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Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the play in terms of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has fascinated poets, playwrights, and composers from the Renaissance to the modern era. Since a central element of the myth is the power of music, it has not surprisingly been the subject of numerous operas, including a version of Williams's Orpheus Descending, with libretto by J. D. McClatchy and music by Bruce Saylor (1994). Plays such as Eurydice by French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and Orpheus by Jean Cocteau (1926; made into a film by Cocteau in 1950), and films such as Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus (1959) are testament to the enduring nature of the myth.
The Orpheus story was not, however, part of Williams's original concept of the play, which initially emerged as Battle of Angels. In this play, one of Williams's earliest, Val Xavier was not a singer but a writer, and therefore no Orpheus. But when the play failed so miserably in 1940, Williams refused to abandon it. Over the course of seventeen years, he rewrote it five times until it reemerged as Orpheus Descending in 1957. Williams's typescripts show that the new title did not appear until 1953, and it is clear that the playwright was intrigued by the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
Orpheus was a minstrel, the son of the god Apollo. He learned to play the lyre with such beauty that he could charm wild animals, and even trees and stones. The trees would uproot themselves and move, just to be nearer to his music. Orpheus's story is told most fully in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Orpheus married the nymph Eurydice, but on the very day of their wedding, Eurydice was bitten by a snake in a field and died. Orpheus mourned her but was determined to bring her back from Hades. Descending into the underworld, he reached Pluto and Persephone, the shadowy realm's king and queen, and appealed to them, accompanying his words with the music of his lyre. As he made his plea, the ghosts were in tears and everything else in Hades stood still. Moved, Pluto and Persephone granted Orpheus his request to take Eurydice back with him to the world of the living. There was only one condition, which was that Orpheus should not look back at her until they were safely home. As he led his wife back almost to the surface of the earth, Orpheus became afraid that Eurydice's strength was failing, and he also desired to see her. So he looked back. At that point, Eurydice faded away, dying for a second time, and was lost to Orpheus forever.
Williams's interest in the myth is apparent from the poem he wrote called "Orpheus Descending," which was published in his collection of poems In the Winter of Cities (1956). In this poem, Orpheus's attempt to bring Eurydice back from the underworld is doomed to failure:
for you must learn, even you, what we have learned,
that some things are marked by their nature to be not completed
but only longed for and sought for a while and abandoned.
And so it is that Val Xavier must fail. He is Williams's modern-day Orpheus who descends to the Hades of a small southern town where Lady Torrance, the equivalent of Eurydice, is enduring a living death. Although the parallels with the myth should not be pushed too far (Lady Torrance, for example, is a highly emotional and spirited woman, far removed from the passive Eurydice of the legend), they do explain the significant role ascribed in the play to music. As in Shakespeare's plays, music often has significance beyond its immediate context, as a symbol of harmony. It is also used as an indication of the kind of "lyric space" (a term used by Jack E. Wallace in his essay "The Image of Theater in Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending") in which deep and sincere feelings can be expressed, and life reaches upwards to a fleeting glimpse of freedom and transcendence. Furthermore, music is a symbol of purity, as Val's comment to Lady about his guitar makes clear: "It washes me clean like water when anything unclean has touched me." The power of music is also conveyed when Val explains to Lady about the autographs of musicians on his guitar. He points to the signature of Leadbelly (1885 – 1949), the legendary blues artist, and says, "Greatest man who ever lived on the twelve-string guitar! Played it so good he broke the stone heart of a Texas governor with it and won himself a pardon out of jail." Leadbelly is thus presented as a thoroughly authentic Orpheus figure, with the Texas governor playing the part of Pluto. And Val's having Leadbelly's autograph, as well as those of others, on his guitar has the effect of linking Val to a tradition of music-making that is larger than himself as an individual.
There are at least five moments in the play when music asserts itself and becomes part of the play's thematic texture. First, Val sings Williams's own song, "Heavenly Grass," or part of it, several times. It begins with the following verse:
My feet took a walk
In heavenly grass
All day while the sky shone clear as glass,
My feet took a walk
In heavenly grass.
Through the ethereal image of "heavenly grass," the song echoes the theme of freedom, which is embodied in all the main characters. Val, Lady, Vee, and Carol all long for "heavenly grass," each in his or her own way.
Music again adds weight to the freedom image in the second example. As Val gives his lyrical speech about the tiny legless bird that lives its whole life on the wing, music (details unspecified) fades in. Val accompanies the faint music on his guitar as he says, "They sleep on the wind and never light on this earth but one time when they die!" So like that mythical bird of paradise, music too can give expression to an unearthly reality, quite removed from the corruption of human life.
