Southern Floods and Reproduction on the Roof: Tennessee Williams’s Kingdom of Earth and Quare Ecology

Had E. Patrick Johnson’s provocation for “‘quare’ studies” appeared a few years later than it did, one wonders if Johnson might have included “environment” or perhaps “ecology” as a way to articulate the “historically situated and materially conditioned” epistemologies he hopes to bring in line with queer studies (127). As it stands, Johnson defines “quare” as a theory that “offers a way to critique stable notions of identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges” (127). Likewise, Michael Bibler argues that “quare” illuminates “how race, ethnicity, class and locality shape the materiality of relations and identities” (211). With interest in the specificity of the local and the materiality of our conditioning, quare might have anticipated the rise of queer ecology, and at the very least, quare articulates components of queer ecology’s political and theoretical project. Drawing on Tennessee Williams’s 1968 play, Kingdom of Earth, and its development over three decades of short story and dramatic versions, this essay will explore Kingdom of Earth as a text of quare ecology, one that reveals how notions of sexuality and race contour the environment, and in turn, how the environment and environmental disaster shape our cultural anxieties over property, progeny, and futurity.

In his New York Times review of the short-lived 1968 Broadway production of Williams’s The Seven Descents of Myrtle, or Kingdom of Earth, Clive Barnes writes, “Time was when Tennessee Williams wrote plays, but nowadays he seems to prefer to write characters”; he continues, “The theme appears to be a little slender, even though it is one of those highly charged Southern themes—full of sex and other natural disasters” (54). Even those unfamiliar with Kingdom of Earth would not be surprised at the accusation of a Williams play sporting the “charged” theme of sex, and we would be equally quick to determine that Barnes’s “other natural disasters” refer to those of the human variety. I am, however, interested in natural disasters not as a metaphor for the human condition, but as environmental disasters churning in the background of Kingdom of Earth and shaping the world of the play. As I will demonstrate, Williams quares environmental catastrophe as always already implicated in and by the dynamics of sexual and racial oppression, and he offers a problematic resolution to both through the figure of a future child.

Williams’s Kingdom of Earth depends on the environment not as a metaphor, but as a shaping material presence. The 1968 published version of Kingdom of Earth tells the story of a man named Chicken (who is allegedly black) awaiting a flood threatening his farm. Chicken’s white half-brother, Lot, returns with a new wife, Myrtle. Lot dies, and Chicken forces Myrtle into a sexual relationship with him in exchange for saving her from the rising floodwaters. Williams’s play invites us to consider the interrelationality between sex, race, and ecology that does not easily dissipate into the romantic posthuman landscape of queer ecology, a point I will detail below. Tracing Kingdom of Earth and its textual legacy, I examine the full-length version of the play but also the pivotal changes from early drafts to publication, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. These changes and textual consistencies reveal Williams’s long, quare engagement with disaster, the environment, and sexuality. At the intersection of environment and embodiment for Williams, I argue, is the anxiety over reproduction: the idea of and dream for progeny returns again and again—always in context of climates, race, and queerness. Williams’s Kingdom of Earth anticipates and embodies what Lee Edelman problematizes as “reproductive futurism,” and at the ends of the world in Williams’s play, reproduction arises and solidifies the heteronormative impulse to dominate the feminine and the environmental through agricultural production and property.

A quare ecological reading of Williams unites the overtold story of Williams’s theater with the undertold story: namely, while sexuality studies has had a long history of engaging Williams’s writing (indeed, Williams has borne...