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Tennessee Williams Outcasts

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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

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