Third, music has the power to make people speak truthfully, or at least to highlight when they are doing so. In act 2, scene 1, music fades in as Carol, in a moment of tender sincerity, confesses to Val that she would love to hold something as tenderly as he holds his guitar. She then says, "Because you hang the moon for me!" This startling image well conveys how Val, and the music from which he is inseparable (his guitar, after all, is his "life's companion"), gives Carol the feeling that everything is right on earth and in the heavens. Everything is in its place, with the moon hanging exactly where it should be in an orderly cosmos.
For Renaissance composers such as Monteverdi who set the Orpheus myth to music, this cosmic dimension of music was an important part of their conception of the myth. In Monteverdi's opera Orfeo (1607), for example, Orpheus sings in praise of his lyre:
When you play, the stars fall silent
at music so celestial,
and all the constellations
dance in measure with swift or slow gyrations.
In other words, Orpheus "hangs the moon." His lyre is an expression of a cosmic harmony, what the poet Shelley called in Prometheus Unbound, "the deep music of the rolling world," as quoted in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers.
The fourth moment when music makes a significant contribution to the play's themes comes at the end of act 2. Lady and Val have quarreled over the money Val borrowed from the cash register, and he is about to leave the store for good when he is stopped by Lady's passionate outcry that she needs him just to go on living. Guitar music, "Lady's Love Song," fades in and continues during their tender reconciliation in the tiny alcove. This is a fine theatrical moment because visual and musical elements combine to reinforce the theme. The alcove is lit up, making the curtain that covers it, with its bizarre design of white birds and scarlet fruit, translucent. The alcove becomes a kind of sacred space in which love can triumph.
Finally, music accompanies Lady's dying moments as she walks unsteadily to the confectionery, having been shot several times by Jabe. Williams's stage direction is telling: "Music rises to cover whatever sound Death makes in the confectionery." In a contest between music and death, music triumphs.
At the personal level, of course, the tragedy is inescapable. Lady and Val die violent deaths. Val's demise, burned to death by a mob, has some vague similarity to the fate of Orpheus. The minstrel was torn to pieces by a group of Ciconian women, who were angry because Orpheus, after losing Eurydice, had renounced the company of women. And yet despite this grisly end, the ancient myth is not ultimately dark, because the principle of music survives. In Ovid's version of the story, after Orpheus has been killed, his head and his lyre are thrown into the river Hebrus. Miraculously, the lyre still plays, the tongue of the dead singer still moves to the melody, and the riverbanks echo in lament. Orpheus is dead, but music lives on.
And so it is with Val Xavier. At the end of the play, his snakeskin jacket remains, and is gathered up by Carol. She runs off with it, in spite of Talbott's shouted order to stop. The jacket symbolizes a whole complex of meanings that it has accrued during the course of the play. It is the longing for "heavenly grass," for the bird that never touches the earth, for creative and sensual "wildness," for beauty, for authenticity in feelings, for an end to loneliness — and also for music, since the jacket was part of Val's identity as a singer in New Orleans, when he was known simply as Snakeskin. As Williams (quoted by Wallace) put it in a draft that was intended as a foreword to the play, the "impulse of song breaks out of confinement and goes on despite all order to halt."
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Orpheus Descending, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Kevin O'sullivan
O'Sullivan writes for both film and stage. In this essay, O'Sullivan examines the use of both pagan and Christian motifs in Williams's play. Orpheus Descending occupies a unique place in Tennessee Williams's body of work. Orpheus Descending, in fact, descends from Williams's first produced full-length play, Battle of Angels, which opened to disastrous reviews in 1940. Both Orpheus Descending and its antecedent concern the arrival of a virile stranger in the midst of a repressed Southern community. While the psychosexual dynamic that fuels most of Williams's work was present in the earlier play, a surfeit of incident coupled with an excess of religious and pagan imagery threatened to overwhelm it. This welter of sex and symbolism proved too much for early audiences and Battle of Angels was forced to close shortly after its opening. The playwright was undaunted and for the next 17 years, a period that witnessed his greatest artistic and commercial triumphs, he continued to rework the original material of Battle of Angels. The result of this relentless effort was Orpheus Descending, which premiered on March 21, 1957.
