Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Low, Jennifer A.

Abstract

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.

Extent

64 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FA00000906

Format

pdf

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