The Dichotomous World Of Tennessee Williams

Abstract

Tennessee Williams is often identified as a playwright of ‘self’. This self alludes to himself and many other wandering souls who are, time and again, relegated to the realms of aberrant or anomalous. These deviances are generally part of constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality and self. His characters are at constant strife with the world as well as with the self. Williams presents a very poignant state of pathos of these characters, which is ingeniously accentuated by the virtue of playwriting, diction and stagecraft. In this article we will try to understand the writer and creator, through his depictions, who was a loner, dubbed as a variant due to his sexuality and gentle nature. The article will explore that how in a hetero-normative world homosexuality leads to homophobia, how assertion of one’s needs and pleasure is misconstrued as a disease and how the system fails to understand the spiritual dimension of love and sex.