684 The American Century: Literature since 1945longed for was some kind of height where she could stand and see out and around
and breathe in the air of her own free life.” That catches perfectly the critical faith in
America that characterizes all Miller’s best work, as well as its intimate blend of the
domestic and the political, family and history. So does Baum’s next remark about
the woman he loved and now sees as representative: “With all her defeats she believed
to the end that the world was meant to be better.”
For Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), too, the world was meant to be better;
however, he and many of his characters believed that it had little chance of ever
being so. “I write from my own tensions,” Williams once observed. “For me, this is a
form of therapy.” And those tensions drove him toward a series of intensely poetic
examinations of the injured spirit: the private pains and passions of lonely individuals
for whom the task of living in the world is almost unendurable. “We’re all of us
sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life!” the main character
Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending (1957) declares. “What does anyone wait for? For
something to happen, for anything to happen, to make things make more sense.”
Waiting, and living in the meantime, so many of Williams’s protagonists are
concerned with nameless fears and insecurities – and with desperate desires, grasping
at anything to numb them, to offer distraction from the pain. Williams called his
fragile, deeply wounded characters “the fugitive kind.” “It appears to me, sometimes,”
he explained, “that there are only two kinds of people who live outside what
e.e. cummings has defined as “this socalled world of ours” – the artists and the
insane.” Williams added that, of course, “there are those who are not practicing
artists and those who have not been committed to asylums” but who have,
nevertheless, “enough of one or both magical elements, lunacy and vision” to see
into the dark heart of things, to sense the raw, cold, frightening nature of life. And he
made those people, often leading ordinary, unheroic lives but far from ordinary
otherwise, the core subject of his plays.
The Glass Menagerie (1945) was the first drama to announce Williams’s voice and
vision: his project of stretching ordinary domestic realism to explore extremes of
sensibility and experience. The domestic setting of the play is transformed by being
filtered through reminiscence. “The play is memory,” Tom Wingfield, the narrator,
announces at the beginning. “Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is
sentimental, it is not realistic.” “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket.... But I am the very
opposite of a stage magician,” Tom explains. “He gives you illusion that has the
appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Williams
deploys evocative language, elusive symbolism, and sly, suggestive glimpses into
processes of thought and emotion that are too ephemeral, too evanescent to be
analyzed or explained. And all of this is to describe the truth, which circulates around
Tom’s memories of his family, living in genteel poverty in St. Louis during the
Depression. Tom recalls his life with his mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle
who clings persistently to glamorous illusions about her past, and with his sister
Laura, a crippled, painfully shy young woman whose intensely private world is
centered on a treasured collection of small glass animals. He recollects how he ached
to leave home, but how his mother insisted he first supply a man to care for Laura inGGray_c05.indd 684ray_c 05 .indd 684 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM