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Saturday, February 9, 2019

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 have destroyed 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 to the south2 Holditch and Leavitts book is vivacious with nostalgia for a southeasterly that no longer exists a culture of pad and ease, of cavalier behavior and stoic endurance, a place where the romantic mental imagery is alive and in perpetual struggle with the crude realism of modernity. concord to the authors, this paradise lost was crucial to the dramatic imagination of Williams, but higher up all it seems to have inspired their own.Besides establishing Williamss intimate ties with the South and revealing the biographical material beyond the writers fiction, the book relishes the perpetuation of Southern mythologies. The childishness of Thomas Lanier Williams III, who was born in Co lumbus, Mississippi, and raised in various different Southern locations, is described as nothing less than a Confederate idyll, regardless of the fathers evident alcoholism, frequent family quarrels, and the older sisters fragile 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 business office that clouds Toms otherwise sunny childhood, but his displacement to the North. And since southerners . . . have deep root in their own native soil and do not run 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 tangle sheltered from personal and social conflicts. The alienation and conflicts of the North, in turn, trigger the chemise of the Southern past into a comforting myth His experiences, good and bad, served as a sort of magical catalyst to convert the past into a precious stone of memory, enriching it with a luster and magnificence it may never have possessed in reality. That this myth had little to do with the cover reality of the South stands beyond question. But one wonders for whom the magical reincarnation of the past took place. After all, even in his dramatic imagination the South was never simply just a place of enduring fostering and romanticism to Williams, but it was also the site of very concrete and lots cruel social, ethnic, and sexual conflicts.

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