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From Parmenides’ insistence that language instead of empiricism could lead us to immutable truths, to Plato’s form of a cat as the ideal rather than any living cat, to Descartes’s distrust of an evil genie who deceives his senses, and to Kant’s sense of isolation, the human being trapped in his body without ever knowing what another body thinks and feels, Western rationality has regarded the®esh as an impediment and an impostor, a troublemaker thwarting the mind’s awareness of the self and the world. Nowhere in modern theater is this split examined and evaluated as it is in the work of Tennessee Williams. What has often been regarded as a critique of the remnants of Victorian repression in the South (Falk 70–71) is in fact a running dialogue, a much deeper ambivalence about whether the mind and body can communicate or even coexist. That the battleground for this apprehension is often sexual transgression, at least as de¤ned by the last decade’s standards, should not mislead readers into thinking that Williams is solely a moralist. He is also a metaphysician searching for a connection between seemingly different entities. This duality has been mentioned in passing by Nada Zeineddine (Because It Is My Name 136) in a section on The Night of the Iguana and has been analyzed in more depth with regard to Summer and Smoke by Alice Grif¤n (Understanding Tennessee Williams 81–103), although only in a one-sided manner with respect to Alma. Dualistic approaches to Williams’s work have, instead, focused on gender, geography, power relations between weak and strong or gentle and violent, illusion and reality, good and bad faith (using Sartre’s sense of the term), the self and other, and, more re6 The Metaphysics of Tennessee Williams Robert Siegel cently, heterosexual/homosexual schisms in his work. While these approaches certainly speak to the playwright’s concerns, a mindbody analysis can amplify and perhaps integrate these other dualities . The argument between mind and body is spoken in vastly different contexts by characters with vastly different motives, and yet the con®icts are almost identical. When Amanda confronts Tom for wanting to leave his job at the warehouse in The Glass Menagerie, Tom defends his need for adventure by claiming that man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, and a ¤ghter; and Amanda’s rebuke is that instinct belongs to animals, that Christians desire the mind and spirit, and that surely Tom’s aims are higher than those of pigs and monkeys. His answer has the cadence of a punch line: “I reckon they’re not” (Glass 30). The clash becomes more caustic and the dichotomy blunter in Blanche’s famous monologue as she pleads with her sister to leave the lowly Stanley, to choose art and tender feelings over the Neanderthal brutes (Streetcar 72). If instead of Stanley Big Daddy were eavesdropping, his rejoinder would plainly assert that man is no different from ¤sh, bird, or reptile, just a lot more complicated and more trouble (Cat 75). These exchanges resemble the Shavian arguments between the realist and the idealist in Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, and St. Joan. And as with Shaw, Williams’s plays often create archetypes, in his case for the ®esh and the spirit, that seek, test, and do battle with each other. As mentioned, Grif¤n explores the spirit-®esh con®ict in Summer and Smoke, but mainly in the context of Alma’s awakening to her own body. She sees John’s awakening to the spirit as a “sudden turnabout ” that needs to be made credible through acting technique (Understanding 89). Though John’s is described by Williams as Promethean , and ®esh, here, is clearly more aware of its nature than spirit, John’s isolation and discontent are as palpable as Alma’s. John admits that he can offer little comfort to his dying patients: “I’m made for the science of medicine but not for the practice of it” (Four Plays 171). John diagnoses Alma’s “condition” as a doppelgänger, the earthy double that Alma’s chaste spirit yearns for, but John, too, has a doppelgänger and seeks out Alma in her element, the sterile, intellectual social club. Once there, he is quickly bored by the pompous squabbling, and he satis¤es his curiosity with a more familiar pleas112 Robert Siegel ure, Rosa Gonzales, the sensual queen of the local gambling casino. But body is not content...

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