5 Thresholds of Abjection: Identity and Space in Tennessee Williams’s Fiction
ABSTRACT
By means of their rupture with mimetic realism through expressionistic techniques and devices, some of Tennessee Williams’s plays are able to convey the interdependent relationship that exists between subjectivity and space. Before this experimentation on the stage, it was present in Williams’s prose writings, in particular those of his short stories rooted in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, where his characters’ crises of identity had been allegorized through the use of spatial tropes such as gothic houses or doors, the dynamics of the inside/outside boundary, and the presence of the ambiguous, liminal abject. An analysis of these elements in Williams’s short fiction will reveal how the spatial subtext problematizes the borders of subjectivity and in what terms Williams uses it in order to advocate for their/the latter’s flexibility.
During the climactic scene in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), prim Blanche Dubois faces her most terrible encounter with her brutish brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, a ‘date’ that they had had ‘with each other from the beginning’ of the play (Williams 1951: 130). The growing tension between these two characters created by Tennessee Williams finally erupts when Stanley, the embodiment of the new sap in American society, grabs the opportunity of his wife not being home to settle his conflict with Blanche by forcing himself upon her. This rape precipitates Blanche’s fall into mental derangement and so leads to the end of the play, in which she will leave the Kowalski’s home to be conducted to an institution. As John S. Bak (2009b) has stated, critics have mostly focused on the mimetic aspects of the scene and have considered it a representation of domestic violence and male sexual dominance whose seeming inevitability from the beginning makes it difficult to extract a positive reading of the gender politics in the play. ← 115 | 116 → However, as Bak suggests, ‘there is an enormous difference between rape as literary “sign” and rape as social “signifier” in Williams’s play and in his canon prior to 1946’ (2009b). Therefore, a reinterpretation of the value of this scene should take into account, on the one hand, how its symbolic nature can be enriched by a semiotic reading of non-mimetic, expressionistic theatrical techniques, and on the other, how this violent encounter relates to similar occurrences in other texts by Williams.
The physical realization of the rape is not actually represented on stage, but Blanche’s ensuing psychic disintegration is signified by means of one of Williams’s technical innovations that disrupted the realism still prevailing in the American theatre of the mid-twentieth century. At the moment of Blanche and Stanley’s confrontation, Williams specifies in one of his abundant stage directions that the audience is to witness the appearance of ‘lurid reflections’ on the walls, ‘shadows […] of a grotesque and menacing form’ (Williams 1951: 128), an expressionistic manoeuvre that suddenly transports the spectator inside Blanche’s agitated mind as if perceiving the scene through her eyes. At the same time, the text indicates that ‘through the back wall of the rooms, which have become transparent’ (Williams 1951: 128), the sidewalk can be seen, so that the exterior goings-on and the strangers on the street break into the privacy of the Kowalski’s house at a moment when intimacy – even if it is a perverse one – is paramount. These external intromissions mingle with Blanche’s inner hallucinations, which are still visible on a few solid sections of the stage walls. Thus, the spectators see how Blanche’s psychic breakdown is accompanied by a similar breakdown of physical borders and the blurring of the distinction between what is inside and outside her own experience. After that final ordeal, she will be shut off from reality altogether and descend into an evasive seclusion that will make her forever ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers’ (Williams 1951: 142).
Williams’s experimentation with expressionistic elements had already begun in earlier plays, which incorporate technical devices that endow the scene with a non-realistic, poetic atmosphere, for example in his first Broadway success, the family drama The Glass Menagerie (1945). Unlike with A Streetcar Named Desire, however, some of these unconventional techniques have usually been discarded at the time of the play’s production ← 116 | 117 → (Adler 1994: 136–7). In The Glass Menagerie, besides introducing light effects and music as a counterpoint to what happens on stage, Williams proposes the use of a ‘screen device’ (Williams 2000: 395), whose images and written legends enable the audience to visualize the feelings and associative thoughts of Tom, the play’s protagonist, towards his mother and sister (Single 1999). In addition to the projections on this screen, Williams’s directions include a transparent fourth wall that divides the stage between the space of present time – from where Tom as a narrator pronounces his speeches – and the Wingfields’ apartment, the locus of Tom’s hazy recollections. Both the projections and the articulation of space recreate the psychic functioning of the narrator of this ‘memory play’ and offer a subtext that complements the written/spoken word in order to create a more material, ‘plastic theatre’ (Williams 2000: 395), that attempts to capture ‘the impressionistic qualities of the human memory’ (Presley 1990: 80).
With these non-mimetic representations of space, Williams’s theatre contrasts with ‘the spatial obsessions of realism [that] close off territories […] analyse them, inhabit them with observable types;’ but instead, his plays denounce the ‘destructiveness of closure, of establishing limits’ and seem to ‘explore a discontinuous space, a light, mobile perspective, against the grain of mimetic illusion’, by simultaneously establishing and transgressing borders and lines of interpretation, as Anne Fleche has observed (1997: 87, 1). The key to this flexible configuration of space in A Streetcar Named Desire is, precisely, that Williams is attempting to ‘visualize the restless discourse of desire, that uncontainable movement between inside and outside, soul and body’ that is so characteristic of his entire oeuvre (Fleche 1997: 99). Whereas in realist theatre the moral code in relation to sexual life is ‘you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse’ (Foucault, quoted in Fleche 1997: 90), Williams does not merely talk about desire, but tries to materialize its effects by creating an allegorical subtext that ‘makes explicit what realism obscures, forcing the sexuality that propels discourse into the context of the scene’ (Fleche 1997: 99) – in this case, where the violation of both Blanche and mimetic realism coincide. That is the symbolic effect of such a violent act on Blanche’s already fragile psyche – she is forced to face that part of her self that she had been trying to hide behind her assumed role as the genteel Southern ← 117 | 118 → belle and the prudish schoolteacher: her latent, disavowed sexuality, hinted at throughout the play by the references to the ‘epic fornications’ of her ancestors (Williams 1951: 43), her attraction to younger boys, and her past furtive encounters with soldiers.
In his revision of this and other scenes of rape within the Williams canon – in the plays Not About Nightingales (1938), 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (ca. 1946), Vieux Carré (1975), and in the stories ‘The Important Thing’ (1945), and ‘The Night of the Iguana’ (1946/1948) – Bak detects a similar interaction or movement between soul and body in the feminine characters involved, who feel a conflict between their deep-seated moral condemnation of the flesh and their repressed need for human contact and intimacy beyond the merely spiritual. Hence the ambivalent attitude of these women, who seem to both reject and welcome their attackers. The involuntariness of the rape exonerates them from their Puritanical sense of guilt and so they are able to acknowledge the otherwise traumatic act as ‘a liberating experience in that it forced [them] finally to accept [their] long-denied sexual longings;’ the underlying intended effect would then be ‘to excoriate religious dogma for having appropriated human spirituality and sequestered it from various worldly appetites’ (Bak 2009b). Even in the case of Blanche, her submission to Stanley’s attack (she has an opportunity to escape while he is in the bathroom, but she does not) can be interpreted as an attempt to put an end to the desire that has been consuming her life and so ‘have a chance to continue existing, if only in her imagination, in that now-moribund Old South’ (Bak 2009b). The ultimate symbolic function of these acts that mix seduction and aggression, Bak concludes, is ‘to raze the self-imposed barriers we set between ourselves and another’ (2009b), as we can see in Not About Nightingales through the spatial metaphor in:
Eva’s earlier explanation to Jim about her fascination with rape. In describing her ‘favourite nightmare,’ in which she finds herself alone in a ‘big empty house,’ knowing that ‘something or someone was hidden behind one of the doors, waiting to grab [her]’ (NN 84), Eva recalls being frightened but enjoys the feeling because in the dream it is she who finally pursues the source of her sexually aggressive fears: ‘But instead of running out of the house I always go searching through it; opening all of ← 118 | 119 → the closed doors—Even when I come to the last one, I don’t stop, Jim—I open that one, too’ (NN 84). (Bak 2009b)1
Although Bak does not pursue the use of spatial metaphors any further, his and Fleche’s analyses seem to agree that in Williams’s allegorical vocabulary, the breaching of the bodily limits that rape entails is also a sign for the razing of the innermost barriers of these female characters’ identities which are preventing them from penetrating those ‘closed doors’ that separate them from the feared/wanted realization of their desire. In the exemplary case of Blanche, the boundaries of her body, spirit and the stage space are pushed too far to the point of their collapse.
It is also the intention of this chapter to trace the origins of such correlation between the body, the psyche and their representation in architectural terms to Williams’s early affinity with the Gothic, a trend which indeed found its disciplinary basis in architecture (Armitt 2011; Monnet 2010). It was in his short fiction, rooted in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, where Williams began to explore the constitutive relation between subjectivity and space. Before and beyond his career as a playwright, Williams was the author of more than fifty short stories, most of them originally published in periodicals such as Partisan Review, Story or The New Yorker, and then collected into five volumes: One Arm and Other Stories (privately published in 1948 and reissued in a trade edition in 1954), Hard Candy, A Book of Stories (1954), The Knightly Quest: A Novella and Four Short Stories (1966), Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), and the posthumous Collected Stories (1985). Scholars of the American short story have usually placed him within the second wave of Southern Renaissance writers (after 1945) together with Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers (Weaver 1983: 20–5). United under the common label of ‘new American gothic’ (Peden 1975: 72), they all share what Williams himself defined as ‘an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience’ (Williams ← 119 | 120 → 1978: 42), as well as a penchant for violent imagery and the grotesque, and a characteristically gothic ‘narrativization of Otherness’ (Savoy 1998: 6).2
A typical strategy for gothic stories to narrate otherness as well as inspire such dreadfulness or uncanniness, as Freud put it (Freud 2003), is by awaking the double, a repressed other both familiar and estranged, who attracts and repels the protagonist subject and confounds its (the subject’s) self. Grounded on Freud’s uncanny– from the German unheimlich, unhomely (Freud 2003: 124) – Julia Kristeva’s seminal work Powers of Horror (1982) reformulates the spatial character of that haunting other through her figure of the abject, a not-me who has been excluded from individual and social self-definition because it ‘disturbs identity, system, order [… and] does not respect borders, positions, rules’. The abject is ‘[t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). The abject threatens the subject’s sense of a fully self-sufficient identity by arousing a conflict of drives and drawing it ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’ due to a ‘spatial ambivalence’ with origin in the mother-child dyad (Kristeva 1982: 2; 63). The abject brings about an inside/outside uncertainty that characterizes the earliest stage in subjective development, when the close bond between child and mother does not let the former realize any separation between them yet, but it feels itself immersed in a space of completion that Kristeva names chora – Greek for ‘womb’ (Moi 1986: 12). Although it holds the potential for a re-union into a wholeness that promises the fulfillment of desire, the Kristevan ‘longing to fall back into the maternal chora’ arouses ‘a deep anxiety over the possibility of losing one’s subjectivity’– the very fear that ‘Freud identified as the ultimate source of the feeling of uncanniness [… or] “the return of the repressed”’ (McAfee 2004: 49).
Tempting yet repulsive, the abject other in Williams’s stories is endowed with sexual and/or racial ambiguity, and provokes that gothic anxiety and the subsequent crisis of subjectivity that have been defined by Eve K. Sedgwick as an ‘insidious displacement of the boundaries of self’, a self she additionally described as permeable (quoted in Jarraway ← 120 | 121 → 1998: 72, n. 4). The abject troubles the subject’s apparently stable identity by causing the collapse of the border between what is I, inside, and what is not I, outside. This disarticulation of a spatialized self correlates with a similar experience of fragmentation of the body (Kristeva 1982: 53), which in its turn finds its narrative spatial correlative in the ‘the most persistent site, object, structural analogue, and trope of American gothic’s allegorical turn’: the haunted house (Savoy 1998: 9). This gothic architectural allegory provides an indirect way to signify the subject’s psychic/physical borders between inside and outside that can give way to the penetration of the other or remain shut for the protection of the endangered self, so that not just the stories Bak mentions (‘The Important Thing’ and ‘The Night of the Iguana’) feature examples of symbolic rape, but other earlier texts deserve a re-assessment of their spatial dynamics in that light.
Probably the clearest example in Williams’s fiction of this gothic crisis of identity and its interwoven narrativization of body, house and self is the story ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, written in 1935 and mostly overlooked by critics.3 Not only this story – both a poem by Emily Dickinson and one legend on the screen device of The Glass Menagerie share the same title. The poem by Dickinson encapsulates the mood of the homonymous story: ‘Elysium is as far as to / The very nearest Room. / If in that Room a Friend await / Felicity or Doom – / What fortitude the Soul contains / That it can so endure / The accent of a coming Foot, / The opening of a Door!’ (Dickinson 1999: 584). The story is about a young girl, Catharine, ← 121 | 122 → who returns from the city for a short visit to her hometown and finds that her bosom friend Bud Hamilton, who was supposed to wait for her at the station, is not there. Disappointed, she has to walk alone to his family’s house and upon arriving there, she uneasily finds out that Bud is not ‘waiting on the other side of any door of this house’ (Williams 1994: 32). The story adopts Catharine’s point of view exclusively and reproduces her thoughts and impressions during the increasingly restless wait and ‘suspense’ (Dickinson’s title for the poem) for the encounter with Bud, which she simultaneously looks forward to and fears.
The Hamilton’s house fulfils all the requisites of the gothic haunted house: it’s ‘ugly, yellow’, full of dark rooms with creaking timbers and high ceilings that lead you upwards towards an ‘undiscovered submit of darkness’ from where ‘the sly laughter and whispering of ghosts’ are heard (Williams 1994: 34). The allegorical discourse that manifests the correlation between Catharine’s body and the house exemplifies how ‘inside and outside constitute the essential tension of the gothic’ (Holland and Sherman 1977: 288). Just as Catharine pictures the phantasmagorical house as struggling against ‘the returning spring’ and speaking ‘a loud denial to the playful wind’ outside it (Williams 1994: 34), she reveals her own struggle with a turning ‘spring’ and ‘winding’ inside:
Every step of the long walk from the station had been like a relentless crank winding up inside her some cruelly sharp steel spring whose release would certainly whirl her to pieces. But the release had not come. […] So the spring had to go on winding itself still tighter till heaven knows that might happen. (Williams 1994: 32; italics added)
By a clever parallel of linguistic signifiers that brings to mind Freud’s analysis of dream logic (Thurschwell 2001: 36), the text equates what Catharine imagines is happening outside the house with what is happening inside herself. This equivalence is also detectable in the relation that the absent Bud has with both the house and Catharine. Bud is the house’s ghostly tenant – a ‘galloping ghost’ (Williams 1994: 34), usually secluded in the attic – who in order to make himself visible will now have to trespass its main door. Catharine acknowledges the architectural physical barrier that separates them, and wishes for its elimination: ← 122 | 123 →
She wanted all at once to stand up and beat her fists against the old yellow boards of the house that were frailly forbidding the spring. She wanted to beat hard against them from the inside like April from the outside till the yellow boards splintered and tumbled down and she and Cecilia stood unsheltered in the leafy wetness outside. And then with no threshold to push his timid feet across, Bud would surely be there. (Williams 1994: 38)
This disintegration is indeed the fate of the gothic house, ‘whose solid actuality dissolves as [it] accommodate[s] (and bring[s] to spectacular figure)’ that which haunts it (Savoy 1998: 9).
