• Romantically Speaking to Save the Suicidal Self in Tennessee Williams and Mary Shelley
• Kirsty Cameron (bio)

It is uncommon to situate the topic of Romantic suicide in twentieth-century American letters. Yet, an uncustomary pairing of works between Mary Shelley and renowned American playwright Tennessee Williams illuminates a similar preoccupation with the phenomenology of poetic and narrative expression as related to issues of Romantic suicidal consciousness and death. The similarity evidences a shared Romantic theory of art related to narrative identity. The theory may be understood through Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of a narrative self. This a self largely organized by language, whose dissolution corresponds with a deadly silence. For Kristeva's narrative self, an inability to address adequately or recover from loss through satisfying significations in language leads to a "living death" state of despair, which is the crux of a type of suicidal ideation, sometimes leading to suicidal death (4). Over a century before Williams explored the mediating effects of writing and art on the artist in his rich canon, his Romantic progenitor asked similar questions related to literature and storytelling in her novella, Mathilda (written in 1819 and published in 1959). Particularly, Williams's 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer shares much in common with Mathilda. In both Suddenly Last Summer and Mathilda, the psychologically violent limit on the Romantic figure of the creative self, who is also a child constrained by an incestuous parental relationship, becomes a suicide wish and then actual or impending death, with a trace of the artist/child's legacy remaining in forms of sadly truncated literary expressions. Suicidal consciousness in these texts symbolizes the failures of writing and storytelling to save the sensitive person. However, this tragic effect is not ultimately the failure of art or expressions in language. If creative expression is limited to the point of suicidality, the question becomes what limits expression? The protagonists of both Williams and Shelley cannot write enough or speak enough to save themselves because their narrative identities have been too confined by other narratives. Specifically, the unspeakability of taboo desire adds to the previous parental limits placed on identity to the extent that language cannot amend any loss of the self in a Kristevan sense. [End Page 19] Williams and Shelley employ a similar, archetypal Romantic character in texts demonstrating a shared belief in the vitality of writing, and a critique of the destructive restrictions of narrative freedom. While both Suddenly Last Summer and Mathilda highlight sad ends for their poetic characters, they still point to a hopeful possibility in poetry and art. Although there is much critical debate over Williams's designation as a Romantic writer, reading Williams in relation to Shelley broadens a view on his Romanticism (see Dorff and Tischler). Since Shelley's contribution to a Romantic discussion of narrative is significant in both the lesser known Mathilda and the more popular Frankenstein—and this theme is strongly resonant in Williams, with Suddenly Last Summer and Mathilda readable as inverted, parallel narratives—it is productive to view Shelley in light of a latent, Romantic, intertextual reference, whose foundational Romanticism echoes in Williams.¹

While recent literary criticism on Williams classifies him as other than a Romantic writer per se, and his relationship to Romanticism is complex, his lifelong themes in a canon of over 100 plays, several collections of short stories, essays, and books of poetry continually evidence a preoccupation with questions about language and art associated with the British Romantic period. These questions relate particularly to the power of the poetic imagination, language's transformative affect, and faith in art's potential to express significant meaning or truths. Yet, Annette J. Saddik states that Williams rejects Romanticism's idealizations of poetry and art, especially according to what she says is his view that "language, images, [and] all forms of representation are inevitably inadequate and cannot contain emotion, impulse, [or] desire" (6). Saddik states that Williams is grounded in expressionistic explorations of distortions of the body and of being, which deny any possibility for these distortions to be intelligibly contained by artistic forms (6). The critic also reasons that Williams's focus on sexuality and violence as life's "bizarre...

• 在田纳西州威廉姆斯和玛丽·雪莱的浪漫演讲中，以拯救自杀的自我
• 柯斯蒂·卡梅隆（生物）

在二十世纪的美国书信中将浪漫主义自杀的主题放在首位是不常见的。然而，玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）与美国著名剧作家田纳西·威廉姆斯（Tennessee Williams）之间的惯常搭配使我们对与浪漫自杀意识和死亡问题相关的诗意和叙事表达现象学表现出了类似的关注。相似性证明了与叙事身份相关的共同的浪漫主义艺术理论。可以通过朱莉娅·克里斯蒂娃（Julia Kristeva）的叙事自我的心理分析概念来理解该理论。这是一种主要由语言组织的自我，其消散与致命的沉默相对应。对于克里斯蒂娃（Kristeva）的叙事自我而言，无法充分满足语言要求或无法通过满足语言要求从损失中恢复过来，将导致其“生死”状态的绝望，这是某种自杀观念的症结所在，有时会导致自杀死亡（4）。在威廉姆斯丰富的经典著作中探索威廉姆斯对作家的创作和艺术的中介作用之前的一个多世纪，他的浪漫主义祖先在中篇小说中提出了与文学和叙事相关的类似问题，Mathilda（写于1819年，1959年出版）。特别是，威廉姆斯（Williams）1958年的剧集《去年夏天的突然》（Suddenly Last Summer）与Mathilda有很多共同点。在这两个突然去年夏天和马蒂尔达，对创造力自我的浪漫人物的心理暴力限制（他还是一个因乱伦父母关系而受到限制的孩子）成为自杀的愿望，然后成为实际的或即将死亡，并留下了艺术家/孩子的遗产的痕迹。可悲的是，文学表达被截断了。这些文本中的自杀意识象征着写作和讲故事的失败，以拯救敏感的人。但是，这种悲剧性的影响最终并不是艺术或语言表达的失败。如果创造性表达仅限于自杀，那么问题就变成了限制表达吗？威廉姆斯和雪莱的主人公都无法写出足够多的文字或说话来挽救自己，因为他们的叙事身份太受其他叙事的限制。具体来说，[结束第19页]威廉姆斯和雪莱在文本中采用了类似的原型浪漫主义人物，表明了人们对写作活力的共同信念，并对叙事自由的破坏性限制提出了批评。尽管《去年夏天突然》和《玛蒂尔达》都凸显了他们诗意性格的悲惨结局，但他们仍指出诗歌和艺术的希望。尽管关于威廉姆斯被指定为浪漫主义作家的争论颇多，但阅读威廉姆斯与雪莱的关系却扩大了他对浪漫主义的看法（见多夫和蒂施勒）。由于雪莱对浪漫主义叙事的贡献在鲜为人知的玛蒂尔达（Mathilda）和更流行的《科学怪人》（Frankenstein）中都具有重要意义。-这个主题在威廉姆斯中引起强烈共鸣，《上个夏天的突然》和《玛蒂尔达》被解读为倒置，平行的叙述-从雪莱的潜在的，浪漫的，互文的角度来看待雪莱很有用，他的基本浪漫主义在威廉姆斯中得到了呼应。^1个

尽管最近对威廉姆斯的文学批评将他归类为浪漫主义者本身，并且他与浪漫主义的关系很复杂，但他一生的主题超过100部戏剧，短篇小说，散文和诗歌集不胜枚举对与英国浪漫主义时期有关的语言和艺术的关注。这些问题尤其与诗意的想象力，语言的变革影响以及对艺术表达重要意义或真理的潜力的信念有关。然而，安妮特·J·萨迪克（Annette J. Saddik）指出，威廉姆斯拒绝浪漫主义的诗歌和艺术理想化，尤其是根据她所说的观点，他认为“语言，图像和所有形式的表达不可避免地不足，不能包含情感，冲动，