Sexual Liberator as Spiritual Liberator in the Plays of Tennessee Williams.

Frequently one character, serving as a revitalizing agent, informs Tennessee Williams's plays by stirring sex·ual experience in another central player or group of players only to bring about a spiritual experience as well. This dual process illuminates Williams's celebrated theme of the body and soul conflict, and how it might be reconciled. It is well known Williams made D. H. Lawrence his mentor in exploring the first phase, the realm of sex, but the novelist and poet was also key in discovering, for Williams, the effect of sexual intimacy upon the soul. Essential as this guidance was, Williams would later prove to depart more and more from his teacher, showing greater willingness to bring gay protagonists and gay concerns to the stage, emphasizing the body/spirit conflict with increased frequency, and valorizing endurance, leaving Lawrence's more conventional endings behind. At the close of his career, Williams arrived at his goal of having a gay male liberator, through endurance, liberate a gay male lover, both physically and spiritually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]