However, what Catharine does not (or cannot) acknowledge is that there are also physical barriers on her part that deter her from meeting Bud. She is one of ‘Williams’s grand deceivers who believe that they can escape the pull of the flesh indefinitely’, but as Bak remarks, ‘self-assurance in Williams is the true signifier of self-deception’ (2009b). Catharine buries any connotation of disruptive sexuality by hiding her numb corporeality from head to toe under a series of garments – ‘the spring hat of dark blue straw […], the gaily printed dress, the brand-new slippers of black suede with silk bows’ (Williams 1994: 32), and ‘her black kid gloves’ that reveal ‘so icy cold’ fingers beneath (Williams 1994: 36). As a typical Williamsian subject that ‘flees from sexuality to language’ (Sofer 1995: 338), Catharine also tries to divert attention from her body through talking: ‘there was a touch of self-consciousness in the ultra-casual pose of their bodies [and] Catharine was anxious to remove it with friendly chatter’ (Williams 1994: 35). When she prepares herself for the reencounter with Bud and plans to avoid any physical contact that might ‘frighten him off’ (Williams 1994: 39) – no kiss, no shake of hands – it is her own anxiety towards her body and its sexuality that she is trying to dispel by means of an image of her self embellished by glamorous commodities and distracting language. In contrast, according to his sister’s description, Bud proves to be Catharine’s antithesis as he ‘doesn’t act civilized’ and lets his bodily side unrestrained, not bathing himself, remaining unshaven, and ‘not even bothering to put on all his clothes’ (Williams 1994: 37).
Catharine’s attempts to come together with Bud on a merely spiritual level and transcend the body forebode the catastrophic effects that a physical encounter will have, as the abject ‘implies the subject’s recognition and ← 123 | 124 → refusal of its corporeality’ (Grosz, quoted in Weiss 1999: 92). The recognition of her own sexuality will bring about the discharge of the inner ‘spring whose release would certainly whirl her to pieces’ (Williams 1994: 38), a bodily disintegration like the one she wished for the house attacked by the spring outside. At the climactic moment of the story, when Bud makes his long-awaited-for appearance banging the door open and standing there on its threshold, the boundaries between inside and outside are inverted and Catharine does not stand unsheltered in the wetness outside, as she had wanted, but instead ‘her knees seemed ready to sink’ in the water inside herself because ‘now her bones were hollowed out by the running waters of fear’ (Williams 1994: 40). So, it is not the spring outside that succeeds in pulling down the house, ‘splintering’ the yellow boards as she intended, but her own inner spring which, after its ominous tightening throughout the story, eventually destroys her poise ‘with a noiseless splintering’ that lets terror overcome her and makes useless the strategies she had planned to sustain her feeble self-assurance: ‘She couldn’t speak the gay words of greeting nor touch the red cherries’ on her hat (Williams 1994: 41). Despite the distance that separates them, Catharine and Bud seem to touch faintly as two mirror images, he on the threshold with ‘his hand lifted slightly before him’ and she standing opposite with her hand on the staircase banister, joined by the almost physical contact of ‘the palpable blaze’ of his ‘arrow-bright’ eyes (Williams 1994: 41).
Moreover, despite what some critics have called the ‘distasteful sexual imagery’ (Vannatta 1988: 12) of the references to rape that accompany Bud’s entrance (the offering of the cherry, impalement, arrows and nakedness),4 the reversal of boundaries that accompanies Catharine’s ordeal is suggested by a coincident trope by which Bud is not actually entering Catharine’s body but exiting it. ‘She wouldn’t be able to bear the intolerable moment of his birth in her presence’, she desperately reflects (Williams 1994: 40). Hence, Catharine and Bud’s implicit sexual encounter is at the same time signified as the exemplary moment of separation of two formerly united bodies, birth, an experience that Kristeva interprets as the ultimate abjection ← 124 | 125 → and that connects with the Gothic’s ‘exploration of her [the heroine’s] relation to the maternal body that she shares, with all its connotations of power over and vulnerability to forces within and without’ (Kahane 1985: 338). In fact, has not Catharine been expecting Bud all along, feeling ‘a funny feeling in her stomach’ (Williams 1994: 38)? Does not the whole story depict a threshold sensation akin to birth, which Kristeva describes as a ‘scorching moment of hesitation (between inside and outside, ego and other, life and death)’ (Kristeva 1982: 155)? The birth-giving metaphor transforms here Bud’s outside-to-inside intrusion into an inside-to-outside passage, and he becomes thus the expelled abject that ‘demonstrates the impossibility of clear-cut borders’ (Grosz, quoted in Weiss 1999: 92). When at the end Catharine flees up the stairs of the ugly house to find refuge in what now presents itself as a ‘haven of darkness above’ (Williams 1994: 40), she proves to be a precursor of Blanche. We witness her relapse into a regressive, psychic isolation within the darkest recesses of a body unable to reach and be reached by others, lost in ‘vast obliviousness [… and] tranquil self-absorption’ (Williams 1994: 42), almost becoming a haunting spectre herself.
