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“A relatively warm and easy intermingling of races”: Reading Race and Ethnicity in Tennessee Williams’s Plays

The paper will examine the (de)construction of the concept of ethnicity in Tennessee Williams’s plays The Rose Tattoo (1951) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and the screenplay of his Orpheus Descending (1957) - The Fugitive Kind (1959). Beginning with a brief theoretical excursus, the paper will point out the central tenets of the concept of ethnicity in the US. The second section of the paper will discuss the mirroring of the actual in the fictional, that is, how Tennessee Williams has brought into being the three generational structure of ethnicity in the characters of Serafina and Rosa Delle Rose, Stanley Kowalski, and Lady Torrance. The paper will conclude by considering, in the light of possible objections, some consequences of my argument: it shows that the discourse of ethnicity is not only an essential part of Williams’s literary rhetoric but a surrogate used to deal with the issues that had to be left unsaid in his oeuvre.

Tennessee Williams, ethnicity, generations, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, The Fugitive Kind

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