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The Martyr in Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer,The Mutilated, and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde

Alison Walls

Among the remarkable Christian imagery that suffuses Tennessee Williams’s oeuvre, the figure of the martyr in particular peoples his plays. Tracing the martyr through Suddenly Last Summer, The Mutilated, and The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde brings to light an underacknowledged evolution consistent with the general trajectory of Williams’s work, in which the plays’ generic tendencies and tonal shades of light and dark diverge, highlighting his preoccupation with the struggle between the worldly and the divine. The following discussion makes no pretense of providing a truly theological analysis of Williams’s plays but seeks rather to build on his well-established religious themes and iconography and his acknowledgement of religious feeling to suggest that the martyr was particularly significant for Williams. An examination of the martyr thus provides a connection to another persistent and well-recognized motif in his work—the fragmented, disappearing, or suffering body.

¶2

Williams was born in the Episcopal rectory, and in a 1958 interview described himself as having grown up “in the shadow of the Episcopal church.” He was the grandson of a clergyman, someone for whom he had intense love and admiration and whose devotion to the church and “sincerity and depth as a person” made it “impossible” for Williams to “ever be against formal religion per se.” In the same interview, moreover, Williams describes himself as “a very religious man,” speaks of praying before every show opening, and claims to have “very often,” in fact, “always received an answer” (“Tennessee” [1958] 57–58). Williams converted to Catholicism in 1969 under the influence of his brother, Dakin. Williams had just recovered from an attack of the so-called Hong Kong flu—a brush with death that, according to Michael Tueth in a 2016 report in America: The Jesuit Review, “may have caused a reckoning with his mortality and also served as a reminder of his comment to his brother that he hoped one day to have a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.” Although Williams’s Episcopalian baptism would have been recognized by the Catholic Church, a second baptism was performed by a Catholic priest, Joseph L. LeRoy, who expressed that “it was Mr. Williams’s wish, in the interest of his own spiritual and emotional needs at the time, that the rite be repeated” (qtd. in Tueth). The romance of a parting Catholic conversion aside, denomination does not seem to have been of great importance to Williams. In 1981, in his characteristically contradictory style, moments after having asserted to Dotson Rader, “I was born a Catholic, really. I’m a Catholic by nature,” he describes being declared a Catholic after his conversion and remarks, “Does that make me a Catholic? No, I was whatever I was before” (“Art” 333–34). His prebaptismal confession was apparently “the shortest confession” LeRoy had ever heard, and yet Williams supposedly expressed to LeRoy (despite being heavily medicated during the priest’s visits) the hope that a Catholic baptism would help him “get [his] goodness back” (qtd. in Tueth). It seems clear that Williams’s personal doctrine is more concerned with earthly struggles, with human suffering and sensuality, and with the “terrible” responsibility “to see that we are behaving in some sort of a decent fashion toward our fellow creatures, animal and human” (Williams, “Will” 141) than with conventional, restrictive moralities or metaphysics.¹

¶3

It is equally clear that the Catholic and Episcopal Churches held particular appeal in their dramatic ritual and aesthetically rich symbology (see Williams, “Tennessee” [1966] 129, “Will” 140, “Art” 333–34, and “Playboy” 248), including impressive representations of martyred saints. Traditionally, martyrdom testified to the faith of the martyr, faith in an afterlife, in a transcendent God and a transcendent realm. Paintings of martyrdoms often show God, an angel, or Mary looking down from heaven, or the soul rising from the body (as in, for instance, the famous 1525 painting of Saint Sebastian by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, or Il Sodoma). Brian Parker has presented convincing evidence of Williams’s familiarity with Il Sodoma’s painting and with Guido Reni’s two seventeenth-century renderings of the saint (639–53).² And yet, what Williams’s martyrs testify to, by contrast, is the agony of the human condition in a seemingly godless world. In his plays and short stories, the martyr becomes a central emblem of the desperate need for human compassion and connection—compassion and connection tantalizingly glimpsed in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), fumblingly achieved in The Mutilated (1966), and gruelingly absent in The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde (1982).

