Tennessee Williams's Guilt Inspired 'Savior' Doubles

This thesis documents Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams's treatment of
brother/sister relationships in literary works written between 1939 and 1950. Though
Williams began by exploiting his troubled relationship with his sister Rose in "The Long
Goodbye" and "The Purification," two one-act plays, he revised his treatment of siblings
in The Glass Menagerie and the short story "The Resemblance between a Violin Case
and a Coffin." These works do not merely reveal the writer's transparent guilt and shame
at having neglected his sister at moments when he could have helped her, nor do they
serve simply to over-write his torrid depictions of similar relationships in the earlier
plays. I contend that Williams's intense guilt inspired the creation of literary doubles in
both The Glass Menagerie and "The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin,"
not only to undo in symbolic terms the ways he had previously characterized Rose and
her relationship with him and, more importantly, to express his wish that he had done
more to help Rose avert her tragic fate.