SOURCE: Schiavi, Michael R. “The Hungry Women of Tennessee Williams's Fiction.” In Tennessee Williams: A Casebook, edited by Robert F. Gross, pp. 107-20. New York: Routledge, 2002.

In the following essay, Schiavi elucidates the role of feminine hunger in Williams's short fiction.

Throughout his “secondary” career as a fiction writer, Tennessee Williams repeatedly staged dramas of female appetite. This theme also anchors some of his seminal stagework: A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), and Kingdom of Earth (1968) all pivot upon women's sexual needs and satisfactions. In short stories, however, Williams proved far more adept at tracing multiple female desires as they transfix and baffle observation. Free from Broadway's narrow conception of stageworthy bodies, Williams the storywriter spent nearly fifty years displaying women in open gratification of various hungers. Indeed, in his fiction, female characters' appetites constitute their very narrativity and make them worthy of the...