Gender Conflicts in the Dramas of Tennessee Williams

Table of Contents

1  Introduction  2

2  Theories on Gender  4

3  Theories on Conflict  9

4  Gender Conflicts  10

5  The Cultural Background of the Plays The United States South  11

5.1  Historical Background of the United States South  12

5.2  Southern Culture and Identity  14

5.3  Gender Roles in the South  15

6  Southern Culture in the Dramas of Tennessee Williams  18

6.1  Southern Culture and Identity as a Source of Gender Conflicts in Cat on a Hot Tin  

  Roof  18

6.2  Southern Culture and Identity as a Source of Gender Conflicts in A Streetcar Named  

  Desire  21

7  Sexuality in the Dramas of Tennessee Williams  23

7.1  Sexuality as a Source of Gender Conflicts in A Streetcar Named Desire  23

7.1.1  Blanche  23

7.1.2  Stella and Stanley  25

7.2  Sexuality as a Source of Gender Conflicts in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  26

7.2.1  Big Daddy  26

7.2.2  Mae and Gooper  28

7.2.3  Brick and Maggie  28

8  Homosexuality in the Dramas of Tennessee Williams  31

8.1  Gender Conflicts Related to Homosexuality in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  32

8.1.1  Brick s and Skipper s Relationship a Source of Conflict for Maggie  

  and Brick  32

8.1.2  Brick s and Skipper s Relationship as Source of Conflict for Big Daddy  

  and Brick  34

8.2  Gender Conflicts related to Homosexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire  35

9  Conclusion  37

10  Works Cited  38

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1 Introduction

Tennessee Williams has often been called the American national poet of the perverse and a dirty writer because a recurrent theme in his work is sexual deviation, such as nymphomania, promiscuity, rape, impotence, homosexuality, profligacy, frigidity, cannibalism, and castration (Bauer-Briski 11).

This statement clearly suggests the controversy with which Tennessee Williams’ dramas were perceived by the public and the critics. It is well known that conflicts on these issues can be found in many of his plays. This raises the question as to what extent these conflicts are related to specific gender roles and their subordinate themes. Williams once said that he has never written about anything he has not experienced first hand, thus most of the conflict issues can be considered to be autobiographical to a certain extent. As Williams’ childhood was restricted to a rather reclusive life due to diphtheria, which forced him to spend almost his entire childhood at home with his family, the experiences with his mother, father and sister shaped not only his character, but also the themes in his plays. His upbringing was characterised by Puritanism which was of vital importance in his family. His mother later became the model for his antiquated Southern Belles and overprotective mothers in the plays. His boisterous father was perceived as a frightening and alien male presence by him, his sister and his mother. He later became the model for the same type of harsh, brutal characters in his plays, such as Big Daddy and Stanley Kowalski (Falk 155 f). Yet, not only his Puritan upbringing shaped his life, but also the fact that he grew up in the South of the United States, in the Mississippi Delta, and the region’s heat, its storms, floods, the division into social classes, the colourful imagery and rhythms of the language were to shape his setting and dialogue (Tischler 2).The uniqueness of the South along with its cultural and social characteristics is embodied in many of his plays, and the social roles appointed to the people living there offers an extensive basis of analysis for not only gender roles, but also the related conflicts. In addition to this, Williams was known as being homosexual and leading a very promiscuous life, especially with men much younger than him (Bauer-Briski 11). Homosexuality also plays a very important role in some of his plays, but, as it will be analysed later, even though it is the source of highly important conflicts in the play, it is only mentioned in a very subtle and careful manner.

The two plays A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were chosen as the basis of the analysis of gender conflicts in Williams’ dramas, because they both represent not only very fruitful sources for gender conflicts, but also contrasting and unanimous elements on the

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issues. The Glass Menagerie was deliberately left out in this analysis even though it

represents a good basis of analysis in terms of gender conflicts related to Southern culture, but

it was found not suitable in terms of sexuality and especially homosexuality, as it entirely

lacks elements of the latter, and homosexuality is regarded as a very important and interesting

factor in the analysis of gender and its related conflicts.

In order to understand the gender roles and conflicts in the plays an analysis of Southern

culture was regarded as being necessary, which was also of great concern to Williams as he

states in the foreword to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

I once saw a group of little girls on a Mississippi sidewalk, all dolled up in their mothers’ and sisters’ castoff finery, old raggedy ball gowns and plumed hats and high- heeled slippers, enacting a meeting of ladies in a parlor with a perfect mimicry of polite Southern gush and simper. But one child was not satisfied with the attention paid her enraptured performance by the others, they were too involved in their own performances to suit her, so she stretched out her skinny arms and threw back her skinny neck and shrieked to the deaf heavens and her equally oblivious playmates, “ Look at me, loot at me, look at me!” And then her mother’s high-heeled slippers threw her off balance and she fell to the sidewalk in a great howling tangle of soiled white satin and torn pink net, and still nobody looked at her. I wonder if she is not, now, a Southern writer (6).

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2 Theories on Gender

In linguistic terms, gender concerns substantives and is a vital component in the grammar of many languages. In this context it is a category by which words and grammatical forms are classified according to not only sex or the absence of sex (neutral gender) but also other characteristics, such as morphological characteristics in what is called “grammatical gender.” In English, however, there is almost no such thing as a gender in the grammatical sense, meaning that no gender is applied to non human beings, objects and things. Many nouns still seem to have a gender, though, but this development is rather accidental than intentional (Miller 63).

In the German language, the English words sex and gender translate as the same word, Geschlecht. As a result, in German, there exists no distinction between the meanings of these expressions, as there is only one translation. In English, however, this distinction has been the basis of various discussions, mainly socio-philosophical ones, and its analysis raises subsequent questions which shall be analysed as well. Commonly, the term gender is used to refer to the difference between men and women. Usually, this is meant in a sexual context, actually referring to the biological sex of a person. In everyday communication, the terms sex and gender are often used simultaneously.

One of many theories concerned with this topic is the so-called biological determinism, in its earliest stages present in Aristotle’s philosophies, justifying social inequalities on the basis of physical, mental and moral inferiority of women. This determinism is based on the assumption that the differences between men and women, in terms of character traits, behaviour, social relationships, and social and economic status, are a results of their biological constitution (Swanson 45 ff). The consequence of this theory shall be brought up again later in the gender discussion.

It shall be supposed that the general difference between gender and sex is that sex is considered to be the biological constitution of the body, a human being comes equipped with, whereas gender is culturally constituted. In addition to that, gender is not a property of bodies or something originally existent in human beings. It is rather the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours and social relations (de Lauretis 3). Therefore, it cannot be concluded that gender is to any extent linked to sex, is the causal result of it, nor that its condition and definition is as fixed as that of sex. Assuming that gender is the cultural meaning which the sexed body takes on, it becomes obvious that a gender cannot be said to derive from a sex in any way (Butler 9). Therefore it is suggested that there is a strict distinction between sexed

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bodies and culturally constructed genders, representing a quite apparent discontinuity. This non-existent link between the biological sex and the cultural gender means that the gender construction of men does not necessarily refer to male bodies and that women does not only apply to female ones (Butler 10).

It is often assumed that gender is the representation, the mirror image, of sex and is therefore not only binary, but also linked to or to a certain extent restricted by it. This assumption actually represents a contradiction, but since the existence of two sexes in terms of morphology and constitution does not directly imply that there are also only two types of genders, it shall be assumed that there are more than two genders. It shall be added that even though there are naturally only two biological sexes, the existence of several variations to this fact cannot be denied, as there is medical evidence to this.

It can therefore be deducted that the culturally constructed gender is independent of sex. It is important to note that gender is not only the cultural inscription of meaning on a given sex, but that it is also the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. Therefore, the relationship between sex and nature is the same as the relationship between gender and culture (Butler 11).

As already mentioned above, gender is constructed, but does that mean that the differences of the genders are created and limited by certain laws?

The assumption that gender is constructed implies that the body simply receives the gender in a passive way, and that this is controlled by an inexorable law. If then gender was determined and fixed, then culture, and not biology, would be the origin of identity.

Another suggestion is that a person rather becomes a certain type of gender than being one. This alteration always happens under the cultural compulsion to become that certain gender, and this compulsion does not come from sex (Butler 12).

There are two ways to place the body in the gender construction. The body is either “a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed, or an instrument through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning for itself.” The fact that the body is simply a mere medium or instrument which only relates to certain cultural meanings in an external way, is true for either case. However, the body itself can be considered to be a construction, as are the countless bodies which make up the entire domain of gendered subjects, because they do not have any signifiable existence before they are marked by a certain gender.

