SOURCE: "Fluidity and Differentiation in Three Plays by Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," in Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theater and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort, Peter Lang, 1995, pp. 141-56.

In the following essay, Sarote examines Williams's treatment of discrimination and resistance to mainstream American "normalcy" in his three major plays. According to Sarote, "Streetcar, like most of Williams's works can be interpreted as a plea for a less repressive, more fluid, more androgynous American Society."

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable. It immediately became my place of retreat, my cave, my refuge. From what? From being called a sissy by the neighborhood kids, and Miss Nancy by my father, because I would rather read books in my grand-father's large...