[Tennessee Williams takes] familiar characters, situations, and themes and then weaves them into a baroque conceit possessing neither original substance nor extrinsic value. The world so imagined hardly exists—or, at least, hardly deserves consideration—on any other level than the decorative: it offers us a group of charming grotesques, preserved in amber. What is Southern about it, really, is not a certain quality of perception, a sense of engagement between past and present, the public and the private, myth and history: but a turn of phrase or personality, a use of the bizarre and sensational for their own sake, which has the net effect of creating distance. For regionalism is substituted a form of local color, and a very precious and slightly decadent form at that, in which the gap between drama and audience seems deliberately widened so that the latter can revel without compunction in a contemporary "Gothick" fantasy. (p. 258)
[Williams] himself, I think, remains less than fully aware of [this reductive process]. Of course, Williams does have some suspicion of what he is doing, as his references to his own literary exhibitionism indicate. But these references are scattered and nearly always discreetly qualified. More to the point, they have never prevented him from reaching for some larger theme in his plays—and reaching in such a way, unfortunately, as to emphasize his limitations rather than go beyond them. Far from helping to charge his rich style with a vision equal to it, all his occasional ventures into moral statement tend to do is to remind us how very much he depends on the romantic commonplace; our attention is directed above all to the passing of time, the fragility of innocence, the loneliness of the sensitive person in a brutal world. This can hardly provide the sort of framework he requires, within which each play's images could be satisfactorily accommodated; and without it the audience is left to experience those images at random, to enjoy, in a fairly casual way, a series of Gothic—… largely Southern Gothic—effects. Often, if we look closely at the different elements in the series, we can even see from exactly where they came. Many of the characters, for example, seem when examined to trail the shadow of Yoknapatawpha behind them…. [There] is nothing intrinsically strange or suspect about this kind of borrowing: Faulkner is so much a part of the South by now that it would have been stranger, in a sense, if Williams had tried to ignore him. But there is, surely, something suspect and even wrong about the manner of this borrowing. For all Williams has been able to do with his adopted characters, really, by way of making them new is to vulgarize and dilute. His people (like his tropes, his settings) have been deprived of the functions and meanings assigned to them in their original context, and they have assumed no satisfactory fresh ones to replace them. They are there in the plays for the interest they inspire as exhibits, curios of human nature, and that is just about all they are there for. Thus, Williams's predatory women are not dangerous and frightening as Faulkner's are, a subversive commentary on sexual and family relationships; they are just neurotics, and rather silly neurotics at that. His girl-children are not mythic, Southern avatars of the Earth Goddess, merely Gothic pinups. And, as for his aristocratic young men, they are treated with the kind of approval, and taste for the pathetic or bizarre detail, that recalls the literature of the fin de siècle more than anything else. The funereal mansion, the intimations of incest, violence, and miscegenation, the brooding over the past and the desperate attempt to recover some of its memories: many, if not all, of the familiar elements of Southern writing reappear, but only, we must suspect, for the local excitement they can produce—to punctuate the narrative and, possibly, to intrigue. Yoked together as they are here, the most that Williams is able to create out of them is an exotic, broken world—a place that may provoke our lively curiosity at first but which, precisely because it is so very much less than the sum of its constitutent parts, is likely to leave us feeling a little cheated. (pp. 259-60)
Richard Gray, in his The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South (copyright © 1977 by Richard Gray), Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
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