ing to starve Chris Flanders into sexual submission in order to
secure “some male companionship” at her isolated Mediter-
ranean villa. Valerie Coynte, by the way, “an erotic, not a
frigid, spinster approaching thirty,” opens an antique shop and
hires a series of young black men to haul furniture for her—
and provide sexual services on the side.
Readers unfamiliar with Williams’ dark humor may be of-
fended by Miss Coynte’s apparent lack of a sexual ethic and by
the story’s stereotyping black men as sexually and morally com-
pliant. But the story is a rich satire aimed at revealing the
hypocrisy of exactly such concerns. For, as the narrator com-
ments, “it is easy to lead a double life in the Delta; in fact, it is
almost impossible not to.” Williams inverts the gender norms of
the South’s traditional double standard that allows white men to
take advantage of black women sexually without the men suf-
fering any social recrimination. Instead, he offers a white woman
as the imperturbable sexual aggressor who escapes any real so-
cial censure. Unlike the Texas woman who vengefully pursues
Val across state borders after he rejects her sexual advances in
Battle of Angels
, Miss Coynte does not persecute a partner who
grows tired of her. The first time Sonny Bowles resists his em-
ployer’s sexual overtures, she simply sends
him off on a paid vacation and during his ab-
sence replaces him with “his two younger
brothers, a pair of twins named Mike and
Moon.” Rather than criticizing Miss Coynte
for her selfish sexual pursuit, Williams—
with tongue in cheek—celebrates her behav-
ior as a possible way of bridging the racial
divide in the South. (In a similar manner, in “The Killer Chicken
and the Closet Queen,” repressed 36-year-old Wall Street lawyer
Stephen Ashe is liberated by a gloriously amoral sixteen-year-
old male hustler from Arkansas.)
“t
He
o
ne
u
nFoRGIvaBLe
t
HInG
”
“Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable,” Blanche explains to her
nemesis Stanley in
Streetcar
. “It is the one unforgivable
thing.” Sebastian Venable in
Suddenly last Summer
is the an-
tithesis of Miss Coynte. Sebastian speaks of sexually desirable
young men “as if they were—items on a menu—‘That one’s
delicious-looking, that one is appetizing,’ or ‘that one is
not
appetizing.’” Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt,
editors of the two-volume Library of America edition of
Williams’ selected plays, describe
Suddenly last Summer
as “a
dark portrayal of the dehumanizing quality of the failure to
love and to respect other human beings.” But such a categor-
ical dismissal of Sebastian is inimical to the ambivalent sex-
ual scheme that pervades Williams’ canon. Clearly, there is a
poetic justice to Sebastian’s being physically devoured by the
same male youths whose bodies he’d bought and enjoyed ear-
lier. But the play carefully presents appetite as part of the nat-
ural order of things and the suppression of appetite as the way
to certain madness.
In
Suddenly last Summer
, Williams takes an unflinching
look at the nature of sexual appetite and, unlike Holditch and
Leavitt, does not pass any kind of moral judgment on his char-
acters. Rather, as Williams commented in an interview, Sebas-
tian “is completely enslaved by his baser nature and this is what
destroys him. ... And when he fails, when he is unable to write
his poem that summer, then he is completely lost. He was [only]
a little more decadent” than Blanche DuBois and
Night of the
iguana
’s Lawrence Shannon.
By grouping Sebastian with two characters for whom au-
diences generally feel great sympathy, Williams pre-empts the
pat condemnation of Sebastian as a sexual predator. Like the
homoerotic icon for whom he’s named, Sebastian is martyred,
but not for attempting to satisfy his sexual appetite. Rather, to
use the language of
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
, Se-
bastian is destroyed because he allowed both of his eyes to
cloud over, thereby losing the balance that the clear eye (the
one that allows him to write poetry) provides—and committed
Blanche’s one unforgivable sin. However rapacious she has
become sexually, Blanche remains to some extent the warm-
hearted, idealistic girl that Stella remembers from their youth.
And, however badly Shannon is driven by his demons, he is
still capable of feeling compassion for others; thus, he is sur-
prisingly gentle with Nonno, and he runs interference with
Maxine for Hannah.
As a meditation upon the individual’s need to strike a balance
between sexual selfishness and feeling for others,
Something
Cloudy, Something Clear
is the logical con-
clusion to the dramatic career that Williams
launched to great acclaim with
The Glass
Menagerie
. Most obviously, bothAugust and
Tom Wingfield are avatars of Williams him-
self, making
Something Cloudy
and
The
Glass Menagerie
the only two full-length
plays in which Williams presented on stage
modified versions of his own life. Tom escaped the claustropho-
bic confines of his life in St. Louis where his spiritually deaden-
ing job in a factory inhibited his writing poetry, and where, like
Pablo Gonzalez (“The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”) and Mr. Krup-
per (“Hard Candy”), he searched for sexual adventure in movie
houses. By financing his escape with the money that his mother
had given him to pay the utility bill, Tom has left Amanda and
Laura quite literally in the dark at play’s end. Amanda is a sur-
vivor and no doubt will somehow find a way to support herself
and Laura after Tom’s desertion. But Tom spends his adult life
feeling guilty and “pursued” by the memory of his fragile, trust-
ing sister, Laura. Like Blanche, who hears in her head the music
from the Varsouviana that played when her young husband shot
himself, Tom Wingfield is haunted by guilt over abandoning his
sister, even though he needed to do so in order to fulfill his desire
to become a writer. Like August, Tom displays the paradox of
heroism and cruelty in acts of self-fulfillment.
Unlike Tom, August seems to have escaped feeling any
guilt over the fate of Kip, the handsome young man that he took
advantage of, or over that of Kip’s friend and protector, the
sickly Clare. For if
The Glass Menagerie
concludes on a note
of haunting loss for a fragile world of glass,
Something Cloudy,
Something Clear
concludes in a mood of quiet exhilaration as
August reconciles with his “victims,” Kip and Clare, who enjoy
a final meal with him and watch a shooting star travel across the
sky. The difference between the two endings is accounted for
by the fact that something had changed in Williams. In the forty
years that had transpired between his completing each play,
he’d learned to accept and even to appreciate his own divided
nature.
14
The Gay & lesbian review
/
worldwide
Williams extended to sexual
behavior his own disgust
with dishonesty, insisting
that people have the
courage to acknowledge the
nature of their desires.
