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영어

Tennessee Williams was a short story writer until he became interested in writing plays at the age of twenty-four. When he seriously began to write plays, he reused plots, characters, and ideas that he had already dealt with in short story form. In fact, almost all of his major plays grew more and less directly out of his short stories. “Desire and the Black Masseur” is an appropriate story to explore his plays because it conveys very graphically and grotesquely the basic attitude, that sexual desire is a terribly destructive force, which is at the root of most of Williams’ works. In Summer and Smoke, the fires of desire inside her destroy Alma mentally and physically. Her descent into promiscuity at the end of the play shows how real this destruction has been. In A Streetcar Named Desire, desire as her husband’s homosexuality was responsible for Blanche losing Allan, which loss drove her into the behavior that finally destroyed her. For Blanche, desire in the form of promiscuity has brought about the loss of her teaching position, her respectability, her self-respect, her ideals, and desire in the form of Stanley has caused her to lose Stella, Mitch and finally even her sanity. The destruction that desire brought to Alma and Blanche warns us that there is in store for them the terrible suffering which finally makes their lives intolerable.