PARTISAN REVIEW
ing the part of the wife's unwelcome relation. The literature of domestic
realism is a literature of horrors and apparitions--Dickens, Dostoevsky,
Farrell, even Ozzie and Harriet, rattle the skeleton of family life;. there
is no limit, apparently, to what people will do to each other in the
family; nothing is too grotesque or shameful; all laws are suspended,
including the law of probability. Mr. Williams, at his best, is an
out–
rageous
writer in this sense; at his worst, he is outrageous in the other.
Had he been content in
A Streetcar Named Desire
with the terrible
trivia of the in-law story, he might have produced a wonderful little
comic epic, The Struggle for the Bathroom, an epic ribald and poignant,
a
comedie larmoyante
which would not have been deficient either in
those larger implications to which his talent presumes, for the bathroom
might have figured as the last fortress of the individual, the poor man's
club, the working girl's temple of beauty; and the bathtub and the
toilet, symbol of illusion and symbol of fact, the prone and the upright,
the
female and the male, might have faced each other eternally in
blank, porcelain contradiction as the area for self-expression contracted
to the limits of this windowless cell. Mr. Williams, however, like the
Southern women he writes about, appears to have been mortified by
the literary poverty of such material, by the pettiness of the arena which
is in fact its grandeur. Like Blanche Du Bois in
A Streetcar Named
Desire
and the mother in
The Glass Mtmagerie,
he is addicted to the em–
broidering lie, and though his taste in fancywork differs from these ladies',
inclining more to the modernistic, the stark contrast, the jagged scene,
the jungle motifs ("Then they come together with low, animal moans"),
the tourist Mexican
("Flores para los muertos, corones para los muertos),
to clarinet music, suicide, homosexuality, rape, and insanity, his work
creates in the end that very effect of painful falsity which is imparted
to the Kowalski household by Blanche's pink lampshades and couch–
covers.
To illustrate with a single instance, take the character of Blanche.
In her Mr. Williams has caught a flickering glimpse of the faded essence
of the sister-in-law; thin, vapid, neurasthenic, romancing, genteel, pa–
thetic, a collector of cheap finery and of the words of old popular songs,
fearful and fluttery and awkward, fond of admiration and overeager
to obtain it, a refined pushover and perennial and frigid spinster, this
is the woman who inevitably comes to stay and who evokes pity because
of her very emptiness, because nothing can ever happen to her since
her life is a shoddy magazine story she tells herself in a daydream. But
the thin, sleazy stuff of this character must be embellished by Mr. Wil–
liams with all sorts of arty decorations. It is not enough that she should
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