Queer Attachments in Tennessee Williams’ “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”

Abstract

Queerness has been a staunch presence throughout Tennessee Williams’ dazzling oeuvre. Compared with his famed plays, his achievement in short fiction is critically underrated. Gore Vidal deems Williams’ short stories as the “true memoir” of the writer, the candor of which even surpassed his autobiography (xxii). Dennis Vannatta argues that while Williams “failed to deal honestly... in his plays with the issue of homosexuality,” this subject has become “frequently and directly dramatized over the remainder of his short-fiction career” (x). Michael S. D. Hooper notes Williams’ short fiction as a parallel endeavor alongside the playwriting: Unlike his commercial theater where sexual expressions are “diluted,” Williams’ early short stories “tackle gay experiences head on” (96-97). The studies above unanimously pinpoint Williams’ short-fiction, less trammeled by censorship, as an unfading asset for unraveling his sexual politics imbricated with material minutiae. “Portrait of a Girl in Glass’ is critically considered the basis for the fulllength play The Glass Menagerie (1945). Tom Wingfield—the first-person narrator—is a young poet who works at a warehouse as the breadwinner to support his mother and sister, after his father’s desertion years ago. His sister Laura Wingfield quits business school and idles away her life among an “infinite number of little glass ornaments” left behind by their estranged father (Williams 98). The overbearing mother pushes Laura toward marriage by forcing Tom to bring home a gentleman-caller—also his fellow worker— named Jim Delaney. While Laura starts to enjoy his company, Jim inadvertently reveals his engagement to another girl. The visit ends in the mother’s disappointment. Afterwards, Tom leaves his hometown and becomes a drifter, yet still haunted by the memory of his sister. This essay focuses exclusively on “Portrait” as a self-contained text as I probe into the story’s intertextual entanglements with Gene Stratton-Porter’s potently homoerotic novel Freckles (1915). By extricating the homoerotic elements embedded in and mediated https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2205577