Showing or Telling: Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Williams

Author(s): Nancy Anne Cluck

Source: American Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 84-93
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924921
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 Showing or Telling: Narrators in the Drama of
Tennessee Williams

NANCY ANNE CLUCK

University of Texas at Dallas

Tl RADITIONALLY, drama has been described as the most direct a

. objective of the literary genres. Drama requires neither the
speaker of the lyric poem nor the narrator of prose fiction. It is a
uniquely unmediated vision which relies on action rather than de-
scription. This emphasis on showing rather than telling often be-
comes the envy of writers in other genres. Many novelists and critics
of novels aspire to let a story tell itself through the actions of its
characters. In fact, Percy Lubbock implies that a novel is successful
to the extent that it shows and unsuccessful to the extent that it tells.
In his discussion of The Ambassadors, Lubbock notes:

Just as the writer of a play embodies his subject in visible action and
audible speech, so the novelist, dealing with a situation like Strether's,
represents it by means of the movement that flickers over the surface of
his mind. . . . In drama of the theatre a character must bear his part
unaided; if he is required to be a desperate man, harbouring thoughts of
crime, he cannot look to the author to appear at the side of the stage and
inform the audience of the fact; he must express it for himself through his
words and deeds, his looks and tones. The playwright so arranges the
matter that these will be enough, the spectator will make the right
inference.'

Significantly, Lubbock writes here of the "drama of the theatre," the

acted drama. The unacted drama may be quite different, however,
for it moves toward the genre of fiction. Lubbock perspicuously ob-
serves that "if he (the novelist) offers nothing but the bare dialogue,
he is writing a kind of play; just as the dramatist, amplifying his play
with 'stage-directions' and putting it forth to be read in a book, has
really written a kind of novel."2 The dramatist may, then, tell his
reader some things through his stage directions, as the narrator of a
novel relates information.

1 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London, I92I; rpt. New York, I957), p. I57.
2 The Craft of Fiction, p. III.

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 Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Williams 85

Stage directions are most often confined, though, to short des

tions of where and how a character should move or what express
he should assume. Rarely do they advance the action of the plot or
provide dramatically inaccessible insights into character or theme.
Any stage direction which cannot be subsumed into the action of the
play itself is generally considered superfluous and antithetical to the
art. The dramatist may speak to his readers at length in a preface as
Shaw did, but rarely does he include material directed exclusively to
the reader in the body of the play. Yet, Tennessee Williams seems
to be poet, storyteller, critic, and philosopher in many of his stage
directions without detracting from the integrity of his acted drama.
He vigorously affirms his concern with the acted play, while he
deprecates the written form in his "Afterword" to Camino Real:

There are plays meant for reading. I have read them. I have read the
works of 'thinking playwrights' as distinguished from us who are per-
mitted only to feel, and probably read them earlier and appreciated them
as much as those who invoke their names nowadays like the incantation
of Aristophanes' frogs. But the incontinent blaze of live theatre, a theatre
meant for seeing and for feeling, has never been and never will be extin-
guished by a bucket brigade of critics, new or old, bearing vessels that
range from cut-glass punch bowl to Haviland teacup. And in my dissident
opinion, a play in a book is only the shadow of a play and not even a clear
shadow of it.3

Certainly, Williams's preference for the acted play should not be

ignored. This statement notwithstanding, however, Williams often
reveals himself as poet and even as novelist, not only in his poems
and his fiction, but, perhaps most successfully, in the plays.
It is through Tom Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie that we can
begin to educe the poet-novelist of the drama. The autobiographical
similarity between Tom Wingfield and Tennessee Williams has long
been recognized, but even without these affinities, Tom, the narrator/
character/poet/playwright, can furnish insights into how Williams
works. Tom is the acknowledged narrator of this play in which he
is also a major character.
Williams states that "the narrator is an undisguised convention of
the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention is con-

3 Tennessee Williams, "Afterword" to Camino Real in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams

(I953; rpt. New York, I970), II, 423.

