Variations On The Margin

As one of the greatest playwrights in the 20^th- century, Tennessee Williamswon many top theatrical awards, such as Pulitzer Prize, New York Drama Critics' CircleAward and Tony Award, etc. Yet, the playwright whose unique creative style hadenriched American and world theatre was a controversial figure. Owing to his ownmorbid life experience, along with his fantastic dramatic plots and recurrent themesof sex, violence, insanity, and etc.,Williams used to be shunned by Americanmainstream culture for quite some time and also labeled as an immoral abettor bysome critics. As Linda Winer commented when he was found dead in Room Sunset atthe Hotel Elysee of New York City in USA Today:When told Tennessee Williams had just died upstairs, no one needed to ask whohe was…Celebrity, of course, is no proof of greatness. Yet it is impossible toname another modern playwright who has broken into American'sconsciousness with Tennessee Williams' complex, vivid force. Despite publicityabout drugs, alcoholism, homosexuality, and failures of his later plays, it is theaward-winning playwright's work—the knives and poetry of flawed humanity—that remain s⁶.The concurrence of Williams' great power over the global theatre and theunfavorable criticism he encounters in his playwriting demonstrates:the richconnotation of human nature in his plays do touch modern people's fragile andsensitive souls, but owning to ambiguous characters and evasive language, his playshave been misread for a long time. In view of this, it is necessary to make apanoramic interpretation of Williams' dramatic canon to delve into the ideologicalconnotation in his plays.Williams, like the other two great American playwrightsEugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, concerns himself with the inner psyche ofspiritually perplexed modern man, but he chooses to fix his eyes on all hues of marginal people, devoted to probing into the tortured inner worlds of"the flawedpeople⁷"populating his plays. Tracing the root in his life experience, Williams'obsessively dramatizing the marginal people originates in his sufferings of being asexual deviant in American homophobic society. It is justifiable to say that the mainmotif of his plays is his marginal ideology closely associated with his marginalizedsexual identity.Williams' life experience, together with American socio-political and culturalmilieu, complicates his presentation of homosexuality. The complexity requires thepresent study to deploy a vast panorama, i.e. individually, socially, culturally andpolitically, with consideration into all"four elements in the total situation of a workof art⁸,"i.e. the work to the author, the universe (or nature, and the world) and theaudience (or listeners, spectators and readers). The milestones of psychoanalyticaldevelopment, i.e. Freud's individual psychology, Fromm's social psychology, Jung'sanalytical psychology and Lacan's post-modernism psychoanalysis are respectivelyapplied to the present study in a chronological order. Thus, with homosexuality asthe research object, psychoanalysis as theoretical approach and Williams' marginalideology as the aim of research, Variations on the Margin: A Psychoanalytical Critiqueof Homosexuality in Tennessee Williams' Plays is born.Freudian individual psychology suggests that a piece of literary work be studiedthrough the interrelationship of an author and work and dream-work parallelart-work. Considering that the"dream-thoughts"can be represented by the manifestcontent of a dream, namely"pictographic script,"Williams' individual sense ofmargin can be obtained by reading the visual images/characters in his plays.Williams' plays are mostly emotional autobiographies, which do not serve as thepresentation of his real life experience but the reflection of his inner world. In hisplays, he feels compelled to project his feelings of being on the margin onto hischaracters, so the female characters, mythical figures and thinly disguisedhomosexual artists are his alter egos at different stages of his life, who constitute a cubist portrait of Williams as a homosexual artist. Through the investigation of theself-portrait,Williams' individual sense of margin is obtained.Fromm's social psychology that explores how a given society imposes its socialunconsciousness on the individual provides us with convenience in the exploration ofWilliams' marginalideology on the social level. In a heterosexuality-dominatedsociety, the homosexuals are always in a plight situation. The internalizedhomophobia causes most social members neurotic, which in turn drives thehomosexual group to the margin of mainstream society. When he vents his ownsense of margin in his plays, Williams does not ignore the presentation of thehomosexual group's sufferings of being on a margin in all aspects: all social members,with the impact of their internalized homophobia, ostracize and isolate thehomosexuals; in fear of ostracism, the repressed homosexuals find no way out butescape; yet, it is their escape that imprisons them in the loneliness. We thus getWilliams' marginal ideology on the social level in witnessing how Williams as amature playwright transfers his individual feelings and experiences to the ones of art.Williams in his plays widely uses myths and archetypes, both of which for himare very symbolic,"the natural language of drama⁹"Jungian archetypal theorybelieves that myths and archetypes represent human beings' universal feelings andthus carry the cultural connotation. By employing them, Williams indicates hisperception of the world. In his plays, he describes the incomplete world constructedin the mode of binary opposition advocated by mainstream culture, and in themeanwhile, emphasizes his ideal world with the concepts of compatibility andharmony. From man ontology to the outside world, he constructs three ordinalworlds as the counterparts of the ones that accord to mainstream culture. The sharpcontrast of the two kinds of worlds reveals Williams' great contribution to the gaysubculture in conflict with mainstream culture.Michel Foucault thinks that language serves as a carrier of various powerexercises. The interpretation of Williams' homosexualdiscourse in terms of Lacanian postmodernism psychoanalysis that lays more weight on the interrelationship of theunconscious and language presents his unique tactics coping with the constraints ofmainstream discourse. The fluidity of Williams' language style can be read as a"barometer"of American socio-political climate and the change of his literary status,thus connoting Williams' marginal ideology on the political level.The study of homosexuality in Williams' plays from the omnibearings in termsof psychoanalysis gives us an access to the four aspects: his self-portrait as ahomosexual artist, the pitiable plight of the homosexual group on the social margin,his ideal world connoted by gay sub-culture, and the homosexual discourse. Throughthe analysis of these four aspects, we have got four ideas held by Williams as amarginal being. They serve as four variations of Williams' marginal ideology, thusworking together to play a colorful musical movement with his marginal ideology asprimary motif.Today, twenty-six years after his death, Williams' plays have imperiouslystarted another revival on the world's theatrical stage. The revival not only hasauthenticated Williams' strong artistic vitality, but also, in some sense, indicated thatthe various marginal groups with moral and human dislocations in his plays havefinally got the attention in the era of diversity. The life style and marginal ideology ofthese marginal characters are waiting to be anew appreciated and surveyed so as tomine for the rich ideological connotation beyond time and space. It is hoped that theunique theoretical perspective offered in the present dissertation will open up aprospect of Williams study in this respect and hence enrich the increasingly colorfulWilliams studies.