SOURCE: Schiavi, Michael R. “The Hungry Women of Tennessee Williams's Fiction.” In Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, edited by Robert F. Gross, pp. 107-20. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Throughout his “secondary” career as a fiction writer, Tennessee Williams repeatedly staged dramas of female appetite. This theme also anchors some of his seminal stagework: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), and Kingdom of Earth (1968) all pivot upon women's sexual needs and satisfactions. In short stories, however, Williams proved far more adept at tracing multiple female desires as they transfix and baffle observation. Free from Broadway's narrow conception of stageworthy bodies, Williams the storywriter spent nearly fifty years displaying women in open gratification of various hungers. Indeed, in his fiction, female characters' appetites constitute their very narrativity and make them worthy of the dramatic venue often denied them. With highly noticeable physical proportions and expression, these women manifest theatrically to bewildered spectators who, in struggling to name and interpret the aberration before them, become negligible forces within their own dramas. By no coincidence, these spectators are typically males who, over the years of Williams's career, become inversely less active against the consuming women who devour figurative “stage space.”

Before discussing the stories, it is necessary to address a staple of Williams criticism: that the playwright venomously travesties female representation for the male homosexuality he cannot stage openly.¹ As a mid-century gay man, Williams had great personal stake in the risks of gratifying a proscribed appetite,² and, like many of his female characters, knew well the dangers of putting his desires on public display. At the same time, it is reductive to assume that Williams conflated the different experiences of abject women and gay men. Gay men appear on their own terms throughout the body of Williams's fiction in such stories as “In Memory of an Aristocrat” (c. 1940), “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (1941), “The Angel in the Alcove” (1943), “The Malediction” (1945), “The Interval” (1945), “Something about Him” (1946), “The Night of the Iguana” (1948), “Hard Candy” (1949-1953), “Two on a Party” (1953), “Mama's Old Stucco House” (1965), “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen” (1977), and “The Negative” (1982). By treating gay themes and characters ever more explicitly in stories—a more tolerant venue than Broadway—Williams had no need to use female characters as camp “beards.”

Indeed, most of Williams's women experience a vulnerability unknown to his fiction's gay men. In his stories, Williams generally keeps gay sex hidden, whether behind the wall Miss Jelkes shares with an amorous male couple in “Iguana,” or in the shadows of the Joy Rio balcony. Effeminacy, which American culture continues to read as infallible (homo)sexual marker, remains conspicuously absent throughout his stories (and his plays, until Quentin in Small Craft Warnings [1972]). Without such displays, the gay men of Williams's fiction generally address their hungers without excessive notice or risk. Such is not the case for the overweight and sexually direct women of the stories. These characters cannot hide their passions; their bodies and behavior keep them at high profile. Their satisfaction of appetites meets with a critical scrutiny that seems to elude men.³ The stories' hungry women thus help Williams to stage a personally familiar war of wills that the theatre of his time did not tolerate.

The Broadway of Williams's career allowed precious few large women to tread the boards. When they did appear, qualified stage directions attempted to defuse the visceral shock of their bodies. In Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten (1946), Josie Hogan is “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak,” but her largeness comes chiefly from height. She has a “slender” waist and, their strength notwithstanding, reassuringly feminine arms. O'Neill rushes to reassure us that she is “all woman” (301), and Josie herself comes to know that size needn't kill all hope for love. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Edward Albee chivalrously describes Martha as “ample, but not fleshy,” and her “ample” figure certainly doesn't prevent her offstage seduction of Nick, twenty-two years her junior.

Other large women of the American canon enjoy a reprieve from the judgmental gaze by dint of their age and/or de-sexed maternity. “Short” and “stout,” Big Mama in Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) may earn authorial comparison to a “Japanese wrestler,” but the noted “sincerity” with which she seeks to unify her family elevates her above ridicule (33). Mama of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), euphemized in stage directions as “full-bodied,” is also described as “beautiful” and possessing enough strength of character to save her family from moral bankruptcy (39). Even the “rather fleshy” Myrtle of Williams's Kingdom of Earth, perhaps the most clownish of these women, treats her husband Lot with an ill-deserved maternal delicacy that bespeaks essential kindness (9); Chicken's desire for Myrtle, moreover, deflects interest from her size to their deferred coupling.

