Tennessee Williams' Persistent Battle of Angels

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' PERSISTENT BATTLE OF ANGELS WHEN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PUBLISHED THE TEXT of Orpheus Descending ! which, in its first incarnation on Broadway in 1957 had lasted only sixty-eight performances, he included in the same volume the play on which it was based, Battle of Angels, which had opened in Boston in 1940 and had never reached Broadway at all. Read together , the two plays reveal a highly respectable reason for their commercial and aesthetic failure: the author's frantic ambition to make each of them a compendium of almost everything he believed about life and its artistic reflection in drama. In each of the plays, Williams attempted to amalgamate tragedy (both Greek and domestic ), melodrama (both metaphysical and psychological), morality play (both frankly allegorical and subtly symbolic), ritualistic drama (with overt and covert mythic referents) and romantic mood play (both visually and verbally poetic). Each of the plays thematically attempts to depict sexual repression as the basis of religious sublimation and social hypocrisy, to portray the inability of love and sex to counteract God-given aloneness, and to sketch a portrait of the life and fate of the artist as a pariah-scapegoat in quest of meaning in a waste land. Above all, each of the plays attempts to celebrate existence as a continuous battle of the forces of light against those of darkness in which the former, though cruelly defeated (often by mutiny within their own ranks) are never totally destroyed though they appear never destined to win. Compared with Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending reveals Williams' greater control of the dramatic effects of image and symbol, his gain in confidence in the audience's ability to recognize thematic patterns without blunt and excessive signposts and his diminished need to rely too heavily on melodramatics to convey his vision of tragedy. The earlier play, however, because of its very bluntness provides an excellent blueprint to Williams' sexual, social and religious or cosmic attitudes as they have persisted with little modification to the present day. Furthermore, a close reading of Battle of Angels reveals Williams in the act of grappling to find suitable dramatic metaphors to express his basically abstract concerns and insights. 1 Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending with Battle of Angels (New York, 1958). 27 28 MODERN DRAMA May Because throughout Battle of Angels Williams uses verbal and theatrical imagery that demands moral interpretation in universal terms, it becomes imperative from the first to consider even what appears to be the play's most realistic details as part of its predominantly symbolic design. That the play is less concerned with the plight of some unfortunate people existing in the Deep South than in the plight of existence itself becomes immediately apparent when the stage setting is examined as part of the whole moral-symbolic context which it introduces. The setting of Battle of Angels is conceived as ((A ~mercanti1e~ store in a very small and old-fashioned town in the Deep South." Considered in context of those elements which make Battle of Angels a morality play, that this great stage of fools is portrayed as a store bears out the view expressed throughout the drama that the buying and selling not only of goods but of human beings is one of the primary social ills of the human condition. This store which is the domain of J abe Torrance, who is compared to "the very Prince of Darkness," "has large windows facing a tired dirt road" (what else but the road of life?) "across which is a gasoline pump~ [and] a broken-down wagon" (possibly reflecting the necessity and impossibility of physical and spiritual pilgrimage on that road. "and cotton fields which extend to a cypress brake" (the cemetery in the play is called Cypress Hill) Hand the' levee" (or the bank of the river which is the source of life). Considered in terms of the myth of Orpheus which permeates the play, the setting suggests the kingdom of Hades and the river not only the source but the end of life, the Styx. The interior of the store, Williams tells us, is "dusky" and, in the epilogue which takes place on the same set, that it resembles...