¶4

Williams scholars over the decades have laid bare the religious foundations in the plays, although the criticism has primarily focused on his earlier work. Suddenly Last Summer has possibly received the most scholarly attention for its wealth of religious allusion. Janice Siegel, Judith Thompson (97–130), and Robert Gross are all alert to the “mythic overtones” (240) of Sebastian’s death. Gross, Thompson, and Andrew Sofer also point to the repeated evocations of the Eucharist throughout the play.³ The names of two of the most important characters, Catharine and Sebastian (one present, one absent, both implicitly compared to Christ in the play), as well as the name of the beach on which the latter meets his fate (La Playa San Sebastian), have invited scholars to investigate their evident origins in Christian mythology and will be discussed below. Philip C. Kolin provides an exception to this tendency to focus on early work, with his readings of The Mutilated as “Tennessee Williams’s Apocalyptic Christmas Carol” and of Small Craft Warnings as “an eschatological finale of sorts to the previous decade of Williams’s work,” much of which he describes as being “activated through Christian sympathy and symbology.”⁴

¶5

As I will demonstrate, however, the more grotesque physical suffering inflicted upon the characters of The Mutilated and Rooming-House, while coherent with the more obvious religious connotations of the earlier plays, reveals an increasingly intense contemplation of physical suffering as a fearful reach toward the divine. The plays, I argue, use the martyr figure to explore the accessibility of God to a fallen world: they point to a Williams troubled by the world’s lack of human compassion and continuously fascinated by the relation of physical suffering and spirituality, a relation explored with greater urgency over the span of his career. The characters in Monk’s “cathedral-bar” that Kolin sees as groping toward spiritual salvation “in a society needing more, not less, devotion to others and to God” in The Mutilated (“Having” 122) thus fit within a lineage of such desperate grasping at spirituality, at the end of which lie the now truly hopeless characters of Rooming-House. The martyr who, in achieving saintliness through pain, joins human suffering to that of Jesus Christ and thus is a conduit between the mortal and divine, is not banished from the rooming house but is denied purpose to his suffering, since the material world of Mme. Le Monde obscures any hint of a spiritual world beyond. In one of his last and most “outrageous” plays, Williams thus makes an irreligious application of a religious archetype that has been present since his earliest works.⁵

¶6

The three plays considered here are far from the only works featuring a martyr figure: in fact, Orpheus Descending’s Val Xavier and Sweet Bird of Youth’s Chance Wayne were created between 1954 and 1959—in other words, around the same time as Suddenly’s Sebastian. Val Xavier, who meets his fiery death at the hands of the bigoted Jabe and the hypocritically puritanical townsfolk just before Easter Sunday in Orpheus Descending, is certainly a martyr figure. While his snakeskin jacket suggests the serpent of Eden, his name reveals a more saintly as well as personal connection for Williams, as the character was named for Valentine Sevier, an ancestor of the Williams family who may have been related to Saint Francis Xavier, Williams’s chosen patron saint for his Catholic conversion (see Tueth; Phillips 198). Val Xavier’s pairing with Lady, whose name and semi-miraculous pregnancy evoke Mary, reinforces his saintly cast. The visionary painter Vee, who early in the play describes her painting of “the Holy Ghost ascending” as having only “a blaze of light” for a head, since that was the vision she received, seems to share an affinity with Val; later, she is struck with a powerful vision of the eyes of “Christ Risen,” after which she looks at Val in a state of “blasted ecstasy and dismay and belief” and exclaims “You!” and then “The Ey—es!” before collapsing in Val’s arms (242, 316–17). Vee has clearly seen a Christ figure in Val.

¶7

Like Val, Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth is also victim to hypocritical bigotry, and his apparently inevitable castration at the end of the play by Boss Finley’s lackeys takes place on Easter Sunday. Chance is not, however, linked so directly to Christ as was Val. Moments before his mutilation, Chance in fact sets himself apart from “saints and heroes,” who, unlike him, are capable of escaping time (123).⁶ Ironically too, Boss speaks of himself as having been “crucified” “by his own offspring,” and his effigy is burnt on Good Friday (65, 108). Chance’s martyrly status is further complicated by his first love’s name—he has, in a sense, literally and figuratively known “Heavenly” pleasures too soon. And yet, in his final mutilation, which mirrors Heavenly’s own (her hysterectomy), Chance does seem to find redemption. John Clum identifies Val and Chance, along with Sebastian Venable, as Williams’s “sacrificial stud[s],” notably describing them as “sexual martyr[s],” “sacrificed for violating their proscribed roles in the patriarchal sex/gender system” (128). Though Suddenly, The Mutilated, and Rooming-House are not the sole plays through which to explore the theme of martyrdom, I will focus my attention on these three works, which are connected by the martyr figure and yet emerge from different stylistic phases in Williams’s oeuvre. In each of these plays the martyr is placed within distinct and differing, if not mutually exclusive, visions of the world.