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86 American Literature

venient to his purpose."4 Tom does present the play, but he is also
very much involved in it. He is not simply an objective observer who
serves as a point of view; he is a major character and even play-
wright. The setting of the play is in his memory, and in the opening
speech, he casts himself as artist-magician: "Yet, I have tricks in my
pockets, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage
magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth, I
give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (I, i, p. 22). As
playwright, he creates the play to exorcise his sister from his memory,
to try to explain his own actions to himself, and to free himself from
his guilt. He exits memory, enters the present time of the Epilogue,
and exclaims: "Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but
I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I
cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak
to the nearest stranger-anything that can blow your candles out!
For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles,
Laura-and so goodbye . . ." (II, vii, p. "I5). Neither Tom the
character within the play nor Tom the playwright can escape the
reality of Laura in the present.
Tom is even identified as stage manager at one point in the play.
As Amanda melodramatically recounts how things used to be when
she had gentlemen callers at the plantation in Mississippi, the stage
directions read: "Tom motions for music and a spot of light on
Amanda, her eyes lift, her face glows, her voice becomes rich and
elegiac" (I, i, p. 27). Tom not only arranges setting and theme; he
also directs the technical aspects of the play at this point.
Tom is, then, the undisguised narrator and central character in this
play. Yet there is also a disguised narrator who may also be associated
with Tom in so far as Tom is a poet, a stand-in for Williams, and the
creator of the play. This narrator who appears primarily in the stage
directions, functions very much like a dramatized narrator in prose
fiction; he is one of the characters who also tells the story. Through
Tom, who acts, narrates, directs, and writes his play, we can begin
to understand how Williams works. He does not merely let the play
tell itself; like Tom he frequently interjects himself or another im-
plied narrator into the play to give the reader information which

4Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (I949; rpt. New York, I970), p. 22. All
further references to this play will be from this source.

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 Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Williams 87

could not be communicated to the audience of the performed play,

to comment on the themes, and, occasionally, to imbue the stage
directions with a metaphoric quality.
Often the story-teller simply provides straightforward information
much as the novelist does. For example, we are told in Act I, iii that
Amanda wears an old robe, "much too large for her slight figure, a
relic of the faithless Mr. Wingfield" (p. 40). The audience in the
theatre could not possibly know that the robe was once her hus-
band's. A similar bit of information is given in the stage directions
in Scene iv. Preparing to go outside, Laura pulls on a coat which is
"one of Amanda's inaccurately made-over, the sleeves too short for
Laura" (p. 47). Although the audience will undoubtedly know the
coat is old and ill-fitting, only the reader receives the definite infor-
mation that it has belonged to Amanda. Still later, as Laura prepares
for her gentleman caller, we are told that her dress is "colored and
designed by memory" (II, vi, p. 69). How can this be conceived as
a direction to actors or even to costume designers? Whose memory
had designed it and even colored it? Since this is a memory play, we
must assume that Tom's memory furnishes the shape and color.
Nevertheless, this is information provided only for the reader-not
for the theatre audience.
The implied narrator also comments on action and theme from his
mask in the stage directions. After the quarrel between Amanda and
Tom, he tells us that it was "probably precipitated by Amanda's
interruption of Tom's creative labor (I, iii, p. 40). Even the narrator
seems not to be entirely sure, but he can comment on probable cause.
He becomes more philosophic in I, iv, when he describes the manner
in which Tom shakes his noisemaker in counterpoint to the church
bell "as if to express the tiny spasm of man in contrast to the sustained
power and dignity of the Almighty" (p. 44).
The philosopher becomes poet in some of his narration. For exam-
ple, he tells us in I, vi, that "It is about five on a Friday evening of
late spring" which comes "scattering poems in the sky" (II, vi, p. 69).
There is no way that, through set or actions, the audience could know
this spring scatters poems. At the beginning of this same scene, the
following description is given of Laura: "A fragile, unearthly pretti-
ness has come out in Laura: she is like a piece of translucent glass
touched by light, given momentary radiance, not actual, not lasting"

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 88 American Literature

(p. 69). Once again the reader, not the theatre audience, has the
advantage of the poetic metaphor.
The same beauty of poetic expression occurs later when Laura sits
at the table with her gentleman caller. As the curtains billow, we are
told that "there is a sorrowful murmur from the deep blue dusk"
(II, vi, p. 83). In II, vii, the stage directions acquire a pattern of
imagery from the action. Because Tom has chosen not to pay the
light bill, the house is dark, and all of this section is played to the
light of candles which Jim has carried in and set beside Laura. The
actual light of the play is transformed into poetic metaphor when
Jim leans toward Laura "with a warmth and charm which lights her
inwardly with altar candles" (II, vii, 97). After he reveals his engage-
ment, "the holy candles on the altar of Laura's face have been snuffed
out" (II, vii, p. 97). This pattern of imagery, created by the narrator/
poet of the play, invokes the characteristics of the lyric poem. The
figurative language may inspire the actors to portray the sensitivity
of Laura, but only the reader can perceive the enclosed lyric structure
of the written direction.
In his first successful play, then, Williams creates both undisguised
and disguised narrators, both of whom may be Tom Wingfield/
Tennessee Williams. The persona of the stage direction supplies addi-
tional information, comments on action and theme, and contributes
poetry through patterns of imagery. While the narrative technique
is particularly appropriate to the autobiographical The Glass Me-
nagerie, it serves similar functions in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The narrator of this later play takes his reader into his confidence
with the use of the pronoun "we." This intimacy is exhibited near
the beginning of Act II after Big Daddy asks Reverend Tooker, "Y'
think somebody's about t'kick off around here?" The narrator then
speaks directly from the stage directions to the reader in Act II:
"How he would answer the question we'll never know, as he's spared
the embarassment by the voice of Gooper's wife, Mae, rising high
and clear as she appears with 'Doc' Baugh, the family doctor, through
the hall door."5
Although this disguised narrator sometimes allies himself with
the reader through the pronoun "we," at other times, he seems to be

