Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose suffered from lifelong mental illness, and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy in 1937. The operation was new and untested, and in Rose’s case was a disastrous failure, leaving her permanently brain-damaged. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, unsure who she or her family were, and convinced that she was forever twenty-eight years old. Tennessee Williams’ attempt to explore the tragedy of Rose gave rise to many of his greatest plays, and Rose herself appears in various guises throughout his work.
The Rose-theme begins with Tennessee Williams’ earliest major work in the theatre,
The Glass Menagerie. This play began around 1941 as a short story called ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass’, which was later expanded into a screenplay entitled
The Gentleman Caller, before becoming
The Glass Menagerie in 1944. The plot is as follows. The Wingfield family live a drab existence in a cramped flat in St Louis, Missouri. Amanda, the matriarch, aspires to a life of delicate Southern gentility, but this has long ago become impossible: her husband walked out on her fifteen years ago, leaving her to bring up her two children. As the play opens the children are in their twenties. They are Tom, a warehouseman with literary aspirations, and Laura, a mentally-fragile young woman with a limp who seeks solace in her collection of little glass animals. Laura’s nickname in the play is ‘Blue Roses’, a reference to a bout of pleurisy (pleuroses/blue roses) she’d had as a youngster. When one day Tom brings his friend Jim home from work, Amanda makes lavish preparations, hoping Jim might make a husband for Laura, and things appear to augur well when Laura realizes that Jim is the young man she’d fallen in love with at school. Amanda and Tom leave Laura and Jim together for a sultry evening, but Jim reveals that he is engaged to be married. Before leaving he accidentally knocks over and breaks one of Laura’s glass animals (a unicorn). After he has gone Amanda rounds hysterically on Tom, accusing him of bringing Jim home under false pretences, saying that Tom must have known all along about the engagement. The play ends as Tom addresses the audience, from the perspective of several years in the future:
Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger – anything that can blow your candles out! For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura – and so good-bye.
'Tom’ was Tennessee himself (‘Thomas’ was Tennessee’s original name); ‘Amanda’ was his mother, also a heroically-declining Southern Belle; and ‘Laura’ was his sister Rose, who did indeed own a menagerie of little glass animals. Tennessee said in an interview with the New York Times in 1945 that the play was
semi-autobiographical, based on the conditions of my life in St Louis. The apartment where we lived wasn’t as dingy and poverty-stricken as that in the play, but I can’t say much for it, even so. It was a rented, furnished apartment, all over-stuffed furniture, and the only nice room in it was my sister’s room. That room was painted white and she had put up a lot of shelves and filled them with little glass animals. When I’d come home from the shoe place where I worked – my father owned it, I hated it – I would go and sit in her room. She was the member of the family with whom I was most in sympathy, and, looking back, her glass menagerie had a meaning for me. Nostalgia helped – it makes the little flat in the play more attractive really than our apartment was – and as I thought about it the glass animals came to represent the fragile, delicate ties that must be broken, that you inevitably break, when you try to fulfill yourself.
Tennessee’s brother Dakin went further and said it was ‘a virtually literal rendering of our family life at 6254 Enright Avenue, St Louis, even though the physical setting is that of an earlier apartment, at Westminster Place. There was a real Jim O’Connor, who was brought home for my sister. The Tom of the play is my brother Tom, and Amanda Wingfield is clearly my mother.’
The glass animals therefore represent the fragility of his sister Rose, her sad attempt at feminine delicacy in a rundown flat, and the bonds that must be broken if anyone is to find personal freedom.
Tennessee never forgave his parents for authorizing the lobotomy that left Rose so scarred, and continued writing about Rose for the rest of his life. The desire to document the tragedy of Rose can be seen clearly in
The Glass Menagerie, but it is also present in plays such as
The Purification,
The Two-Character-Play,
Suddenly Last Summer – in which one character, Catherine, is also threatened with a lobotomy – and
The Rose Tattoo, where she even appears in the title.
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One day in January 1931 Stella Gibbons was having lunch with her friend Elizabeth Coxhead. The pair were young journalists at The Lady, and neither had yet published a book (Coxhead was later a novelist and biographer). Gibbons told Coxhead that she was writing a take-off of ‘all the grim farm novels’ (such as those of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb, DH Lawrence, and others, sometimes known as the 'loam and lovechild' genre), to be called Curse God Farm; Coxhead replied that it was a good idea but that she should call it Cold Comfort Farm. When asked where she had got such a marvellous name, Coxhead told her that it was the name of a farm near Hinckley belonging to a grammar school where her father was headmaster. So Gibbons, recognising that nature always trumps art, changed the title of her book. It was an enormous success and won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933.
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