Thomas Lanier Williams III Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Thomas Lanier Williams III - Essay Example Thesis religions education and values of his grandfather had a great impact on themes and motifs used by Williams in his plays. The religious dimension is appeared in his early plays and portrayed as an important part of characters life. One of his best early one-act plays, Portrait of a Madonna, is at once a pathetic portrait of a deranged Southern spinster, precursor of Blanche DuBois of Streetcar, and a grotesque parody of the immaculate conception. Miss Collins both believes and denies belief. She has been brought up in the shadow of the Episcopal church but feels she has been abandoned by the church. Her walk in the scorching, merciless sunlight is a kind of passion, punctuated with cries to God, Jesus, and a "merciful Christ in Heaven" who show her no mercy. The recluse who believes herself pregnant wants to educate her imagined child privately, "to make sure that it doesn't grow up in the shadow of the cross and then have to walk along blocks that scorch you with terrible sunlight" (Bigsby 2004). The collapse of her belief turns her life into nightmare, as Williams makes amply clear through the tightl y woven pattern of Christian reference turned into parody and developed through imagery of light and shadow (Bigsby 2004). In Summer and Smoke the rectory is the home of a deranged woman and the angel in the park which dominates the set brings at the end not heavenly mercy or the "Eternity" inscribed at its base but the traveling salesman. The central irony of this struggle of body and soul is that by the time that Dr. John finally recognizes that human beings do have souls, Alma has given up hope and searches for satisfactions of the body alone. God's mercy comes not in the form of spiritual aid but in sleeping pills. As Alma tells the salesman, "Life is full of little mercies like that, not big mercies, but comfortable little mercies. And so we are able to keep on going." In The Rose Tatoo Serafina can shed her loneliness and prolonged grief and find love again only after she has blown out the candle under the Madonna's image. The priest is ineffectual and cannot solace her (Bloom 2003). Only in Mangiacavallo does she find renewed life. The Night ofthe Iguana gives us another ineffectual minister, the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon.Locked out of his church for heresy and fornication, Shannon rages romantically against the traditional image of God as a "senile delinquent" and wants to preach "God as Lightning and Thunder," in oblivious majesty before the terrors of the human condition. His own suffering is described by Hannah as a "voluptuous crucifixion," and her final appeal to God at the end of the play is only the last link in a chain of imagery of crucifixion and unsuccessful resurrection, of Christian belief gone awry. . Dr. John in Summer and Smoke will be married on Palm Sunday. Orpheus Descending reaches its wild climax on Easter Sunday and the lynching of Val Xavier becomes as a result a brutal parody Christian imagery becomes a means of denying Christian belief. In its quieter forms the combination produces cosmic irony; in its most violent manifestations, grotesque parody (Bigsby 2004). In the Glass Menagerie , religion is used as a unique theme which helps Williams to unveil false dreams and ideals of the character. On the level of plot, this circle of reference enhances the credibility of the dramatic situation. Given Amanda's sham