Yet, while it is true that the gothic crisis of subjectivity of the protagonist in ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, like that of Blanche, is described in destructive terms and leads to a tragic end – ‘doom’ instead of ‘felicity’, in Dickinson’s poem – Williams’s exploration of the permeability and displacement of the limits of the self does not always strike such a sombre note. The interdependence between subjectivity and space makes itself manifest in other texts that, although less clearly gothic in tone and setting, also share the narrativization of abject others and their disrupting effects on the subject’s self and relations with/in space. Such is the case of ‘Something About Him’ (1946), another story that has hardly received any critical attention. It coincides in some ways with ‘The Important Thing’ (1945), as both their protagonists take the risk of trespassing the frontiers of normativity and embrace the outsider other, experiencing thus destabilizing but exhilarating moments of liberation from conventional constraints. However, in the latter story about the relationship between John and Flora, two college students, spatial metaphors are not so clearly present, maybe because there ‘Flora is unquestionably raped’ (Bak 2009b) and the bluntness with which ← 125 | 126 → the act is described does not allow for a metaphorical subtext. Nevertheless, Bak analyses it as another example of ‘Williams’s queer notions of rape as rough sex cum spiritual truth’ (2009b), and this makes its resemblances with ‘Something About Him’ worth exploring.
Flora is a strange girl, ‘a fugitive with no place to run to’ (Williams 1994: 174), ambiguously androgynous in behaviour – she shows none of the ‘softness and languor which [John] found physically interesting in girls’ when, for instance, she squeezes his arm in ‘a grip that was almost as tight as a wrestler’s’ (Williams 1994: 165) – and in appearance: her features are excessive, a face ‘so broad’, eyes ‘too large’ and ‘always so filled with superfluous brightness’ (Williams 1994: 172). Still, John finds her ‘at once homelier and more attractive’ than other girls (Williams 1994: 167). Despite this seeming freakishness, Flora is not perceived by John merely as an ‘outlandish’ character (Williams 1994: 172), but also as someone uncannily close to his own thoughts and beliefs, ‘know[ing] intuitively what he was trying to say’ (Williams 1994: 167) and uttering his own unspoken words so that ‘her words fitted exactly what he had been thinking’ (Williams 1994: 166). If his very own thoughts, feelings, and sympathies are echoed by this ambiguous girl, and their shared interests ‘served to draw them closer together’, John risks discovering that ‘Perhaps he was no more like other people than she was’ (Williams 1994: 170). Flora seems his double, a part of himself mirrored back to him – in fact, they met dancing at a ball where ‘the walls were covered with long mirrors’ (Williams 1994: 163) yet John felt like ‘dancing by himself’ (Williams 1994: 164). The final rape scene is John’s attempt at grasping the ‘Important Thing’ (Williams 1994: 166) that eludes him throughout the story, the materialization of that ‘something about her [Flora]’ (Williams 1994: 164) that he thinks will solve the question of his own desire. While Bak and others understand that what John discovers in himself at the end is his secret homosexuality – given the masculine attributes of Flora (Bak 2009b, Vannatta 1988: 44) – it can also simply be the recognition of the very possibility of breaking away from ‘patriarchal gender definitions’ altogether and from social constraints in a broader sense (Clum 1996: 48).
In ‘Something About Him’ (1946), spatial allegory makes the sexual subtext less unquestionable, as in ‘The Important Thing’, but still very similar in character. It is the story of Miss Rose, the librarian of a small ← 126 | 127 → Southern town, who becomes the only friend to Haskell, the new grocery clerk that nobody seems to like. Haskell’s eagerness to please people and his odd habits are suspicious for the community, who consider him ‘too oily’ and ‘gruesomely excessive’ (Williams 1994: 213). As the abject that disturbs system, borders, and rules (Kristeva 1982: 4), Haskell perturbs the social system by exceeding his expected role as ‘an ordinary dime-a-dozen grocery clerk’ and inappropriately acting ‘like a new preacher’ (Williams 1994: 213). Like Flora, he confounds the sexual borders with his voice that reaches ‘an almost girlish falsetto’, and fingers ‘as delicate in their precision as the fingers of a young woman’ but capable of ‘wringing hands so fiercely’ (Williams 1994: 216, 218, 213); and he defies the rules of the community when he dares to disagree with some of his customers.
