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"Poor Devil—Hopeless." Modern drama specializes in the smaller-than-life hero, the stunted image of man. When a Hamlet or a Lear falls in the fatality of his overmastering will, the seismic shock rips open the earth's crust like a giant grave, and half a dozen other men tumble to their doom. The fall of a modern playwright's hero is about as exalted as a sheeted patient's being wheeled out of the operating room with the surgeon shrugging "Poor devil, his case was hopeless. He never had a chance."
This is the theater that Williams heads, with its image of man as prey, a victim of the wayward id. Williams' typical hero merely waits to be physically or psychologically emasculated, invites his doom with a self-immolating passivity that masochistically converts pain into pleasure.
True tragedy cannot exist in a deterministic universe, where the hero lacks the will to be responsible for any part of his fate. Despite this, Williams has restored certain of the necessary elements of tragedy. The Greeks made myths out of crimes; Williams makes myths out of vices. Crimes and vices turn strangeness into size, create the distance of awe between the beholder and the hero, and make his fall a destiny rather than an accident. It is precisely because the hero has been set apart from others (and he can be separate as a Delta monster as well as a Theban king) that he moves and shakes the audience with pity and terror when he falls to the common lot of human suffering and death. What Williams' heroes and heroines lack in loftiness they partly make up for in the horrifying retributions of their declines. The playwright punishes their aberrant behavior with atonements (cannibalism, castration) that are quite as terrible as the blood that pours down the face of the self-blinded Oedipus.
Moral Symbolist. Williams has been called a poetic realist, but he is more exactly a moral symbolist. His terrors are not of the South but of the soul. His people journey over a symbolic landscape amid the strife-torn dualities of human nature. The duel is between God and the Devil, love and death, the flesh and the spirit, innocence and corruption, light and darkness, the eternal Cain and the eternal Abel. These concerns, if not his gifts, link Williams not to any other playwright, though he comes closest to O'Neill, but to three 19th century U.S. moral symbolists: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, whose eyes were fixed on the dark side of existence and of American life.
With them, Williams shares transcendental yearnings, the sense of isolation and alienation, the Calvinist conscience, the Gothic settings and horrors, the restless, demonic voyaging coupled with the longing for a home, the rebel need to say "no in thunder" (as Melville wrote to Hawthorne), the pervasive fear of an Old Testament God whose existence is half doubted and half believed, a romantic sense of a lost paradise of innocence, and a nagging suspicion that the seemingly infinite possibilities of the American Dream have been betrayed. Williams belongs with this triumvirate of disquietude, in the minority tradition of naysaying in U.S. letters.
The same Hawthorne who wrote the Puritan allegory of The Scarlet Letter