Is Tennessee Williams playing off stereotypes of the Latin Lover? Paolo is repeatedly described with his hand in his crotch “the center of his being”. Likewise isn’t Rome also sexualized? There was an odd little description early in the story where the domes of Rome were likened to the breasts of reclining women. How much is Williams depending on the preconceptions of his mid-20th American readers?
I was also intrigued by Williams blunt sexual descriptions that managed to avoid being either explicit or coy. Only occasionally did they seem awkward like that dome bit. But he did go on at great length in that mode. Was he excessive in the sort of way that KC thought he was in his bird motif descriptions?
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It did seem graphic for something from 1950. I read a collection of his short stories years ago, and many of them were actually pornographic. So I wasn't terribly surprised by some of the stuff in "Mrs. Stone." I don't know that he's using the stereotype of the Latin lover so much as just using his own very sexualized view of human experience. (I also wondered whether his own experiences with young hustlers informed his take on Mrs. Stone's experience with gigolos, who go with either male and female patrons — if as an aging literary man he found himself in similar straits, with beautiful young men who couldn't begin to appreciate him or love him for himself, who had nothing to offer but paid-for beauty and the paid-for "center" of their beings.)
ReplyDeleteHas anyone read "Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann? The premise there — different Italian city — is an aging intellectual who makes himself ridiculous for a boy whom he can only admire from afar but has no chance of ever having any kind of spiritual/sexual connection with. Venice figures largely in the book, as Rome does here, and there are similar themes.
Short stories from the 60s and 70s? The “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Naked Lunch” cases at the end of the 50s pretty much wrapped up book censorship. Did Williams cut loose once that lid came off? I think our story would have suffered from being more explicit because it would have been more at odds with Mrs. Stone’s sensibility.
ReplyDelete“Death in Venice”? Is our stalker some sort of counterpart to the cholera?