Yet Miss Rose likes him and, after making acquaintance with each other in the library, Haskell moves to the same boarding house as the librarian, who starts changing her usually introverted attitude under the influence of her interest in him. Like Catharine in the aforementioned story, Miss Rose does not want to be touched – she and Haskell ‘edged unnecessarily close to the wall to prevent their clothes from touching’ (Williams 1994: 216) – but instead wants to be viewed, and founds her fantasy of identity on another fetishized commodity, in her case a French negligee that she wears in front of her mirror to reveal ‘a new Miss Rose’ (Williams 1994: 216). The negligee acts as a protective layer in her exposure to Haskell’s gaze:
One morning she stood just on the inside of her door till she heard him descending the stairs […]. Then she caught the creamy lace about her throat and stepped out of her bedroom. She stood there in his full gaze for three ecstatic moments before she scurried into the bathroom with a slight hysterical giggle and locked the door […]. (Williams 1994: 216)
Significantly, Miss Rose chooses a space between doors for this fleeting moment of tentative self-exposure where the negligee camouflages her inner insecurities; however, the borders are still clearly established, as the doors are tightly closed.
Miss Rose’s interaction with Haskell ends up in the breach of her defensive strategies and the identity crisis that abjection entails. While they are taking a walk from their home to the library and debating poetry, she ← 127 | 128 → experiences Haskell’s gaze in a very different – and more dangerous – way than before: ‘He looked down at her very slyly and something new came out of his eyes. It was almost palpable. It seemed to touch her cheek with little, tentative fingers. A palpable though very timid caress’ (Williams 1994: 217). In spite of Miss Rose’s initial avoidance of physical contact and her desire to be only looked at, Haskell, like Bud, ironically accomplishes the former by means of the latter: his gaze touches her, announcing the cracking open of her shell and hence the destabilization of her pretended solidity. However, unlike in the case of ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, Haskell’s eyes are not the only thing that touches Miss Rose, he physically touches her too:
He caught her elbow as she stepped over the curb. His touch, his slight upward pressure, seemed to release her from all effect of gravity so that she felt as though she were floating with feathery lightness over the street. The laughter bubbled out of her lips irrepressibly like water gone down the wrong way. She was lifted up and blown forward, a thin tissue kite that was suddenly caught in a rising wind (Williams 1994: 217).
In contrast to the planned visual encounter in the hallway, this sudden physical intimacy and contact with the abject alters Miss Rose’s relation with ‘the more or less beautiful image in which [she] behold[s] or recognize[s]’ herself, and which is sundered by abjection ‘as soon as repression […] is relaxed’ (Kristeva 1982: 13). Like Catharine, Miss Rose lets herself go and cracks under the pressure of her inner waters, yet not of fear, but of uncontrollable laughter, and experiences a release from her outer shell, the fetishized negligee, which returns as that weightless, flimsy tissue that the wind will very likely rip apart as it is said to do with clouds a few paragraphs before: ‘some radiant white cloth, like a bridal veil, had been drawn swiftly over the sky and fragments of it had caught on these sharp projections and been torn loose and held there’ (Williams 1994: 217). Again, Williams makes use of implicit sexual symbols in the ‘pointed church steeples’ – those ‘sharp projections’ – tearing through the bits of bridal veil, as he himself commented elsewhere about the set of his play Battle of Angels (1939), which ‘depict[ed] churches with red steeples:’ ‘Get it? It’s symbolism, Freudian symbolism’ (quoted in Leverich 1995: 390). ← 128 | 129 →
During this climatic scene, Miss Rose’s inner self proves itself readily permeable – as Sedgwick put it –, so that the effects of her contact with the abject Haskell are not as destructive as in the case of Catharine. When subsequently she returns to the library, she discovers borders to be more flexible, and finds inside/outside differentiations blurred:
That heavy oak door with its foolish brass knocker and elaborate molding had never admitted her with so little resistance. It seemed to swing open from someone pushing inside. She stepped away to avoid a collision. But there was nobody but her, it was her own frail grasp that had drawn it so easily open! (Williams 1994: 218)
Doors are opened effortlessly now and lead to a limitless space that brings inside what previously was outside. The brightness that was formerly outdoors (‘Such brilliant sunlight this morning!’ Williams 1994: 215) and that will again be exterior at the end of the story (when the air is ‘keen and brilliant as a polished blade’, Williams 1994: 220) is internal now: ‘The room inside was wonderfully light and spacious. Brilliance was refracted from every surface, from the yellow oak tables and chairs, from ink pads and pencils, even from old Miss Jamison’s knobby cheekbones’ (Williams 1994: 218). Now that she traverses the borders with ease, incorporates Haskell’s ‘alacrity’ and ‘good humour’, and takes no account of the objectified presence or reproving gaze of ‘Miss Jamison [who] watched her sourly’ (Williams 1994: 218) – the same look that is being cast over Haskell all through the story5 – Miss Rose has clearly pulled down her self-imposed barriers and has come closer to the abject.