¶8

Of the three works that are my focus here, Suddenly Last Summer is the earliest and best-known work and makes a useful lens through which to view the later works. That Sebastian Venable’s eponym is a saint with a long literary and artistic history as a somewhat controversial icon of “feminized masculinity, homoerotic desire, working-class consciousness, and sado-masochism, all seemingly sanctioned by religious faith” is fitting (Kaye 269–70). As Parker observes, Williams was responding to the entire culture surrounding Saint Sebastian rather than seeking pure allegorical equivalence (653).⁷ The historical Saint Sebastian was shot full of arrows under the Roman emperor Diocletian’s orders, and in Italian and French painting he is most often depicted as handsome, nude, and commonly tied to a post or tree—“a glorious emblem of male beauty,” as Richard Kaye puts it.⁸ In both the homoeroticism inherent in the saint’s “compliant, yet triumphant” muscular body, submitting with “ecstatic grace” to the piercing of (phallic) arrows, and in the doting women who surround him (such as Irene, who nursed him after a first, failed execution) (272), Saint Sebastian bears more than a passing resemblance to Sebastian Venable. The two even share the paradox that their violent ends are presented with the appearance of simultaneous punishment and pleasure. Kaye notes, “For homosexual aesthetes, [Saint] Sebastian also hinted at the exultant pain afforded by the restrictions of the Catholic Church, the beauty of an undisclosable sin that must be punished” (274).⁹ Sebastian Venable’s death by cannibalism can similarly be interpreted as both punishment and masochistic fulfillment.

¶9

It is perhaps less clear to which saint Catharine Holly owes her name, the Saint Catherines of Bologna, Ricci, and Siena all being contenders.¹⁰ A case could also be made for Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who, having successfully debated the anti-Christian philosophers and orators of Emperor Maximian, was tortured and then beheaded. Like Catharine Holly, she knew and said too much. The threatened lobotomy is a kind of beheading, comparable to that which finally silenced the saint (see Costelloe, “Catherine of Alexandria”; “Catherine”). Interestingly, Catherine of Siena was also a dangerously knowledgeable and defiant woman: “she argued against authority to become the first woman ‘doctor’ of the Church” (Parker 645).¹¹ Most likely Catharine Holly represents a composite of several saints, perhaps all four. Other religious figures are also significantly layered onto the character of Catharine. There is, for instance, the textual confusion between Catharine and the “sisters” of the asylum (“I think it’s me they’re calling, they call me ‘Sister,’ Sister!” [375]) as noted by Thompson (119). Thompson points out, moreover, the significance of Catharine’s surname, Holly, which carries associations both of Christ’s birth and his crown of thorns, while also acting as a symbol of pagan sexuality (118)—an intermingling of martyrdom with sexuality that aligns her with Sebastian. Furthermore, in an overlooked but noteworthy exchange, when Dr. Cukrowicz goes to “give [her] something,” she responds: “Do I have to have the injection again, this time? What am I going to be stuck with this time, Doctor? I don’t care. I’ve been stuck so often that if you connected me with a garden hose I’d make a good sprinkler” (400). The endless needles that have pierced Catharine’s body, and the surgeon’s “needle-thin knife” that will pierce even deeper (366), recall the arrows that struck Saint Sebastian, thereby hinting at a deeper affinity with her cousin’s holy eponym.

