SOURCE: Hitchcock, Francesca M. “Tennessee Williams's ‘Vengeance of Nitocris’: The Keynote to Future Works.” Mississippi Quarterly 48 (fall 1995): 595-608.

In the following essay, Hitchcock demonstrates the significance of “The Vengeance of Nitocris” to Williams's later work.

Throughout his literary career, when asked about “love,” Tennessee Williams almost always answered with an explanation about his relationship with his sister, Rose. He called their love “the deepest of their lives,” a love that precluded the need for “extrafamilial attachments.”¹ Various friends of Williams saw the connection between Tom and Rose as so close that they appeared as “two halves” of a whole person.² Harry Rasky, author of Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation, writes that “Just as Siamese twins may be joined at the breast bone, Tennessee was joined to his sister, Rose, by the heart. The blending of two souls was so complete that they could have occupied...