Miss Rose’s fulfilment will nevertheless not last for long, since her feeling of completion comes from that ‘undifferentiated union’ with the abject and the surroundings that is a threat both to the identity of the self and of the community (McAfee 2004: 48). Eventually, Haskell will be indirectly forced out of town when he is fired from the shop due to the customers’ unjustified complaints about that uncanny ‘something about him’ that nobody likes (Williams 1994: 214, 218, 219). When he drops ← 129 | 130 → by to say goodbye, he is not deterred by Miss Rose’s effort at keeping the abject under control by ‘naming the [lost] pre-nominal, the preobjectal’ (Kristeva, 1982: 11): ‘“Haskell!” she called. But he had already gone out the library door’. With his departure, Miss Rose sees how her previous ‘feathery lightness’ is quickly replaced by the fettering control of the community, represented by a stranger’s gaze ‘fixed on her, pinioning her attention coldly like a blade thrust down on quivering, agonized wings’ (Williams 1994: 219). Her life returns to a routine of urban hustle and bustle – ‘boxcars […], whistles screaming urgently, sparrows restlessly crossing the windows […], traffic signals and cars’ –, where she will then have to reconstitute a sense of a unified identity behind another shell – this time, a brown tweed jacket that she had reserved for special occasions but in the end she ends up using ‘every day’ (Williams 1994: 220).
These stories seem to reproduce the underlying logic of Eva’s dream in Not About Nightingales: the attainment of one’s (forbidden) object of desire is a matter of ‘opening all of the closed doors’. In fact, the liminal space that a door frames seems a fitting location to signify the in-betweenness of the abject. This is the situation of other ambiguous characters – both sexually and racially – that make their appearance in Williams’s stories. In ‘Gift of an Apple’ (1936), for example, a young hitchhiker flirts with a fleshy and voluptuous Italian woman who lives in a trailer off the road along which he walks. The woman’s looks baffle the boy yet do not prevent him from feeling a certain attraction towards her. The darkness of her features, the masculinizing ‘coarse hairs along her upper lip’ and the ‘few dark hairs in the middle of her chest’, and an animalistic resemblance to a catfish that had ‘something not normal’ for having grown up inside a bottle (Williams 1994: 65), all make this Italian woman one of the most abject of Williams’s characters. She remains near the door of her trailer, from where she subtly negotiates with the boy the exchange of culinary and sexual favours that starts with the gift of the apple in the story’s title, and continues with a piece of meat initially reserved for the woman’s son. During that negotiation, we can see the hitchhiker’s identity waver as his masculine bravado is undermined by the emasculating comments and caresses of the woman (Kolin 2007), and he actually ends up wishing to satisfy his desire by taking the place of the woman’s son and thus becoming the very thing he had ← 130 | 131 → considered not normal (Torres Zúñiga 2014). After the failure of the negotiations, however, the boy has to continue on his way while the woman stands ‘[b]ig, heavy and dark […] in the door of the trailer’ that he never got to enter (Williams 1994: 68), keeping just for her both her dinner and the secret of her fascinating nature.
Some years later, Williams would write the ‘heterosexualized’ autobiographical story ‘Rubio and Morena’ (1948) and make its writer–protagonist encounter a similarly ambiguous woman. Although she is based on Williams’s first long-term homosexual love, Pancho Rodriguez Gonzalez (Spoto 1985: 146, footnote), the masculinization of this female character is not necessarily an attempt to mask a male lover behind a more legitimate heterosexual appearance; Flora in ‘The Important Thing’ also mingles masculine and feminine traits but has her biographical origins in the feminine figure of Williams’s college friend Esmeralda Mayes (Spoto 1985: 120). Rather, Williams’s fascination with the androgyne lies in its ‘denial of definition, its functional ambivalence, its fusion of opposites, its transcendence of barriers’ (Bisby 2001: 57), features that also make it into the ideal other of gothic fiction. In ‘Rubio y Morena’, the writer Kamrowski encounters this other while he is precisely ‘detained at the border’ with Mexico (Williams 1994: 258; italics added), and in the hotel room where he has to spend the night ‘a figure appeared in the doorway […] so tall that he took it to be a man’, although soon it reveals itself to be a woman when she crosses the door and joins him in bed (Williams 1994: 258). This revelation does not however do away with the inherently indefinite character of the girl Amada, who as ‘the dark figure in the doorway of the hotel, even mistaken at first for that of a man, did not come into the light. It remained in shadow’ (Williams 1994: 261; italics added).
