A Rhetoric Of Outcasts In The Plays — страница 2

  • Просмотров 333
  • Скачиваний 9
  • Размер файла 16
    Кб

a paltry figure compared to Eugene O’Neill (considered by many critics to be Williams’s main competitor for the title of premier American playwright). The MLA database lists more than 1,146 entries for O’Neill. The number of scholarly examinations of Williams’s work represents a fraction of the number of dissertations, essays, and books written about other important American writers–for example, the MLA database lists 4,019 entries using the descriptor “William Faulkner.”2 Why has so little been written about Tennessee Williams, compared to other important American playwrights such as O’Neill? My research has yielded no satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps the most common theory is that Williams’s work is considered “popular”; academicians have

ignored his work for the same reasons contemporary scholars avoid Tom Clancy and Stephen King. As my research continues, I find such prejudices common. For example, the second most frequently iterated theory as to why Williams has been relatively neglected involves sexual prejudice–some scholars believe that the playwright’s homosexuality makes him unfit as a critical subject. Such prejudice appears to be common, particularly from some scholars in the new critical movement3. Regardless of the reasons for the relative neglect of Williams and his work, the fact is that his plays and other writings are pregnant with possibilities for scholarly research. Even if we except from examination the new material recently made available by the Williams estate, there is a great deal to be

discovered about this playwright. If we include this newly-available material–and, as scholars, we must–it is entirely possible that we will be inundated, over the next few years, with so much research that what has been written–including this dissertation–will be temporarily lost. Already, enough new information is available to afford a closer examination of Williams’s work. For example, a considerable amount of biographical information concerning Williams can be found in accounts from family, friends, and professional acquaintances. Considering what we now know about his life, we can argue that the outcast characters examined in this dissertation seem central to Williams’s poetics. Through these outcast characters Williams outlines a struggle between the moral

values of nonconformists, who are outcasts because they can not, or will not, conform to the values of the dominant culture; and conformists, who represent that culture. The outcast characters in Tennessee Williams’s major plays do not suffer because of the actions or circumstances that make them outcast but because of the destructive impact of conventional morality upon them. They are driven, in the conflict between their values and those of conventional morality, to 1) confess their transgressions against humanity and 2) suffer, at their own hands or by placing themselves in dangerous situations, in atonement for their violations of conventional morality. That Williams’s outcasts are miserable is evidence of his opinion that the demands of conventional morality can be

destructive. In a 1939 letter to his editor, agent, and literary mentor, Audrey Wood, he makes this clear: “I have only one major theme for my work which is the destructive impact of society on the sensitive non-conformist individual” (Letter, 1939, to Audrey Wood)4. I have created three categories into which Williams’s outcasts can be placed: first are sexual outcasts who, like the playwright, offer insight into Williams’s feelings about his own sexuality; second are religious outcasts, who are vehicles for the playwright’s commentary on contemporary Christianity; and third, fugitive outcasts, whose flight reflects Williams’s own insecurity and alienation. These categories loosely reflect those noted by T.E. Kalem, in his examination of Williams’s work: “the odd,

the lonely, the emotionally violated” (88). Such a threefold distinction serves as a useful way to group Williams’s outcasts. What can we gain from this examination of William’s outcast characters? I agree with Jack Fritscher, who argues that Williams’s work reveals “the more difficult dichotomies of the interior American experience” (7). The conflict between these outcast characters and conventional morality is tied to the myriad tensions that form twentieth century America. To examine Williams’s outcasts is to open avenues toward understanding those tensions. Dianoia, the meaning of a work or works of literature, includes the symbols and archetypes that exist in the society that produced the texts (Frye 357). In iterating the dianoia of Williams’s outcast