Tennessee Williams and Strindberg

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND STRINDBERG1 In his Cornell University lectures a few years ago the critic Joseph Wood Krutch remarked that "Strindberg is ... directly or indirectly the strongest literary influence upon the currently admired Tennessee Williams, I should be willing to wager.'"2 Mr. Krutch was wrong about some things in those lectures. He persisted in calling Strindberg a Dane, and in getting play plots mixed Up.3 And he thought the influence of Strindberg on Williams was largely a deleterious, a damaging one. But he was fundamentally right in observing what I should prefer to call an affinity, a relationship that needs to be explored. You Touched Me!, an early play which Tennessee Williams wrote with Donald Windham, is an olio of half-cooked ingredients set against a background of D. H. Lawrence. It tells the story of Matilda, fragile , poetic, and repressed by her Aunt Emmie, who finally escapes domination and goes away with the soldier Hadrian, her brother by adoption. But the most interesting character is the Captain, Captain Cornelius Rockley, Matilda's father who has adopted the orphan Hadrian , "your sniveling little charity boy," as Emmie calls him. In creating the Captain the authors have taken Captain Andy out of Show Boat (as George Jean Nathan has observed), turned him into something like the rummy-raissoneur Captain Shotover of Shaw's Heartbreak Howe, and given him the old Strindberg treatment. Or at least imperiled him in that direction. When the Reverend Guildford Melton calls, in Emmie's mind a likely suitor for Matilda's hand, Emmie explains that the Captain is quite a scholar and at the moment intensely absorbed in preparing an article for the Royal Geographical Society. Later Emmie threatens the Captain that if he continues with his rambunctious drinking she will "call and get the male nurse to bring the strait jacket," and it is clearly in her plan to see that the Captain is sequestered in what Reverend Melton euphemistically calls "some Christian retreat." All echoes of Strindberg's The Father! Emmie is almost a Strindberg character. Says Williams, "what Emmie represents is not predatory maternity but aggressive sterility," She aims, as the Captain remarks, at "reducing the net amount of masculinity on the place." But, unlike Strindberg's Laura, Emmie loses. Williams takes a more sanguine view of male survival. You Touched Me! is, I am afraid, a mere awkward gesture of a play, but it does indicate Williams' early orientation toward Strindberg. 1. An expansion of an article which originally appeared in Soen.ska Dagbladet (Stockholm), 11 April, 1956. 2. "Modernism" in Modem Drama: A Definition and an Estimate (Ithaca, 1953), p. 23. 3. See Carl E. W. L. DahlstrOm's review, Scandinaoian Studies, XXVI (November, 1954), 182-86. 166 1958 TEIWESSEE WILLIAMS AND STRINDBERG 167 It has been said, with insight but no substantiation, that A Streetcar Named Desire is Tennessee Williams' version of the Miss Julie story.4 What is the truth? In both plays an hysterical girl, the product of degenerate aristocracy, descends to a devastating sexual encounter that results in her complete undoing, in one case, consignment to an insane asylum, in the other, suicide. Does the similarity go deeper? Blanche Dubois, Tennessee Williams' protagonist, is a product of the Southern magnolia school of writing. Like the magnolia blossom she is perishable, turning bruised and unhealthy at the slightest touch of the flesh, a touch that is inevitable. Williams has expressed his love for the "fading," in particular, "fading beauty in a woman." This is a decline that the playwright has successively chronicled in Glass Menagerie , A Streetcar, and Summer and Smoke, so tenaciously and lovingly that for a time playgoers wondered whether he knew any other kind of woman. Blanche has been debilitated by the cheap intellectual and aristocratic pretensions of the deep South in America. Add to that a sequence of deaths in the family, economic setbacks, and a catastrophic marriage with a man who turns out to be a homosexual and you have Blanche Dubois, forced into prostitution and eventual flight to the hoped-for asylum of her sister Stella's home with an ex-army sergeant and traveling salesman, Stanley Kowalski, in the...