Tennessee Williams' Early Heroines

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' EARLY HEROINES CRITICS HAVE GENERALLY AGREED that the heroines of Tennessee Williams are his finest creations. They dominate the plays in which they are found, and to them, as representatives of certain Southern types, Williams has brought much insight. This insight, which is at once poetic and sociological, has, since 1945, provided the American theater with several characters who may well rank in future histories of American dramatic literature with Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie and Nina Leeds as the most successful creations of dramatic heroines in the first half of the twentieth century. There are basically two types of women in the plays of Williams: the women who are the relics of the moribund tradition of gentility in which Williams himself was reared, women who are unable to accept the twentieth century and who prefer living in the illusive and legendary world of something that never really was-the mythically cavalier Old South;l and the healthy, uncultured, basically sensual women, usually of Latin origin, by whom Williams has been attracted in his more recent plays, and who seem to have been conceived by their creator, if not as representatives of a sort of salvation, then at least as attractive earth goddesses whose salvation is their own sexuality. I propose in this paper to study the first type of heroine, for by studying her, I believe, some important facets of the dramatic art of Tennessee Williams may be revealed. The Civil War was as destructive to the Southern landlords as the French Revolution had been to the French nobility. Where once had been a rigid social system based on slavery and ruled by many cultured , wealthy aristocrats, there was, after the Civil War complete anarchy and loss of values. When the economic system on which this society had been based was destroyed, the society itself fell with it. When his plantation was broken up, the Southern aristocrat was faced with three alternatives. He could accept the changes the war had made and conform to the new society. He could migrate west and start again, or he could retire from active life in the new South, live in a world of false values, and become increasingly alienated from the society which he had sired unknowingly and which had rejected him. The proudest (and the weakest, perhaps) chose the last way. It was certainly the easiest. But, as the years rolled by, this group, still 1. For a complete discussion of the myth of the cavalier Old South see w. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, Doubleday Anchor Books (Garden City, N. Y., 1954). 211 212 December retaining its pre-war viewpoint and ignoring all who were not acceptable by the old standards, steadily degenerated. Tennessee Williams is the poet of this decline. His world is the world of the New South with, in his early plays, especial emphasis on the place of the aristocrat in it This world is one of fragile beauty and unnatural horror, of lost dreams and poetic visions, of animal sex and refined deviations, of first-generation Americans and their blue-blooded wives, of failure and unhappiness, seldom of success. It is a world of yesterday and today, practically never of tomorrow. The characters of Williams always look to the past for their salvation. They cannot understand the present or, if they do, they are powerless to act within it because they will seldom compromise with it They are damned the moment they come on stage. It was during the years between 1944 and 1948, between the writing of Battle of Angels and A Streetcar Named Desire,2 that Williams created the character for which he is most renowned-the neurotic Southern white woman of aristocratic origin. Be she Cassandra Whiteside of Battle of Angels living among the poor white trash of a town in the deep South, or Amanda Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie in the slums of Saint Louis, or Blanche DuBois in a near-slum section of New Orleans, or Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, a sleepy town invaded by the crass commercialism of the twentieth century, the Williams heroine exists mamly in illusion...