Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Fé
FUJITA Hidekiີ५ఱ‫૽ڠ‬໲‫ڠ‬໐‫ܮ‬ါలĶĵ࣢าक़ˎˌˍˍාˎ࠮Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Fé

Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Fé
FUJITA Hideki
Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Fé is a one-act play collected in the original edition of 27 Wagons
Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays, published in 1945. The title of this short play may attract
a reader’s notice. It refers to the burning of a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition. Auto-Da-Fé is not,however, a period play; it is set in New Orleans in the twentieth century. But it ends with the maincharacter subjecting himself to the gruesome penalty. Thus, the title suggests the way he meets hisGRRP$VZHVKDOOVHHLWLVDOVRVLJQL¿FDQWLQWKDWLWDOOXGHVWRZKDWKHLVJXLOW\RIZKDWKLV³KHUHV\´LVThe narrative opens with the description of the setting. The action takes place on the front porch ofMadame Duvenet’s old frame cottage in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans. The opening stage direction isas follows.

Scene: The front porch of an old frame cottage in the Vieux Carré of New Orleans. There arepalm or banana trees, one on either side of the porch steps: pots of geraniums and other vividÀRZHUVDORQJWKHORZEDOXVWUDGH7KHUHLVDQHIIHFWRIVLQLVWHUDQWLTXLW\LQWKHVHWWLQJHYHQWKH
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sad glow of an August sunset. Eloi, her son, comes out the screen-door. He is a frail man in
his late thirties, a gaunt, ascetic type with feverish dark eyes.
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or religious incantation. (107)

The front porch suggests “sinister antiquity” and “the richness of decay”; the nearby street is a “lurid”
one. In this way, the opening part of the play establishes an atmosphere of ominousness, decay,
and decadence. The atmosphere is reinforced by the use of color imagery. As is evident in “pots ofgeraniums” and the “glow of an August sunset,” the dominant color is red, a color symbolic of danger
DQGFDUQDOSDVVLRQ -REHV 7KHFRORULPDJHU\DOVRIRUHVKDGRZVWKH¿UHPRWLIThe opening stage direction also portrays two main characters, Mme. Duvenet and her son, Eloi.
What is noteworthy about their characterizations is religious resonances. The mother and the son, who− 157 −ີ५ఱ‫૽ڠ‬໲‫ڠ‬໐‫ܮ‬ါis an “ascetic type with feverish dark eyes,” are “both fanatics and their speech has something of thequality of poetic or religious incantation.” These religious resonances serve to create the atmosphere ofthe Inquisition in medieval and early modern times.
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roots through my things” (107). He suspects Miss Bordelon, the boarder, of spying on him. He objects
to even his mother going into his room to clean it. The impression here is that he has in his room
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that you were concealing something” (108). Later in the play, he says that “Miss Bordelon is standing
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is connected with sex.
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old swamp we live in, the Vieux Carré! Every imaginable kind of degeneracy springs up here, not atarm’s length, even, but right in our presence!” (109). In this way, he admits that he has been infectedby the corruption of the Vieux Carré. He uses disease imagery to describe the infection. He says thatdecadence is “all in the Quarter” and goes on:

This is the primary lesion, the focal infection, the chancre! In medical language, it spreads bymetastasis! It creeps through the capillaries and into the main blood vessels. From there it isspread all through the surrounding tissue! Finally nothing is left outside the decay. (110)This morbid description convinces us that, as noted in the opening stage direction, he is a “fanatic.”
Indeed, Mme. Duvenet tells him, “You mustn’t allow yourself to sound like a fanatic” (110).
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Mme. Duvenet: You mean this old section torn down?
Eloi: Condemned and demolished!
Mme. Duvenet: That’s not a reasonable stand.

