Menageries, Melting Pots, Movies: Tennessee on America

Abstract

Labels of “Southern” and “apolitical” notwithstanding, Tennessee Williams took center stage in a postwar period of quintessential “American-ness,” which more fittingly describes his focus. His own life and works punctuated by the nation’s drama, Williams was born in the Mississippi Delta in 1911 but moved in 1918 to the country’s heartland, where his internal battles began as America’s overseas battles concluded. Not until 1939, with the world on the cusp of yet another war, did he leave St. Louis for the South, having by that time written three explicitly political plays. In that pivotal year for Williams, American Blues appeared as harbinger, both in title and theme, of Williams’s conviction that the blues, albeit born in his birthplace, transcends the South and that tragedy arises from the cornerstones of the American Dream: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Dream itself was formalized, ironically, during Williams’s formative Depression years; its explosion into monolithic and mythic proportions during the postwar era coincides with Williams’s own explosion onto the American stage and realization that even success could not melt him into the American pot.