TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND
THE WHITE BODY
Excessive attention to the black body in America is a bit of
a crisis for those who believe the white body is the peak of human
evolution. The sense of alarm is not
trivial. Have you noticed, of late, that
a disproportionate number of white female bodies do not conform to the
universal standards of beauty? It is a
crisis making its way to being a tragedy "when many women past forty or
even thirty have boobs like a couple of mules hanging their heads over the top
rail of a fence." The quoted words
did not spew from the mouth of Donald Trump.
They come from dialogue assigned to Celeste Delacroix Griffin, one of
"a pair of old bitches" in the 1966 play The Mutilated by Tennessee Williams. A great American dramatist and paragon of
pan-sexuality, Williams earned his place in American theatre history by writing
such remarkable plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly Last Summer. All of these focus from one angle or another
on the white female body as a prized object.
Well, Laura's disability in The
Glass Menagerie may make her slightly less of a prize; not all of Williams'
female characters could win blue ribbons at the county fair.
Williams' obsession with the white female body reaches a
climax in The Mutilated. The play is vintage New Orleans in its subject matter, its setting in the
sleazy Silver Dollar Hotel on South
Rampart Street and in the exquisitely cruel language the unrepentant trollop Celeste uses to torture and manipulate her rich "friend" Trinket Dugan, who is
by her own admission a mutilated woman.
That Trinket has had a mastectomy is the great secret that Celeste
threatens to expose to the world. The
no-nonsense reckoning with the problem of mutilation comes from Slim, the
drunken sailor Trinket finally gets up enough nerve to seduce: "You being
mutilated is your own business except it's a stinking trick to take a fellow to
bed without letting him know he's going to bed with someone
mutilated." It's a stinking trick
for the white female body not to announce that it lacks some of its parts. Slim's reckoning is very American, very
male. In everyday life, American males, until recently, could only
deal with the white female body between two stops: either the body was a virgin
to be worshipped or it was a canine to be violated to achieve phallic pleasures
and confirmation of male power. Pleasure
and power shrivel when they have to deal with the grotesque.
It will be a revelation of the contemporary state of white male and female minds when audiences
see the revival of The Mutilated at
the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, November 19-21, 2015. The play is
actually about human cruelty and mental anguish in the lower depths of the
Crescent City in the 1940s (I suspect), but it brings to the foreground how
inadequately American society and the academic world has dealt with the white
female body, feminists notwithstanding.
The brutal honesty Tennessee Williams brings to the subject of the body
in pain is most often in a state of arrested development. The
Mutilated negates undue preoccupations with and envy of the black body and
necessitates dealing with what the white body might actually be and what Donald
Trump is talking about.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. August 16, 2015