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Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Fé

Eloi: It’s the stand I take.
Mme. Duvenet: Then I’m afraid you’re not a reasonable person.
Eloi: I have good precedence for it.
Mme. Duvenet: What do you mean?
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got to be nests of foulness.
Mme. Duvenet: Eloi, Eloi.
(ORL&RQGHPQLW,VD\DQGSXULI\LWZLWK¿UH +HVSHDNVRIKLPVHOILQ¿UHLPDJHU\WRR³<RXMXVWGRQ¶WNQRZ<RXURFNRQWKHSRUFKDQGWDONDERXWFOHDQZKLWHFXUWDLQV:KLOH,¶PDOOÀDPHDOOEXUQLQJDQGQREHOOULQJVQRERG\JLYHVDQDODUP´  This remark foreshadows Eloi’s auto-da-fé at the end of the play. Moreover, what is noteworthy about
the above-quoted dialogue between Eloi and his mother is that he speaks of “cities destroyed by the
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with religious apostasy, it put the heat on sexual deviation, too. Pedro de Leon, a Jesuit prison chaplain,
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In this connection, the mother-son relationship between Mme. Duvenet and Eloi is interesting.
Eloi, who is in his late thirties, still lives with his mother. Mme. Duvenet is depicted as a dominating
mother who treats her grown-up son like a little child. She tells Eloi:

There are three simple rules I wish that you would observe. One: you should wear under-shirts
whenever there’s changeable weather! Two: don’t sleep without covers, don’t kick them off inthe night! Three: chew your food, don’t gulp it. (113)7KHWKLUGUXOHUHPLQGVXVRIZKDW$PDQGD:LQJ¿HOGWHOOV7RPDWWKHGLQQHUWDEOHLQWKHRSHQLQJVFHQHRIThe Glass Menagerie. Mme. Duvenet belongs to the lineage of Williams’s domineering, overprotective
mothers including Amanda, Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer, and Mrs. Krenning in “Mama’s Old
Stucco House.” There is a popular notion that domineering, overprotective mothers are responsible for
their sons’ homosexuality (Doyle 270). As a study of the American family in the mid-twentieth century− 159 −ີ५ఱ‫૽ڠ‬໲‫ڠ‬໐‫ܮ‬ါ

shows, it was believed that “excessive mothering posed the danger that children would become tooaccustomed to and dependent on female attention. The unhappy result would be sissies, who allegedly
were likely to become homosexuals… Fathers had to make sure this would not happen to their sons”(May 139). But the father is absent from the Duvenet family. He never appears on stage; no mention
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development.
The opening stage direction describes Mme. Duvenet as a “fanatic.” Her fanaticism can be seenin her obsession with cleanness, immaculateness, and spotlessness: “I love clean window-curtains, I
love white linen, I want immaculate, spotless things in a house” (108). We might say that her prim
preoccupation with purity urges Eloi to repress his “impure” thoughts. His fear of his own sexuality has
made him, as the opening stage direction remarks, an “ascetic type.” With the growing awareness ofwhat he harbors within himself, however, he bitterly expresses his irritation at his mother: “Your world
is so simple, you live in a fool’s paradise!” (113). He goes on: “I stand in your presence a stranger, aperson unknown! I live in a house where nobody knows my name!” (113). This remark suggests that herecognizes himself as someone beyond his mother’s understanding and imagination.
As we have seen, Auto-Da-Fé contains hints of Eloi’s homosexuality. This play traces his growing
and anguished recognition of his own sexual deviation to his mental breakdown and suicidal burning ofhimself. What has a decisive effect on his self-awareness is “a lewd photograph” which he found fell out
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revelation of the genders of the two.
Eloi explains how he felt when he looked at the picture: “I felt as though something exploded, blew
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be seen here. And this image of burning reminds us of the description of the sexual self-awareness thatdawns on the Lutheran minister who serves as a prison chaplain for the one-armed male hustler Oliver
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memory of his first sexual experience. One summer he went daily to the zoo to look at a golden
panther, to which he was mysteriously attracted. One night he dreamed that the tongue of the panther“bathed” him, and he awoke “burning with shame beneath the damp and aching initial of Eros”(23).
When he visits Oliver, he feels that “here was the look of the golden panther again”(23). The minister’sfascination with the panther is obliquely indicative of his homosexual disposition. Both Eloi and the− 160 −Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-Féminister experience their homosexual awakening with guilt and shame and with a sensation of “burning.”
Eloi reveals that he is irresistibly attracted to the sender of the picture. He behaved like a stalker
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he says about the visit is interesting: “The attitude taken was that I had come for money. That I wasintending to hold the letter for blackmail”(117). As David Savran observes, “Tennessee Williams’s
most productive years, 1940s and 1950s, were extremely turbulent and trying decades for gay men andlesbians in America”(84). Subjected to “witch hunts,” they lived in constant fear of being exposed,blackmailed, and arrested. Eloi’s pretending to be a blackmailer is a telling indication of what the senderis really like.
He explains what happened in the sender’s room: “And then the sender began to be ugly. Abusive.
I can’t repeat the charges, the evil suggestions! I ran from the room”(117). Presumably, the sender
became aware of Eloi’s queerness and made “evil suggestions.” Eloi’s running from the room represents
his ambivalence about his homosexuality.
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a spatial dimension. He says, “I can’t go back in the house, and I can’t stay out on the porch!”(114).
The interior of the house represents his “closet”: the porch as a space outside the house encapsulates
the outside world. Eloi’s remark suggests that he can neither retreat to the closet nor continue to act
heterosexual nor declare his homosexual identity to the outside world. The emotional conflict drives
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that her son is talking very wildly, Mme. Duvenet tells him to burn the photograph along with the letter
immediately. Thereupon Eloi becomes obviously shaken: “Eloi fumblingly removes some papers fromhis inside pocket. His hand is shaking so that the picture falls from his grasp to the porch-step. Eloi
groans as he stoops slowly to pick it up”(119). He starts to do as he is told to, but not only his reluctance
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the paper within one inch of each other but seems unable to move them any closer. All at once
he utters a strangled cry and lets the match fall. (119-120)

