In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

210 Book Reviews FOSTER HIRSCH. A Portrait ofthe Artist: The Plays ofTellnessee Williams. Port Washington, N. Y. , London: Kennikat Press 1979. Pp. 121. Even before the publication of Tennessee Williams's Memoirs (1975) and Letters to Donald Windham: 1945- 1960 (1977), it was almost a foregone conclusion that someday there would appear a monograph along the lines of Foster Hirsch's, which is the first full-length critical study of the dramatist in nearly a decade and a half. For it was only a matter of time until what had been said for years about Edward Albee's plays - namely, that they are disguised homosexual conflicts (see Philip Roth on Tiny Alice, for example) - would be said about Williams's works, too. Indeed, Richard Eder's New York Times review of his most recent production, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (January, 1979, and so too late for inclusion by Hirsch), suggested as much, perhaps following the lead of Nancy Tischler, who had raised the specter of "female impersonators" in Williams as far back as 1961 . Essentially, Hirsch claims that back in the forties and early fifties, Williams was compelled by societal restraints to mask his central concerns and motifs if he wanted his works produced in the commercial theater. Interestingly enough, when the playwright finally does deal directly with homosexual characters and conflicts (beginning with Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer), Hirsch finds Williams guilty of presenting them "in a grim context" (p. 13) as "decadent" and "desperately sick" (p. 56); it is only in the relatively recent Vieux Carre (1977) that his characteristic "mystical connection between sex and religious salvation is seen in specifically homosexual terms" (p. 96). Yet Hirsch would have us believe that "on one level, almost all the plays are homosexual fantasies" in which the dramatist had to "transfer ... his own intense attraction to men" to the female characters with whom he shares "a deep emotional connection" (p. 1 I) . There is no denying that Williams, some of whose heroic characters like Hannah in Night of the Iguana seem very nearly androgynous, has always exhibited as a writer - and this is arguably one ofhis greatest giftsa deeply "feminine" sensibility and sensitivity, but then so do Shakespeare and Chekhov, in contrast to the more "masculine" and judgmental social playwrights like Jonson, Shaw, and Miller. But this is something altogether different from Hirsch's point. While Hirsch does back off slightly from his thesis, evidently trying to placate more traditional viewpoints by arguing that all of these disguised men "play" as women because "Williams has transmuted private fantasy into art" (p. 12), his perspective still causes havoc when reading a work like Streetcar Named Desire, which is, as Hirsch rightly claims, "a serious contender for the best American play ever written" (p. 30). Hirsch evidently agrees with those critics, left unnamed, "who read the playas a kind of pre-gay liberation homosexual nightmare with Blanche cast as an effeminate male" (p. 33); he makes no attempt, however, to reconcile this interpretation with such simple facts as Blanche's earlier disgust at and rejection of her young husband when Book Reviews 211 she discovered his homosexuality, or her hoped-for marriage with Mitch, who hardly seems a proper object for an effeminate man's attentions. Regarding Williams as a "confused moralist" (p. 4), Hirsch sees him as "shocked and offended by Blanche's [dishonest and promiscuous] sex life," for which she must be punished by expulsion from the community "so that the moral order may continue as it was" (p. 33). Now there is good question as to exactly how moral the "moral order" represented by the Stanleys of this world is (Hirsch claims Williams "chooses" him in preference to Blanche), though there is no denying that the neoLawrentian relationship between Stanley and Stella is favorably portrayed. The critics - Hirsch is not alone in this - may, however, be more confused on this issue than the dramatist. To say, as Hirsch does, that Williams dichotomizes and presents sex either as a "form ofgrace" or as "sinful," or that he "alternately condemns and worships the life ofthe body" (p. 8), is an imprecise statement of Williams's ethical position, creating a...

pdf

Share