Tennesse Williams

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Tennesse Williams
“Tennesse Williams saw himself as a shy, sensitive and gifted man trapped in a world where mendacity replaced communication, brute violence replaced love, and loneliness.” (Ryan 3176) This one statement explains most of Williams’s life. He grew up and went to school in the South. While growing up, he had a disfunctional family. The time frame in which he grew also had an extreme effect upon his writing. Tennesse Williams used his many observations of the South’s emergence from naiveté and the daily life of the people’s struggle to stay live in body and spirit to display the cruelty of his time and place.
Williams’s Southern influences are clear when reading his work. For example, his characters from A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche and Mitch both have a tenacious Southern persuasion. Both are refined, genteel, softhearted, and cultured. In addition, the wild Cecilians of The RoseTattoo, show some the South’s ideal that Mediterranean people have more fun (Unger 380). Unger further thinks that the fun-loving Mexicans in The Iguana demonstrate that if foreigners ever cease to be foreigners; they will still be outsiders (381). This is a Southern view and was important to Williams’s writing style.
Speaking of the Southern view, it had much impact in Tennesse’s works. For instance, in Streetcar, Leonard Unger’s view was “…the rape of Blanche signifies the ravishment of the tender, sensitive, and delicate by the savage and brutal forces of modern society” (Unger 380). Williams was born March 26, 1911 in Columbus,
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Mississippi (Ryan 3172). The South he grew up in was gentile, refined, and very relaxed. Considering the time in which the play was written (1947, Hippograph Web Page), the “rape” clearly depicts the Great Depression’s effects on the South. Everyone had to fight to hold a job, buy food, and just plainly, to survive during that ravenous and despondent tim...