of a deranged woman and the angel in the park which dominates the set brings at the end not heavenly mercy or the "Eternity" inscribed at its base but the traveling salesman. The central irony of this struggle of body and soul is that by the time that Dr. John finally recognizes that human beings do have souls, Alma has given up hope and searches for satisfactions of the body alone. God's mercy comes not in the form of spiritual aid but in sleeping pills. As Alma tells the salesman, "Life is full of little mercies like that, not big mercies, but comfortable little mercies. And so we are able to keep on going." In The Rose Tatoo Serafina can shed her loneliness and prolonged grief and find love again only after she has blown out the candle under the Madonna's image. The priest is ineffectual and cannot solace her (Bloom 2003). Only in Mangiacavallo does she find renewed life. The Night ofthe Iguana gives us another ineffectual minister, the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon.Locked out of his church for heresy and fornication, Shannon rages romantically against the traditional image of God as a "senile delinquent" and wants to preach "God as Lightning and Thunder," in oblivious majesty before the terrors of the human condition. His own suffering is described by Hannah as a "voluptuous crucifixion," and her final appeal to God at the end of the play is only the last link in a chain of imagery of crucifixion and unsuccessful resurrection, of Christian belief gone awry. . Dr. John in Summer and Smoke will be married on Palm Sunday. Orpheus Descending reaches its wild climax on Easter Sunday and the lynching of Val Xavier becomes as a result a brutal parody Christian imagery becomes a means of denying Christian belief. In its quieter forms the combination produces cosmic irony; in its most violent manifestations, grotesque parody (Bigsby 2004). In the Glass Menagerie , religion is used as a unique theme which helps Williams to unveil false dreams and ideals of the character. On the level of plot, this circle of reference enhances the credibility of the dramatic situation. Given Amanda's sham version of idealized love and a fantasy past, how could the gentleman caller's visit be other than a failure (Bloom 2003). Despite Amanda's dress which is "historical almost," despite the attempt to live in the nineteenth century when the electric power goes off, Jim is not Rhett Butler but an "emissary from a world of reality," as Tom calls him, an engaged twentieth-century man on vacation. The flickering candlelight of Jim's scene with Laura is not enough to sustain the illusion; at the end of their scene this illusion collapses and we are left in darkness. The experience of the 1930s did not turn Williams into a proletarian writer or social realist, but it did open up for him a darker vision of American life which he suggests to his audience but which is denied to his characters. The Catastrophe of Success," Williams said that "the Cinderella story is our favorite national myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not of the Democracy itself" (Bigsby 2003). The social catastrophe inherent in The Glass Menagerie lies precisely in the fact that. His development of The Glass Menagerie as a "memory play," organized around Tom's remembrances of things past, gave Williams the freedom to develop the "new plastic theatre" of which he spoke in the author's production notes to the published versions of the play. Lighting, music, and the device of the narrator who is both a commentator on and a part of the series of tableaux which he presents in his search for the meaning of the past all contribute to the play's fluidity, a quality and metaphor which one critic sees as central to Williams's art (Bloom 2003). In sum, early background and religious values are reflected in his writing style and themes used in plays. The themes related to religious principles helped Williams to move away from realistic drama and too great a dependence upon only the literal significance of word or action. Religion and Church symbolize a kind of emotional defloration, the girl's irreversible loss of purity, the unavoidable mutilation that Williams sees as necessarily accompanying the process of growing up. Characters' reaction to the accident, however, reveals that they are less concerned about what they have lost than about what they senses might be a gain: References Adler, Thomas P. "The Search for God in the Plays of Tennessee Williams." Renascence 26 ( 1973): 48-56. Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. vol 2; Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams. New Haven, Conn.: Chelsea House, 2003. Read More