¶10

Parker, Annette J. Saddik, and Clum offer further insights to Suddenly through a significant intertext: Williams’s 1946 short story “Desire and the Black Masseur,” in which a white client, Anthony Burns, offers himself to an African American masseur to be devoured. The connection is not merely thematic; Parker explains that in an earlier draft of Suddenly, soon after having changed the character’s name from the original Bertie to Sebastian, Williams experimented with interpolating a speech from “Black Masseur,” putting the idea of moral purgation through “the surrender of self to violent treatment by others” (“Desire and the Black Masseur” 240) into the mouth of Catharine (who was still Valerie at this point; the name changes alone are evidence of Williams’s deliberate evocation of the saints [Parker 655]).¹² The short story is useful because it makes explicit Suddenly’s implicit fusion of sexual desire and violent atonement. This fusion is most evident when the preacher’s “fiery poem of death on the cross” provides the complementary narration to the sadomasochistic acts between Anthony Burns and the masseur, around “the end of the Lenten season” (244): the “exhortations of the preacher” emanate from the church across from the room to which Burns and the masseur have escaped. Both the preacher and the parishioners are in an almost trance-like state, “groaning and writhing [. . .] in a massive atonement” (244). The opening lines of the section immediately following underscore the parallel: “All during this celebration of human atonement, the negro masseur was completing his purpose with Burns” (245). Clum suggests that for Williams, “love, insofar as it exists at all, is the transient joining of two different desires contained in individuals who will always remain isolated, separate” (132), a solipsistic vision that counters Blanche’s claim that the “opposite [of death] is desire” (Williams, Streetcar 389). Instead, “the fulfillment of desire is death and the only total relationship is a literal enactment of the Eucharist” (Clum 132). As Nathan Tipton points out, moreover, Burns’s desires could easily exemplify what Kaja Silverman describes as “Christian masochism,” by which the Christian masochist “seeks to remake him or herself according to the model of the suffering Christ, the very picture of earthly divestiture and loss [. . .] installed in a suffering and castrated position” (Silverman 198; see also Tipton 45). The homoerotic sacrifice of Sebastian (as characterized by almost all the scholars already mentioned here) could be viewed in much the same light.

¶11

This interconnection of violence, sex, martyrdom, and atonement amounts to a fairly dark perspective on love, desire, and religion, in line with Thompson’s argument that Suddenly is essentially a “demonic myth,” an ironic inversion of the romantic image of marriage as the union of souls into “hermaphroditism, incest [. . .] or homosexuality,” the crucifixion into “unregenerate sparagmos,” and the Eucharist into “its demonic parody, cannibalism” (97). I suggest, however, that Catharine offers an alternative vision of martyrdom (whether or not she also offers the liberation that Clum suggests [128]).¹³ As noted above, Sebastian and Catharine can be seen as paired martyrs, with Catharine’s needle-pierced self even evoking Sebastian’s eponymous saint, as well as her own. Yet while Sebastian’s sacrifice is to the “terrible,” “cruel” god that he sees in the baby turtles devoured by sea birds, Catharine’s sacrifice is to truth and love (355–57).¹⁴ Twice she talks of loving Sebastian because he liked her (375, 397), and she tells the doctor “It began with his kindness” (406); her love, moreover, is paired with the desire to “save” him (397). It is Catharine too who sees that “we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what’s—hate . . .” (396). As the only character who understands the nature of genuine love and sacrifice, Catharine emerges as the true saintly martyr of the play, even though she too further entangles violence and saintliness: at one point she impulsively burns a nun’s palm with her cigarette, inflicting a stigma-like wound (372). It is notable also that when Williams is considering including text from “Black Masseur” in Suddenly Last Summer, it is to Catharine that he gives the words “The sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions”¹⁵—words that in “Black Masseur” follow the proclamation that “Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being” (240). Perhaps, even if the play as a whole more potently evokes Sebastian’s vision of desire as one of lonely transactions or masochistic sublimation, Catharine represents the hope, at least, that wholeness can be found and desire fulfilled in the connection to another human being.¹⁶

¶12

This oscillation between soulful yearning and cruel destruction can be found across Williams’s oeuvre, and much the way “Black Masseur” sheds light on Suddenly, so does Suddenly—and its theme of martyrdom—shed light on his later works. Indeed, the delicate balance between using and loving that seems just out of sight in Suddenly is tentatively reached in The Mutilated. The play opens with a fragile promise of hope. The action takes place on Christmas Eve, and as the curtain rises, carolers thread in and out of the play with their unusual carol sung to those deserving of Christmas warmth: “I think the strange, the crazed, the queer / Will have their holiday this year.” The second verse focuses on the martyrs and saints of this latter-day inn, the seedy Silver Dollar Hotel: “I think the mutilated will / Be touched by hands that nearly heal” (81). Although resonant with the inn at Bethlehem (like the holy family, Celeste is denied a room, finding shelter only in the lobby), the name of the hotel marks it as a place of betrayal, evoking as it does Judas’s payment in silver. The name also trades on clichés of the American myth, much like the handful of silver that Leona throws on the table in Small Craft Warnings, which Kolin argues gives the “palpably realistic” episode religious resonance (“Having” 121). Various betrayals are indeed enacted at the Silver Dollar Hotel, most centrally between the former friends Celeste and Trinket.

