Tennessee Williams and the Radical Romance

During class this week, we discussed Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the "Radical Romantic Comedy" chapter of McDonald's text.  To get a better idea of the concepts and theories put forth by the authors, we watched Shakespeare In Love and Annie Hall.  However, since I just watched a classic Tennessee Williams' play, The Glass Menagerie, at the Mark Taper Forum, I'm going to relate some of the things we talked about in class to the play.

The play's narrator, Tom, played by Patch Darragh, takes us through an alter-ego-representation of his life, with his crippled sister and outrageous mother - an all-around dysfunctional family, abandoned by their father long ago.  Jim O'Connor, played by Ben McKenzie, enters Act Two as a "gentleman-caller", invited by Tom as part of a plan (on his mother's part) to find a suitable husband for his sister, who was actually in love with Jim in high school.  As the night progresses, Jim and Tom's extremely shy sister, Laura, are left alone.  Jim is able to get Laura to break out of her shell, they share a dance in the moonlight, and even a small kiss.  Just when it seems like Laura and, as a result, the Wingfield family as a whole will finally live happily ever after, Jim reveals that he's engaged and leaves shortly after, never to return, as does Tom, who follows in the footsteps of his father.

The play itself is set in the late 1930s - before the social upheavals leading up to the formation of the modern radical romance - but many of the issues it confronts seem to correlate to McDonald's ideas.  Williams, instead of creating a boy meets girl to boy gets girl scenario in Act Two, throws multiple obstacles into the characters' pathways, resulting in the implied resolution of Jim to stay with his fiancé and Laura being left single and unemployed, unable to take care of herself.

Tom's idea of what life should be is kept down by his familial problems, his alcoholic-tendencies, and his obsessions.  His mother is portrayed as an overly-loving, financially-dependent, traditional woman, who puts all of her eggs in one basket when Jim comes into the picture.  Both Tom and his sister struggle with their mother to maintain sanity on their less-than-average incomes and less-than-normal family life, and Tom finally decides to leave them both in the end with nothing but a memory of him.  The show in itself is not quite self-reflexive, although it does become a sort of play-within-a-play.  And it's really not about romance at all, but about the more complex issues of life and its failures, self-worth, and truth.  But it is comedic and has its share of romance, nonetheless.  One of the bigger issues, though, is the idea of breaking away from life and its conventions.  Although it's not a radical romance, there are radical notions that defy conventional plots in general, and it most certainly does not end on a happy note.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers.  Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre.  New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.  Print.