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The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams

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Obviously there is no issue with the inevitable influence on his writing of the writer's cultural background, personality, personal emotions, and life experience. This reflection of the artist on his work may even be to such extent pervasive that the writer ends up writing several but same books, telling the same story inspired from his own life wounds. If anything, the connection between the celebrated author of Streetcar and his work is even deeper, transformed into a complete identification. Donahue in The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams quotes him as proclaiming, "A poet's life is his work and his work is his life. True enough, living a bohemian life, moving from city to city, in search of his decaying post-bellum South, he kept revisiting, through the characters he staged, his troublesome childhood and youth, and he kept trying to write in the less fecund second half of his career fraught with personal tragedies." The debate is elsewhere, in the disturbing egocentric nature of the quote. If a work of art inevitably reflects the personality of its author, should it be forcibly identified with its creator, or directly or obliquely reduced to a biographical document? Must creativity be that constrained, confined to the sublimation of personal emotions, pulses, and impulses, to the resolution of personal conflicts? Why drama must always rime with personal trauma? The debate is about the artist's purpose. As there is no morality ring to Williams's assertion, I cannot help asking what could honest writing accomplish? Exposing honestly his homosexual self, his complex and painful relationship with his sister Rose and his violent father, what does Williams aim to accomplish beyond self-analysis, purification, or sanity preservation? Does Williams truly expect his audience to take interest in his life story, his "lit by lightning  nightmarish world, and his psychotherapeutic release? Williams sidesteps the question with his defi

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