عنوان

Desire over Protest :

TLets520460

Desire over Protest :

[Thesis]

Hooper , Michael Spencer David

Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams

University of East Anglia

2009

Ph.D.

University of East Anglia

2009

Desire over Protest: Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams examinesgrowing claims that Tennessee Williams is fundamentally, or in large part, a politicalwriter. Drawing on newly published texts from both ends of Williams's career, his prosefiction, essays and unpublished manuscript material, this study uniquely charts thewriter's development from an apprenticeship influenced by the radical social drama ofthe nineteen thirties, through the commercial successes of the nineteen forties andfifties, to his most experimental late work. Unlike the books and articles that havetackled separate aspects of Williams's writing within the broad area of politics, thisstudy is structured in chapters that combine mainstream ideology, homosexuality, raceand gender. Many of the texts analysed contain both overt and indirect references tosocial conditions, discrimination, regimes and the ethics of America's foreign policy,but these are ultimately of secondary concern. Though Williams presented himself as arevolutionary instinctively allied to a leftist politics, his writing privileges privaterelationships, the power struggles that are, or emerge from, sexual encounters. Theresulting vision is one of fractured communities, of individuals selfishly pursuing linesof desire that are self-destructive or, increasingly and conversely, just a mode ofsurvival. As Robert F. Gross reminds us, Williams's work assumes a liberalindividualist stance. Effectively, it deconstructs the tyranny and alienation of modernlife only to admit the impossibility of refashioning something more structurallyegalitarian and spiritually humane. Protest is diagnostic, not corrective; desire hassovereignty

Hooper , Michael Spencer David

University of East Anglia

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y