334
PARTISAN REVIEW
memory, a process that includes her becoming a tyrant to her daughter,
outraging the neighbors, and defying the authorities. There is vivid
action on the stage; there are real scenes, as when Serafina compels her
daughter's sweetheart, a sailor, to kneel and swear to the Virgin that he
will protect the girl's innocence. But soon the play starts flying to pieces
(aided by a production which, save for Maureen Stapleton's tumultuous
performance as Serafina,
is
farced-up and over-paced in the worst
Broadway style). Improvisation now reigns; anything may happen, one
feels. Even then one is taken aback
(honestly shocked
are perhaps the
words) when Serafina's daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, is shown
trying to argue her sweetheart (Melville's Handsome SaIlor with a
difference) into breaking his vow and sleeping with her-a delicate scene
at best but written by Williams with a nervous shrillness.
Why does
The Rose Tattoo
disintegrate? Partly, no doubt, because
it depends on a tradition of American exoticism that was already frayed
in the days of
Tortilla Flat
and now hangs together by a thread.
It
may
or may not be true, as the tradition maintains and as Serafina is always
demonstrating, that our marginal primitives are better-sexed-for that
is what it amounts to---than are Americans of the majority. However
that may
be, has
not the contention become a convention? For Williams,
there is only enough virtue left in it to inspire the portrait of Serafina,
which in itself is good. But a consciousness of anything
opposed
to the
tradition fails to materialize for him. Hence, after the early raptures
of
The R,ose Tattoo,
no real conflict, no characters, no structure, no
play, no literature.
F. W. Dupee
