Caged Birds: Bad Faith in Tennessee Williams's Drama

Caged Birds: Bad Faith in Tennessee Williams's Drama RITA COLANZI In The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 March 1948, Tennessee Williams listed among his current reading the works of two existentialists: Albert Camus's The Stranger, Caligula, and Cross Purpose, and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit and The Flies.' Reminiscing in his Memoirs about his 1948 stay in Paris, he expressed a particular admiration for Sartre: "I was most interested in meeting Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy appealed to me strongly, as did his play Huit {sic] Clos.'" Despite Williams's admitted affinity for Sartrean existentialism, his work has never been read within the context of Sartre's philosophy. A Streetcar Named Desire has been examined in relation to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.3 But, as a rule, critics draw parallels between Williams and the existentialists without positioning the playwright within anyone school of existentialist thought,' or they discuss his existentialism in generalized tenns. Gerald Weales's commentary, which represents the latter approach, suggests that Williams's drama is existentialist in the way that much of modem drama is perceived as such, namely in its presentation of humanity as alienated beings trapped in a meaningless universe: Uit is the universe that has been implicit in all his work, one in which man is a stranger. ... There is no escape in a universe where there is no God and where the other inhabitants are as dangerous as one's own self."5 To facilitate our understanding of Williams's specific brand of existentialism, as it converges with and diverges from Sartre's, we will examine in relation to Williams's drama one of the central tenets of Sartrean existentialism: bad faith. According to Sartre, we nee the anguish of our nothingness "by attempting to apprehend ourselves from without as an Other or as a thillg.,,6 The philosopher emphasizes, however, that human reality is a lack of being or a transcendence , "a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is never given," while an object "is what it is," "de trop for eternity" (B&N, Modem Drama, 35 (1992) 451 452 RJTA COLANZI pp. 89, lxv- Ixvi). "Always somewhere outside of [itlself, as an incompleteness ," humanity cannot define itself as meaningful (B&N, p. 591). It must try unceasingly "to make itself," to choose itself, to create an essence (B&N, p. 440). "Condemned to be wholly responsible" for its being, humankind is "not able not to choose" (B&N, p. 556). Sartre's definition of human reality suggests that being is ephemeral and insubstantial. On the metaphoric level, Williams supports this concept of transcendent being. Among the analogues for human transcendence in many of Williams's dramas are birds and olher winged creatures, and with references to captive birds often accentuating a character's denial of his or her transcendence and responsibility to create a self. Observing that "Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for," Marguerite Gautier discounts the "liule comfort of love" that she shares with Jacques Casanova while immobilized on the Camino Real.7 As he prepares to brave the "Terra Incognita" or the unknown realm beyond the Camino, Byron, the poet who traded his art for worldly pleasure, carries for luggage caged birds, which serve as reminder of his self-imprisonment on this road in the middle of nowhere. Williams also uses the image of the captive bird in his "Foreword" to Camilla Real. Referring to the theatergoer who is unreceptive to the play, he writes: A cage represents security as well as confinement to a bird that has grown used to being in it; and when a theatrical work kicks over the traces with such apparent insouciance, security seems challenged and, instead of participating in its sense of freedom, one out of a certain number of playgoers will rush back out to the more accustomed implausibility of the street he lives on. (2, p. 422) Fear of the "Terra Incognita" impels this theatergoer to shun innovation and to remain safe in the cage of traditional value. But, according to Williams in "The Catastrophe of Success," "Security is a kind of death" (1, p. 140). This security, which denies transcendence and which holds birds fast in their...