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I If one reads The Glass Menagerie, an encyclopedia entry about Tennessee Williams, or any of the biographies or memoirs of him prior to Lyle Leverich’s landmark Tom, one is likely to come away with a particular impression of his sister Rose and of Williams’s feelings for her. The reader will have learned that Williams loved his sister very much, that he felt closer to her than he did to any other person in his life, and that, famously, he based Laura in The Glass Menagerie on her. But Williams felt a number of other things about his sister besides love, and these various feelings dictated the shape, content, and effectiveness of much of his work from the very beginning of his career until its end. While I’m not going to suggest that there is only one way in which to view the career of Tennessee Williams, I do propose that it can be seen as a long dialogue with his sister. It is a dialogue full not only of love but of regret for her terrible fate. It is also full of anger over certain acts that may or may not have actually taken place. One, especially, surfaces again and again in the course of a career that spanned seventy-odd plays and more than forty years. I would like to examine some images in his work that repeat themselves , sometimes to the point of obsession and beyond. New ones arrived to take the place of old ones or moved in alongside them, re®ecting Williams’s con®icting feelings toward Rose. These feelings are, at ¤rst, ones of love, and they never altogether vanish from the plays. But Williams’s feelings were complex as well as lifelong. There 4 The Escape That Failed Tennessee and Rose Williams Michael Paller is no discernible, neat pattern to the way the feelings occur from play to play; they are too volatile and too human for that. In this sense, his career was a continuous dialogue with himself, in which Williams insisted he felt one way about his sister while many plays make clear that he felt differently. First, some background. Rose Williams was born on November 19, 1909; Tom, as Tennessee was christened, followed on March 26, 1911. Although they were separated by sixteen months, the two were often mistaken for twins. So alike were they that their nurse called them “The Couple.” They were unusually close, and Tom idolized his older sister. Until 1918, they lived a sheltered, idyllic existence, ¤rst in their maternal grandfather’s rectory in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and later in one he took over in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1918, their father exchanged the traveling salesman’s life he loved for a supervisory desk job at the St. Louis headquarters of his employers, the International Shoe Company. Almost every aspect of their new lives frightened the children, from the noisy, dirty city to the strange neighbors to the atmosphere in their home. From the beginning, their parents, Cornelius Cof¤n Williams and Edwina Rose Dakin, were a dreadful mismatch: she was the neurotically puritanical daughter of an Episcopal minister; he, a hard-drinking, profane veteran of the Spanish-American War. The children were spared Cornelius’s domineering presence for much of their early life, as he was usually on the road selling men’s clothing. But this absence ended in St. Louis. Cornelius was frustrated by his desk job, disdainful of the “sissy” way in which he thought Edwina was raising their son, and furious with a wife he could dominate neither intellectually nor sexually. Life at the Williams home was a constant round of arguing, smoldering silences and sexual tension. In self-defense , Rose and Tom clung together all the more ¤ercely. As Rose approached adolescence, her personality began to change. She became increasingly distant and aloof; her habitual good spirits slowly became a kind of hysteria. She fell in love with a series of young men, but nothing worked out, in part because Edwina had done such an excellent job of passing along to her children her monolithic hatred of sex. The family’s rage, anxiety, and neuroses—together with a history of mental illness on both sides—affected Tom and Rose differently. Tom was discovering his talent for writing, and it became both his The Escape That Failed 71 escape from family pressures and an outlet for stresses he felt internally . But Rose had no such escape. She turned her growing psychological...

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