How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn

figure, powerful and competent, brought unexpectedly low by some flaw in himself, some bad decision rooted in his character that leads, with awful irony, to inexorable destruction. In Williams’s plays, the bad decisions have already been made by the time the curtain rises; the emotional core of his drama lies not in a critical moment of choice but in the spectacle of abjection, of an already doomed, ruined person struggling to hang on to something beautiful. Greek tragedians tend to be interested in character, which is why the suffering comes at the end of their plays (it’s the result of bad choices). Williams is interested in personality, which is why he begins with the suffering, with the poverty or the madness.
    This is why his characters, while complex, rarely develop. He prefers, instead, to counterpose characters who represent monolithic and unchanging concepts or values—the raw energies of capitalism or of libido, say (to take the most famous examples, from Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire ), and the delicate, even delusional, ideology of beauty and romance, an ideology that is, you could say, both characteristically Southern and characteristically homosexual of a certain period—and then watch the hand play itself out as we all know it must. When you watch Antigone or Bacchae , you’re always haunted by the possibility that things just might have turned out differently, because the characters seem to be independent subjects—seem, however briefly, to be in control of their own choices. When you watch The Glass Menagerie , you know from the start that the narcissistic Amanda Wingfield’s desperate attempts to find a suitor for her crippled daughter will end up crushing the girl forever; when you watch Streetcar , you know, from the minute Blanche DuBois appears outside her sister’s tawdry New Orleans apartment dressed in her dainty white garden party outfit, that she will end up in a loony bin.
    And yet that same sense of inevitable doom, the spectacle of abjection rather than the drama of choice, is what generates the considerable emotional interest in Williams’s best work. The fascination lies in the pathetic tension between the characters’ illusions about themselves (the dainty white outfit) and the crushing disappointments that, we know, await them (poverty, the sordid reality of lust). We respond to his heroines not because they are particularly good—they are, if anything, often unattractive; nobody in his right mind would want Blanche DuBois as a houseguest any more than Stanley Kowalski does—but because, since we all have secret fantasies and illusions, we are bound to be moved by the spectacle of characters who can’t, or won’t, give in to the sordid realities of life.
    In his expansive stage directions for Menagerie , Williams amplifies his description of the music he wanted. This melody, he said, must be
    like circus music, not when you are on the grounds or in the immediate vicinity of the parade, but when you are at some distance and very likely thinking of something else…. It expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow.
    Surface vivacity competing with inexpressible sorrow: it would be hard to find a better characterization of Williams’s greatest characters. The question is not whether, but rather how long, the vivacity, the beauty, can hold out against the sorrow.
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    A crucial feature of Williams’s dramas of beauty crushed and heroic failure—a feature that does, after all, suggest a certain resemblance between his theater and Greek tragedy—is the playwright’s use of female characters to represent both the aspiration toward beauty and the inevitability of defeat. In the time and place and culture that produced him, women could still serve, without irony, as useful vehicles for exploring those qualities. Few dramatists in the Western tradition