Writing Sample-2
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EXPLORING THE IDEA OF ‘REMINISCE’ AND ‘ILLUSION’ THROUGH THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’S PLAYS: THE GLASS MENAGERIE AND THE ROSE TATTOO
ABSTRACT
Under the debris of criticising the Aristocratic Southern American Façade, human experiences of unescapable harsh reality deep-rooted in Tennessee Williams’s work hints at the autobiographical elements and reflects his crux of persona. His Plays strikingly capture solitary confinement in one’s circle of life. Tennessee Williams mechanises and Projects details of Reminisce, anguish, sexual repression, existential remoteness, depression, insanity, memory lapses as an expression of the beauty and matter in the confusion of breathing and sustaining life. The objective of the paper is to witness Dualism; Illusion vs Reality in the portrayal of women in The Glass Menagerie trapped in the age of Great depression and The Rose Tattoo that witness the failure of acceptance of reality and continuous coiling as a way to escape by reliving the youth as a cover to hide the inabilities to come out of past. The symbolic essence of Dualities folded in the veil of crippled emotional vulnerability could be viewed from decisions’ subjectivity perspectives due to Varied life circumstances explored in the paper. The paper focuses on the question of women protagonists’ ignorance of reality due to continuous reminisce as an escape to darkness and desolation in the hope for seeking light and breakage from constraints. The paper would argue the need of reminiscing in their duality of illusion and reality supported by the paper titled “Reminisce as an autobiographical memory: a catalyst for theory development” by Susan Bluck and Linda Levine.
INTRODUCTION The theatrical cosmos of Tennessee Williams is structured around dualities evolving from reminiscing of his survival reflection of which his characters are made up of. Tennessee Williams celebrates this stunning ambiguity of life in his plays authentic and life-like, representing the human dilemma’s inner and outer crisis. In Tennessee Williams’ plays, we notice dualism in women’s characters that have significantly evolved through his plays. Since the work and the life of a writer are inevitably associated, Dualities due to varied reasons results
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Writing Sample-2 in reminiscing in Tennessee Williams’ plays because of many factors, which influenced his life. The first was his own miserable life, which comes through the layers of characterisation and instances in his play, ‘The Glass Menagerie’. In an interview with a magazine, Tennessee Williams stated:
“I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person1. In the paper titled “Reminisce as an autobiographical memory: a catalyst for theory development” it is defined as; Reminiscence is the volitional or nonvolitional act or process of recollecting memories of one’s self in the past. It may involve the recall of particular or generic episodes that may or may not have been previously forgotten, and that are accompanied by the sense that the remembered episodes are veridical accounts of the original experiences. This recollection from autobiographical memory may be private or shared with others.
Such characters are an accurate representation of his conflicts and disturbances corresponding to his tensions. In the play ‘The Rose Tattoo’, clashing his ‘puritan’ upbringing with his ‘cavalier thinking’ was highly influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s symbolisation and views regarding sex and his love and animosity towards women shaped Tennessee Williams’s characterisation of complexities and dualism in women. The artistic intellect of Tennessee Williams wants to hammer on the idea that illusions are the inextricable part of human lives. Though they are precarious to human lives, fallacies in the reminiscing act as an escaping shelter from challenging facets of life. Through the portrayal of dualistic women Amanda Wingfield in the glass menagerie and Serafina Delle Rose in the rose tattoo, he uses the idea of reminiscing, to replace the frustrating reality.
Amanda and Laura Wingfield’s reminisce and Illusion in The GLASS MENAGERIE As stated in the paper, “The claim that people’s reminiscences are reconstructed does not preclude the possibility that people have encoded complete and accurate records of their past. Selective recall from the set of available autobiographical memories may also be seen as a type of reconstruction of a person’s history.” The glass menagerie represents the true essence of an autobiographical discourse referring it to as a ‘memory play’. Amanda Wingfield’s characterisation represents fragility and vulnerability conquered by living in the past’s memory. Amanda embraces the illusion of glorious days of her youth in reminisce, which she tries to fulfil through her daughter Laura’s life, representing an escaping of her dying reality of ageing. Amanda tries to relive her youth by expecting gentleman callers for Laura
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Writing Sample-2 overshadowing her physical defects and yet giving her false hope of existence. As she proclaims to Tom and Laura :
“One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain - your mother received seventeen!- gentlemen callers! Why sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them all. We had to send the nigger over to bring in folding chairs from the parish house”( scene I) It proves that she is yearnfully accustomed to the past and rejects to face the reality of the St. Louis complex. She thinks: “I am what I was”. She tries to reclaim and re-experience her lost past. She makes repeated connotations into her past. She looks sadly to the past that has been conciliated in her memory. Amanda thinks of her comfortable and luxurious days when she was leading an aristocratic life of the South as her mind is a faithful follower of the traditional South with the Mississippi Delta, but her body stagnates in St. Louis. The shadow of the past lies in the present and future. Later she tells Jim O’ Connor :
“ Well in the South we had so many servants………All vestige of gracious living! Gone completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me”. ( scene VI) This also indicates the necessity to compensate for the dreariness and hopelessness with the conquests of the past. Reminisce acts as defence instrumentation of her living. Williams describes Amanda as:
“A little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place... Amanda having failed to establish contact with reality, continues to live vitally in her illusions.” She seems to be defeated, but Tennessee’s Portrayal does not embark her as devastated. So Amanda wavers between the world of illusion binding to her reminisce of youth and the world of reality which is her present. The past is her haven from the present. Inspired from his own sister’s reality, Tennessee Williams addressing Laura states in the production notes …………Laura’s situation is even graver”.
