The Rose Tattoo (Style)

Style

The Bawdy and Slapstick

This mostly light-hearted play is funny largely owing to its bawdy humor and slapstick action. Bawdy humor refers to uncomplicated wit that focuses on bodily functions. In this play, the bodily function at issue is sex, with Serafina boasting continuously of her husband's wonderful performance in bed and her own lusty enjoyment of the sexual act. One particular bawdy element is Rosario and Alvaro's job, which is to transport bananas. The way in which this fruit conjures the male sex is blatant and silly, and therefore bawdy.

The slapstick dimension of the play is another reason why it is comedic. Slapstick humor is physical comedy, as when characters trip over things, have things fall on their heads, behave outrageously, and so forth. The Rose Tattoo is replete with slapstick events. Serafina frequently parades in a state of semi-undress for all to see, stumbles around her house as she tries to squeeze herself into a girdle, and generally makes a fool of herself.

Symbolism

Williams employs many symbols in this play. Symbols are objects, names, or persons in an artwork that suggest many things as opposed to just one. Primary among the play's symbols are the character names, which are suggestive of the rose flower (Rosa and Rosario), Rosario's and Alvaro's rose tattoos, and Serafina's dress-shop mannequins.

Red roses are commonly associated with love and passion, and Williams exploits these associations to their fullest. The play's focus on life, physical passion, and the spiritual communion between lovers is made amply evident through its plethora of roses. Serafina's certainty that a rose tattoo temporarily appears on her bosom the night she conceives a child with her husband hints at Williams's desire to suggest a spiritual dimension to sex and love, the manner in which the closeness between lovers makes them mystically one and the same.

Serafina's group of mannequins suggest social censure and the importance of communal life, among other things. They suggest social censure because, as a group of figures, they are doubles for the group of neighborhood women who believe that Serafina is too proud for her own good. They suggest the importance of community because in standing in for the neighborhood women, they point to how Serafina has isolated herself from the larger community.

Primitivism

Primitivism refers to a particular way in which artists working within European traditions in the early and mid-twentieth century used other cultures and these cultures' artworks in their own work. Art from distant lands was upheld as embodying a beauty and artistry that suggested a greater closeness to nature and to truth. For Western artists, the works pointed to something that had been lost and was yearned for. This was a simple way of life, one in touch with the simple and the sacred. Western artists admired these works and adopted their forms. Yet, it is now understood that these artworks signified entirely different things in the cultures from which they sprang, that the cultures Western artists imagine (appreciated for their simplistic truth in art were merely imagined cultures. In seeking the truth in art, certain Western artists manipulated the truth by taking foreign art out of its cultural context and then attributing value to it based on Western aesthetic sensibilities.) were just that, imagined cultures. Consequently, this primitivism seems naïve in retrospect, obscuring the complexity of these cultures and their peoples, and obscuring as well the way that cultures of all kinds necessarily impose upon individuals any number of constraints in the interests of upholding tradition and social order. Williams's play is primitivist in the sense that he employs a cast of Sicilian American characters of peasant roots and depicts them as persons controlled by elemental forces and largely devoid of self-reflection. These characters do not appear to think; they appear merely to act. And when they act, their actions follow from the controlling power of elemental forces, such as the sexual impulse, hate, love, envy, jealousy, and so forth. These Italian immigrants might be Westerners, but since they come from peasant stock they are to be understood as primitives. Williams's play is primitive in the sense that he employs a cast of Sicilian American characters of peasant roots and uses them to represent the importance of the elemental things in life.