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SOME ATTITUDES AND A POSTURE: Religious Metaphor and Ritual in Tennessee Williams' Query of the American God TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' THEATER is in one sense very like the ancient classical theater. It is essentially a religious act. Sweet Bird of Youth, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and Baby Doll center on altar tables of beds; Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Sumn:ter and Smoke, and Camino Real revolve around ritual fountains of Eternity.l Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, and Suddenly Last Summer are ritual reenactments of events of salvation and damnation. The patio setting of Night of the Iguana is sanctuary-like, the characters making entrance from their isolated sacristry cells. A Streetcar Named Desire moves its people in a deftly choreographed ritual from the introit of scene one, played appropriately on the steps of the house, to Stella's offertory to Blanche, to Blanche's repetitious ritual cleansing in white tubs of water, to the rituai of The Poker Night played around an altar of a table by men whom Williams' stage directions place in ritual vestments of primary colors. Blanche; Host·white as a victim should traditionally be, knows Stanley to. be her executioner. Her words of consecration are her story to Mitch about her young first husband: she wins Mitch and "there's God~so quickly." This. story next told by Stella does not convert Stanley -who by scene ten vests himself in the ritual silk pajamas of his wedding night and protrudes his tongue between his teeth to rape-consume Host-Blanche in an inverse ritual of communion become sexual cannibalization. The remainder of the play is concerned with cleansing and collecting: Blanche bathes herself, a used communion dish, and collects her things together, the victim doing the ablutions and straightening proper to the executing priest. Eunice gives Stella a credo to live by ("You've got to keep going") and Blanche, attended by Doctor and Matron, processes out past a congregation of Williams characters. Williams' metaphorical translation of the Episcopalian Mass is dark parody of institutionalized religion. With Emerson, Williams feels that prayers and dogma simply mark the height to which religious waters once rose; now, when the aesthetic (to do the beautiful thing) is 1 A truly excellent study of Williams by R. B. Vowles elaborates at great length upon the fluidity of Williams' plays. their flow of verbal image intermingling with stage setting. Tulane Drama Review, III (1958), 51-56. See also Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1961), p. 149. 201 202 MODERN DRAMA September replacing the institutionalized ethic (thou shalt not), Williams' translation points up the lack of the old economy. The validity of listening to artists in areas of interpersonal relationships (which include man's relation to God) is that historically artists have pre-known and presung for ages the kerygma, the primacy of charity, that the institutions have arrived at only latterly. This is true no more than in the comparison of sensibility between ancient Greek drama and the kerygma of interpersonalism which Belgian and Dutch theologians have brought to the attention of twentieth-century America's theological conSCIOusness. Williams obviously prefers the intuitive aesthetic approach to what an institutionalized religious ethic would call the metaphysical interaction of God and man. To show his preference he oftentimes contrapuntally plays the intuitive aesthetic against the institutionalized ethic. Williams defines artist in the Greek sense of the maker, the man of poiein~ the man who imposes order on disconnected reality; art, therefore, can be as wide as the art of being human. Many of his "artists" live at least near, if not next-door to, churches of various denominations, if indeed they do not live in parsonages themselves. And if the protagonists do not live near~ next~ or in~ then some representative of the religious institution is likely to intrude upon themand rarely to good advantage. vVilliams' cynical clerical spectrum runs through the mincing minister of You Touched Me~ the mercenary Reverend Tooker of Cat~ the sexually disturbed Lutheran prison chaplain of the story "One Arm," the misunderstanding priest Father de Leo of Rose Tattoo, the concerned-with...

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