When the unexpected visitor enters Kamrowski’s bed, only a muffled objection intimates the silent act that happens next between her and the writer: ‘No, he said, but the caller paid no attention and, after a while, Kamrowski was reconciled to it’ (Williams 1994: 259). This is yet another instance of a veiled coerced sexual encounter that nevertheless will have positive effects. The subsequent sentimental relationship between the girl and Kamrowski will trigger a dramatic change in the latter’s life, first of all by erasing the feelings of powerlessness that women had previously ← 131 | 132 → provoked in him and so restoring his sense of male dominance (Williams 1994: 261). Then, although they separate for some time, he returns to her border town to find her at her deathbed, where she will eventually succeed in the same feat as other abjects that ‘continuously violate one’s own borders’ (McAfee 2004: 47). Her literally breath-taking embrace breaks ‘all the way through the encrusted shell of his [Kamrowski’s] ego’ so that he undergoes a traversal of boundaries too, moving, like Miss Rose in ‘Something About Him’ does, ‘out of the small but apparently rather light and comfortable room of this known self into a space that lacked the comfort of limits’ (Williams 1994: 267). Unlike Miss Rose, however, Kamrowski experiences with anxiety such unbounded space where opposites are confused: ‘a space of bewildering dark and immensity, and yet not dark, of which light is really the darker side of the sphere’ (Williams 1994: 267). At the boundary of his known self, yet still a part of himself, that limitless space causes in him the paradigmatic feelings of the gothic unheimlich: ‘He was not at home in it. It gave him unbearable fright’ (Williams 1994: 267, emphasis added). Kamrowski belongs then with Catharine from ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, since both are unable to open up to the indeterminacy of the abject and retreat instead into the safety of their previous deadening self-absorption: ‘he crawled back […] crawled back out […] crawled back into the small room he was secure in’ (Williams 1994: 267).
What all these stories reveal is how Tennessee Williams made use early on of the symbolic relevance of borders, doors and spatial dynamics in order to inscribe the discourse of desire in his texts in an indirect way that he could later on incorporate into his creations for the stage. It is noteworthy how many of the climactic moments of other early short stories are placed on or around a door’s threshold. A mansion’s threshold becomes the symbolic ‘altar of some wrathful god’ where the fearful trash picker in ‘A Lady’s Beaded Bag’ (1930) returns to its legitimate owner the money-laden bag he has found in the garbage, relinquishing thus his only chance to make the ‘enchanting visions of the pleasures which this money could bring him’ come true (Willliams 1994: 15). The tragic love story of ‘Something by Tolstoi’ (1930–1) concludes with the clanking of ‘the heavy black key to the bookshop’ being dropped by the returning wife when she discovers her abandoned husband is not able to remember her anymore ← 132 | 133 → (Willliams 1994: 25). In ‘Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton’ (1935), the origin for the homonymous play from 1946 and for the controversial film Baby Doll (1957), Mrs. Meighan tries to resist the sensual advances of the syndicate man that she has to entertain on her porch while her husband is away, but as ‘all the resistance flow[s] out of her flesh like water’, she is pushed in by the little, dark man through doors he progressively opens into the darkness of her house (Willliams 1994: 48).
Moreover, this spatial allegory rooted in the gothic tradition brings with it the figure of the uncanny abject as that character able to stand on the threshold, defying boundaries, classifications and social control, and attracting the subject to the place where the border of his or her self-enclosed identity is pulled down or apart. It is not only the female characters who are raped – openly or symbolically– and experience that breaching of bodily/psychic/spatial limits; men such as those in ‘Gift of an Apple’ or ‘Rubio y Morena’ and also perpetrators such as John in ‘The Important Thing’ face their own abjects and are drawn to the thresholds where the foundations of their selves quiver. Even Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire faces in Blanche ‘a double significance: She is both the Phallic Mother and the abjection (the feminizing abjection) he fears in himself’ (Bedient 1993: 55), allowing for a new reading of their ambivalent relation. The importance of this spatial allegory definitely encourages future research into Williams’s stagecraft from a semiotic perspective that would focus not just on cases of rape but also on other spatial limits, openings and breakages that are part of the signifying network that weaves theatrical space, historical space, psychic reality, and literary text together (Übersfeld 1989: 108–43).
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1 Bak is quoting Williams’s Not About Nightingales, ed. with an Introduction by Allean Hale (New York: New Directions, 1998).
2 An unpublished play by Williams is in fact entitled American Gothic, but it makes reference to Grant Wood’s painting, as Bak (2009a) has argued, rather than to the literary movement.
3 References to this story just appear in comprehensive volumes on Williams, and then only briefly. Vannatta considers that it is in ‘Accent’ that ‘for the first time [Williams] clearly employs his own experiences as substance for a short story’ by reflecting his own and his sister Rose’s anxieties onto the two characters; he also finds that this story shows a more mature use of modernist techniques such as the use of imagery and apparently commonplace actions to convey great emotional intensity (1988: 11–12). Heintzelman and Smith-Howard’s Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams opens its alphabetical list of works with ‘Accent’, but they only include a synopsis and a mention about its resemblance with the story ‘The Important Thing’, ‘another tale of strained romantic tension between a budding writer and an ambitious yet sensitive female counterpart’ (2005: 19). This latter story will be dealt with later in this chapter.
4 Upon his appearance, Catharine feels ‘herself impaled like a butterfly upon the semi-darkness of the staircase’, ‘unclothed’ (Williams: 1994: 41–2).
5 ‘Mrs. Henderson glared at him suspiciously’ (Williams 1994: 213), Mrs Jameson looks at Haskell ‘sharply’, and ‘Mr. Owens gave him the same look that customers gave him, puzzled, uneasy, a little bit hostile’ (Williams 1994: 214).