Tennessee Williams's Becoming-Clown

A ubiquitous character in Tennessee Williams's dramatic work, the clown has not yet attracted the critical attention it deserves. Often confined to the limits of the late plays, its role as a major common thread in the playwright's oeuvre has somehow been overlooked by Williams scholars. The article analyses the clown's evolution in a selection of plays through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of "becoming," understood as an ever-changing process: a movement toward otherness achieved not through identification or imitation but through contamination or contagion. The aim is to reveal the aesthetic as well as ontological implications of the clown's metamorphoses, implications that might lead to a better understanding of Williams's sense of the tragic.