Tennessee Williams: The Incest-Motif and Fictional Love Relationships

The dramatic works of Tennessee Williams provide a number of insights into the interplay of oedipal and preoedipal motifs in life and in art. Williams created a memorable gallery of doomed, rebellious oedipal sons and sons attached symbiotically to their destructive mothers (Giovacchini, 1975). His female protagonists combine the roles of mother and mistress, as well as the roles of Earth Mother and vestal virgin. Williams' treatment of homosexuality reveals its many fictional disguises as well as the playwright's strategy of raising homosexuality to the level of a metaphor for ideal love. The sources of Williams' oedipal themes are to be found in his relationship with his father and mother and in his partial identification with his schizophrenic sister, as I will show. Another important influence is seen in the writings of D. H. Lawrence, whose misogynous views reinforced Williams' perception of women as dangerous and destructive. Unlike Lawrence, who equated the female principle with false spirituality and antisex, Williams vacillated between viewing the female principle as destructive or as the last remaining expression of innocence and romantic idealism in an unfeeling world.

Williams' ambivalence toward women is one of the powerful motivating forces behind his drama. His acceptance of his own femininity from an early age provides some understanding of Williams' ability to empathize with female vulnerability in a male-dominated world. This is not to say that Williams had a profound grasp of the problems faced by women, but rather that his identification with women enabled him, at times, to simultaneously defend the dignity of women and the nobility of the spiritual ideal. Williams' affinity for idealism is all the more paradoxical in light of his sensational use of