| Four major plays by Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961), are principally responsible for the phenomenon known to the world as the poet-playwright Tennessee Williams. The presence or absence of the father in these both critically acclaimed and commercially successful Broadway plays is particularly revelatory about the dramatist's psychological make-up and the American culture of his time. The absence of the father from the menagerie-like Wingfield household represents the Godless existential human condition. The dead father that haunts Blanche is a toxic legacy that drives the female protagonist to destruction as the streetcar named desire takes her to the scene of her tragic downfall. The coarse, imposing, verbally abusive, and critically ill but still powerful and benevolent Big Daddy is the dramatist's tribute to American pragmatism, which is believed to have the potential to save human beings from existential despondency now that Dionysian redemption is also found to be delusional. The powerless father figure in Iguana testifies to the futility of the quest for father-saviors, but his sensitivity and dignity enable him to become an eloquent attorney in defense of humanity, which is capable of communicative rationality where the hope of redemption seems to reside.Tennessee Williams's plastic theatre is very expressionistic. His seemingly compulsive employment of expressionism can be best explained by his obsession with the apparently subtle but consequently violent changes of Western culture and the invisible scars they leave in the most tender and most vulnerable part of human souls. His protagonists are often the Modern man paralyzed by inner violence; his dramatic actions are obsessive but futile quests for release from the imprisoning shell of the self. Tennessee Williams is, by turn, nostalgic, escapist, and primitivist. His most important contribution to the Modernist primitivism in literature is his sophisticated treatment of sex, which makes sex almost a religion. Sexuality is most often equivalent to salvation in his theatre.Tennessee Williams' expressionism, primitivism, and apparent sex-obsession bear his distinctive personal signature; nevertheless they fall into the communal responses of the Western world to the turbulent social, political, and intellectual development since the middle of the 19th century, which can be characterized by words like irreverence, rebellion, revolution, and existential despair. If we have to use a single word to describe the commonality of all those violent changes, it will be "patricidal." Since the mid-19th century, symbolic patricidal rituals have been performed at domestic, social, political, and intellectual levels. Every sensitive soul has at some point become a ruthless or conscience-stricken parricide. In Williams' dramatic world up to his 1961 play, The Night of the Iguana, the father is never the protagonist or antagonist, but he is always an important character; even his absence is often deliberately made very conspicuous. The American audience's enthusiastic reception of his major Broadway successes can be, to a remarkable extent, accounted for by his treatments of the father which reflect Americans' complicated and delicate involvement with the patriarch at every institution of every sort in the few middle decades of the 20th century. His dramatization of the father-son situations relates to the American audience powerfully. The changes in his implicit evaluation of the father also keep pace with the psyche of the nation.While the father figure in his theatre is intended to carry a heavy load of cultural messages, Williams was also personally motivated to present his hate-love relationship with his biological father. All the fathers on his stage are not faithful representation of Cornelius Coffin Williams. However, both the imagined father's similarities to and divergence from the real father are functions of the intimidating old man and Williams' changing visions of him. Cornelius Coffin's influence on him and the dramatist's youthful resentment against his father and later identification with his own Big Daddy were profoundly involved in his characterization of the father figure in his theatre. More important, the remarkable changes in his vision of his father interplayed with his religious, social, cultural, and political attitudes which underwent important modifications over his two decades of artistic and commercial success from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s.With Menagerie, where the father is conspicuously absent, Williams released two of his unconscious drives simultaneously: his patricidal fantasy and his latent wish to be his father's son, instead of his mommy's boy. The defiant image of Stanley in Streetcar is Williams' manifesto to his father declaring his success and his attainment of manhood and independence. In contrast to the birth of a man in him as indicated by the masculine Stanley, the father figure in the play is allegedly dead, which again bespeaks the dramatist's patricidal drive. This time, Williams, now more confident thanks to solid financial security and tremendous social recognition, had the guts to arrange for the father to be dead rather than just absent. However, the immense commercial and critical success of Menagerie and Streetcar turned out to be far from adequately redemptive. Unwittingly he began to reach out, in his dramas, to his father that he had enjoyed tormenting with his deliberate avoidance. The vulnerable but still powerful Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has now become the most impressive father in the history of American theatre. The Politt father-son bond of love and care is by no means a representation of the messy relationship between Cornelius Coffin and his eldest son, Thomas (later renamed as Tennessee), but it reveals the dramatist's desire and fantasy. Both the son and father could have done better communication and respectively made a better son and a better father out of each other. The Night of Iguana, Williams' last remarkable commercial success, is an attempt at self-help on the part of the author who had indulged himself in endless repentance over his cruelty to his father, who had been dead for more than four years. The father figure in the play is sometimes pitiable and even ridiculous mostly because of his advanced age, but for all that he is dignified and commands sensitive souls' unconditional respect.However, Tennessee William's great power over the American audience does not primarily reside in his dramas' autobiographical traces concerning his relationship with his father. On the contrary, I am convinced that his charm consists largely in his "impersonality." Many critics have been discussing his lyricism, his tremendous verbal power, and his romantic texture, but I think he was able to hold the American people under his spell because of his effective representation and dramatization of essential issues of extensive social relevance and profound spiritual meaning. The presence or absence of the father on his stage is often used as a powerful device to convey the meaning and attain the relevance.The fatherless state of the Wingfield family in Menagerie makes up an effective metaphor