An Interpretive Study of the Religious Element in the Work of Tennessee Williams

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1973 An Interpretive Study of the Religious Element in the Work of Tennessee Williams. Henry R. Beasley Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Beasley, Henry R., "An Interpretive Study of the Religious Element in the Work of Tennessee Williams." (1973). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2444. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2444 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 74-7206 BEASLEY, Henry R., 1939- AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY OF THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE WORK OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modern I University Microfilms, A XERQKCompany, Ann Arbor, Michigan TUTC nTCCPOTATTOM HAS RFEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY OF THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN THE WORK OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University emd Agricultural emd Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English by Henry R. Beasley B.A., McNeese State University, 1961 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1965 August 1973 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT An acknowledgement of this sort serves a useful purpose in that it reminds the author of all the people who have contributed in various ways to the completion of the work. Among those people are my major professor. Dr. James T. Nariin, and my principal readers. Dr. Lewis P. Simpson and Dr. Don D. Moore. Additionally I am grate ful to the other members of my committee. Dr. Thomas L. Watson and Dr. Nicholas Canaday. Obviously it is gratify ing to work with the assistance of such distinguished teachers, scholars, men. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. There are only three kinds of persons; those who serve God, having found Him; others who are occupied in seeking Him, not having found Him; while the remainder live without seeking Him, and without having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy; those between are unhappy and reasonable. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 257 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................. il ABSTRACT .................................................... v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION AND PERSPECTIVES .................. 1 II. THE HEROIC CHRISTS OF BATTLE OF ANGELS AND ORPHEUS DESCENDING ............. ................ 48 III. THE FAILURE OF S A L V A T I O N ........................... 82 IV. THE SATANIC CHRISTS OF SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER AND SWEET BIRD OF Y O U T H ........................ 167 V. TOWARD THE E A S T ................................... 208 VI. C O N C L U S I O N .......................................... 292 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................ 320 VITA ...........................................................328 IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT Tennessee Williams' first professionally produced play, A Battle of Angels, is characteristic of the play wright's continuing concern with sex and with religion. The sexual content of Williams' plays has been the subject of a great deal of criticism, most of which involves the applica tion of Freudian principles to the playwright or his charac ters. The religious content of the plays has been largely ignored. Accordingly, the criticism relative to Williams is misleading and disproportionately concerned with the play wright's treatment of sexual themes. Psychologists Viktor Frankl and Colin Wilson offer perspectives within which Williams' work may be understood more clearly. Frankl proposes that the traditional psychol ogies of Freud, Jung, and Adler are invalid. He further asserts that the dominant motive in human psychology is the Will to Meaning and that most emotional disturbance is the result of the frustration of the Will Meaning. Colin Wilson treats extensively of a character type called the Outsider, who is characterized by a kind of minority con sciousness marked by world rejection and the iritc icification of the Will to Meaning. A close study of his work indicates that Williams' plays are characterized by the struggle of an Outsider pro tagonist who attempts to fulfill his Will to Meaning. Withi: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VI the context of these ideas, Williams' work emerges as con spicuously and consistently religious. Accordingly, Williams adopts the language of Christian symbolism as a means of stating his ideas, and the figure of Christ cind tlie passion of the crucifixion emerge as central symbols. A Battle of Angels treats the Christ figure explicitly and dramatizes events that are unmistakably symbolic of the crucifixion. There are indications in this play and in others that Williams' Christ figure is based partially on Wilhelm Reich's idea that Christ is the supreme example of life affirmation in a world that suffers from the Emotional Plague, a condition marked by progressive indifference to life itself. Reich concludes and Williams concurs that the crucifixion of Christ is perpetual. Following the failure of A Battle of Angels , Williams' concern with religious themes becomes less explicit and shows itself in a recurrent pattern. The Outsider procagonist looks to some other character as a savior. The imagery of the plays identifies that savior with the Christ. The implied Christ consistently fails to meet the needs of the protag onist. The pattern of the failure of salvation is repeated in most of Williams' plays that fall between Battle of Angels (1940) and Orpheus Descending (1957). The later plays return to explicitly religious themes. Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth feature charac ters who are equated with Christ but who function as antag onists. Apparently Williams had become disillusioned with Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vil theological Christianity, but he remained convinced of the efficacy of Christian ethics. Night of the Iguana, The Milk Train Doesn* t Stop Here Anymore, and Iri the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel are increasingly involved with Oriental mysticism. These plays dramatize Williams' idea that one must confront the contrarieties of existence by achieving a kind of mystical consciousness marked by acceptance. Sweet Bird of Youth had proposed that God is silent. Subsequent plays dramatize the orthodox mys tical conclusion that identifies God with the silence. How ever, Williams continues to insist upon the necessity of practicing the Christian ethic. Thus, his final position involves the synthesis of Christian and Oriental religious thought. In the light of these ideas, Williams' work may be viewed as more conspicuously religious than previous commen tators have acknowledged. Furthermore, the work dramatizes the rather consistent progress toward a set of philosophic conclusions that are religious in nature and stated in terms of traditional Christian symbolism. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND PERSPECTIVES Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, was infamous before he was famous. His day of infamy was December 30, 1940, the day of his first pro fessional production of a major play— Battle of Angels, at the Wilbur Theater in Boston. Despite the talent associated with the production (Margaret Webster, Miriam Hopkins, John Gassner, Irwin Shaw)^ it was an unmitigated catastrophe whose final curtain saw a half-empty house, a smoke-beclouded leading lady, and a stricken playwright. Tennessee Williams reacted with characteristic melodrama— a rewritten third act that he submitted with the plea: "I will crawl on my belly through brimstone if you will substitute this." He added, to Miss Webster, the director, "You don't seem to see that I put my heart into this play."^ Only later, after the success of The Glass Menagerie, was Williams to see that first fail ure more clearly, if more defensively. With a touch of self- deprecating humor that is as characteristic as his melodrama, he said of Battle of Angels : "That play was, of course, a much better play than this one [The Glass Menagerie]. The ^Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams : The Man and His Work (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1961), pp. 50-51. 2 Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending with Battle of Angels (New York: New Directions, i95o; , pp. v-vTl Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. thing is, you can't mix up

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