While these women exceed the physical boundaries of normative female representation, they do so through motherly and/or sexual channels that steer spectators' attention from their girth. Aside from Josie's potshots at herself, no character criticizes the women's bodies. Never, more importantly, are any of these women described as “fat,” a term that stops dramatic plotting in its tracks.⁴ Since Susie Orbach's pioneering Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1978), self-declared “fat” women have often cited the deadly performativity of their bodies; once named, fat becomes its own visual raison d'être and ensures its bearer's inability to participate in other narratives. W. Charisse Goodman, for example, recalls that “anytime I moved my body, people would laugh at me … even if I sat still and quietly read a book they would point and laugh.” As the neighborhood “fat kid,” Goodman considered herself not a self-determined subject, but rather “just an object described by an adjective.” She discusses fat in appropriately theatrical terms: “… big women are typically trotted onstage solely to amuse and reassure the members of the [thin] ruling class” (x, ix, 5). Charlotte Cooper similarly describes herself and other fat women as “super-visible and vulnerable as targets” and argues that the “fear of fat encourages people to be judgmental” about corporeal deviance, particularly that observed in women (26, 3).⁵

Fat bears a hyperactive semiotic curse. Viewers of non-streamlined chins, breasts, stomachs, buttocks, and legs search passionately for etiology: what has brought a woman to such physical explosion? Poor self-discipline? Wild overindulgence? Indifference to popular image? Such interpretations construe fat as a key symptom of immorality and its public appearance a nervy performance deserving unchecked attack.

Williams realized the dramatic possibilities of conspicuous bodies that resist abjection. He also knew, however, that such bodies would find no greater welcome in theatre than they generally do in public. He thus turned to short stories as the venue in which he could most thoughtfully mount dramas of rebellious mass. From the anonymous scribbling of his twenties through the commissioned work of his late career, his fiction is filled with women whose appetites for food, credibility, and, later, sex, read distinctly on their bodies.⁶ Williams exults in dropping such characters into social arenas crawling with critics. He also exults in showing how these women, even when overpowered or banished, govern the thought and speech of their detractors, whom they demote from actor to reactor even within the critics' own stories. Having removed these nominal protagonists from the reader's focus, Williams celebrates women whose evident hungers receive endless public attention.

LITERAL HUNGERS

In her openness to attack, Mrs. Meighan of “Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton” (1935) mirrors several of the best-known women in American short fiction. John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates have all written tales about isolated women who, thinking themselves invulnerable at home, suffer exploitation by a male interloper. In Steinbeck's “The Chrysanthemums” (1935), mannish Elisa loses all sense of self when a peddler charms her out of her prized flowers only to obtain their copper pot. Haughty Hulga of O'Connor's “Good Country People” (1950) loses her wooden leg—hence her mobility, autonomy, and identity—to a Bible salesman whom she, like Elisa, had treated with initial dismissiveness. In Oates's “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1970), teenaged Connie finds herself overpowered by a sinister male visitor who gradually seduces her from her empty family home. Like Elisa and Hulga, Mrs. Meighan attracts notice in physical aberration; like Connie, she faces sexual menace from a demonic male visitor who traps her in her own house. Unlike Steinbeck, O'Connor, and Oates, however, Williams allows his protagonist to maintain narrative sway even as she falls prey to assault. Throughout the tale, both Mrs. Meighan and the “little man,” her unnamed visitor, are fixated upon her size. In the story's six pages, the man appreciatively mentions Mrs. Meighan's “bigness” seven times; she herself comments on it three times. The omniscient narrator lingers over Mrs. Meighan's “huge body,” its “bulging calves,” “lumpy ankles,” “tremendous shoulders,” the “soft multiple complexities of her chin,” and the “mountains of sweating flesh” that comprise her torso (46, 47, 49).⁷

The little man's noticing of Mrs. Meighan's body assumes a sexual rhythm and becomes the story's animating force. The man supplements his intermittent switching of Mrs. Meighan's calves with professed appreciation for her “bigness” until the two acts combine in violent foreplay. By story's end, Mrs. Meighan is badly frightened and stumbling toward escape, her languorous masochism replaced by a realistic fear of being beaten and raped. She becomes “a tremendous, sobbing Persephone” (50) en route to an underworld of sadomasochistic horrors, possibly death. Her Hades masters her not through brute abduction, however, but through incessant invocation of the physical qualities that have led her to deny her beauty (46). In his repetitive flirtations, the little man sexualizes what other men have found freakish, as per Mr. Meighan's calling his wife “the biggest woman in this part of the state” (47). His flirtations also suggest him as the simplest form of spectator/critic, one who bases speech upon the eager pronouncement of difference.

Thus reviewed, Mrs. Meighan is well aware of herself as object of spectatorship, but to her peril, she does not maneuver this heightened objectivity to advantage. Instead, she allows herself to become dulled by consumption. By the time the little man arrives, she has slid into a post-caffeine slump, a casualty of the many sodas she has drunk in the summer sun. Now “utterly numb” (46), she cannot maintain her subjectivity against visual assault. Like the September cotton surrounding her house, she sits in vulnerable, inert abundance, a ripe semiotic system unto herself. Content to parrot the little man's rating of her body, Mrs. Meighan fails to protect herself from attack. Her textual dominance, in other words, does not translate to physical safety.