for the existential conditions from which God has been excused by Nietzsche and many other intellectual giants. The play is typical of the outbursts of creative violence triggered by the Nietzschean discovery of the irrational power that defines an important part of the existential conditions of humankind. It presents a picture of the disjointed world in the aftermath of the absence of the father. The resultant void, chaos and misery express bitter disillusionment with the family institution, where love fails and man is unable to transcend his enslaving existential condition. The absence of the father stands for the violation of the social promises that American society has made, including the fancy American Dream, and the dramatist's renunciation of religion as a source of power for salvation.Blanche DuBois' dead but haunting father symbolizes the toxic legacy of the institutionalized Christianity as the most prevalent Apollonian illusion that has dominated the Western mind. Blanche's seditious and seductive efforts on Stanley's turf and their disastrous backfire take on tragic significance only when we interpret Blanche's desperation as a cultural compulsion. Her fanatic activities on the two fronts of sedition and seduction are the final appeal feebly launched by some decaying tradition represented by the dead father. The tradition finds itself on the brink of collapse and threatened by more powerful rivals, and acutely feels the need to re-assert its value and superiority. In the battle between the dead father's ghostly double and Stanley, the immigrant son-in-law of the father, the winner is the Dionysian Stanley, who embodies the "mysterious primordial unity." Stanley is not Lawrence's or Rousseau's noble savage, who would invariably turn out defenseless in harsh reality. He is Dionysian, in that sex does not expose him to extra dangers but empowers him in both private and social spheres. He is a mixture of the new American frontiersman and the old mythic Dionysus. His self-affirming and empowering Dionysian intoxication constitutes a sharp contrast with Blanche's depriving and self-defeating Apollonian self-denial, a toxic legacy represented by the haunting dead father, and radically responsible for the tragic downfall of Blanche.The powerful Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof declares the father's glorious comeback after his exile from Williams' two major plays. The characterization of the savior-like father reflects the dramatist's conversion to American pragmatism and reflects the mid-20th century appeal in America to "national greatness." Critically ill as he is, Big Daddy is powerful and benevolent. His benevolent power saves his son, the melancholic Brick, and, consequently, Maggie, the desperate but persistent "cat on the hot tin roof." Brick's melancholia and existentialist rejection of the world are dragging down not only himself but also largely innocent people like Maggie. They need a savior and Big Daddy is looked up to by Maggie and finally by Brick, the son, as well, as such a savior. The play's characterization of the father as a tolerant, understanding, wise, benevolent, and powerful father makes Cat Williams' most explicit tribute to American values which are believed to have the potential power of saving the beautiful but despondent son that stands for the ailing soul of the human being suffering from the attack of existential anxiety that marks America and modern Western society in general. At the core of the value system is Pragmatism, the compelling charm of which is suggested by the compelling Big Daddy and Maggie. Big Daddy's preference of Brick's romanticism to his eldest son's materialism testifies to the accommodating nature of American pragmatism. Compared with Big Daddy, Maggie the Cat is a more beautiful, but equally eloquent, spokesperson of pragmatism, which reconciles the conflicting desires for Brick-type innocence and Big Daddy-like success. The emergence of the All-American Big Daddy in Williams' theatre also has much to do with the dramatist's personal success as well as the social and cultural changes in the 1950s, which turned right.Iguana marks the dramatist's conversion from creative violence typical of Nietzschean philosophy to constructive communication. In the process of his conversion, he liquidates his old self obsessed with the "religion of sex" and escapism, and overwhelmed by existentialism. The play initially illustrates the existentialist vision that hell is other people, and more. For a moment, the audience is tempted to interpret the iguana at the end of its rope, a dominant symbol in the play, as a mute witness to the miserable situation of human beings in this Godless world. However, as the story unfolds, the flapping sounds of angelic wings are heard more and more distinctly. Humanity is angelic. Hopes of redemption are found in the here and now thanks to the very human desire for and capability of communication. The play is also an attempt, on the dramatist's part, to eliminate his prolonged enchantment with the Nietzschean savior-god of Dionysus, the "religion of sex". Williams is a "sexual snob." "No sex, no salvation" seems to reverberate throughout his theatre until then. Iguana is a radical change in that the extensive communication between the male and female protagonists does not conveniently and automatically lead to sexual union as a romantic triumph. In the play, the proud but fragile and vulnerable father is at once charming and disconcerting. He himself turns out to be one of the reptilian, hopeless creatures that human beings typically are, like the iguana at the end of its rope. This father figure reveals the dramatist's tentative conclusion about the futility of the quest for any father-like saviors in life. Instead of looking for and looking up to such a father figure, one is supposed to act as an angel to himself as well as everyone else around. Iguana appeals to the American audience due to its respectful, gentle but persistent and head-on challenge to, and ultimate renunciation of, the prevalent skepticism launched or endorsed by a whole gallery of fatally seductive intellectual giants from Nietzsche through existentialist philosophers up to Structuralists and Post-structuralists. It prefigures Habermasian effort to restore the tower of human reason. Habermas' notion of communicative rationality was not to come until many years after the production of the play, but the play and Habermas' theory share a common background: the shattering edifice of belief. Having been baptized by post-modern philosophy rooted in Nietzsche's skepticism, Williams and his dramatic alter egos are, just like Habermas, fully aware of the falsity of believing in any single reassuring, anchoring force in the world. In the end, Williams and Habermas find the same solution to the crisis of rationality symbolized by the absence of father-like anchoring forces: break gates between people, reach out, and communicate. Nonno, the major father figure in the play, is not anything that Williams' previous father figures are, but he has his own value, the value of a sensitive human soul, who is, invariably, eager to tell and listen, to communicate.
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