From the perspective of social scientists, gender is the factor of an analysis, but can also refer “to embodied persons as a mark of biological, linguistic, and/or cultural difference” (Butler

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12). Therefore gender can be considered to be the signification that a body, which has previously been sexually differentiated, assumes, and that the sex is the biological identity. Biological determinists would probably deny the existence of gender, as a cultural construction, because biological destiny is final and cannot be altered. Theories of biological determinism also imply that a change in the roles and hierarchy, which nature has designed for each individual, is “impossible, or at least, if possible, it is dangerous, immoral, regressive or antievolutionary” (Swanson 45).

However, even in the above mentioned case, the signification does only come into existence when it is in relation to another, opposing signification. Especially the feminist point of view supports the fact that gender is a relation, although here it is often considered to be a set of relations rather than just one. From the humanist feminist point of view, gender is an “attribute of a person who is characterised essentially as a pregendered substance or ‘core’, called the person, denoting a universal capacity for reason, moral deliberation, or language” (Butler 14). Yet, historical and anthropological positions, which understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specific contexts, displace the universal conception of the person as a point of departure for a social theory of gender. This assumption suggests that the constructed relations which determine what the person is, and especially what gender is, are always in a relative relation. Therefore it cannot be said that gender is a substantive being, but rather a relative point of convergence among sets of relations which are historically and culturally specific (Butler 15).

DE LAURETIS agrees on the point that gender can only signify a relation. She claims that gender is in fact a representation, but not only in the sense that every word and sign refers to its referent, which can be an object, a thing, or an animate being. Gender is the representation of a certain relation, in fact, that of belonging to a certain class, group or category. Therefore gender constructs a relation between one entity and several other entities, which are previously constituted as a class. Thus, this relation is one of belonging. Assuming that one of these entities is an individual, it can be said that gender assigns to this individual a position within a class and also one between them and other preconstituted classes. Hence, gender does not represent an individual, but instead, a relation, which is a social relation (de Lauretis 3ff). The term gender can therefore be used to denote any kind role that exists between individuals, or between an individuals, a class of individuals and society in general . In feminist social studies there is a conceptual structure called the sex-gender system, which is a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus. It is a representation system which assigns meaning, such as identity, value, prestige, location in kinship, status in the social hierarchy,

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etc., to individuals within society. As already mentioned, gender represents relations which are positions in classes. If then gender representations are social positions which carry different meanings, “then for someone to be represented and to represent oneself as male or female implies the assumption of the whole of those meaning effects” (de Lauretis 5). Therefore, “the construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation and self-representation” (de Lauretis 5).

If gender then is a type of cultural role which depends on the contextual relations surrounding it, what can be meant by identity, or even gender identity?

Sociologically it is suggested that the notion of the person is an “agency that claims ontological priority to the various roles and functions through which it assumes socials visibility and meaning” (Butler 22). In terms of philosophical discourse, the notion of the person has been thoroughly discussed, and it is being assumed that “whatever social context the person is “in” remains somehow externally related to the definitional structure of personhood, be that consciousness, the capacity of language, or moral deliberation” (Butler 22). Concerning the constitution of personal identity, philosophical sources usually deal with the question as of what internal feature of the person establishes this self-identity or continuity of the person through time. BUTLER, however, is mainly concerned with the question as to what extent “regulatory practises of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person” (Butler 23). Is identity a descriptive feature of experience or a normative ideal? Is identity governed by these regulatory practises to the same extent as gender is? BUTLER notes that the coherence and the continuity of the person are rather socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility than logical or analytic features of personhood (Butler 23). Since identity is assured through sex, gender and sexuality, the notion of the person is called into question by gendered beings who “appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined” (Butler 23). This implies that the identity of beings failing to conform to these norms is questionable, because they are incoherent and discontinuous. Those genders which display and maintain coherent and continuous relations among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire are said to be intelligible genders. Since the claims of discontinuity and incoherence always depend on their relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, they are constantly prohibited and produced by the same laws that seek to establish connections between biological sex, culturally constructed genders, and the way they are manifested in sexual desires which are expressed through sexual practice (Butler