Williams foreshadows Mrs. Meighan's predicament in her disregard of the little man's power and sexuality. With a longstanding aversion to “little men,” she overlooks her inexplicable attraction to her visitor and contemptuously thinks of him as “hardly more than half her size. Why it would be just the same as …” (47). Mrs. Meighan's unfinished incestuous thought also occurs to the equally large, unnamed dark woman of “Gift of an Apple” (1936) during her dalliance with a hungry young drifter who is the same age as her son. Throughout their flirtation, the visitor never mentions his hostess's largeness aloud, but the topic overpowers his mind and allows him only a limited mental range. In his observation, the woman is “huge,” “big, heavy and dark” with “coarse hairs along her upper lip” and on the “great loose bulge of her bosom,” reminding the young man of a sideshow hermaphrodite he'd seen. He watches with some disgust as “her … huge jaws … munched [an apple] like a horse”; he later imagines her “fat elbows” spread over a table as she devours a “big piece” of “rich, oily meat” (67, 71, 68, 69, 72).

Even as these squalid images crowd the young man's mind, dominating his perception of the woman as well as the sketch's spare text, her size also holds sexual currency for the drifter, who imagines her “big dark female body” spread out at night, waiting for a lover (69). He considers the woman an easy conquest, as vulnerable as the large, bottle-trapped catfish he killed as a boy out of sadistic spectatorship. Wedged in her tiny trailer, this woman seems equally trapped, as pressed into satisfying his appetite as she has her own.

Nevertheless, this guest cannot master his host as Mrs. Meighan's visitor does her. As a hitchhiker, he dreads the weight of an assessing gaze and cannot, therefore, return it with sufficient gravity. Tired and dirty, he has been variously ignored by motorists, viewed with suspicion, and subjected to unwanted caresses from male drivers. The “mental compulsion” (66) he tries to wield over potential hosts on the road proves no more successful than that attempted over the woman, who gives her starving guest but one apple. Sexual aggression, as on the road, also remains out of his hands. The woman follows her open appraisal of his body with a caress and the emasculating assessment, “You got nice skin like a girl's” (71)⁸; before he can take the reins, she abruptly terminates the flirtation upon learning his age. In departing, the young protagonist tries to gain interpretive control by assigning the woman cancer, ironically demonstrating the degree to which even her absent body choreographs his imagination along with the story's plot.

“In Memory of an Aristocrat” similarly opposes young male drifters against a large woman with the ability to dominate spectacle, text, and plot. In the story's first paragraph, the unnamed narrator describes himself and his friend Carl as “hungry” would-be artists dependent on the kindness of Irene, a French Quarter bohemian who “always ha[s] something cooking” and who wishes to “embrace the whole world” (90). Irene satisfies not only her own appetite; others feed off her resources as well. The narrator also feeds imaginatively off Irene's ample body and spirit, aptly characterized as “compulsion to poetry” (85), when he chronicles the epic battle waged between his friend's physical mass and its horrified spectators.

“Aristocrat” features the conspicuous size references familiar from “Twenty-seven Wagons” and “Gift of an Apple,” but it also configures its heroine as explicit spectacle. Described as “one of those big, dark girls, everything about her on a monumental scale,” Irene had served as an improbable model for New York WPA classes. Despite his qualified appreciation for Irene's beauty, the narrator renders her body in cruel cinematic caricature by “photographing” it “as though the camera had been placed at her feet” in floor-to-ceiling inversion of perspective. From this vantage, the narrator directs our gaze to her “lower part … [which] was disproportionately heavy … [and] on a larger scale toward the bottom” (85). Irene thus emerges a cinematographer's oddball darling, worthy of funhouse consideration from all angles. In its size, proportion, attire, and public outrageousness, her body becomes an object of spectatorship more imposing than any offered by Williams's Broadway contemporaries.

A perfect Mardi Gras grotesque, Irene appears in self-styled spectacle throughout New Orleans, deliberately spreading her visibility far beyond the attentions of friends and WPA students. Clad only in a grass skirt and “very scanty brassiere,” she passes out in a small Quarter bar, overwhelming the space in her sprawl, after “shrieking” through the streets and turning tricks all afternoon (89); clearly, she has given much of downtown New Orleans an unforgettable show. Upon rescue by the narrator, she spends the rest of the night outlining her battered past in between vomiting spells, her body endlessly producing signs of its mythical appetites for food, alcohol, and love.

Prominent even amid the Quarter carnival, Irene assumes Barnum and Bailey stature as she wreaks sideshow vengeance upon the bluebloods who, at their Annual Spring Display, have rejected her submitted paintings. She, in fact, becomes the display, described by one patron as “the floor show” even before targeting the gathering's “too fragile” occupants and accoutrements. Eager “to make a scene,” she tears through the room as “Bubonic Plague,” befouling the air with obscenities and shattering precious tchotchkes in her wake. In unwitting parody of her own maternal expansiveness, Irene falls out of her dress during a toe-stomping, crotch-kicking frenzy that renders her an eminently watchable natural disaster, a hurricane whose energy must exhaust itself before civility can resume. When she collapses, the narrator marvels that “such a big girl,” who had commandeered mass attention while demolishing her disdainful spectators' own performance space, could dissolve into impotence (92-95). He has become accustomed to Irene's weighty mastery of public view and discourse; even after she disappears from New Orleans, her adopted motto on “the aristocracy of passionate souls” remains scrawled across a wall of her abandoned studio. Her expressive legacy endures.

