Society’s Outcasts in the Works of Tennessee Williams The American playwright Tennessee Williams wrote more than thirty plays from 1945 to 1961. Williams, who was known as the “Laureate of the Outcast” uses characters in his plays that are troubled, self-destructive lives, and seen as undesirable members of society. In The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Night of the Iguana Williams tackles the taboo themes of nymphomania, alcoholism, sexual violence, and homosexuality. For decades, the “lost” and socially alienated characters in Tennessee Williams’ plays have remained some of the theatre’s most memorable characters. Many feel The Glass Menagerie is Williams’ best drama and his characters are the most …show more content…
That theme was “the destructive power of society on the sensitive non-conformist.” (Onyett, and McBratney) None of Williams’ plays demonstrates that theme better than A Streetcar Named Desire. Like Laura and her glass animals, Streetcar’s main character Blanche DuBois is emotionally fragile. The play was written and debuted in 1947, and Blanche is a social outcast because of her need for sex and alcohol. Respectable women of that period did not consume large amounts of alcohol and have sex with strange men, and teenage males. Despite her crude actions, Blanche, like Amanda Wingfield, is stuck in the polite, genteel south of yesterday. To keep the audience from feeling overly sorry for her, Williams’ makes Blanche self-centered, snobbish, inconsiderate, and aggravating. Blanche’s past continues to haunt her. Her first love and young husband Allan kills himself after Blanche catching him with another man tells him he disgusts her. The bank has foreclosed on Belle Reve, the family home, and Blanche lost her teaching job because of an affair with a seventeen-year-old student. In her hometown, Blanche has a reputation for being promiscuous, and has been kicked out of the hotel where she has been living and “entertaining.” Blanche, looking for “magic” and a place to live goes to her sister Stella and her husband Stanley in New …show more content…
It appeared on Broadway in 1961. In this last play, Williams once again has societal outcasts struggling with sexual desire, loneliness, and alcohol. The Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon has been banned from the church for sexual misconduct. He is currently working as a tour leader for Blake Tours. His position as the group’s leader is also under fire because he has been accused of the statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old girl in the tour group. By the end of the play, Shannon does not care about the consequences he would suffer for acting on his sexual desires. He eventually has an emotional breakdown proving he was intent on
2. Blanche is the protagonist, had a great tragedy in her early life. She fell in love young and married, and discovered her husband was gay. Shortly after, her husband died and left her a young widow. “And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle.”(scene6) After her sister left, she had to take care of family members. Their deaths resulted in the loss of her familys Belle Reve, and Blanche being displaced and thrown into a society she did not understand. After all this tragedy, Blanche preferred to live in her own made up reality of denial where she is still the belle of the party; and life is full of small talk and manners. She tries to display herself as innocent.
Blanche has a devastating and scarring past in which her tragic flaw originates from. The elements of love, sex, and death haunt her until she is unable to handle it any longer and loses what is left of her sanity and sparks her unstable mind. To expatiate, Blanche was once married to the love of her life, Allen Grey, until she found
Blanche displays inappropriate behavior. She gets kicked out of the high school for mixed up with a seventeen year old boy. “They kicked her out of the high school before the spring term ended and I hate to tell you the reason that step was taken! A seventeen years old boy she had gotten mixed up with(122)”. By Blanche's inappropriate behavior she had lost her job and respect, moreover, it leads her to become broke. The mayor of Laurel forced Blanche to leave the town because she pretend that she was rich, and dated multiple men in town. After they found out the truth they quit but Blanche hadn't stop dating different men.” She's practically told by the mayor to get out of the town” (121). By her inappropriate behavior, she had been kicked
The next major theme of the book is the relationship between sexuality and death. Blanche’s fear of death manifests itself in her fears of aging and of lost beauty. She refuses to tell anyone her true age or to appear in harsh light that will reveal her faded looks. She seems to believe that by continually asserting her sexuality, especially toward men younger than herself, she will be able to avoid death and return to the world of teenage bliss she experienced before her husband’s suicide. Blanche’s lifelong pursuit of her sexual desires has led to her eviction from Belle Reve, her ostracism from Laurel, and, at the end of the play, her expulsion from society at large. Sex leads to death for others Blanche knows as well. Throughout the play, Blanche is haunted by the deaths of her ancestors, which she attributes to their “epic fornications.” Her husband’s suicide results from her disapproval of his homosexuality.
Throughout Tennessee Williams’s play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” one can learn a large portion about his personal life. In the play the character, Blanche has a mental illness the same as his sister Rose had in her lifetime. Blanche’s ex-husband was also homosexual and he made the point to say that he left her for a man and Williams himself was also a homosexual. Tennessee chose for the story to be based in New Orleans, which was a crumbling town at the time and Williams was living a crumbling life, due to he was battling depression. In his plays a reader can see that he has different views than most men of his time, he developed many of these views due to his travels throughout his life. ““Streetcar” tackled themes of desperation, sexual
Georgia Ordway Dr. Roland Finger English 201B 21 July 2016 Final Exam Essays On Drama 1. How does Williams make Blanche a sympathetic character? How much sympathy does Williams accord to Stanley? What does Williams suggest about gender relations?
