He is a southerner born in Columbus, Missouri, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When he was 12 his father who was a travelling salesman moved with his family to St. Louis, & both he & his sister found it impossible to settle down to the city life. He entered college during the Depression & left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 & completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play “Battle of Angels” & he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 & 1955.
In 1940 he started journey around the country & ended it up in New York. There he wrote poetry & short stories. 1945 – his first success “The Glass Menagerie”. Autobiographical elements are very strong in the play. Williams managed to create a special lyrical atmosphere of the Wickfield family. It consists of three people – mother, crippled daughter & son. Each of them lives in his or her own glass menagerie i. e. imaginary world which has nothing to do with reality. They fear the reality, its hoarse & repulsive jungle for they cannot adjust to the law of these jungles. Main idea is that kindness & good feelings are doomed in clash with reality. These people are too fragile, too sensitive.
The play introduced features of new plastic theatre. The principles of this theatre Williams formulated in the afterward to the play “Note for Reproduction”. It is characterized by tense emotional atmosphere, certain romanticism, masterly music & light effects, attention is given to cinography & attraction of expressive means of other arts. In stage remarks Williams is scrupulous about details for they bear important meaning. he calculated to produce certain effect on the audience.
His second play “A Streetcar Named Desire” gained him a reputation of leading stage writer & Pulitzer Prize. In this play there is a clash between realism & imagination; physical forces, brutishness & helplessness; sexual drive &thirst for poetic love; naked ugly truth & illusion, world of fantasy. The main character is Blanche du Beau. The action takes place in New Orleans in French quarters (it is often compared to the “Cherry Orchard” by Chekhov). Blanche visits her sister’s family after their parents died & the family estate is sold. Blanche wears old ridiculously looking dresses as a symbol of the world she lives in. Blanche meets her sister’s brute of a husband Stan. Her sister gets out of the way to the hospital to give birth to a baby. Blanche and Stan detest each other. He hates a woman who lives in Ivory tower & she hates his brutishness. She denies & longs for him at the same time. In the end he is taken into lunatic asylum.
Williams plays with human subconsciuosness. But he finds that the core of the conflict is not inherent in the struggle between masculine & feminine but a complex interrelation of personal circumstances: social & others.
Tennessee Williams’ human type is an outcast, lonely, constantly in search of a relative soul with whom to share a burden of loneliness. But life is such that the outsider is doomed to defeat. The only salvation is love (but even this is questionable). Broken & lost people who are not able to defend themselves & their dreams can find love that will help them to sustain.
Williams is a prolific writer, he also wrote 2 collections of poems. He combined poetry & realism & this unique combination singles him out from other writers.
“Camino Real” is an allegoric drama, very experimental. “This is my conception of contemporary world in which I live,” he said. The scene is divided into two parts:
ü fashionable hotel in which people are bored & degraded
ü slums in which people are weak, humiliated, apathetic
The town is in terror, free thoughts are persecuted, people are killed in the streets, brainwashing is actively underway. All problems are solved by an old gypsy woman who provides a certain entertainment. The city is called Camino Real[re’a:l], that is the way of hope & dream. It ends to sound real[ri:al], that is the way of reality, dead end of civilization.
Killroy is an ordinary American who feels that atmosphere of social hysteria & he tries to make sense in life. Old literary characters (Don Quixote, Byron) come to rescue him. The play has an optimistic ending: Killroy finally finds the way out of the city to terra incognita. Williams idealized past, his future is uncertain. His past is good but dead, & the present is abhorrent.
His other plays “Baby Doll”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “Something Unspoken”, “Suddenly Last Summer”, “Sweet Bird of Youth”, “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More”, “The Night of the Iguana”, etc.
Post Modernism.
Post modernism can be regarded in two aspects:
ü as a literary trend
ü as a phenomenon which doesn’t belong exclusively to literature – a certain mentality of post industrial age.
Post modernism appeared after the second WW. In 50’s, especially 60’s new type of fiction, new writing emerged, drastically different from previous writers. The idea that permeated this works: there is need to reevaluate old values, the values that lead Western civilization (idea of emancipation, enlightenment). But the WWII showed that the belief that a human is a reasonable creature who can build a reasonable society is inconsistent.
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