Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Williams, Tennessee (Vol. 11) - Richard Gray

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RICHARD GRAY

[Tennessee Williams takes] familiar characters, situations, and themes and then weaves them into a baroque conceit possessing neither original substance nor extrinsic value. The world so imagined hardly exists—or, at least, hardly deserves consideration—on any other level than the decorative: it offers us a group of charming grotesques, preserved in amber. What is Southern about it, really, is not a certain quality of perception, a sense of engagement between past and present, the public and the private, myth and history: but a turn of phrase or personality, a use of the bizarre and sensational for their own sake, which has the net effect of creating distance. For regionalism is substituted a form of local color, and a very precious and slightly decadent form at that, in which the gap between drama and audience seems deliberately widened so that the latter can revel without compunction in a contemporary "Gothick" fantasy. (p. 258)

[Williams]...

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1. Introduction
2. John Simon
3. M. A. Corrigan
4. Michael Lassell
5. John Whitty
6. Mary Ann Corrigan
7. Charles Marowitz
8. Michael Anderson
9. Richard Gray
10. Copyright

1. Tennessee Williams