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, wrote The Glass Menagerie, a play which premiered in Chicago in 1944. This award winning play, autobiographical in nature, represented a time in which Williams felt the obligation of his responsibilities in regards to the care of his family. Robert DiYanni, Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University, rated it as, “One of his best-loved plays...a portrayal of loneliness among characters who confuse fantasy and reality” (DiYanni 1156). Alternatively, The Glass Menagerie, a play set in the era of the Great Depression and written from the narrator’s memory, was meant to teach us the how our relationships with one another can alter our futures, for better or worse. Everything about this particular play was a direct and clear symbolization of Williams ' life growing up. Williams uses characterization to depict several people from his real life in this play; his sister, himself, his overbearing mother, absent father, and a childhood best friend. Williams does a splendid job transforming his personal life into a working piece of art. In Tennessee Williams ' play, The Glass Menagerie, his character, Laura, is central to the structure and focus of the story due to her individual ties to all of the supporting characters throughout the seven scene play.
Blanche’s enduring quest of her sexual longings has resulted in her expulsion from Belle Reve, her shunning from Laurel, and, finally, her eviction from society. Time has only progressed towards Blanche’s
Tennessee Williams is regarded as a pioneering playwright of American theatre. Through his plays, Williams addresses important issues that no other writers of his time were willing to discuss, including addiction, substance abuse, and mental illness. Recurring themes in William’s works include the dysfunctional family, obsessive and absent mothers and fathers, and emotionally damaged women. These characters were inspired by his experiences with his own family. These characters appear repeatedly in his works with their own recurring themes. Through The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams presents the similar thematic elements of illusion, escape, and fragility between the two plays, proving that although similar, the themes within these plays are not simply recycled, as the differences in their respective texts highlight the differences of the human condition.
Blanche’s past affects her relationships with men, which we learn with Mitch. Blanche sees Mitch as a chance to close the major void in her life. With Mitch she feels that he is her salvation, and the life that she has been pretending to have will finally come true. Blanche feels comfortable with him, she reveals past issues to draw him closer to her, but still hides the worst of her past because she does not truly see herself for who she really is. Blanche tells Mitch about Allan by saying “He was a boy, just a boy when I was a very young girl. When I was sixteen, I made the discovery—love” (1579). Blanche tells of how she found out about Allan and the other man and tells Mitch that just after she said “I saw! I know! You disgust me…” (1579) Allan killed himself, Blanche felt like she failed in her marriage, saying, “All I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give him the help he needed but couldn’t speak of!” (1579). Mitch embraces Blanche with passion and love and tells her, “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be—you and me, Blanche?” (1579). Blanche finally is getting what she has been striving for all these years.
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, wrote The Glass Menagerie, a play which premiered in Chicago in 1944. This award winning play, autobiographical in nature, represented a time in which Williams felt the obligation of his responsibilities in regards to the care of his family. Robert DiYanni, Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University, rated it as, “One of his best-loved plays...a portrayal of loneliness among characters who confuse fantasy and reality” (DiYanni 1156). Alternatively, The Glass Menagerie, a play set in the era of the Great Depression was written from the narrator’s memory, was meant to teach us the how our relationships with one another can alter our futures, for better or worse. Everything about this particular play was a direct and clear symbolization of Williams ' life growing up. Williams uses characterization to depict several people from his real life in this play; his sister, himself, his overbearing mother, absent father, and a childhood best friend. Williams does a splendid job transforming his personal life into a working piece of art. In Tennessee Williams ' play, The Glass Menagerie, his character, Laura, is the central to the structure and focus of the story due to her individual ties to all of the supporting characters throughout the seven scene play.
The Glass Menagerie is a play that Tennessee Williams made to portray the gender roles that were socially constructed in this time
Blanche deals with many issues the loss of loved ones, the loss of the family estate, the inability to deal with reality, rejection from others, and the rape by Stanley. Blanche has also become independent and assertive which is not the typical norm of a southern woman. She has been forced into a world she is not prepared for. Because of this Blanche begins to live in her own world, her own little fantasy. She also uses alcohol and sexual promiscuity to escape from the loneliness she has endured since her husband’s death. Williams shows us through the way Blanche speaks to the paper boy;
Tennessee Williams’s, The Glass Menagerie, is one of the most popular plays of all times and the play that started his success as a playwright. This play explores a dysfunctional family who has been abandoned by the husband/father and struggles to progress in an economically stressed time. The play showcases three extremely complex characters who each have personal struggles in their own lives which furthermore create tensions between each other as a family unit. As a true lover of this play, I had to dig deep into the text and try to understand each of the characters of this play in order to figure out what was the cause to their unhappiness. There were many factors that played a huge role to the misery of their lives but the most
Set in St. Louis Missouri prior to World War II, Tennessee Williams reflects back on his deeply tragic and dysfunctional familial experiences in, “The Glass Menagerie”. Williams brilliantly incorporates real aspects of society to reveal how they contributed to the nonreal aspects and the conflicts which affected his family. The real aspects of the play which had a significant impact on the lower middle-class families such as the Wingfields included, the economic hardships surrounding the Great Depression, the fall of the American south, society’s intolerance towards homosexuality, and many threats abroad. Although Williams play was merely a series of hazy memories, the nonreal aspects combined with the major societal conflicts contribute