As Williams pointed out in the introduction to the published script, the basic plot of Battle remained intact. Orpheus Descending, he wrote, was "the tale of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop." Benjamin Nelson has pointed out in his study Tennessee Williams that "Much of the naive plot pyrotechnics have been eliminated in transition," and, he adds, "the physical plot is considerably tightened." Yet, despite these changes, Williams stubbornly clung to the surplus of symbolism that so baffled and infuriated Battle of Angels's critics. Orpheus Descending did not fare much better. The play received poor notices and closed after a short run. Williams expressed his disappointment to Don Ross in a 1958 interview that ran in the New York Herald Tribune:
I was terribly shocked by its reception. I had invested so much of myself in it. I had worked longer at it than any other play. I thought it had lyricism, the feeling of tenderness, the striving to understand, the longing, but I did feel that the ending didn't come off quite right.
To best judge the play on its intrinsic merits, independent of the strengths or shortcomings of any given production, one must look at the elements woven into the fabric of the play, particularly on the promiscuous use of symbolism from conflicting traditions. The success or failure of the play can, in large part, be measured by the degree to which Williams has been able to fuse both pagan and Christian imagery.
The play abounds in symbols. There is an excessive commingling of motif from the pagan and Christian traditions. The weight of these symbols threatens to founder the play, freighted as it is with too many allusions. If, as Williams claims in the introduction to Orpheus Descending, the play is "a lyrical play about memories and the loneliness of them" he risks burying these memories under an excess of symbols. It would be well, then, to discuss some of the motifs, both Christian and pagan, which Williams employs in his story of light against dark, life against death.
There is a marked Mediterranean aspect of the play, rich in classical allusions. The fallen debutante Carol Cutrere has evolved from the character of Cassandra Whiteside, who appeared in Battle of Angels. In classical mythology, Cassandra was a seer whose prophecies were not believed.
In act 2, scene 3, a fugitive from a chain gang is pursued by dogs offstage. Val and Lady listen as the dogs' baying "become almost a single savage note." "They're tearing him to pieces!" says Val. This both illustrates Val's affinity for the fugitive kind and foreshadows the tragic denouement that closes the final act. It also carries with it the connotation of the rending of Actaeon by his own dogs, after he spied the goddess Diana bathing. Again, Williams has demonstrated his ability to load — or overload — a scene with multiple layers of meaning. As the baying of the dogs dies out, following a single gunshot, the couple make the first tentative steps towards the coupling that will both rejuvenate Lady and threaten her life.
Dolly, Beaulah, and the Temple Sisters function as a sort of Greek Chorus, commenting on events as they happen and providing the audience with background information.
The character of Lady Torrance, an Italian immigrant whose father was burned alive, along with his wine garden, for selling wine to blacks, is derived from Battle of Angel's Myra Torrance. The shift in Mrs. Torrance's ethnicity and the manner and place of her father's death serve multiple purposes. On the level of plot, the immolation of Lady's father presages the violence of act 3. The vines of Papa Romano and the wine made from them also evoke the wine-wreathed Dionysus, god of excess, inebriation and, incidentally, theater. Dionysus, who gave wine to humankind, is associated with orgiastic revels, unbridled passions, and irrational violence. The effect the god has on his female followers, the Maenads, is akin to the effect that Val has on the town's women, from the nymphomaniacal Carol Cutrere, to the visionary Vee Talbott, to the repressed Lady Torrance.
The title change is, perhaps, the most telling. In the Greek myth, adopted by the Romans, Orpheus descended into Hades to retrieve his beloved Eurydice after she had been bitten by a deadly snake. He so charmed the guardians of Hell with his lyre playing that he was allowed to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld with the condition that he must not look back at her until he had left Hades. He, of course, looks back, with the fatal consequence that she is lost to him forever. Grieving over the loss of Eurydice, he sang of his love for her until Maenads tore him to pieces. The classical scholar Michael Grant points out in Myths of the Greeks and Romans that Orpheus, who was first associated with Apollo, who gave him his lyre, later came to be contrasted with him, "So Orpheus combined both Apolline and Dionysiac tendencies in Greek religion."
Val Xavier, a writer in the earlier version of the play, is now a guitar-toting drifter in a snakeskin jacket. The change of occupation emphasizes the identification of Val with the lyre-strumming Orpheus. He is now something more than a mere "fox in the hen house." Val's arrival has an intoxicating effect on the local womenfolk, inciting the jealousy and resentment of the town's men. As Nelson points out in Tennessee Williams "Val's music does not affect everyone but his presence certainly does. He descends into the under-kingdom to help Eurydice but his mission goes awry. The enchanted minstrel descends into the under-kingdom and is defeated."
