Abstract
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE THAT I AM writing a book on the representation of mama’s boys in postwar American culture, almost invariably their response includes the suggestion to pay attention to the work of Tennessee Williams, in particular to his breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie (1944). Indeed, Amanda Wingfield is a prototypical overbearing mother and her son Tom can be credibly read as a closeted homosexual. However, I opt to focus on another of Williams’s plays—namely, Suddenly Last Summer (1958).1 This is because it has been somewhat overlooked in the Williams canon, in my opinion undeservedly so.2 In addition, whereas The Glass Menagerie is a relatively tidy and coherent play, Suddenly Last Summer is cluttered and weird, thus posing a greater interpretive challenge.
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Notes
My analysis is of the script of Suddenly Last Summer, not of a performance of the play. This is also why I ascribe the text to Williams and not to a director. I work with the Library of America edition published in 2000, which is a copy of the first printing of the script by New Directions in April 1958, three months after the play’s Off-Broadway debut. When citing from this text, I refer to it as SLS between parentheses.
To give but one example of this oversight, in his otherwise excellent study of all things queer in relation to Williams, David Savran fails to mention Suddenly Last Summer even once in Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (1992).
Perhaps here illumination is shed on a puzzling issue touched upon in note nine to Chapter 2. In Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (1991), Ross Chambers states that the final sentence of a narrative often serves as an instigator of the textual function and its concomitant active reading mode, but he does not explain why this is so (Chambers, Room 42). I suggest that when a reader cannot provide closure to a narrative by the time of the final sentence without the performance of conscious interpretive work, the desire for closure entices her to engage in a conscious act of interpretation.
Perhaps not inconsequential in this respect, Wilde used the pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth” in the final years of his life.
There is possibly yet another element— a sixth micro-question— to Violet’s story that acquires significance with Catharine’s announcement that Sebastian was gay. Violet sounds out her name and Sebastian’s name in unison— “Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian” (SLS 111)— which for me evokes the twins Sebastian and Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1623). Critics have suggested that Sebastian in Twelfth Night can be homoerotically linked to Antonio— see for instance Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice” (1992).
Suddenly Last Summer premiered Off-Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of the double bill Garden District, which opened with Something Unspoken, a oneact play Williams had written in 1953. In Something Unspoken, wealthy Cornelia tries to explicate her amorous feelings for her secretary Grace, but the latter successfully wards off the actual utterance. With both plays revolving around a queerly invested female couple, Garden District proves to be thematically more coherent than previous critics have thought.
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© 2012 Roel van den Oever
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van den Oever, R. (2012). Narrative Closure and Suddenly Last Summer. In: Mama’s Boy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295088_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295088_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44549-3
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