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In/Out of the Closet: Gay Characters in Tennessee Williams’s Plays

Author: XiaoZuo
Tutor: LingJianE
School: Hunan University of Science and Technology
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: Tennessee Williams gay characters gay closet
CLC:
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 330
Quote: 1
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Abstract

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is one of America’s best and most dedicated playwrights. Among the elements that contribute to his popular and critical acclaim is his portrayal of gay characters trapped in the society due to their homosexual identity. Between Williams’s masterful dramatic art and his insider’s experience of gay life, these people turn out to be the first prominent gay characters in modern American drama.Basing its framework on what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the gay closet, this study examines gay characters in Williams’s major plays with full awareness of their varying attitude toward the unorthodox identity within a period of forty years, arguing the earlier ones tend to hide in the closet while more recent ones tend to step out of it. Among the first type are Allan Grey in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Brick Pollitt and Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). While Allan Grey appears to be a fugitive gay, Brick seems to be more panic than his father Big Daddy who learns to tolerate with his homosexuality.Among the second type are Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and Quentin in Small Craft Warnings (1972). Different from their precursors, they are much more open with the gay closet. While Sebastian Venable is characterized as a violent gay, Quentin still goes beyond to become an introspective gay pondering over his dilemma.To be in or out of the closet is the question for them all. It confuses their lives so much that such a clear-cut categorization may not seem fair enough. The efforts, however, still matter a great deal in that they not only exemplify Williams’s nuanced representation of the gay people, but also foreground a particular perspective of isolated modern men.

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