Home and Homelessness in Tennessee Williams’s Plays

Abstract

This paper deals with the motif of home as well as the lack of it in the works of one of the gretatest 20th century American playwrights, Tennessee Williams. Having examined his life story and personal wanderings, most of which ended up in his plays, the focus shifts towards the plays themselves and their respective film versions. Five plays have been chosen to showcase the homelessness and home motifs: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending. During the respective analysis of the plays, a special accent is put on the role of home in the character-forming process and on the characters’ moral dilemmas and decisions, while characters who are vagrants are scrutinised, for they apparently have no home. In the conclusion, the role of home is placed into a time and spatial frame of America, and in the personal frame of the playwright’s own life. Finally, the concept of the institution of home is discussed, as well as the way it would be perceived in the future.