According to the paper, The conception of the self as a central processor of incoming information is evident in constructs such as the self-schema (Barclay 1986; Markus 1977), self- theories (Epstein 1973) and self as cognitive prototype (Rogers et al. 1979). Barclay (1986) describes the self-schema as arising by schematising both the significant and the frequent personal episodes of life. Schematisation is how memories for events are transformed for easy storage into their most generic, while still useful, form. These serve to summarise similar or repeated personal events. Once created, the self-schema helps individuals interpret events as they occur and supplement details of remembered experience.
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Writing Sample-2
She lives in her own world, making fragile glass animals, and worn-out phonograph records as she cannot conduct herself in cold and cruel surroundings with the continuous expectation of demands and cannot participate in human relationships. Jim O’ Connor, her pretentious gentleman caller who called her ‘Blue Roses’. Blue roses are not found in nature. Like them, Laura could not exist in the real world. Her continuous longing for the ballroom dance, the typewriter is external to her existence. Laura’s vulnerability weaves a world of, falseness symbolised by the glass unicorn. Jim’s inauguration of self-confidence in Laura’s personality, making her think as someone exceptional and exclusive.
Serafina Delle Rose’s Reminisce and Illusion In THE ROSE TATTOO
In The Rose Tattoo, a play that showcases passionate human emotions such as love, superstition, possessiveness, jealousy, sex was directly influenced by “vitality, humanity, and love of life” expressed by the Italian people”. Serafina Delle Rose, the play protagonist, is a romantic and passionate dressmaker living in the Sicilian community who is intensely in love with her husband, Rosario, a young Sicilian truck driver smuggles narcotics under the shed of bananas. Since he belonged to a family of small landowners in the city, he is given the label as ‘baron’, to which in her world of illusion she thinks of belonging to an above than average and hence she conducts herself as ‘baronessa’. After losing her husband, she withdraws herself from reality and lives in a world of illusion for three years holding an urn of ashes of him and also onto the thought of reminiscing of love from Rosario which was only hers:
“ I count up the nights I held him all night in my arms, and I can tell you how many. Each night for twelve years. Four thousand three hundred-eighty……I’m satisfied just to remember the love of a man that was mine-only mine! Never touched by the hand of nobody! Nobody but me!-Just me!” ( Act I, Scene V). Her illusion of having a rose tattoo on her breast denoting the idea of conceiving showcases another bag of collective reminisce:
“Senti! That night I woke up with burning pain on me, here, on my left breast! A pain like a needle, quick, quick, hot little stitches. I turned on the light, I uncovered my breast! On it, I saw the rose tattoo of my husband…… I screamed. But when he woke up, it was gone. It only lasted a moment. But I did see it, and I did know, when I seen it, that I had conceived, that in my body another rose was growing!”( Act I, Scene I). Her inability to accept reality and create an illusionary world propagates severe predicaments emotionally and mentally. According to the paper, Self-acceptance refers to how an individual views himself or herself in entirety. To be self-accepting one must be able to accept not only the ‘ good ’ aspects of self and memories of positive experiences, but also those aspects of self or experiences that are less positive. Individuals who already have a moderate level of self- acceptance may reaffirm this sense or increase their self-acceptance level through the use of
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Writing Sample-2 reminiscence techniques. If a reminiscence technique’s primary goal is to affirm, reinforce or increase self-acceptance, it may be adequate for individuals to reminisce and tell their life story without much probing.
Contrary to that, she is trapped in a vicious cycle of the Illusion and Reminisce. After being addressed to the bitter realisation of her husband involved with a mistress breaks the mirror of illusion and she comes to face the reality of life wherein she no longer could hold to reminisce as an escape to her personage and dignity. However, Serafina’s discard of Rosario’s memory and her acceptance of Alvaro’s sexual pleasantness drive her crazy and remind her of Rosario built a symbol of strong and audacious womanhood.
Conclusion
From the depiction of women’s tendency to escape the dualities of real-world and holding on to reminisce in ‘The glass menagerie’ to a web of desire and sensuality in ‘the rose tattoo’ Tennessee creates ambiguity in the characters to which he writes: “When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do….I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.” Such portrayals of human nature are depicted through characterisation of women in Tennessee William’s plays wherein he tries to show dilemma of humankind in southern aristocracy and on another aspect, he dismisses inhibited sexual desires and construct the idea of liberation and such idea is portrayed with the implication of the paper which states that “ Linking reminiscence with autobiographical memory is seen as a first step in tying together several approaches that can help us to understand the significance of the tendency of human beings to contemplate their past”. This paper also highlights the tendency of Tennessee Williams’s illusion and reminisce as an autobiographical element through the voice of his women characters.
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