5 Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (New York, I955), p. 49. All further
references to this work will be from this source.

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 Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Williams 89

omniscient, having unlimited information about the past lives a

families of various characters. Soon after Big Mama's first appea
ance, the reader is told that "her 'family' was maybe a little supe
to Big Daddy's but not much" (I, p. 33). In Act II we are told
"Big Daddy is famous for his jokes at Big Mama's expense, an
nobody laughs louder than Big Mama herself, though someti
they're pretty cruel and Big Mama has to pick up or fuss with so
thing to cover the hurt that the loud laugh doesn't quite cov
(p. 50). After Big Mama has played her own sort of joke on
preacher, the narrator elaborates, "Big Mama is notorious through
the Delta for this sort of inelegant horseplay, Margaret looks on
indulgent humor, sipping Dubonnet 'on the rocks' and watch
Brick, but Mae and Gooper exchange signs of humorless anxiety o
these antics, the sort of behavior which Mae thinks may account
their failure to quite get in with the smartest young married se
Memphis, despite all. One of the Negroes, Lacy or Sookey, peeks
cackling. They are waiting for a sign to bring in the cake and ch
pagne. But Big Daddy's not amused. He doesn't understand why,
spite of the infinite relief he's received from the doctor's report,
still has these same old fox teeth in his guts. 'This spastic thing
is something,' he says to himself, but aloud he roar at Big Ma
(II, p. 5I). Some of this direction cues the actors: Maggie can sip h
Dubonnet, Mae can look askance at Gooper, and the Negroes ca
look in. But the reader must be told that Big Mama is notorious
her horseplay; he must be told Mae's thoughts by someone who h
access to them; and only with the help of an omniscient narrator
he know what Big Daddy is thinking, much less saying to himsel
The narrator knows more about Brick than Brick himself d
During the long conversation between Brick and Big Daddy in
Act II, the omniscient narrator comments: "Brick looks back at his
father again. He has already decided, without knowing he has made
this decision, that he is going to tell his father that he is dying of
cancer. Only this could even the score between them: one inadmissi-
ble thing in return for another" (II, p. go).
Although the theatre audience can guess at the marital relationship
of Big Mama and Big Daddy, the reader of the play receives more
specific information. In Act III, when Big Mama fears she is about
to learn bad news from the doctor, she asks, "Is there? Something?
Something that I? Don't-know ?" The stage directions follow, "In

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 go American Literature

these few words, this startled, very soft,

the history of her forty-five years with
embarrassingly true-hearted and simp
Daddy, who must have had something Br
loved so much by the 'simple expedient' o
turb his charming detachment, also once
virile beauty" (III, p. 103). The action of t
love for Big Daddy, but this comment tell
it has always been, and explicitly points o
Big Daddy and Brick.
This narrator is similar to the one in The Glass Menagerie in his
ability to extract from the language of the acted play a pattern of
imagery for the stage directions. Animal imagery abounds; Margaret
is Maggie the Cat, the children are no-neck monsters, dogs, and
monkeys. But the stage directions contain an even more conspicuous
pattern. At one point in Act I Brick breaks away from Maggie and
raises a chair "like a liontamer facing a big cat" (I, p. 32). This can,
of course, be acted as can Big Mama's "charging like a rhino" in
Act II or even the actions of the little girl who "hops and shrieks like
a monkey gone mad" (II, p. 75). The interesting point, though, is
the manner by which these directions for acting are appropriated by
the poet/narrator for his similes for Mama's dress, for it has "large
irregular patterns, like the markings of some massive animal" (II,
p. 5o), and for the description of a conversation in Act III when "the
stage sounds like a big bird-cage" (p. ioo). The animal pattern con-
tinues in the description of the preacher, whose smile is "sincere as
a bird-call blown on a hunter's whistle, the living embodiment of the
pious, conventional lie" (II, p. 86).
Finally, during the discussion between Brick and Big Daddy, the
narrator moves from acting directions to commentary on the theme
of the play to drama critic in his long intrusion in Act II:

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his

forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice
hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of
Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that
Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had
to be disavowed to 'keep face' in the world they lived in, may be at the
heart of the 'mendacity' that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may
be at the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of

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 Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Willi'ams 9I

it, not even the most important. The bird I hope to catch in the net of t
play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying
to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy,
flickering, evanescent-fiercely charged-interplay of live human beings in
the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the
revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always
left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to
himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and
probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him
away from 'pat' conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a
play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. (p. 85)

Some of this is direction to the actor; Brick's distress can be acted;

his breath can come fast, and his voice can actually become hoarse.
In the next few sentences, though, the narrator tells the reader what
is being discussed. He no longer seems omniscient as he speculates
that Brick's problem may be his particular mendacity. As if he has
not quite made his point yet, the narrator speaks in the first-person
"I," who must be the playwright since he tells us his intention in the
play. Then, he explains his dramatic theory: the playwright must
always leave some mystery in his characters while attempting to
capture human experience. This long stage direction is the epitome
of telling as opposed to showing in Tennessee Williams's dramas.
Although the narrator seems much less obvious in the other plays,
he can be discerned at various points. In Streetcar Named Desire, the
reader derives additional information about Stanley and his earlier
life. After supplying a physical description in Act I, the narrator tells
us that "since earliest manhood the center of his life has been plea-
sure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak in-
dulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly
feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete
and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of rough humor,
his love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, every-
thing that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He
sizes women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images
flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them."6
This omniscient narrator, who knows about the past lives of the
characters, also seems able to enter their heads at any moment. For
example, in Camino Real, as Kilroy imagines the body of the gypsy

6 Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York, I947), p. 29.

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92 American Literature

under her veil, the narrator tells us

head."7 We may be able to see his co
actions on stage, but we could hardly
being told.
In The Rose Tattoo, the narrator once again takes the reader into
his confidence by using the familiar "we." After he is kicked by the
salesman, Alvaro screams to Serafina that he must go inside her
house. She is palpably affected by him as she has managed to ignore
males since the death of her husband. The stage directions comment:
"We must understand her profound unconscious response to the
sudden contact with distress as acute as her own."8
Then, at the opening of III, iii the poetic setting is described, as a
human narrator explains to the reader, "We see first the exterior view
of the small frame building against a night sky which is like the
starry blue robe of Our Lady." The simile which associates the sky
with the Virgin cannot be acted: it can only be told.
The poetic qualities of the narrator are evident again in the Pro-
logue to Camino Real. As he sets the stage, the narrator tells the
reader that there "are flickers of a white radiance as though day-
break were a white bird caught in a net and struggling to rise"
(p. 431). Later in the Prologue, he uses the set to comment on one
of the themes of the play: "Upwards is a small balcony and behind
it a large window exposing a wall on which is hung a phoenix
painted on silk: this should be softly lighted now and then in the
play, since resurrections are so much a part of its meaning" (p. 431).
The distinction between drama and prose fiction is artistically
clouded in the plays of Tennessee Williams. He may profess not to
care for the printed drama, but the narrative voice, both disguised
and undisguised, speaks from his directions, and enriches the reader's
experience of his plays. The dramatized narrator of The Glass Me-
nagerie reveals himself to be the slightly disguised playwright and
stage manager as well as poet and actor. While the narrator seems
not to be so obvious in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, a more objectively
presented play, the story-teller appears frequently in stage directions
to take the reader into his confidence, to provide more information

7Tennessee Williams, Camino Real in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (I953; rpt.
New York, I970), II, 547. Further references to this play will be from this source.
8 Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (I950;
rpt. New York, I970), II, 350. All further references to this play will be from this source.

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 Narrators in the Drama of Tennessee Willi.ams 93

about the past lives and the current thoughts of his characters, to
create a pattern of imagery, to comment on the themes of the play,
and finally, to present his theory of playwrighting. Williams does not
confine his own comments to his prefaces as Shaw tended to do, but
tells the story much as the narrator does in prose fiction. He tells in
the printed play while the acted play shows. Each version offers its
own riches for the audience or the reader, for Williams both shows
and tells.

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