¶13

Trinket is another of Williams’s physically “afflicted” characters. She hides a “mutilation,” which is gradually revealed as a mastectomy. The absence of Trinket’s breast, as well as her sense of shameful disfigurement, are thrown into relief by Celeste’s “large bosom of which she is excessively proud, wearing low-cut dresses by night and day” (82). Celeste’s abundant bosom coheres with her abundant sexuality, upon which she shamelessly trades for booze, money, and food. Before the play’s beginning, Celeste had also taken advantage of her friendship with the wealthy Trinket (both Trinket’s body and name are at odds with her father’s “gusher” from whence stems her fortune), until her threats to expose Trinket’s secret and the insult “mutilated monster!” created the rift between them (115, 89).

¶14

The characters’ names further draw on religious meaning. Not only is the name Celeste obviously celestial, she ostentatiously announces her full name: “Celeste Delacroix Griffin,” or Celeste of the cross (83). Kolin observes, however, that there is a typically Williamsian contradiction in her name, since the griffin, “or dragon of the last days,” is literally the other side of the coin that is the medal of Saint Benedict, the patron saint of exorcisms. Thus “Celeste can be the griffin (dragon) as well as the light of the cross of the Christ. As the play unfolds, she is both monster and blessing in The Mutilated” (Kolin, “‘Mutilated’” 88). Intriguingly, the shedding needles of the Christmas tree in the lobby (which for Kolin ironically signal “pain and death, not fertility and joy” [89]), cover Celeste, echoing the injections and arrows with which Catharine and Saint Sebastian, respectively, were assaulted.

¶15

“Trinket” has no immediate religious resonance (except perhaps as a Christmas tree “bauble” [Kolin, “‘Mutilated’” 90]), but Agnes Jones, the name she gave “for her secret operation” (Williams, The Mutilated 92) and the name Celeste stole when arrested, does. “Agnes” recalls the Agnus Dei, the sacrificial lamb of God, and could also refer to Saint Agnes of Rome, the patron saint of chastity, young girls, engaged couples, rape survivors, virgins, and the Children of Mary (Costelloe, “Agnes”; “St. Agnes”), who is also often depicted with a lamb, reinforcing her innocence and her martyrdom and associating her with the ultimate martyr—Jesus Christ.¹⁷ Like Catharine, Trinket does not share her saintly counterpart’s virginity, but her mastectomy has forced her into a self-imposed period of abstinence, “not daring to expose the mutilation” (101). After three years that have felt like “a lifetime—a death time,” Trinket has decided to offer herself a “Christmas gift”—the longed-for “miracle” of a lover (117, 101).¹⁸ Significantly, this decision is partly the result of an urge to purge herself of the martyrly persona—a sort of reverse exorcism, in which she attempts to “drive out Agnes Jones [. . .] OUT, Agnes Jones, out, out, out and stay out!” (100). She picks up the sailor Slim, but his celestial crown of golden hair (see Kolin, “‘Mutilated’” 92) proves deceptive as this search for her own resurrection through the miracle of intimacy backfires. Slim discovers her secret from the words Celeste had earlier scratched into the bathroom wall, cruelly accuses her of morbidity, and calls her a “mutilated whore” (121)—not at all the kind man to whom Trinket had hoped to reveal her mutilation.¹⁹ The pain in Trinket’s breast returns.

¶16

Although Trinket’s mutilation links her to the martyr, she too has betrayed Celeste, exposing her jail time, but more important, encouraging her dependence and then rejecting her. When Trinket yells, “You scratched a hideous lie on the stairs about me!,” Celeste replies, “I scratched the truth about you! You got two mutilations, not one! The worse mutilation you’ve got is a crime of the Christian commandments, STINGINESS, CHEAPNESS, PURSE PRIDE! Your rosary’s in the gutter with your GUSHER!,” and the accusation has some ring of truth (117–18). Their shared lack and longing is evoked through parallel syntax as the two women then resentfully ruminate to themselves:

TRINKET: Celeste’s alone but I’m not, I’m not alone but she is.

