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| Tennessee, Williams
Tennessee, Williams
Tennessee
Williams
His Life and Career
Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in the US and
spent a happy childhood at his grandfather.
In 1918 he had to go to St. Louis with his
father. The years the boy spent there must have been hell to the little boy. He
and his mother hated his father. She was a little help to him as the lived in
the genteel South. So his elder sister Rose became his only refuge but when she
reached puberty she fled to her glass menagerie. The only comfort of Williams
was an old second-hand typewriter.
In1929 he entered the University of Missouri but
he had to take a job at his father’s firm because he was no scholar. In
the evenings after work he began to write poems and short stories. He enrolled
at the University of Iowa and took his B.A. in literature at the age of 27.
After that he spent a year in New Orleans with shady characters, whom he felt
drawn to. During this time he did not stop writing. He finished his first full
length play
"Battle of
Angels", whose
performance in 1940 was a disaster.
"The Gentlemen
Caller" became
his breakthrough play and
"The Glass
Menagerie" was an
great success in Chicago in 1944.
In Mexico he found himself again and also worked
on his second great play:
"A Streetcar
Named Desire"
which won him his first Pulitzer Price.
In the fifties Williams turned out play after
play and the best one was
"A Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof" with
which won the second Pulitzer Price in 1955. He depended more and more on
alcohol and drugs and after his last great success for some years
"The Night of the
Iguana" he
underwent psychoanalytical treatment.
In the seventies he regained part of his creative
power and wrote quite a few plays but none of them reached the acclaim of the
critics of his early plays.
"The Red Devil
Battery Sign" was
a great success in Vienna at Vienna’s English Theatre in
1976.
Tennessee Williams died in 1983.
His Personality and Works
He was not really a likeable person nor can his
plays be called pleasant. To him writing was a therapy through which he had to
stay healthy. Most of his plays are self analyses.
His fiction, mainly short stories, and his poetry
are not great but he undoubtedly is a great playwright with a writing language
full of symbols. He leads a hopeless war against the powers of
fate.
Three leitmotifs can be made out of his plays and
they can be found in
"The Glass
Menagerie":
- Sex and
Violence: Williams was obsessed with sex and has been regarded as an
erotomaniac. He drew on his erotic fantasies and shocked the audience with sex
and violence at a time when the topics he discussed were still taboo: rape and
nymphomania in "A
Streetcar Named
Desire";
impotence, homosexuality and alcoholism in
"Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof"; drug
addiction and castration in
"Sweet Bird of
Youth";
cannibalism and homosexuality again in
"Suddenly Last
Summer". He has
stayed a puritan in all his plays: sex is good but also sinful it is bound to be
punished. Many religious images can be found in his stories, e.g. in
"Glass
Menagerie".
- The Southern
Renaissance: Tennessee Williams belongs to a group of writers, most
prominent among them William Faulkner, who present a nostalgic vision of the Old
South. Their characters dream of a perfect social order. This romantic and
exotic background can be found in many of Williams plays, e.g. in
"The Glass
Menagerie".
"The
Laureate of
Outcast":Williams
is not really a social(istic) writer. The best example of that type of play is
"The Glass
Menagerie".
Williams does not want to change anything and he does not aim at rebellion or
revolution. The play is the poetic verbalisation of his compassion for little
people, all of them are failures, in America’s
"outcast".The
"Glass
Menagerie" is an
excellent example of William’s artistic procedure.
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