Life and art : a classification of the artist-figures in selected fiction of Tennessee Williams

Abstract

Because they seek in varying ways to correlate life and art - some succeeding, most failing - it becomes necessary to adopt a system of classification to cover the ways of the artist-figures in Tennessee Williams' fiction respond to the life-art relationship. This study demonstrates the distinctions between the many artist-figures in Williams/ selected fiction. In their attempt to achieve an interdependence between life and art, Williams' artist-figures can be classified into three categories: (1) the contemplative artist, (2) the hedonistic artist, and (3) the histrionic artist. The contemplative artist self-consciously isolates or detaches himself from the mainstream of life with its demands, yet he observes, orders, and captures life in his art. Williams first depicted the contemplative artist as an apprentice to art. During the apprentice stage, William's contemplative artist rejects life about him for art. Joe, a writer in "The Long Goodbye," attempts to discover himself by ordering his memory of his family in art. In "Portrait of a Girl in Glass" and later in The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, also a writer, attempts to find meaning in past experience.