As described above, Eloi cannot burn the picture. This means that he cannot break with what the picture
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− 161 −ີ५ఱ‫૽ڠ‬໲‫ڠ‬໐‫ܮ‬ါGRRUDIWHUKLPDQGVHWV¿UHWRWKHKRXVHZLWKWKHERDUGHU%RUGHORQLQVLGHLW

Eloi’s voice is raised violently. The woman inside cries out with fear. There is a metallic
clatter as though a tin object were hurled against a wall. The woman screams; then there isDPXIÀHGH[SORVLRQ7KHUHLVDVXGGHQEXUVWRI¿HU\OLJKWIURPWKHLQWHULRURIWKHFRWWDJH
(120)

This extreme form of self-condemnation recalls “the principle of atonement” Anthony Burns
uinconsciously has chosen to compensate for his “incompletion” in Williams’s short story “Desire andthe Black Masseur.” This principle represents “the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with
the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt”(85). Burns surrenders himself to violent massagesby the black masseur of the title and is finally devoured by him. As Dennis Vannatta remarks, the“incompletion” Burns has to atone for can be said to be homosexuality(49). Like Burns, Eloi chooses toclear his self of his “guilt” through his surrender to violent treatment, although the violent treatment isVHOILQÀLFWHG+HEXUQVKLV³FORVHW´DVZHOODVKLPVHOIIt is interesting that Eloi involves Bordelon in his auto-da-fé. We may say that the boarder, who,
despite never appearing on stage, evokes in Eloi constant fear of being spied on, is presented as a symbol
or a force rather than an individual. She represents social surveillance. Eloi’s involvement of her in theburning indicates his anger at the society which stigmatizes homosexuality.
Auto-Da-Fé was written and published in the 1940s, and probably because of the homophobic
milieu of the decade, Williams seems to shy away from explicit representations of homosexuality.
Buried within connotation, however, this short play depicts the main character’s ambivalence andanguish about his homosexuality. The play is a significant piece in that it raises issues related tohomosexuality developed later in such plays as Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

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Self-Punishment for a “Heresy”: Tennessee Williams’s Auto-Da-FéŘŰųŬŴġńŪŵŦť
Doyle, James A. The Male Experience. 2nd ed. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1989.
*reenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Jobes, *ertrude. Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols. New York: Scarecrow, 192.
May, Elaine Tyler. +RPHZDUG%RXQG$PHULFDQ)DPLOLHVLQWKH&ROG:DU(UD. New York: Basic, 2008.
Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller andTennessee Williams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Vannatta, Dennis. Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988.
Williams, Tennessee. Auto-Da-Fé. 27Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays. New York: New Directions,19. 107-120.
---.ȨDesire and the Black Masseur.ȩOne Arm and Other Short Stories. New York: New Directions, 197. 83-94.
---.ȨOne Arm.ȩOne Arm and Other Short Stories. New York: New Directions, 197. 7-29.

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