CELESTE [sinking onto the bottom step of the outside stairs]: No, I’m not mutilated. She is.

Trinket continues, mentally melding breasts, religion, and longing:

The candlelight service is over. —The Holy Infant has been born in the manger. Now He’s under the starry blue robe of His Mother. His blind, sweet hands are fumbling to find her breast. Now He’s found it. His sweet, hungry lips are at her rose-petal nipple. —Oh, such wanting things lips are, and such giving things, breasts! (119)²⁰

The association is reinforced when Trinket remembers Celeste’s apparent ability to “see colored aureoles around people’s heads” (127). Celeste corrects her—“Not aureoles, auras”—but the comedic malapropism disguises a deeper resonance, since the term commonly given the circle of darker skin around the nipple more strictly refers to a radiant circle of light or halo around the head (“Areola”; “Aureole”; “Aureola”). The remarkably sensual image of Christ’s lips meeting Mary’s breast is indicative of Williams’s conception of desire as almost a spiritual quest, a longing for the sublimation of self in the other.²¹

¶17

The central relationship in The Mutilated is not sexual, and yet longing plays no less important a part, and the temporary fulfillment of this human need reaches toward—though does not obtain—the immortal. After Trinket’s mistreatment by Slim and the returning pain in her breast, a new character appears: Jack In Black, a cowboy dressed in black and a patent manifestation of death. Jack In Black joins the carolers and offers up his own verses:

I think the ones with measured time

Before the tolling of the bell

Will meet a friend and tell their friend

That nothing’s wrong, that all goes well

[. . .]

They’ll say it once and once again

Until they say it to themselves,

And nearly think it may be true,

No early tolling of the bell. (122)

Friend does indeed meet friend. Trinket and Celeste realize their need for each other and reconcile.

¶18

The scene is given a spiritual cast, as Mary herself perhaps appears. Celeste claims that “an elderly sister at Sacred Heart Convent School” told her that if she was ever “cut off and forgotten by the blood of [her] blood and was homeless alone in the world,” she would “receive the presence of Our Lady” and would know it by the scent of roses, candles burning, and incense and by the sound of a bell ringing. Celeste claims to smell roses, candles, and incense and to hear a bell. She cries out, “Our Lady’s in the room with us. She entered the room invisible when you opened the door. You opened the door of your heart and Our Lady came in!” As Celeste and Trinket kneel, reaching out and kissing the invisible robe of Mary, the scene is farcical. The gradual change in light that now “seems to be coming through stained glass windows” is no affirmation of holy presence but “a subjective phenomenon of the trance falling over the women.” And yet Trinket’s pain disappears, and the women cry out together that “Finally, oh, finally!” the miracle has arrived (127–28).²² Jack In Black resumes his song and is joined by the others, including Celeste and Trinket:

The tolling of a ghostly bell

Will gather us from where we fell,

And, oh, so lightly will we rise

With so much wonder in our eyes!

A miracle, a miracle!

The light of wonder in our eyes

[. . .]

But that’s a dream, for dream we must

That we’re made not of mortal dust.

There’s Jack, there’s Jack, there’s Jack In Black! (129)

But although Jack warns to expect him, he smiles and promises “not yet, not yet! [. . .] The bell has stopped because I smile. / It means forget me for a while.” The chorus sings, “A miracle, a miracle! / Forget him for a little while,” and the play ends (129–30). Again, it is worth turning to Kolin, who points out that the apocalyptic language in the play interweaves “the sacramental within the destructive,” presaging “the passing of an evil age, purified in suffering, and the creation of a new epoch of grace for the righteous.” Despite the play’s seediness, the carolers “recast our gaze toward the spark of divinity in mortal clay” (“‘Mutilated’” 86). And so, although the redemption of tainted flesh is equivocal—death is staved off only for a while, the mutilated are touched only by hands “that nearly heal,” and the agonized feel a comfort that is only “nearly real” (Williams, The Mutilated 81; emphasis mine)—the miracle of deeply imperfect human connection promises, if not immortal life, at least the ability to forget death.²³

