in 1950. “You’d think, being an Episcopal Minister, he’d have wanted to go to Heaven,” Dakin Williams told the press, missing the point that to a man of Reverend Dakin’s likely closeted inclinations, Key West
was
Heaven.
Williams, who often complained of feeling “like a ghost,” grew up in not one but two haunted households where secrets and the unsayable suffused daily life with a sense of masquerade, creating an emptiness as palpable, elusive, and corrosive as it was to the Wingfields. The blown-up “ineluctably smiling” photo of Amanda’s decamped husband “facing the audience” on the living room wall allows a sense of the spectral to hover ironically at the edge of
The Glass Menagerie
’s theatrical experience, at once an immanence and homage to the presence of absence in the fabric of the Williams family life. To their children and to themselves, CC and Edwina were ghostly figures, both unknowable and unknowing. Never having experienced much love or ease, CC inevitably chose a partner who could provide him with neither. Edwina’s personality, according to Williams, was marked by a “gross lack of sensitivity.” CC was a dashing twenty-seven when he met Edwina, who thought herself over the hill at twenty-three. He knew—as salesmen must—how to persuade; he had liveliness, humor, and a gift of the gab. “One thing your father had plenty of—was charm!” Amanda says in
The Glass Menagerie
, echoing Edwina’s familiar mantra of disenchantment. “Before we arrived in St. Louis, I saw only the charming, gallant, cheerful side of Cornelius,” Edwina wrote (omitting to mention that, in those early days, CC had seen only the seductive, playful side of her). “I never could understand how Cornelius and Edwina ever got together,” Margaret Brownlow, a well-born Knoxville friend of the family, said. “To Edwina, there was no fun in life at all. To Cornelius, everything was fun. He drank. He danced. He smoked. He just did everything. Edwina just frowned on that. She just wasn’t raised that way and she didn’t like it.” She added, “She rather fancied herself.”
When Edwina set up house in St. Louis, she was thirty-four. She had been married to CC for eleven years; it was the first time that the family lived under one roof away from her parents. It was also the first time that Edwina had to cook. When CC had asked for Edwina’s hand in marriage, the Reverend Dakin told him, “Edwina can’t sew. And she can’t cook. There’s nothing she can do but be a social butterfly.” CC replied, “Mr. Dakin, I am not looking for a cook.” By her own admission, Edwina was a spoiled only child; her domestic ignorance was a badge of aristocratic honor. But in St. Louis, deprived of her parents and her privilege, she was thrown back on herself and on the limitations of her and her husband’s Victorian rigidities. For different reasons, both members of the couple were soon disappointed and furious. CC took refuge from his hurt in excessive drink; Edwina, a teetotaler, showed her umbrage through excessive propriety. The result was war. Whereas Williams’s maternal grandparents were for him an inspirational model of intimacy—“Baucis and Philemon . . . that’s what they were like. . . . I thank God that I have seen exemplified in my grandmother and grandfather the possibility of two people being so lovingly close as they were that they were almost like a tree”—his parents were “split violently apart and tore the children apart through division and conflict.” Edwina claimed with much justification to be terrorized by her husband, who, Williams wrote, always entered “the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside.” CC, who made a good salary, withheld money; Edwina, who was some kind of emotional terrorist herself, withheld affection.
The beautiful, pious chatterbox who had sworn her devotion to CC was now devoted exclusively to her
was
Heaven.
Williams, who often complained of feeling “like a ghost,” grew up in not one but two haunted households where secrets and the unsayable suffused daily life with a sense of masquerade, creating an emptiness as palpable, elusive, and corrosive as it was to the Wingfields. The blown-up “ineluctably smiling” photo of Amanda’s decamped husband “facing the audience” on the living room wall allows a sense of the spectral to hover ironically at the edge of
The Glass Menagerie
’s theatrical experience, at once an immanence and homage to the presence of absence in the fabric of the Williams family life. To their children and to themselves, CC and Edwina were ghostly figures, both unknowable and unknowing. Never having experienced much love or ease, CC inevitably chose a partner who could provide him with neither. Edwina’s personality, according to Williams, was marked by a “gross lack of sensitivity.” CC was a dashing twenty-seven when he met Edwina, who thought herself over the hill at twenty-three. He knew—as salesmen must—how to persuade; he had liveliness, humor, and a gift of the gab. “One thing your father had plenty of—was charm!” Amanda says in
The Glass Menagerie
, echoing Edwina’s familiar mantra of disenchantment. “Before we arrived in St. Louis, I saw only the charming, gallant, cheerful side of Cornelius,” Edwina wrote (omitting to mention that, in those early days, CC had seen only the seductive, playful side of her). “I never could understand how Cornelius and Edwina ever got together,” Margaret Brownlow, a well-born Knoxville friend of the family, said. “To Edwina, there was no fun in life at all. To Cornelius, everything was fun. He drank. He danced. He smoked. He just did everything. Edwina just frowned on that. She just wasn’t raised that way and she didn’t like it.” She added, “She rather fancied herself.”
When Edwina set up house in St. Louis, she was thirty-four. She had been married to CC for eleven years; it was the first time that the family lived under one roof away from her parents. It was also the first time that Edwina had to cook. When CC had asked for Edwina’s hand in marriage, the Reverend Dakin told him, “Edwina can’t sew. And she can’t cook. There’s nothing she can do but be a social butterfly.” CC replied, “Mr. Dakin, I am not looking for a cook.” By her own admission, Edwina was a spoiled only child; her domestic ignorance was a badge of aristocratic honor. But in St. Louis, deprived of her parents and her privilege, she was thrown back on herself and on the limitations of her and her husband’s Victorian rigidities. For different reasons, both members of the couple were soon disappointed and furious. CC took refuge from his hurt in excessive drink; Edwina, a teetotaler, showed her umbrage through excessive propriety. The result was war. Whereas Williams’s maternal grandparents were for him an inspirational model of intimacy—“Baucis and Philemon . . . that’s what they were like. . . . I thank God that I have seen exemplified in my grandmother and grandfather the possibility of two people being so lovingly close as they were that they were almost like a tree”—his parents were “split violently apart and tore the children apart through division and conflict.” Edwina claimed with much justification to be terrorized by her husband, who, Williams wrote, always entered “the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside.” CC, who made a good salary, withheld money; Edwina, who was some kind of emotional terrorist herself, withheld affection.
The beautiful, pious chatterbox who had sworn her devotion to CC was now devoted exclusively to her
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