Miller and Williams

Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

This book comes fairly early within the discourses of queer studies and masculinity studies, and as such it feels a little dated. but makes some extremely interesting moves. It's about the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and what they each say about a mid-century masculinity juxtaposed against the McCarthy hearings and postwar economics. While it's a fascinating project and I will find this book quite useful, I found it most interesting at the very end. Savran does a great job of talking through the playwrights' works and analyzing them quite specifically, but he seems much more interested in Tennessee Williams than Arthur Miller. He really gets going in the final chapter of the book, comparing Williams' later works to contemporary critical theory by Barthes and Foucault.

Savran argues that Arthur Miller is a lot like Ibsen and Tennessee Williams is a lot like Chekov in their general structures and subjects; Miller addresses the borgeois individual (male) while Williams often presents "the death throes of an old regime and...the conflict between two generatiosn and two social classes" (100). Miller is generally seen as political while Williams is personal. Savran focuses on Williams' "surrealiist theater of extravagant and polymorphous desire" (78) and emphasizes its revolutionary potential. While Miller "recuperate[s] a desperate masculinity" (69), Williams at least in some ways challenges gender-as-usual, although Savran criticizes as well as praises Williams' portrayals of gender.

One concern I had with this work is the fact that Savran dismisses out of hand the "Albertine strategy," in which Williams' heroines are often interpreted as gay men re-gendered to be socially acceptable. While he makes a strong point about "the violence the 'Albertine strategy' inflicts on the Proustian text by recklessly transposing both gender and sexuality and producing an unintelligible clutter whose only coherence becomes the ill-concealed homosexuality of its author" (115), I think he runs the risk of trivializing the deep empathy and identification Williams creates for his female heroines and especially the way that he inhabits their desiring subjectivity. Through Williams and through Blanche and Stella, the audience appreciates the spectacle of Stanley's virile masculinity in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Savran's project seems to be to recuperate Williams as a revolutionary, and he does so quite well and not uncritically. By focusing on textual pleasure and desubjectification as revolutionary and queer strategies, Savran provides an extremely intelligent analysis of Williams much-derided later works. He specifically draws attention to the fact that "too often, the history of the oppression of women is neglected and women are subsumed...under a masculine (that is, nonvaginal) regime of sexuality" (169), recognizing that while Williams may be more revolutionary that the bourgeouis theater with which he is generally associated, he "remains the product of discourses and practices that continue to position him, however uncomfortably, within the locus of Western male privilege" (174). Overall, an extremely interesting book notable for its masterful critical analysis.