The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending

The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending JACK E. WALLACE In Tennessee Williams's first major play, Battle of Angels (1940), a young vagabond poet named Valentine Xavier wanders into a small Southern town where his sympathy for dispossessed blacks and emotionally starved women gets him in trouble with the citizens. In the end he is framed for murder and lynched with a blowtorch. The play's symbolic system implies that the artist hero is a Christ figure destroyed by the cruelty and commercialism of modem America. Most critics agree with Nancy M. Tischler that Val is meant to be the "archetypal artist" and an "idealized self-portrait" of the playwright. I In his preface to Orpheus Descending (1957), a later version of Battle of Angels, Williams encourages the autobiographical approach to Val's story: Why have I stuck so stubbornly to this play? For seventeen years, in fact? Well, nothing is more precious to anybody than the emotional record ofhis youth, and you will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart in this completed play that I now call Orpheus Descending.2 This trail is so well-marked with autobiographical references that the Val of Orpheus Descending seems to be a reliable portrait of the fugitive artist. John Gassner, who assumes Val is the hero, says that Orpheus Descending is "about the tragic isolation of the artist in the hell of modem society."3 Donald P. Costello claims that Williams "never fails to make his protagonist a fugitive"4 in flight from the corrupt earth. And George Niesen argues that Val's insistence on complete freedom represents Williams's belief that "submission to the physical (and therefore corrupt) world demands the destruction of the artistic temperament."5 This view ofthe artist is at odds with Williams's theory ofdrama and his role in American theater. When Williams calls himself a fugitive, as he often does, Theater in Williams's Orpheus Descending 325 we are required to distinguish between his personal loneliness and his public career. As a playwright, Williams adjusted remarkably well to commercial America, and in doing so developed a concept of theater that in Orpheus Descending is more nearly reflected in the rebellion of Lady and Carol than in Val's flight from the "corrupt earth." A more immediate difficulty with the Val-centered reading of Orpheus Descending is that it ignores the changes Williams made during his long revision of the original play. These revisions indicate a significant shift in Williams's concept of the fugitive artist and his relationship to society. Val has his origins not only in Williams's own experience, but in his early portraits of the artist. In the unpublished plays of the late thirties, Williams's heroes are writers seeking to help victims of society - coal miners in "Candles in the Dark," tenement dwellers in "The Fugitive Kind," prison convicts in "Not About Nightingales." Battle ofAngels most nearly resembles the latter play in its violence, imagery, and central action. The heroes, Jim and Val, are both fugitive poets seeking to express the grim and terrible reality oflife (which is not about nightingales), and both are trapped in cruel, repressive societies dominated by sadistic powers - the Warden and guards, Jabe and the Klansmen. Jim's immediate aim is to escape and write an expose that will improve the lot of his fellow inmates, but he is also concerned about their existential loneliness: "There's a wall around ev'ry man in here and outside of here. Ev'ry man is walking around in a cage. He carries it with him wherever he goes and don't let go till he's dead.,,6 This vision of universal loneliness eventually causes Williams to abandon the specific solutions recommended in reform theater. His shift from political to psychological drama is partly indicated by his dedications to these two works. "Not About Nightingales" is dedicated to Clarence Darrow, and the first production of Battle ofAngels is dedicated to D.H. Lawrence, "the brilliant adversary of so many dark angels."7 And it is primarily in a psychological context that Val repeats Jim's complaint that all men are kept in cages...