ASND: AO3 (biographical)

general

• B has a strong connection to Williams' mother, Stanley based off his father

• W also suffered shock from his sister's suffering, having had a nervous breakdown, diagnosed w schizophrenia then lobotomised in an institution

• Williams would have felt like an outsider as a child - severely ill (had a fear of death), effeminate and homosexual

• He wrote to escape from reality and wasn't afraid to tackle uncomfortable topics (rape, alcoholism, mental decline, physical abuse)

• Blanche's personality is based off his aunt

• His father had poker nights

Williams’ difficult childhood

• Father was an alcoholic and his mother resented her husband’s drunken and philandering ways

• Father was a domineering, working-class salesman who is said to have been negligent of his parental duties and often missing from his children’s lives

• Mother was a Southern Belle, born to a higher class and well-read Episcopal minister and an educated music teacher.

• She detested her husband’s drinking, extra-marital affairs and general lifestyle, believing they didn’t reflect well on her as she had a certain social status to maintain.

Rose Williams

• Institutionalised in 1943

• Prefrontal lobotomy authorised by mother

• Williams believed her instability was caused by the strain between her strict Victorian upbringing and her powerful but restrained sexual desires

• she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 27 after a tragic love affair, she was institutionalised and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals.

• when therapies were unsuccesfful and she showed more paranoid tendencies, eventually she was convinced everyone was going to kill her

• in an effort to treat her, a pre-frontal lobotomy was authorised

• the operation went badly, Rose was incapacitated for the rest of her life

• W was so appalled by lobotomy and its effect on his primary childhood friend he spent the rest of his life obsessing over it

• Source of torment for Williams, he never forgave their parents for allowing it to happen

• his sister’s severe illness and failed surgery may have contributed to his alcoholism

• they may have also shared a genetic vulnerability, as Williams also suffered from depression

relationship between Williams and his sister

• a close and troubled one with an intense sibling bond that later threatened his precarious sense of self

• his struggle to come to terms with his intense attachment to Rose, as well as his need to separate from her, is expressed in many of his works.

• this conflict manifests in a searing and dramatic form in ASND through Blanche and Stella, expressing his ambivalent attachment to Rose

• through writing, Williams expresses his desire to give his sister life and sustains his attachment to her

• at the same time, he gives voice to his desparate need to establish his own identity, to abandon a loved one to assure his own creative survival

Williams’ homosexuality (Freudian symbolic reading)

• Williams' homosexuality and guilt - the play embodies sex/love and death symbolised by streetcar named 'Desire' and 'Cemeteries', played out by Blanche taking refuge from her fear of death in promiscuity, expressing her guilt in audio-hallucinations and bathing.

• The characters are expressions of Williams' psyche, the play's symbols and imagery examples of unconscious impulses.

  • "I think I write mainly from my unconscious mind" Williams, 1986

Williams and mental instability

• as a child he was bedridden for two years and grew reserved and vulnerable after he was ostracised and bullied in school

• he was gay during a time where homosexuality was seen as a mental illness

Williams and Blanche

• Williams has repeatedly claimed, ‘I am Blanche DuBois’ and has identified with her, particularly in terms of a shared hysteria.

• Williams also had a tendency to lie, e.g. misleading people concerning their age

• Like Blanche, Williams lied about his age in an attempt to stay relevant in the literary scene as younger writers were viewed as in the prime of their career and still relevant. Both also wanted to say they were younger to distance themselves with the trauma of their early years.

• Similarly to Blanche, Williams also felt alienated from the world, stating he "found writing as an escape from a world in which I felt acutely uncomfortable"

alcoholism

Williams used alcohol to deal with his personal pain and insecurities, to numb feelings of guilt and escape from the societal stigma surrounding his sexuality. (link to Blanche’s use of alcohol)

Williams’ parents (and their relationship)

• father: Cornelius Williams: an aggressive traveling salesman

• mother: Edwina Williams: the puritanical daughter of an Episcopal rector

• Williams once wrote about his parents’ relationships ‘it was just a wrong marriage’

• Williams was raised almost entirely by his mother while his father travelled, she was overprotective of him especially after he contracted an illness (diphtheria) when he was 5

• his mother was of genteel upbringing, somewhat smothering and may have had a mood disorder - prone to hysterical attacks.

• his father came from a prestigious Tennesse family which included the states’ first governor and state senator

• his father became increasingly abusive as the children grew older, often favouring Williams’ brother Dakin perhaps due to Williams’ illness and extended weakness and convalescence as a child

diphtheria (Williams’ illness)

• diagnosed when he was 5

• caused his legs to be paralysed for nearly 2 years

• he could do almost nothing, but his mother encouraged him to make up stories and read

• she encouraged him to use his imagination and gave him a typewriter when he was 13

• he also played a lot of imaginative games - “I’d take a deck of cards. The Kings, Queens and Jacks were royalty. The rest were the soldiers and ordinary people. Each denomination, the diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades, were different kingdoms. You’d be amazed at the number of stories you can act out with that beginning.” (link to poker nights + ‘seven-card stud’

• his mother didn’t approve of him playing with other boys and encouraged this sort of creativity, but his father disapproved of him becoming an author

Williams’ childhood + early life

• as a boy he would make up and tell stories ,many of them scary

• in autumn 1929 he enrolled at uni to study journalism, his father was angry that his childhood sweetheart had also enrolled there and threatened to withdraw him.

• The romance quickly ended and Williams, deeply depressed, dropped out of school.

• at his father’s request he took a job as a clerk in a shoe company, later recalling this time in his life as ‘living death’

• to vent his frustrations with his unfulfilling work he retreated to his room after work to write, he survived his depression for awhile through his poetry, plays, and stories but the strain soon resulted in a nervous breakdown.

• he was sent to Memphis to recuperate where he joined a local theatre group

• when he returned to St Louis he began socialising with a group of poets at Washington uni, one of them introducing him to Hart Crane’s poetry, who soon became his idol

• returned to college in 1937 at uni of Iowa, continued to write an enormous number of lays, some performed on campus. He graduated in 1938 but undermining his success was the tragedy of his sister’s insanity, and the family allowing a pre-frontal lobotomy (leaving her to spend most of her life in a sanatorium)

backstory for Williams’ name

• a nickname from his fraternity brothers ‘Tennessee’ for his rich Southern drawl

• used to separate his new works from his previous, inferior works

• his father was from Tennessee

• unique name

• presents his desire to present America in all of its good/bad

Williams and New Orleans

• left home at 28 to live in New Orleans where he changed his lifestyle and name

• reason for adopting a new name: a reaction against his earlier inferior work (that was published under his real name), his new name had been a college nickname, his father was from Tennesse, the name was unique

• in the last years of his life he also kept an apartment in New Orleans’ French Quarter

Hart Crane

‘And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind [I know not whither hurled]

But not for long to hold each desperate choice,’

• the epigraph in ASND from Hart Cranes’ ‘The Broken Tower’

• Crane was one of Williams’ favourite writers, becoming an idol for him. he wanted to be laid to rest near Crane (who jumped off a passenger cruise ship)

  • ‘Sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped over board, twelve hours north of Havana, so that my bones may rest not too far from those of Hart Crane'.’ (from his ‘Memoirs’)

  • (similarly to Blanche) ‘I’ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard - at noon - in the blaze of summer - and into an ocean as blue as my first lover’s eyes.’

• Williams use of this quotation as apt, as Crane himself often employed epigraphs from his own icons.

• Williams felt a personal affinity w Crane who, like himself, had a bitter relationship with his parents and suffered from bouts of violent alcoholism.

• more importantly, he identified with Crane as a homosexual writer, trying to find a means of self-expression in a heterosexual world.

  • Williams was influenced by Crane’s imagery and attention to metaphor. the epigraph’s description of love as only an ‘instant’ and a force that precipitates ‘each desperate choice’ brings to mind Blanche, who with increasing desperation ‘hurls’ her continually denied love into the world that only revisits her as suffering