Cora in “Two on a Party,” one of Williams's best-known and most candid stories, is Irene twenty years post—“Aristocrat.” The two women share a “monumental kindness” (298), charity to the underdog, hatred of conventional society, and, total public attention. The omniscient narrator drolly refers to Cora as “a noticeable person” (309), a visceral fact that, as in the stories discussed above, determines much of the proceedings. With Billy, her gay friend, Cora wanders aimlessly over the country in search of its most accommodating bars and men, an occupation that pivots on her ability to manipulate common scrutiny to advantage.

For neither character is this an easy task. At nearly thirty-five, Billy is extremely self-conscious about his thinning hair and hearing loss. These disadvantages, however, by no means receive the narrative space allotted Cora's various dissipations. The story begins with Billy's efforts to gauge her obviously advancing age. At their first meeting, he thinks her an “‘old bag’” and watches repulsed as she twists her “rather heavy figure … into ludicrous positions” while scouting for a lost earring amid “disgusting refuse” on the floor (297). Cora repeatedly refers to herself as a “mess” and laments that she is “so heavy in the hips” and hampered by “big udders,” the cumulative effect of which causes her to “shimm[y] fatly” rather than walk (300, 311). Having later exceeded her “saturation point” with nightly ryes, she is left “bloated” and “bloodshot,” conditions for which she overcompensates by burying herself in riotous clothing, hair color, and a deafening profusion of charm bracelets (302, 309). If even Billy “thinks she has overdone it a little,” she must register at Irene-levels on the world's Richter scale of poor taste.

Indeed, much of Cora's life consists of skirting stares from “bull-like middle-aged couples,” the “squares” who regard her drunken, openly sexual antics with contempt (307). While Billy certainly joins her in these escapades, he is protected by male prerogative and the writing career to which Cora believes he will one day return. Cora herself, however, has apparently never had a purpose in life beyond the “party” and cannot imagine what she would do if she got “off” it. Fittingly, even through their inseparable months, Billy learns almost nothing about Cora's past. She remains in his eyes, and ours, a boisterous companion who draws the world's focus to her conspicuous surfaces.

Yet despite her oft-mentioned affronts to public taste, Cora does not behave aggressively; she seeks neither sexual conquest nor social combat. Described, in her passivity, by Billy as a “big piece of seaweed,” she seems instead to await friendly notice, allowing it to find her in big-city throngs rather than capitalizing on her natural noticeability (303). Unlike Irene in her rage, Cora attempts to soothe frays with hotel clerks and disgruntled tricks, thereby keeping herself (and Billy) from litigious view. Despite the literal and textual largeness of Cora's persona, her chief influence in the story remains maternal, especially toward Billy, whom she loves and thus supports financially and emotionally without significant return. Williams would spend the rest of his fiction-writing career reprising this figure, assigning her ever greater and more pernicious spectatorial sway.

OTHER HUNGERS

As Williams's stagework grew more forthright in its presentation of multiple sexualities, his fiction began to configure “appetite” less literally. Whereas the earlier stories (1935-1953) often conflate women's dietary and sexual desires, later tales (1959-1982) tend to exempt their female protagonists from concerns of literal hunger. Accordingly, these women do not face such constant reading by spectators desperate to catalogue indulgences. Williams replaces the expressly large women discussed above with characters whose public bodies, though aging, remain semiotically uninflected until deferred unmasking. Upon interacting with young, often starving and helpless men, the women manifest with Irene's freakish disregard of presentational etiquette. The men, exaggerated versions of the drifters we have already seen, stumble into the women's lives never on their own initiative, but always by accident or by summons. As the women's exhibitionism brings them ever greater inspection, the men retreat into literal and narrative oblivion. By this point in his writing, therefore, Williams construed “appetite” as an obliterating force, the marshalling of which determined any character's right to be read.

When Jimmy Dobyne reaches the balcony of Flora Goforth's Italian villa in “Man Bring This Up Road” (1959), he encounters an apt symbol for his impending meeting with the owner: a monkey chained in the midday sun, unable to reach water or shade. Stretched like the monkey to the edge of his talents and energies, Jimmy arrives at Mrs. Goforth's after a long succession of visits with wealthy, aging patrons. Like the male protagonists of “Gift of an Apple” and “In Memory of an Aristocrat,” Jimmy is also “ravenously hungry” (370), but unlike those significantly younger characters, he has endured perennial deprivation longer, and, at thirty-five, his chances of finding sympathetic benefactors are waning precipitously.