¶19

No such hope is admitted into The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde, which is almost as rich as The Mutilated with religious allusion. In the rooming house every biblical reference is either dismissed or distorted, having no place in the dark world of this play, which is indeed crushingly worldly. Madame herself, who here constitutes “le monde,” embodies capitalist pragmatism and a potential nuclear apocalypse; she is “a large and rather globular woman with a fiery red mop of hair that suggests a nuclear explosion, as does her voice” (103). The school song of Scrotum-on-Swansea, the alma mater of Mint (a tenant in the rooming house) and Hall (a visiting friend), calls for heavenly blessings, but the composer was “accidently dropped off the chapel belfry soon after its composition.” Mint swears by “the blood of Our Blessed Saviour” and desperately invokes “the sake of our blessed Saviour” in his plea for sustenance, but receives nothing (92, 94, 101). The alcove with semi-transparent curtains is reminiscent of a confessional or the medieval rood screen, designed to separate the mystic rites of the clergy from the laity, but here it is the space dedicated to the sexual abuse of Mint by Mme. Le Monde’s son.

¶20

Mint, who, as Kolin remarks, “can stake his ancestry in freakdom to a long line of mutilated/disfigured souls in Williams,” including Anthony Burns, Sebastian Venable, and Trinket Dugan, is the (distorted) Christian martyr of the play (“Remarkable,” par. 5). No direct comparison is made, but visually his limp form with arms outstretched on the hooks that hold him upright recalls the image of Christ on the cross, not to mention the easy substitution of hooks for nails. The visual connection is reinforced when Hall holds Mint’s body to allow Mint to grasp the hooks, placing the two figures in positions similar to those in representations of Christ’s descent from the cross—an interesting reversal (again, Il Sodoma offers an exemplary work with his 1510–13 Deposition from the Cross). Mint is “a delicate little man with a childlike face” (Williams, Rooming-House 91): he is simultaneously man and child, in keeping with Christ’s dual nature as both infant and lord (there is an echo too of Revelations, in which Mary brings forth a “man child” [Rev. 12.5]). The strange Christlike conflation of man and child is reinforced by the setting: like the Silver Dollar Hotel lobby in The Mutilated, the attic of the rooming house is the lesser annex to a place of shelter and thus ever so subtly suggestive of the manger at the inn. Mint, then, can be read as a bizarre double vision of the infant and sacrificed Christ.

¶21

Rooming-House is hardly the first time Williams turns to images of the crucifixion. The short story “His Father’s House” (1948), for instance, centers on an unnamed boy’s obsession with the crucifixion. Although the protagonist is the crucifier, not the crucified, both this story and “Black Masseur” offer a key by which to read Rooming-House. The boy in “His Father’s House” lives with his uncle, since his father “is in a big house where the sick people go” (6). It is clear that the uncle is a violent disciplinarian, and the boy’s fascination is triggered by his uncle’s ridicule of his first sensation of desire. The humiliation of the experience leads the boy to start “looking around the city for death,” before realizing that it is in his “uncle’s own house,” where he then takes a knife to his wrists. The act is not presented as a suicide attempt per se, so much as part of a general search for death, and when the boy presses the blade “into the blue veins,” the sight of the gushing blood makes him “wild with excitement” (7). This same excitement is then stimulated by the image of the cross and story of the crucifixion told to him by a priest, and so he turns from the desire to experience pain to its infliction. The boy constructs his own cross, on which he crucifies Jim, the black man engaged by his uncle to teach him how to build.

¶22

Although a full treatment is beyond the scope of this essay, the complex racial aspect of both “His Father’s House” and “Black Masseur” cannot go without mention. The boy’s cries that he has “made the black Christ” in one sense elevate Jim to the holiest of martyrs, and “the black Christ” is a potent—if unwilling—symbol of the wrongs already done his race (13).²⁴ The physical violence that Anthony Burns undergoes at the hands of the masseur, on the other hand, may seem more just, since it is the white man who is “in search of atonement, and the black masseur was the natural instrument of it” (243). John S. Bak, however, who reads “Black Masseur” and Suddenly (“two of [Williams’s] most gothic works”) as critiques of Puritan hypocrisy, points out that Williams chose the name of the last black slave to be returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854—Anthony Burns—for his white protagonist and argues that by “usurping the historical identity of a black man and making him into a white, middle-class Christian homosexual like himself Williams simultaneously deconstructs the racial Other and reinserts himself into the role of the fugitive/victim” (131–32).²⁵ Allegorically, Burns becomes Christ “and the black masseur sinful humankind for whom he must die.” And yet, as Bak underscores, the sadomasochistic cycle of suffering and desire (hence “sin ad infinitum”) that can only end in ecstatic death leads ultimately to “sin, desire and its atonement culminating in one final and grotesque homoerotic administering of last rites” (132).

