Caged Birds: Bad Faith in Tennessee Williams's Drama

Abstract

In The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 March 1948, Tennessee Williams listed among his current reading the works of two existentialists: Albert Camus's The Stranger, Caligula, and Cross Purpose, and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit and The Flies. Reminiscing in his Memoirs about his 1948 stay in Paris, he expressed a particular admiration for Sartre: "I was most interested in meeting Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy appealed to me strongly, as did his play Huit [sic] Clos." Despite Williams's admitted affinity for Sartrean existentialism, his work has never been read within the context of Sartre's philosophy. A Streetcar Named Desire has been examined in relation to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But, as a rule, critics draw parallels between Williams and the existenti alists without positioning the playwright within anyone school of existentialist thought, or they discuss his existentialism in generalized terms. Gerald Weales's commentary, which represents the latter approach, suggests that Williams's drama is existentialist in the way that much of modem drama is perceived as such, namely in its presentation of humanity as alienated beings trapped in a meaningless universe: “it is the universe that has been implicit in all his work, one in which man is a stranger. ... There is no escape in a universe where there is no God and where the other inhabitants are as dangerous as one's own self." To facilitate our understanding of Williams's specific brand of existentialism, as it converges with and diverges from Sartre's, we will examine in relation to Williams's drama one of the central tenets of Sartrean existentialism: bad faith.