The story concerns itself with the negligible battle of wills waged between Jimmy and Mrs. Goforth. By no means her match in resources or wit, Jimmy cannot sustain warfare for long, but even his brief efforts illustrate Williams's notion that legible desires, when unsatisfied, prove far more dangerous than their requited counterparts, however outrageous.⁹ Immediately upon arrival at the villa, Jimmy lapses into a daylong slumber that intensifies his hunger and vulnerability. As he sleeps, Mrs. Goforth checks his passport, discovers that he is not as young as he pretends, and does some telephone research to build her arsenal against him.

Jimmy thus sits at a factual as well as material disadvantage. Unlike the nameless apple-giver and Irene, Jimmy's hostess makes no gesture to appease his appetite. Dominating discourse as well as resource, Mrs. Goforth holds forth through a rehearsal of her own suspicions and determinations to safeguard herself against fraud. As Jimmy's desperation mounts, he realizes that naked, ungratified hunger rendered him a pariah long before his appearance at Mrs. Goforth's: “Something must be visble in his face that let [old friends] know he had crossed over a certain frontier of. … He didn't want to identify that frontier, to give it a name” (372). Jimmy comes to understand that his decipherable cravings for sustenance and contact—inversely proportionate to his hunger for work—have diminished his sphere of influence to non-existence; at his lowest point, he is reduced to begging Mrs. Goforth for sugar in coffee that does nothing to quiet his stomach.

Mrs. Goforth, on the other hand, becomes monstrous in her successful self-gratifications. As she seeks to solidify her power, her gratuitous humiliation of Jimmy lends her a repugnance that Williams literalizes in the misshapen figure she exposes to Jimmy in her colonizing desire for him. Agog at Mrs. Goforth's “Amazonian” hips in their “skin-tight shorts,” Jimmy thinks her an “immense fountain [figure],” one “travestied by a sculptor with evil wit” (375). The baldness of her sexual desire, expressed through such a warped medium, proves no more enticing to Jimmy than do his manifold needs to friends and acquaintances. By story's end, Mrs. Goforth has banished him from the villa, where she sits materially bloated and wholly unsympathetic to the reader, yet victorious in the discursive and presentational control she maintains throughout the encounter.

Over twenty years after “Man Bring This Up Road,” just a few months before his death, Williams resurrected Jimmy Dobyne as the evacuated protagonist of “The Negative.”¹⁰ In the story's corrected manuscript, Jimmy has been renamed Tonio Maresca, yet Tonio retains Jimmy's evaporating youth, impotent artistry, and helplessness before feminine (and effeminate) appetite. Tonio, moreover, becomes the suicide Jimmy might consider as he leaves Mrs. Goforth's villa penniless and starving, overexposed to hungers gone grotesque.

Like Jimmy, Tonio is approaching his mid-thirties in terror over having become “slightly faded” (vii). The tolerated lover of Lord Amberly, a seventy-year-old sybarite, Tonio realizes all too well youth's currency. No longer able to live off his body, Tonio may soon have to live it down, as Lord Amberly himself tries, through ludicrous hair-dyes and sexual incontinence. Tonio, however, lacks the means to fulfill his own appetites and so suppresses them into nonexistence. Recently felled by a stroke, Lord Amberly nonetheless “feeds himself heartily” and cavorts with renters. Half Amberly's age and twice as healthy, Tonio vomits after a failed effort at fellatio and cannot generate sufficient metabolism to spot a bedpan (xiii, ix). The animation and self-assertion required for ingestion seem missing in Tonio, whom others variously describe as “nearly paralyzed,” a “non-being,” “more of an object than a living being,” and someone who “[doesn't] belong in the world” (xvi, xv, xiii, xix).

Thus eviscerated, Tonio can no more credibly write than he himself can be written. His current poem, also titled “The Negative,” languishes in incoherence, an inarticulate stab at speaking “the abyss into which his life had descended” (ix). His life a negation of movement, Tonio animates neither his own writing nor Williams's. Lacking even Jimmy's desperation to stay alive, Tonio serves more as narrative device than narrative force. Williams thus hinges Tonio's story on the delayed exposure of Mona, another aged and predatory figure who instigates all significant action in “The Negative” according to her own whim. Williams plots the story by rendering Mona, at first merely an omniscient telephone voice, a disembodied awareness of Tonio's pathetic circumstances, ever more visible to Tonio and to the reader. As with the other stories' women, Williams conjures Mona from her desires, revealing by bits the grasping physicality that delineates her body.

As a telephone presence, Mona emerges in articulate opposition to Tonio's stumbling confusion. Materializing from nowhere, she tears through Tonio's half-hearted queries with blunt acknowledgment of his inertia. She shapes all the written expression he manages in the story by directing him, as one might a barely literate child, to transcribe her street address “in large, clear letters” (xi) that will spell his salvation more effectively than his aimless verses. Following her directions, Tonio finds himself in a lightless hallway where he tries to fend off the clutching hands of a woman he cannot see. When Tonio endures more presumptuous gestures from men, such as Lord Amberly and an examining physician, Williams grants the reader some specificity of action and appearance. Mona, however, only emerges into full sight for one horrifying instant at the story's end after Williams has teased into apoplexy his readers' longing for a look at female appetite.