Yet, in classical mythology, Hell is not a place from which no one may return. Michael Grant points out that there have been many Harrowers of Hell, including Heracles, Theseus, Dionysus, Orpheus and Aeneas. And, of course, the Christian tradition begins with Christ's own descent into Hell. Perhaps most pertinent to this play, however, is the example of Persephone. As the queen of Hell she welcomed Orpheus into the Underworld. According to myth, she was carried off by Pluto and forced to spend half the year underground. Her time underground was associated with the germination of seeds and the regeneration of spring, thus becoming an important symbol of rebirth.
While evocative of the temptation in the garden, Val's snakeskin jacket also resonates as a symbol of rebirth. The snake sheds its old skin, to make way for the new, just as the fallow time of winter makes way for the renewal of spring. And, as will be shown the thematic of rebirth or resurrection is the central element of the Christian symbolism, which shares, or competes for space, in this play crowded with symbols.
The Christian motifs commence with Val Xavier's name, "pouring symbolism through every letter," as Nelson states in Tennessee Williams. Val is short for Valentine, a Christian martyr whose feast day, February 14, is associated with romantic coupling and links, in one image, both death and regeneration. While it is clearly intended that Val be associated with the Orpheus of the title, it is worth noting that, according to Grant in Myths of the Greeks and Romans, "the Christians identified him with the Prince of Peace in Isaiah." Nelson remarks of Val's descent, "once in the Underworld his role as Orpheus becomes conspicuously confused with Christian symbolism and he is presented as a Christ figure, raising up the local Magdalenes." The violent denouement of the play evokes both Greek tragedy and, most scandalously, the Passion of Christ.
While Cassandra's prophetic vocation has been downplayed with the name change to Carol, another seer, the religious visionary Vee Talbott is highlighted. Vee is another of the frustrated women suffocating in this small Southern town in whom, as Nelson points out "sexuality has been so perverted that it is hopelessly confused with religious exaltation." It is a running gag that the visions of apostles that Vee commemorates with her religious paintings all bear the likeness of local men. In act 3, scene 2, Vee has a vision of Christ in the cottonwoods, evidently in the form of Val Xavier, which helps precipitate the play's final crisis. Vee has witnessed the sky split open: "I saw, I tell you, I saw the TWO HUGE BLAZING EYES OF JESUS CHRIST RISEN! — Not crucified but Risen! I mean Crucified and then RISEN! — The blazing eyes of Christ Risen!" Vee's ecstatic religious passion exceeds even Carol Cutrere's erotomania, and when Vee places Val's hand on her chest to show her how Christ touched her, his fate is sealed. The fact that the play has two seer figures, each representing a different tradition, rather than settling on a single figure that could fuse the two traditions, demonstrates some of the problems presented by Williams's design. Whether this doubling of the visionary motif deepens or confuses the concept is open to question.
The play's climax occurs between Good Friday and Easter, deepening the association of Val with Christ: the fox has now become the lamb. In a recurrence of the Orpheus motif, Val tarries when he learns that Lady is bearing his child, thus losing the chance to save himself. This Eurydice, evidently, has no plans to abandon her Hell.
Val is not torn apart by Maenads; instead, he falls prey to the lynch mob. Yet, his demise manages, in its characteristic excess, to jumble together the disparate imagery that has both marred and enriched the play. As Nelson notes, "Val's destruction at the conclusion is symbolic of many things: the crucifixion of Christ, the destruction of the bringer of light, the rending asunder of Dionysus, the god of fertility and rebirth, and the punishment of Orpheus."
Source: Kevin O'Sullivan, Critical Essay on Orpheus Descending, in Drama for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is one of Williams's most famous plays. Readers will recognize in the character Blanche Du Bois some similarities to Lady Torrance from Orpheus Descending.
- The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (1997), by Donald Spoto, is the first complete critical biography of Williams. Spoto examines the close connections between Williams's dramas and his turbulent and finally tragic life.
- Like Williams in Orpheus Descending, Canadian writer Alice Munro explores the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in her short story "The Children Stay," which can be found in Munro's collection The Love of a Good Woman (1998).
- Along with Williams, Eugene O'Neill is another of the great figures in American drama. His Long Day's Journey into Night, written between 1939 and 1940 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in drama for 1957, covers just one day in the tragic lives of the four members of the Tyrone family.
- French dramatist Jean Anouilh wrote Eurydice in 1941, updating the Orpheus legend to 1930s France. Orpheus is a young musician who makes a paltry living from performing on the streets, and Eurydice is a young actress traveling around in a theater troupe. The play can be found in Anouilh's Five Plays (1991).
