What's Eating Anthony Burns? Dismembering the Bodies That Matter in Tennessee Williams's "Desire and the Black Masseur"

Abstract

Tennessee Williams may be forgiven if his short fiction never approached phenomenal success of his dramatic works. While his plays explore subjects that were, during postwar period, considered unseemly (such as rape, psychosis, or incest) or dangerous (such as homosexuality), they are almost always viewed through a theatrically translucent, if thinly veiled, scrim of allegorical existentialism) More often than not, however, this veil is lifted in Williams's short stories, laying bare renderings of miscegenation, violent brutalization, and barely sublimated homosexual desire. Although by applying a sense of unreal reality Williams attempts move his fiction into realm of atmospheric theatricality, stories nevertheless retain too much of a hyper-real quality that, paradoxically, prevents any lasting imposition of fantasy. As Dennis Vannatta notes, Williams was the most autobiographical of writers, full of contradictions and clashing (4), and he easily transmutes these reality-based passions into his short stories, concatenating them together with bursts of sound and fury, signifying everything. That said, it is difficult imagine what passion could have inspired notorious short story and Black written in 1946 but not widely published until 1954, in midst of Cold War paranoia alarming proliferation of 'commies, niggers, and queers' that presaged nascent civil rights and homosexual movements (Saunders 137). While Desire is rife with themes of loneliness, pain, violence, and death common in Williams' work, transformation of these themes into explicit representations of sadomasochism and cannibalism is both surprising and disturbing. The titular Black Masseur's devouring of Anthony Burns is, of course, disturbing, but I would assert that story's more sinister subject matter lies in undercurrent of explicitly racial violence both accompanying and as a consequence of interracial homosexual desire shared between Burns and Black Masseur. This violence, I argue, manifests itself in and Black as an allegorically-rendered lynching narrative. Considering little-disputed claim that Anthony Burns is ultimately cannibalized by unnamed Black Masseur, my consideration of and Black as a lynching narrative may seem surprising given historical antecedents of lynching. James W. Clarke, for instance, points out that lynching in America is usually associated with white supremacists who used terror, making lynching a public spectacle, exert absolute power [South's] population. Lynching replaced whipping after emancipation as public exhibition of primordial power of white (274). (2) On its surface, and Black contains no white supremacists, no public spectacles, and no outright displays of raw primordial power of white black. As well, Williams' portrayal of passions shared by Anthony Burns and Black Masseur seem, at first glance, be rather straightforward. Nevertheless, as a southern writer, Williams would have been keenly aware of angst-ridden postwar dynamics surrounding interracial desire, as well as penalties exacted for violations of this strictly delineated racial and sexual divide. Southern historian Victoria Bynum states that there was a palpable hypocrisy associated with America's World War II position as a defender of democracy abroad while tolerating racial discrimination at home (249), particularly in South, where contours of racial discrimination extended deep into terrains of normative sexual mores. After all, southern society had long been obsessed with myth of black beast rapist who would, given opportunity, willingly ravage pure, virginal, and (of course) white paragons of southern womanhood) Even merest suggestion that a man would, in effect, cross over into white world would set off a cascading chain of dangerous events, as Trudier Harris observes: to violate inviolable, as any Black would who touched a white woman or became mayor of a town, is taboo. …