In order to attain this view, Tonio must escape the citadel of Amberly's house and endure manhandling by a porter, a chauffeur, and a waiter—a painful series of invasions for someone who tries to move through life with minimum physical involvement. His uncharacteristic willingness to withstand such treatment sets impossibly high stakes for Mona's appearance, which, in order to justify all this suspense, must finally manifest at grand Gothic pitch. Williams works this aesthetic by shrouding her in a thick veil and behind sunglasses whose removal prompts a scenario of tightly edited, cinematic revelation. In violent staccato phrases, Tonio rips away her disguise to discover a “lacquered face” aberrant for its lack of “discernible age”; his “terror” grows when he reveals “rapacious” eyes equally slathered in make-up (xx). Flashbulbs and thunderous male voices accentuate the chaos surrounding the pair as Tonio brings to light the inscrutable creature that has consumed his language and attempted to control his physical fate as well.

Williams purposefully reveals his agent of female will and expression with horror-film punch. As with Mrs. Bates in Psycho (1960), Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Eva Galli in Ghost Story (1981), and Hedra Carlson in Single White Female (1992), Mona assumes complete visibility after long expository delay, at which point she is glimpsed only in flickering narrative bursts that recall the careening light bulb in Mrs. Bates's cellar. Tonio, like many men who view the women named above, does not long survive the sight. His subsequent suicide suggests the enormous power accorded the display of female desire. Williams's application of cinematic techniques to short fiction underscores a wise reluctance to visit such ugliness on theater audiences.

In other late stories, Williams drops aged female protagonists into tableaux of sexual appetite that, outside Rochester's Sodom (1664), would seem insane choices for the stage. Sabbatha Veyne Duff-Collick of “Sabbatha and Solitude” (1973) and the Principessa Lisabetta von Hohenzalt-Casalinghi in “The Inventory at Fontana Bella” (1973) emerge through self-framing desires as baroque as their fading names. By story's end, Sabbatha has come to see herself as Cleopatra, who also predicates speech upon imperious demands for constant sex and adoration. Once a poet of some note, Sabbatha has lived through her marshalling of an adoring court. Her social and professional reputation on the wane, she now finds herself satisfying appetites before an “audience of one”; Giovanni, who, like Jimmy and Tonio, a seasoned gigolo whose tenuously bisexual attentions she has purchased for ten years (534).

Williams structures Sabbatha's story around flashbacks in which she remembers her former ability to rivet public interest. At a Vassar lecture, Village restaurant, or interview in Rome, Sabbatha came to realize that her noisy scatological “behavior was leading her into public embarrassment” rather than the paparazzi's homage. This realization, nonetheless, only incites her striptease through St. Peter's Square, where her shrieking display of “rather flat and pendulous breasts” brands her a “figura bruta” in the Italian press. Flailing about in the “abandoned posturing of a middle-aged female” (542, 543), Sabbatha has lost all sense of what constitutes engaging spectacle and, accordingly, faces an audience who would consign her to “madhouse” invisibility. Whereas “Aristocrat” [“In Memory of an Aristocrat”]'s Irene imposes her body upon critics in heartfelt protest against their dismissal of her work, Sabbatha, validated by an international reputation over which Irene might drool, exposes herself in petulant rebellion against largely imaginary oppression. Her empty signifying leads her to anti-poetic silence and the deadly “solitude” of her story's title.

In “The Inventory at Fontana Bella,” Williams slams against the boundaries of tenable female representation that gradually constrain Sabbatha's performances. The Principessa, a Cleopatra figure sixty-five years post-asp, bellows through her solitude as if to command a staff of hundreds. As with Mrs. Goforth, age combined with untempered material and sexual ambition have rendered the Principessa a hideous cartoon whose presence registers insistently even in her absence. Her speech, mere expressionistic “babblings of delirium,” discloses only exhaustive lists of her possessions and lewd references to her long-dead fifth husband. This incessant verbal voiding anticipates the actual bowel movement she performs on her open terrace, as well as her masturbation with a live stork's beak, which she imagines to be her husband's penis.

A site of revolting productivity and consumption, the Principessa's body sets final limits on the representation of extreme appetite. Her vaginal suffocation of a watchful stork constitutes a kind of “gaze-rape” that terminates autoeroticism mediated through an “unsuitable”—because “ancient” and incontinent—body. With the Principessa's subsequent death, Williams exorcises from his fiction women whose desires claim lives along with ceaseless attention. His aim here seems far less moralistic than theatrically and narratively expedient. When spectacle becomes so oppressive as to silence, or even destroy, observers, where can it possibly lead? Once it has been remarked as a fascinating abomination, what larger plot function can it serve? Like Mrs. Meighan in “Twenty-seven Wagons,” the Principessa becomes far more exhibition than person and thus cannot interact with other characters. At such a point, appetite becomes too visible even for fiction, much less the stage; it must give way to more diegetic hungers if it is to survive as a viable topic for literature.

