cial authorities (represented by the policeman in the black rain
slicker) had squelched.
“aW
ILD
S
oRt oF
S
WeetneSS
”
The tension between sympathy for others and sexual selfish-
ness—between compassion for one’s economically disenfran-
chised and emotionally dejected companion(s) and the need for
personal gratification—pervades nearly everything that
Williams wrote. On the one hand, as Williams acknowledged in
a 1961 interview, as a playwright he was himself most inter-
ested in “people that have problems, people that have to fight
for their reason, people for whom the impact of life and expe-
rience from day to day, night to night, is difficult, people who
come close to cracking.” These are the nonconformist roman-
tics who, like Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named desire
and Hannah Jelkes in
The Night of the iguana
, possess “the
spirit of anarchy” and refuse to “let the world drag [them] down
to its level.” “This country used to be wild, the men and women
were wild and there was a wild sort of sweetness in their hearts,
for each other, but now it’s sick with neon,” Carol Cutrere
laments in
orpheus descending
. Only “the night people”
(whom Williams terms elsewhere the “fugitive kind”) retain
this quality, which their greedy, hard-hearted contemporaries
are determined to stamp out.
On the other hand, Williams was enough of a survivor to
recognize, as Billy and Cora learn in “Two on a Party,” that “sex
has to be slightly selfish to have real excitement.” When the two
friends have sex together for the first and only time,
it was not very satisfactory, perhaps because they were each
too anxious to please the other, each too afraid the other would
be disappointed. ... Start worrying about the other party’s re-
actions and the big charge just isn’t there, and you’ve got to do
it a number of times together before it becomes natural enough
to be a completely satisfactory thing. The first time between
strangers can be like a blaze of light, but when it happens be-
tween people who know each other well and have an estab-
lished affection, it’s likely to be self-conscious and even a little
embarrassing, most of all afterwards.
If one partner is “too anxious to please the other, each too afraid
that the other would be disappointed,” the result will be disap-
pointment tantamount to “not yet being completely alive.”
Williams deals with the issue of sexual selfishness as an
outrageous comedy of manners in stories like “Miss Coynte
of Greene” and “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen.”
Valerie Coynte is one in a series of Williams’ women who dare
to seek sexual comfort from a man who is not her husband.
These include: Cassandra Whiteside in
Battle of Angels
(like
Carol Cutrere in
orpheus descending
), who propositions Val
to “stud” for her; Maxine Faulk, the “affable and rapaciously
lusty” middle-aged hotel owner in
The Night of the iguana
who keeps two young male employees at the Costa Verde
Hotel for sexual companionship and seeks to make the spook-
haunted Lawrence Shannon her consort; the “nice monster,”
Alexandra del Lago, in
Sweet Bird of Youth
, who has an “un-
satisfied tiger” raging within her and employs bisexual hus-
tler Chance Wayne as her chauffeur and sexual companion;
and Sissy Goforth, the not-very-nice monster in
The Milk
Train doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, who is not above attempt-
January–February 2014
13
COLUMB I A UN I VERS I TY PRESS
·
Are the Lips a Grave?
A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex
LYNNE HUFFER
“Against the persistent rumor that feminism and queer
theory can never be friends, Lynne Huffer recovers a
wide—and at times wild—range of shared political and
critical lineages. Provocative, impassioned, and at times
deeply personal,
Are the Lips a Grave?
is the first full-
length defense of ‘queer feminism.’ It is about time!”
—Robyn Wiegman, Duke University
COMING IN
SPRING 2014
The Homoerotics
of Orientalism
JOSEPH ALLEN
BOONE
