Southern Gothic Tragedy In Tennessee Williams And Beth Henley

Sara Sii

Ms. Cox

AP Literature 4A

05 April 2014

Research Paper Argument

Both Tennessee Williams and Beth Henley utilize the literary genre of Southern Gothic tragedy. However, the exact execution, themes, and devices used to portray the tragedy are different. Beth Henley primarily uses comedy with bits of tragedy mixed in to be accentuated by the comedy, whereas Williams primarily writes tragedy centered around the interactions between the characters and their pasts with little comedy.

In Tennessee William’s pays, the Southern Gothic style of literature is primarily used to portray the interactions between a character that is fixated in the past overcoming this fixation and moving on. William’s plays generally tend to feature a familial unit at their center, be it a conflict between husbands and their wives, the children and parents, conflict between siblings, or even between in-laws (Davis 1). Popkin takes this basic conflict and expands further on the specific style of William’s plays. He states that in most of William’s plays, there is commonly a conflict between a male and female, and one of them, generally the male, will play the role of a strong and confident “Adonis”, while the other will be the “Gargoyle” characterized by a fading beauty, desperation, scheming and cunning, or a disability to let go of the past (Popkin 45-47).

The central conflict is born of the struggle between these two characters, as in the conflict between the scheming Maggie and her husband Brick, or between the more apparent Adonis figure of Stanley who eventually overpowers the fragile and delusional Blanche (Popkins 45).

The tragedy in Tennessee William’s plays also generally stem from the characters’ pasts and their inability to come to terms wi...

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...201). In “Crimes of the Heart” specifically, one of the most prominent symbols is food (Whited 3). According to the author Lor Thompson cited in Whited’s piece, hunger, or the desire to consume food, in the play is symbolic of the emptiness that the individual sisters that they try to fill by eating food, but is ineffective, because the emptiness is one of the “heart” and cannot be remedied by filling the stomach (Whited 3). Whited also points out that the act of eating signifies a sense of familial bonding as well, because whenever they are eating, the MaGrath sisters are together, and this often follows major points of realization or events in their life, including the banana splits after the tragedy of their mother’s death and the birthday cake they share as they smile and laugh after coming to their own individual realizations at the end of the play (Whited 3).