Williams allegorizes a shift to more presentable appetites in “Miss Coynte of Greene” (1973). The story opens to find its eponymous protagonist the imprisoned caretaker of her grandmother, a despicable crone whose body overwhelms “Miss Coynte,” both story and character. Miss Coynte lives in thrall to the “great swollen” creature upstairs, the “massive and immobile body” whose consumptions and productions, like the Principessa's, demand ceaseless ministration (515). Unlike the senile Principessa, however, the grandmother deliberately presses her presence upon observers through her gleeful purges. Intentional incontinence keeps Miss Coynte and Dr. Settle slavishly chained to her bedside, pulled like minor planets into the orbit of her bloated mass. The grandmother excretes sound as wantonly as she does waste: “babbl[ing] all but incessantly” on the telephone, ringing a “loud-mouthed” bell when not actually talking, and finally screaming “like a peacock in heat” (514, 516), she seems less a person than a perpetual venting of sonic toxins.

As with the Principessa, the grandmother's imposition of her appetites on other characters collapses narrative. Prostrate in bed, she becomes a foul monologist presiding over her captive audience. Spending “half [her] time” changing her grandmother's soiled sheets (513), Miss Coynte spends the other half listening to vicious and vapid tales, such as that of Dotty Reagan, an acquaintance whose anecdotal worth depends upon her obesity. While her grandmother lives, Miss Coynte has no opportunity to follow her own animus, thus reducing the story that bears her name a to plotless sideshow.

Following the grandmother's death, “Miss Coynte” redirects appetite into more viable narrative channels. By ridding the house of her grandmother's innumerable acquisitions, Miss Coynte clears the material glut that had held her own life in check; appropriately, she founds an antiques business on the purging of other families' defunct possessions. Having transformed tradition into lucrative kitsch, she can indulge in the sexual adventuring that eventually constitutes both her sense of “mission” and her story's plot (532). Miss Coynte's conquests of various men, all of them young and at least partially black, require little focused analysis here. For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to remark that Miss Coynte comes to control their fates, whether as employer or potential blackmailer, with the power exercised by Flora Goforth over Jimmy, Mona over Tonio, and Sabbatha over Giovanni. Lacking the age and practiced predatory tactics of these women, however, Miss Coynte's body has not yet taken on signs of a grossly satisfied appetite. With her relative youth and “slight but sinewy waist” (522), she escapes the bewildered gaze that thwarts the other women's attempts at seduction along with their successful mixing in public. Via deft “measures of subterfuge” (524), Miss Coynte also avoids the popular scrutiny that would proscribe her “mission” and halt the story. One aborted phone call from a local minister and the sniping comments of a local gossip (whom Williams dispatches in two brief paragraphs) constitute the entire range of public reaction to Miss Coynte's living through appetite.

Williams's obvious delight with Miss Coynte's gratifications prompts a couple of unfortunate indulgences. He ends the story with a broad editorial wink (“‘Right on!’”) that trivializes the character's own disregard of public approval. More importantly, in his eagerness to anoint Miss Coynte's behavior, he takes no critical stance against her breezy control of either the young black men she dismisses at will, or of Michele Moon, the mulatto daughter whom she acknowledges only as a servant. Such treatment may jibe with Delta racial politics, but it mixes ill with the hero status that the author would accord his protagonist. As Williams treats racial issues much more thoughtfully in other stories,¹¹ we might attribute this lapse to his triumph over creating a character whose appetites grant her a practicable modus operandi along with a reasonably mounted story.

Compared to this rogues' gallery of women, the men of Williams's fiction seem a pretty dull lot. Indeed, in most cases, they serve chiefly as proxies for the theatrical spectators that the women, their hungers like newsprint atop self-satisfied surfaces, never face. Away from the stage, Williams explores through these women the politics of inadvertent physical performance. He returns constantly to the tension between women whose appetites inform their selfpresentation and observers who become so transfixed by female exteriors as to disappear within their own stories. Ultimately, however, Williams needed to reconcile appetite's constitution of narrative with its tendency to become plot-stopping spectacle. The most successful stories discussed here—“Twenty-seven Wagons,” “In Memory of an Aristocrat,” and “Two on a Party”—explore the hostile fascination that heavy and sexed women receive from impromptu audiences while also freeing observers from impotent spectatorship. Williams thus rehearses in his fiction a theatrical intuition that, of generic necessity, languished unaddressed in his plays.

