The Victims of Gender Violence in the Cinema of Tennessee Williams: An Approach to Character Study

Abstract

The creation ofcharacters with a great psychological complexity is one of the signs of identity of the American playwright Tennessee Williams.This aspect was a notable innovation in the Broadway scene during the 1940s, but reached a greater dimension from the 1950s in Hollywood. Between 1950 and 1968 were adapted to the cinema a total of thirteen melodramas based on the works of this author, which dealt with aspects considered prohibited by the Hays Code such as alcoholism, drug addiction, ninfomania, homosexuality,sexual desire or violence, among others. In this sense, a representation of gender violence –verbal, physical and psychological character-, is manifested in the classic film through various adaptations of Williams. Thus, this work aims to reflect on how to display this type of violence in the protagonists of the film production of the playwright and, furthermore, how the treatment of this topic favored the weakening of the code and, consequently, a opening theme. The female characters that are analyzed are those who suffer most directly from the gender violence in his films: Blanche DuBois,in A Streetcar Named Desire(1951); Lady Torrance,in The Fugitive Kind(1960), and Heavenly Finley,in Sweet Bird of Youth(1962)