Tennessee WIlliams :: essays research papers fc

IT is OUT OF REGRET FOR A SOUTH that no longer exists that I write of the forces that read undo it, Tennessee Williams explained. This also seems to be the case for Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt, the authors of the beautiful biographical album Tennessee Williams and the South2 Holditch and Leavitts book is alive with nostalgia for a South that no longer exists a culture of grace and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a turn out where the romantic inclination is alive and in perpetual struggle with the in the altogether realism of modernity. According to the authors, this paradise lost was crucial to the striking imagination of Williams, but above all it seems to have inspired their own.Besides establishing Williamss advise ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writers fiction, the book relishes the protraction of Southern romanceologies. The childhood of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Columbus, Mississ ippi, and raised in various other Southern locations, is described as nonhing slight than a southern idyll, regardless of the fathers evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sisters frail health. However, these fundamental problems erupted suddenly and violently, so the authors insist, only with the familys move north to St. Louis. Notably, it is not the innate family situation that clouds Toms otherwise sunny childhood, but his dis daubment to the North. And since southerners . . . have deep roots in their own native soil and do not tend to forget the land that gave them birth, the young Tom could never feel at home in the cold North.Rehearsing such cliches of a long-standing North-South dichotomy, the authors establish the South as a warm and comfortable haven, in which Williams apparently felt sheltered from personal and social conflicts. The alienation and conflicts of the North, in turn, trigger the transformation of the Southern past into a comforting my th His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to interchange the past into a precious st ane of memory, enriching it with a luster and glare it may never have possessed in reality. That this myth had small-scale to do with the concrete reality of the South stands beyond question. But one wonders for whom the magical conversion of the past took place. After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring gentility and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very(prenominal) concrete and often cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts.