Contextual Factors that Influenced Tennessee Williams

20th Century Tragedy

“tragedy is the art fform created to confront the mst difficult experiences we face: death. loss, injustice, thwarted passion, despair.” (Wallace in McEnvoy 2009)

• according to Aristotle. the best structure for a Tragedy should be complx ad one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity

• a Tragedy envolves the downfall of a great man (tragic hero) as a result of a reversal fortune (perpeteia) which is the inevitable result of his own actions and involves the concept of harmatia

• the tragic herogains insight (anagorsis) into the nature of human condition, fate or destiny and the will of the Gods

• on lookers are moved to feel pity and terror, achieving a kind of spiritual cleansing in the process (catharsis)

• Williams declared: “but are there ‘little people’? I sometimes think there are only little conceptions of people, whatever is living and feeling with intensity is not little and it would seem that most ‘llittle people’ are living with that intensity”

• “[Blanche] was a demonic reature, the size of her feeling was too great for her to contain without madness”

Tragicomedy, Melodrama and Soap Opera

“the one American playwright who is a conspicuous exception to the dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is Tennessee Williams.” (Kolin in RC Small, 2004)

• Kolin suggest that several of Williams plays belong to ‘lowbrow’ popular culture genres of melodrama and soap opera rather than the ‘highbrow’ elite genre of classical tragedy

• meoldramas contain sensational incidents, stereotyped characters, exaggerated emotions, simplistic sentiments

• soap operas are often intimate. domestic, family orientated and theoretically realistic

• Blanche is wrestling with the eternal questions that tortured Oedipus (from Oedipus the King): who are we? how can we find love? what are here for?

• Williams juxtaposes diametrically opposed tragic and comic moods in dramatising rape and madness alongside the domestic squabbling of Blanche and Stanley

• Williams’s skill as a dramatist ensures that the play looks at life in the raw, with all its contradictions and irreconcilabilities

Southern Gothic

• southern gothic is steered by authenticity; its a family thing. an intimacy that readers from anywhere can relate to

• southern writers are bonded by an oral tradtion of front porch storytelling and constructing vibrant sentences

• this is also apperent in the dialogue of southern gothic writers who endow their characters with speech that is wise without being didactic

• these colourful phrases brighten the dark themes of southern gothic novels

• the natural world is alive in sputhern fiction and deemed gothic by its persuasive influence on the characters and their actions

• southern gothic revolves around violence and high stakes

• what holds the story together is the tortured history of the american south; slavery and prejudice through the civil war and Jim Crow, the american south has a past full of inexcusable ugliness

• the type of hero this past has created; the heronis the underdog

Realism and Surrealism

• Tennessee Williams matchs form to content

• in order to gain sympathy for a character on the verge of a mental breakdown, Williams depicts a character from without and within; both the objectivity and subjectivity of Blancge are present to the audience

• Williams synthesises depth of characterisation, typical of a drama that strives to be an illusions of reality, with symbolic theatrics, which imply an acceptance of the stage as artifice

• Williams uses symbolic devices to emable the audience to understand the emotional shadow surrounding the events and characters, but also to view the world from the limited and unlimited perspective of Blanche

• the progress of Blanches struggle determines the forward movement of the plays action

• to communicate Blanches state. the ude of aural and visual effects distorts the surface verisimilitude of the play