Notes

1. See, for example, Taubman, 1 and Kaufmann, 291-94. See also Joe Orton's contemporary determination to cast Fay, the female protagonist of Loot, with a “real woman” so as to prevent her seeming like a “Tennessee Williams drag [queen]” (Lahr 257, 247). In the landmark study From Reverence to Rape note Haskell's reference to Williams's female characters as “hothouse, hot-blooded ‘earthmothers’ and drag queens … baroquely transvestized homosexual fantasies. By no stretch can they be called ‘real’ women …” (248-49). It is significant to flag Haskell's verbatim maintenance of this analysis over the thirteen years separating her book's editions. What might have passed for anti-misogynist in 1974 seems blatantly homophobic by 1987.

2. See Williams's Memoirs, 123, for an account of his beating by Times Square sailors; see other “dangerous cruising” mentioned in a 1943 journal entry (Leverich, 476). See also Donald Spoto's description of attacks on Williams's person and home.

3. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example, Big Daddy quite openly announces his renewed sexual appetites to Brick, who hardly blinks (93, 96). Later in the play, Big Mama rhapsodizes over her husband's massive consumption of dinner, seeing in it the sign of a “normal appetite” and good health (130-131). No woman in the Williams canon, with the possible exception of Cora in “Two on a Party,” hazards such a blasé, or uncriticized, revelation of her own appetites.

4. For critical responses to staged fat, see Jill Dolan's discussion of the vitriol surrounding Kathy Bates's performance of Jessie in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother, 30.

5. For other discussions of fat's relations to visibility and interpretivity, see Chernin, Schoenfielder and Wieser, Kano, Bovey, and Thone, all in works cited. For reference to fat as self-determined performance, with possible “coming-out” strategies, see Cooper, 47, and Sedgwick, 72.

6. This legibility stands in marked contrast to such stage protagonists as Blanche DuBois, Alma Winemiller and Serafina Delle Rose, whose various pretensions toward “respectable” behavior mask the sexual passions that govern their behavior.

7. In adapting this story to the one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1945), Williams retained Mrs. Meighan's size while reducing its centrality to the text. Though Jake and Silva mention her girth more than once, it never becomes the focus of her interaction with them. Subtitled “A Delta Comedy,” moreover, the quirky 27 Wagons invites a kind of low-rent gawking unknown to Williams's more substantive dramas. Mrs. Meighan's “tremendous” body fits thematically and presentationally within the carnival milieu that the play's subtitle suggests (11).

   Unsurprisingly, though, when Williams brought the story to maximum audience via the screenplay Baby Doll (1956), Mrs. Meighan was reduced to a thumb-sucking teenage bride small enough to sleep in a child's crib. The sustained sexual tension that drives the film thus depends on a pedophiliac corruption of innocence, not fetishized girth.

8. In this comment, the woman foreshadows Myrtle's assessment of Lot in Kingdom of Earth: “Skin, eyes, hair any girl would be jealous of” (135). In the same exchange, Myrtle admits that her deepest attraction to Lot is “maternal,” suggesting her emotional as well as physical authority over him.

9. Williams expanded “Man Bring This Up Road” into the play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore in 1963. During the four years between story and play, he had transformed Jimmy Dobyne into Christopher Flanders, an Angel of Death whose presumed power makes him a more formidable adversary for Mrs. Goforth, in the play an old woman trying to sort out her turbulent history as she awaits death. By assigning Flora a worthier opponent, Williams leaves Milk Train's narrative deck unstacked and explores these dichotomous characters more compellingly than in “Man Bring This Up Road.”

10. Unpublished until 1999, when it appeared in The Tennessee Williams Annual Review (No. 2).

11. See for example, “Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll” (1932), “The Kingdom of Earth” (1942), “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (1941), “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1946), and “Rubio y Morena” (1948).

[Unless otherwise indicated, all short stories are quoted from Collected Stories.]

Works Cited

Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: Signet, 1983.

Bovey, Shelley. The Forbidden Body: Why Being Fat Is Not a Sin. London: Pandora, 1994.

Chernin, Kim. The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

Cooper, Charlotte. Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size. London: The Women's Press, 1998.

Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1988.

Goodman, W. Charisse. The Invisible Woman: Confronting Weight Prejudice in America. Carlsbad: Guize Books, 1995.

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Signet, 1988.

Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Kano, Susan. Making Peace with Food and Freeing Yourself from the Diet/Weight Obsession. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

Lahr, John. Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton. New York: Vintage Books, 1987.

Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

O'Neill, Eugene. A Moon for the Misbegotten in The Later Plays of Eugene O'Neill, ed. Travis Bogard. (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 295-409.

Schonfielder, Lisa and Barb Wieser, eds. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression. Iowa City: Aunt Lute Books, 1983.

Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.

Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

Thone, Ruth Raymond. Fat—A Fate Worse Than Death? New York: Haworth, 1997.

Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Volume 3 of Theatre. New York: New Directions, 1971: 1-215.

———. Collected Stories. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

———. Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle). Volume 5 of Theatre. New York: New Directions, 1976: 121-214.

———. “The Negative.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2 (1999): vii-xxi.

———. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. Volume 6 of Theatre. New York: New Directions, 1981: 3-38.