From Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities of a Nightingale: The Evolution of the Queer Alma

From Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities ofa Nightingale: The Evolution of the Queer Alma JOHN M. CLUM ALMA There's not much to do in this town after dark. but there are resorts on the lake that offer all kinds ofafter·dark entertainment. There's one called Moon Lake Casino. It's under new management, now, but I don't suppose its character has changed. YOUNG MAN What wasits character? ALMA Gay, very gay. Slimmer and Smoke (255-56)' "Gay, very gay" is an appropriate tenn for the once Victorian Alma Winemiller to use to describe the tawdry Moon Lake Casino, which once horrified the prime minister's daughter but where she now feels quite at home. In its original sense, "gay" certainly seems a euphemism for an establishment where, according to John Buchanan, "anything goes" (195), including weekly cock fights. However, the Alma Winemiller of the final scene of Summer and Smoke is more than capable of a bit of camp irony. And her creator had already proven in his previous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, that he was a master of the codes and subterfuge of gay camp' Surely by the late forties Williams was aware of the double meaning of "gay" and the assumptions that could be made about a place where "anything goes," even without the possibility of an allusion to the gay Cole Porter.3 The playful appearance of that now highly charged word shows Williams signalling some members of his audience that there are gay connotations to Summer and Smoke. My focus in this essay is on how these gay connotations move in Wil1iams's second dramatization of the conversion of Alma Winemiller, Eccentricities ofa Nightingale , toward a prescient exploration of what we now would call queer politics. As if to underscore the gay double entendre with which I began, Williams has Miss Alma invoke Oscar Wilde at the Moon Lake Casino as she and John Buchanan argue about the relative merits of flesh and the spirit: Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 31 32 JOHN M. CUJM ALMA ... To me - well, that is the secret, the principle back of existence - the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in OUf reach..,. Who was that said that - oh, so beautiful thing! - "All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars!" JOlIN Mr. Oscar Wilde. ALMA (somewhat taken aback) Well. regardless of who said it, it's still true. Some of us are looking at the stars! (She looks up raptly and places her hand over his.) (Summer and Smoke, 197-(8) Oscar Wilde's aphorism is truer than Miss Alma is ready to apprehend at this point in the play. In Williams's world all of us are mired in the flesh, specifically guts and groin, in the same neighborhood and symbolically linked as death and desire,' but his most troubled characters try to link flesh and spirit or deny the flesh in a quest for spiritual transcendence. At the beginning of Summer and Smoke, Alma Winemiller cannot link spirit and flesh (like Brick Pollitt, who, in Cal on a Hot Tin Roof, is described as an "ass-aching Puritan ,")5but moves from one to the other as her beloved John Buchanan moves in the opposite direction. In the exchange I quote, the linking of spirit and flesh comes through the words of a gay poet, Oscar Wilde, whose best work problem'atized the relationship of flesh and spirit. Alma may be "taken aback" at her spiritual principle springing from what she would see as a polluted source, but for her it's "still true." Alma does not yet see the irony in the physical act of placing her hand on John's as she voices Wilde's epigraph. In many ways, Tennessee Williams is the true successor to Oscar Wilde in gay literature. Like Wilde, Williams made it impossible for his audience and his critics to separate author from creation. He was the poet as performer, the playwright as celebrity. As Wilde became a scandalous figure, a living embodiment of the unspeakable vice of homosexuality, his name a trope for homosexuality; so Williams...