Chekhov and Williams

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CONTEXTS

LITERARY CONTEXT

EUROPEAN INFLUENCES

The subject matter of Williams’s plays was deeply influenced by his image of the South, but he looked to the playwrights of Europe for models of the form. When a student at the University of Missouri, and already dreaming of a career as a playwright, Tennessee Williams immersed himself in the plays of Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen. August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) may well have influenced A Streetcar Named Desire in its equation of class antagonism with sexual tension.

Again, a parallel may be drawn between the plantation culture of Belle Reve and the household of Madame Ranevskaya in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904). Both are doomed, useless, their extravagant existence based on the labour of others, yet they both possess a charm and romantic appeal lacking equally in the blustering merchant Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard and in Stanley Kowalski.

As for Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams could have wished for no better models for constructing a play around one compelling central character than A Doll’s House (1879), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892) or John Gabriel Borkman (1896), to name a few among many.

The two cultures – the Southern and the European – meet successfully in A Streetcar Named Desire , in its Southern setting and its romantic doomed heroine Blanche DuBois, with her class pretensions and European-sounding name.

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However, it was the playwright rather than work that first 7 attracted him and there were enough things common between the Russian author and Williams to hold on his attention: Chekhov and Williams both were the mediocre student in school who refused to bear the pressures from the outside world in the private activities of reading and writing. Louis Kronenberger, one of the reviewers of the New York premiere, said that “in its mingled pathos and comedy, it’s mingled naturalistic detail and gauzy atmosphere, its preoccupation with memory, its tissue of forlorn hopes and backward looks and languishing self pities, The Glass Menagerie is more than just like a little Chekhovian” (qtd. in Roudane 179). Since many of the dramatic elements “borrowed from The Seagull that appear in The Glass Menagerie” (Roudane 181). Therefore, it can be said, “Williams seized on a Russian play as a suitable model in the process of dramatizing his own material” (181). Just as The Seagull may have called the forerunner of The Glass Menagerie, The Cherry Orchard presents affinities with A Street Car Named Desire. Like Chekhov, Williams used “dramatic impressionism such as sound, lighting and stage effects” (181) as elements of psychological or thematic expressivity. In both places, the “decline of characters is accompanied by music: in the Russian play a Jewish orchestra” (181) was there that express disappointment and unhappiness; in the American plays, there is the Varsouviana, a formal “nineteenth-century polka specially associated with the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Blanche’s young husband and her subsequent sense of guilt” (181).

Roudane, M. C. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams.UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 

Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov have all been cited by critics as important influences on the drama of American playwright Tennessee Williams. While Harold Bloom argues that "Williams truly had one precursor only: Hart Crane," the critic acknowledges that Williams himself "asserted he had other precursors also: D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov in the drama" (Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams, ed. Harold Bloom [NY: Chelsea House, 1987], 2). According to Donald Spoto, when asked "which playwrights he thought most influenced his work, [Williams] usually replied Strindberg and Chekhov" (The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams [Boston: Little, Brown, 1985], 45). The influence of Chekhov on A Streetcar Named Desire is I think rendered obvious through conscious or deliberate allusion by Williams. Blanche Dubois explains the significance of her name to Mitch in scene 3 by asserting, "It's a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring!"([NY: Signet, 1972], 54-5). Blanche's delicate optimism here is undermined by the fact that "white woods" more readily recalls the image of a forest in the dead of winter. Yet her more appealing interpretation of her name also ironically heightens a sense of tragic decay, since "an orchard in spring" directly recalls Chekhov's A Cherry Orchard --that is, the answer to Anca Vlasopolos' query, "Was Williams thinking of Chekhov's ill-fated cherry orchard," is certainly yes ("Authorizing History: Victimization in A Streetcar Named Desire," Theatre Journal 38 [1986]: 334). Chekhov's play uses a seasonal progression from May to October that Williams mirrors in Streetcar...

McAdam, Ian. "Remembering Ibsen in Tennessee Williams." Notes on Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, 2012. Gale Literature Resource Center, . Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.