Tennessee Williams' Wounded Women
This site explores some of the most fascinating characters ever played on the stage: the women of Tennessee Williams. Unlike most of the male figures encountered in his works, his females have psychological depth and and a very human depiction. These women serve as martyrs for common women, and evoke sympathy from all who witness them.
Williams' Fascination with Females
Wounded Women in The Glass Menagerie
Wounded Women in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof
Wounded Women in A Streetcar Named Desire
Canon of the Works of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams' work is a struggle to overcome the guilt of violence, homosexuality, and his addiction to alcohol and drugs. The actors of Williams' shocking plays are faded men and women, consumed by time and decay, and yet the author's handling of these characters is honest, thorough, and sympathetic. The eccentricities of characters help to develop his major themes: denial, loneliness, and isolation. These themes reveal Williams' disguised social protest by effectively making his statements on the smaller canvas of individual lives.
Born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911, “Tennessee” lived a childhood in a home filled with tension, despair, and domestic violence. Most cite that he began his writing career at the age of sixteen with the publication of an essay titled, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” which was published in SmartSet magazine. His first true play was produced in 1935, in Memphis, titled Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay. He wrote and published at least ten more plays before the release of his The Glass Menagerie in 1944, for which he was nominated but never earned a Pulitzer Prize. It was for two of his other plays, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1955) that he won his two Pulitzers. He was most likely at the peak of his popularity in 1951-1952, when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire became motion pictures. He continued to write even after his last big success, Night of the Iguana, in 1961. More than twenty plays were written and produced after this work, as well as several books of poetry, shorter plays, stories, and essays. Tennessee Williams' bizarre death came in 1983, and though originally ruled to have been of “natural causes,” it was later found that Williams ingested a bottle-cap from which he was ingesting barbiturates.
Williams' Fascination with Females
All of his life, Williams was, without a doubt, influenced strongly by the female figures. He based many of his main characters on family members; among them, his aunt was Blanche du Bois of A Streetcar Named Desire, and his sister Rose the sickly Laura Wingfield of The Glass Mengaerie. He once commented in an interview, “All my relationships with women are very, very important to me,” continuing, “I understand women, and I can write about them” (Gussow). It is often commented that Williams treats his female characters very harshly, but still manages to portray them in a graceful and dignified manner. “People who care the most for me are women,” he said. “Perhaps that's always been true” (Gussow).
Wounded Women in The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie introduces the audience to two female characters, both disenchanted with life. Amanda Wingfield, the mother, is in the author's words, “a little woman of great but confused vitality frantically clinging to another time and place” (xviii). “A faded Southern gentlewoman living on her memories,” (MacBride) she is one of Williams' model women, a southern belle who has seen better days.
Amanda: One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received - seventeen! - gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren't enough chairs to accommodate them all.
Tom: Yes?
Her son, Tom, gives her constant grief over her past and present that the audience does feel some pity for her. “There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at,” Williams says in the introduction to the play (xviii). Amanda's daughter Laura is a disappointment to her mother. Amanda works relentlessly and chides her daughter incessantly for her shyness. It is assumed that Amanda's expectations for Laura are those which were likely placed upon her as an adolescent.
Laura Wingfield, an introverted twenty-three year old, was plagued with a childhood illness that left her crippled. Laura is different, and maybe not well suited to the world in which she lives. This undoubtedly contributed to her timidity and her unwillingness to entertain any gentlemen callers. She instead directs her attention to a collection of glass figures, an entire “menagerie.” Like the glass collection, Laura eventually becomes “too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf” (Williams xviii). Her “pathological shyness and complete vulnerability” cripple her even more so than her physical deformity, and serve to alienate her from the rest of the world (Bray xiv). The audience is coerced into not seeing her as an invalid, rather a survivor who sympathizes with the problems of others.
The arrival on the stage of the character Jim O'Connor brings a new element to the play. This gangly intruder threatens the world that Laura has constructed for herself. Bray notes, “Her first impression is flight, the fitting reaction of a wounded creature” (xiv). But Laura does begin to trust this invader, even to show some sort of affinity for him. This lasts only briefly though, when in an accident her most beloved piece of glass is broken. There is immense symbolism in the de-horned unicorn, which best represents Laura herself. As Jim and Laura dance around in “a clumsy waltz,” they bump into the table that houses the menagerie (85):
Jim: Did something fall off it? I think -
Laura: Yes.
Jim: I hope that it wasn't the little glass horse with the horn!
Laura: Yes. [She stoops to pick it up.]
Jim: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?
Laura: Now it is just like all the other horses.
[. . .]
Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns. . . . (86)
Wounded Women in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof
In Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Williams introduces the audience to Maggie, the trophy wife of Brick. She becomes increasingly more self-conscious as she is again and again refused by her husband. Speaking of Brick in a converstation with his overprotective mother, Maggie recalls:
Margaret:
Margaret: Maggie: [with a little laugh] Oh! I think he had a highball after supper.