¶23

Several threads link the two stories and the later play. The astringent that Mme. Le Monde’s son substitutes for lubricant in his rape of Mint is comparable to the substitution of vinegar for water to wet Christ’s parched lips—as recalled by the preacher of “Black Masseur,” and also by the vinegar offered Jim in lieu of breakfast in “His Father’s House” (Rooming-House 102; “Black Masseur” 244–55; “His Father’s House” 12). And, as in Suddenly and the two stories, martyrdom and sadomasochism merge in Rooming-House. Hall congratulates himself on never having “suffered an affliction,” confident he never will, since his theory “about afflictions and accidents is that they’re self-induced” (93). Unlike Hall, Mint demonstrates a distinct “inclination toward accident and affliction,” an inclination that, at least for Hall, seems at one with Mint’s apparent “itchy fingers” (93, 94). And although Mint protests when Mme. Le Monde’s son carries him into the alcove in the opening scene, the “perverse sexual act” causes “[m]oans of masochistic pain-pleasure” to be heard from Mint (91). The hooks from which Mint suspends himself reinforce this masochistic element.

¶24

There is also the suggestion that such “inclinations” are part of Mint’s inheritance. His “dependence on hooks” began “[a]lmost immediately after Mommy’s commitment” (95). The institutionalized parent forms another point of comparison with “His Father’s House.” The uncle’s final injunction, “Every man must live in his father’s house” (13), can be read literally; read with secular symbolism, as in living with the legacy of one’s parentage (Williams was undoubtedly conscious of his own genetic links to an alcoholic father and a sister considered mentally disabled); or read with religious symbolism, in which case his father’s house—or, rather, his Father’s house—is both the church and the world itself. Rather than living in his Father’s house—or his mother’s house—Mint lives in that of Mme. Le Monde, a grotesque maternal figure who casually kills her son. That son is only one of the many “drones” that are the product of her queen-bee-like “fecundity” (104), a perverse distortion of the biblical exhortation, “be ye fruitful, and multiply” (King James Bible, Gen. 9.7). Another biblical verse, “ask, and it shall be given you” (Matt. 7.7), is similarly perverted in Mme. Le Monde’s final lines, which encapsulate the nightmarish house over which she presides: “There’s nothing more to be asked for that will ever be given” (105).²⁶ If therefore, as Kolin suggests, The Mutilated is Williams’s “most optimistic” piece, “because it is one of his most religious” (“‘Mutilated’” 86), Rooming-House may be his most pessimistic: not, however, because it is less religious but because religion—and specifically martyrdom—has been emptied of all meaning.

¶25

The paradoxical urge to transcend the body through its most acute sensations finds its ultimate iteration in the martyr. In Williams’s plays the figure of the martyr unites his attraction to the rich poetry of the church with the physical afflictions visited on his characters and embodies the intimate bond between desire, suffering, and the human striving for the divine. A reading of The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. Le Monde alongside The Mutilated and Suddenly Last Summer thus reveals not only a significant interweaving of two prominent Williams motifs in the martyred body but also an evolving exploration of a world in which God moves ever further out of reach. Some sense of the divine—a God, however terrible—imbues Sebastian’s story with mythic allure. Celeste and Trinket’s more amiable divinity may be no more than a necessary human illusion but can still be glimpsed. Mint’s suffering, however, echoes back on itself in the enclosed chamber of horrors. The transcendent pain of the martyr becomes instead an end in itself—sublimation within sheer bodily sensation. God is absent, because human compassion and connection are absent. And yet, the most grotesque depictions of the body are understood to have a unique sort of divinity. The divinity invoked in Williams’s plays does not rest on traditional strictures or a belief in the afterlife but rather in the struggle played out by his characters between using and loving, getting and giving, sinner and saint.

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