The Homosexual Text And Subtext In Tennessee Williams' Works

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) has been a misunderstood author. As a gay artist, he continuously sought to express his homosexual sensibility in his works, but had to conceal the sensitive subject in his plays because of the homophobic convention of America that culminated in the McCarthy antigay hysteria. To circumvent the severe censorship, especially the watchdogs during the 1940s and 1950s, he either availed himself of the strategies of his homosexual predecessors and contemporaries or ingeniously devised tactics in order to slip a clandestine homosexual subject into a large proportion of his plays. These devices, successful as they had been in outmaneuvering the McCarthy witch-hunters, have also brought about misunderstanding, for while they had shielded homosexuality from the watchdogs, they at the same time have confused the general audience and readership, as well as scholars and critics.Scholarship in Tennessee Williams from the perspective of homosexuality did not start until the late 1980s, and has been scattered and scanty. John M. Clum and David Savran have blazed a new path in academic studies of Tennessee Williams'works, but have not been followed by many. Due to the ignorance—or avoidance—of the homosexual text in Williams'works, there have been misunderstandings not only about his individual plays but also about his overall outlooks and artistic aspirations.For pure academic considerations, the present dissertation attempts to uncover the disguised homosexual texts and subtexts in Williams'pre-Stonewall plays and calls attention to a number of most repeated misunderstandings about Williams'plays and about the playwright himself. The contents of the five chapters in this dissertation are as follows:Chapter I starts with the historical and cultural contexts which primarily account for the confusion and ambiguity characteristic of Williams'pre-Stonewall plays. Taking a bird's-eye view of his drama, fiction and poetry, this chapter brings up six tactics Williams often used to encode homosexual messages in his plays. With examples whenever necessary, the chapter explains how each tactic works in a play and how the reader can use knowledge of the tactic to decode Williams'secret homosexual messages in his early plays. More importantly, this chapter paves the road for the examinations of the homosexual texts and subtexts in a number of plays that have been more often than not unnoticed or misunderstood.