Big Mama: Don't laugh about it! - Some single men stop drinkin' when they git married and others start! Brick never touched liquor before he -
Margaret: THAT'S NOT FAIR!
Big Mama: Fair or not fair I want to ask you a question, one question: D'you make Brick happy in bed?
Margaret: Why don't you ask if he makes me happy in bed?
Big Mama: Because I know that -
Margaret: It works both ways!
Big Mama: Something's not right! You're childless and my son drinks! (37)
Her loneliness results from Bricks refusal to realize her psychological need for love and physical attention. Throughout the play she possesses a second virginity that is the product of Brick's unwillingness to satisfy her sexually. She truly becomes the “cat on a hot tin roof” as she holds on only of her own accord, with no support from any of the other characters.
Maggie has had to come to grips with the fact that her husband is not enamored with her, but harder to deal with is the fact that he is in love with another man. They are forced by convention to pretend that they are a satisfied couple, but the lie ruins both characters. Their relationship then is based only on a formal agreement. One day she fearfully asks of Brick, “What are you thinkin' of when you look at me like that?” He responds, “I wasn't conscious of lookin' at you, Maggie,” showing his complete lack of interest in her (22). She later says that their relationship amounts to little more than “occupying the same cage” (28). But Maggie still yearns for Brick, and at the end of the play, Maggie is found desperately trying to seduce her husband into their conceiving of a child.
Wounded Women in A Streetcar Named Desire
A Streetcar Named Desire contains possibly the best example of a wounded female in Blanche du Bois. She is a character so opposed to her past that she chooses to invent a history for herself with the intention of subverting reality. Blanche recognizes her condition and wishes for a return to innocence, personified in her speech which is laced with just the affectation of demureness. She comes into direct conflict with Stanley Kowalski, a truth-based character, and it is he who facilitates her demise.
As a plantation-bred southern belle, Blanche developed an heir of superiority. Blanche is discontented with her choices in life, and her inability to face the consequences of her choices leads to her flighty nature, her lack of a lasting intimate relationship, and the denial of her past. Blanche is a character filled with hypocrisy. For example, when she claims that she doesn't touch liquor, Stanley quips, “some people rarely touch it, but it touches them often” (30). This is a complete indictment on the discrepancies between Blanche's speech and her actions.
The majority of Blanche's problems surprisingly result not from her past deeds but from the denial of these deeds. She is forced to relentlessly lie to cover up other lies, and in turn, loses herself in the web. In order to make herself more appealing to potential suitors, namely Mitch, Blanche makes a return to innocence, and puts on an act that would lead him to believe that she is a completely pure individual, one who has never been more than kissed. She reinvents herself as what she imagines others would want her to be according to her ideals and traditional values. She certainly acts on neither of these, and in Mitch and Blanche's last shocking conversation Mitch says that he will not marry Blanche, because she is “not clean enough to bring in the house with [his] mother” (121).
Blanche's most shocking confrontations are not with Mitch however, they are with Stanley. Her long baths, her need to be pampered, and her pretentious attitude perpetually agitate him. Stanley is the first to take notice of her outlandish outfits and jewelry. He questions how, on a teacher's salary, Blanche could afford furs, silks, feathers, and pearls. Though the majority of the items in her trunk are faux, nothing more than outfits for a game of dress-up. Stanley finds that nothing Blanche says is true, and battles her lies one by one. Stella, Stanley's wife and Blanche's sister, sees the tension and aggression between Stanley and Blanche, and berates Stanley, “Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change” (111). When Blanche's psychological undoing is not enough, he resorts to rape. This is the last straw for poor Blanche, and it is decided that she must be placed in an asylum. When last the heroine is seen, she is portrayed in an almost animalistic manner, devoid and detached. “Whoever you are,” she says to the doctor, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (142). At her departure, the audience is left with a crumbling Stella and a lustful Stanley.
In The Glass Menagerie, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams shows special favor to his deflowered women. He possesses an extraordinary ability to portray seemingly neurotic and eccentric women with a very human paintbrush. He may expose their flaws, but he never mocks these characters as a playwright. Williams often has another character mock the female figure, but this character is usually the villain, giving additional reasons for the audience to be on the side of the wounded female. Williams' plays, though most are violent and sexual, are beautifully crafted and elegantly written, and his women portrayed splendidly.
Bray, Robert. Introduction. The Glass Menagerie. By Tennessee Williams. New York: New Direction, 1973.
Gussow, Mel. New York Times. “Tennessee Williams on Art and Sex.” 2 Nov. 1975. 24 Apr. 2004 <http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/willams-art. html>.
MacBride, James. New York Times. “Poet's Triumph on Broadway.” 2 Sep. 1945. 24 Apr. 2004 <http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-triumph.html>.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet Books, 1974.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Signet Books, 1985.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Direction, 1973.
Canon of the Works of Tennessee Williams
Coming Soon!