Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire GEORGE W. CRANDELL Audiences and readers familiar with the plays of Tennessee Williams recognize immediately in the voice, the inflection, and the idiom of characters such as Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Big Daddy Pollitt, a language variety that distinguishes the South from other regions of the United States. What is no less obvious, but seldom noted, is the apparent absence of African American voices from this otherwise realistically depicted discourse community . In many of the Williams plays set in the South -Battle ofAngels, The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Suddenly Last Summer - African American characters do not appear in the plays at all. Although C.W.E. Bigsby has remarked upon this absence - "scarcely a black face is to be seen in Williams's South" - Bigsby directs his attention to the more visible presence of the bigot in plays such as Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth to illustrate Williams's "contempt forthe racist.'" The attention that bigots such as Jake Torrance and Boss Finley attract to themselves nevertheless obscures from sight and attention a group of African American characters whose menial roles, limited dialogue, and disparaging names (or namelessness) all attest to their marginal status in Williams's dramatic world. With the exception of Chicken, a man of mixed racial heritage who plays a prominent role in Kingdom ofEarth (The Seven Descents ofMyrtle), the few African American characters who appear on stage in Williams's plays are relegated to peripheral positions, acting as servants or in subservient roles, for example, Lacey and Sookey in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Fly in Sweet Bird of Youth, and the hotel porter in The Lost ofMy Solid Gold Watches. !fthese characters speak at all, it is to say only a few lines (as does the "Negro Woman" in A Streetcar Named Desire),' or to utter inhuman cries (for instance, the "barking sounds" of the Conjure Man in Orpheus Descending).' Contributing to the unflattering images of these characters, Williams ascribes to them names with Modern Drama, 40 (1997) 337 GEORGE W. CRANDELL negative connotations, "Chicken" and "Fly," for example, or - by refusing to name them - diminishes the importance of their personal and social identities. As Lionel Kelly observes, the "social identity" of "the unnamed Negro woman" in A Streetcar Named Desire "is predictably marginalized through her namelessness."4 The absence or underrepresentation of African American characters in Williams's drama nevertheless constitutes a meaningful "gap" or "blank" in the dramatic text that might be said to signify by means of its implicit presence .5 These "gaps," Wolfgang Iser asserts, are what prompt readers "to supply what is meant from what is not said.'''; Such gaps, of course, aTe not limited to the dTamatic form or to the works of Tennessee Williams. WTiting about the novel, for example, Peter J. Rabinowitz Temarks that "it is often mOTe useful to look not at the assertions about the issues at hand but ratheT at those places wheTe the novel is silent." By examining these silences, Rabinowitz suggests, by considering the assumptions about Teality that authoT and audience share (and which fOT this Teason are not stated explicitly in the text), we can discover "the implied audience's unspoken, peThaps unrecognized, beliefs about Teality ." Thus, he concludes, "in answeTing questions about the views held by this larger community [of which the author is also a part], what is not said is as important as what is."7 Along similar lines, Wolfgang IseT argues that "[wlhat is said only appears to take on significance as areference to what is not said; it is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to the meaning."s·The failure of Tennessee Williams to write explicitly about issues, such as "Tace" for example, should not be construed to mean that his works are silent about such matters. Toni Morrison Tecalls, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, how she once believed that the paucity of fully developed black characters in American literatuTe meant that "black people signified little or nothing in the imagination...