Free Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr Page B

hands and quite unable to look at me.” Later, backstage, Laurette Taylor asked her, “Well, Mrs. Williams, how did you like yourself?” “Myself?” Edwina said grandly, rising above what she saw as Taylor’s impertinence.
    Edwina was, as Williams politely characterized her in his memoir, “a moderately controlled hysteric.” And, like many hysterics, she had trouble with her body; she was frigid. “She used to scream every time she had sex with my father,” Williams said. “And we children were terrified. We’d run out in the streets and the neighbors would take us in.” Dakin, who joked about his mother being “president of the anti-sex league,” said, “She didn’t believe in sex, she avoided it completely.” Edwina described her love to her children, rather than demonstrating it. Kissing and hugging—the ordinary tactile expressions of maternal affection—were not in her repertoire. “She just didn’t touch you,” Dakin said. “She didn’t react well to anything physical. We never had it, and didn’t expect it.”
    Amanda, like Edwina, avoids the physical. In the course of the play, the stage directions indicate, she touches her son only three times. “Don’t quote instinct to me!” she snaps at Tom, upbraiding him for his defense of human passion. “Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals! Christian adults don’t want it!” For Edwina, spiritual self-sacrifice took the place of passion, a substitution that made her, in Williams’s eyes, “an almost criminally foolish woman.” With her “monolithic Puritanism,” as Williams called it, Edwina embodied “all the errors and mistakes and misunderstandings that her time and background could produce. She is so full of them that she is virtually a monument of them, nor has she outgrown a single one of them,” he wrote in 1946. He added, “
Society
should be
scourged
for producing such ‘Christian martyrs’!—such monuments of misapprehension!” In the hope that her hapless daughter, who had never graduated from high school or held a job, might become a secretary, Edwina had Rose practice typing such self-improving homilies as:
    Achievement, of whatever kind, is the crown of effort, the diadem of thought. By the aid of self-control, resolution, purity, righteousness and well-directed thought a man ascends; by the aid of animality, indolence, impurity, corruption, and confusion of thought a man descends.
    Like all hysterics, Edwina was adept at transmitting her inner state to others. Her martyred look, which is preserved in
The Glass Menagerie
’s second scene, could pierce even CC’s bow-wow façade. Recalling an evening when his father came late and drunk to the dinner table, Williams wrote, “She fixes on him her look of silent suffering like a bird dog drawing a bead on a covey of quail in the bushes.” Edwina’s performance could draw out of CC an almost “maniacal fury.” In the case of her children, who most needed her emotional support, that fury turned inward.
    Thanks to the dread of the physical that Edwina “imposed,” Tennessee, Rose, and Dakin were strangers to their own bodies. Dakin remained sexually inexperienced until his marriage at the age of thirty-seven; Rose, whose first signs of madness, according to a 1937 Farmington State Hospital report, were a “reaction to delusions of sexual immorality of family,” died a virgin; and, by his own admission, Williams didn’t masturbate until he was twenty-six, “and then not with my hands but by rubbing my groin against my bed-sheets while recalling the incredible grace and beauty of a boy-diver plunging naked from the high board in the swimming-pool of Washington U. in St. Louis.”
    In
The Glass Menagerie
, Laura’s desire—for her gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, on whom she had a secret high-school crush—paralyzes her; she literally can’t bring herself to stand and to answer the front door. In the Williams family, the