Sexual politics in the work of Tennessee Williams: desire over protest

Abstract

Williams's texts do not defend gay experience noisily or refl ect the politics of liberation movements . On the contrary, they work so quietly, so indirectly -even, on the face of it, negatively -that several critics have accused Williams of adopting a homophobic discourse. h e same is broadly true of his treatment of race and race relations. Seldom given prominent positions, Williams's non-Caucasian characters seem to confi rm and accept a historical marginalization. h ey lack a dissenting voice, either as individuals or collectively, and their victimization seems irreversible. Most have no power base from which to disrupt or depose a white majority and, like Williams's gay characters, no awareness of the social changes that have already been accomplished. In this sense, they are not stereotypes so much as characters caught in a historical specifi city. Equally their presence is more than a token gesture of representation. For, whilst they lack political aspiration, their sexual potency is a source of fascination. It is here that Williams's writing seems to celebrate those qualities that have been regarded with most suspicion by white males: sexual uninhibitedness and enhanced pleasure. As with the gay characters, the elevation of sexual fulfi lment means a corresponding neglect of a more public life -here race relations. Inequalities can only be redressed in essentially private situations where power more frequently shifts towards those whose diff erence becomes a mark of strength, even of subversion.Such power is, of course, temporal and normally fi nite. It also, as David Savran correctly states, amounts to a mythologizing of racial otherness, a straight reversal of power that is itself problematic: 'Following liberalism's lead, many of Williams's works attempt to combat hierarchizing strategies less by unpacking the principle of hierarchy than by inverting the scale and romanticizing an oppressed group.' 1 h is 'romanticizing' creates one-dimensionality, not inclusiveness or the type of inversion that, dominolike, will set off other realignments. Interestingly, the sexual exuberance of the African-American male in particular has been read in the character