ROSE WILLIAMS WINDOWS

I pass the lighted windows of a shop where perfume is sold. In Williams' play, the character of Tom, based on himself, speaks to the sister's memory, saying, 'Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. In his first hit, the 'memory play' Glass Menagerie, Williams created the character of the fragile-as-glass Laura, known to her Gentleman Caller as 'Blue Roses,' which is based directly on Rose. The final scene of Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, in which the increasingly unstable Blanche DuBois is carried off to a mental institution, reliant now on 'the kindness of strangers,' captures Williams' horror at his delicate sister's fate. In his play Suddenly Last Summer, a matriarch schemes to have a young woman lobotomized to keep her from revealing a terrible secret about her son's sexual predilections. Rose was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but Tennessee was so appalled by the lobotomy and its effects on Rose, who had been his primary childhood friend, that he spent the rest of his life obsessing about it, according to accounts in various biographies.

It was Tennessee's belief that his sister's growing instability was caused, in no small part, by the strains between her strict Victorian upbringing, enforced by Edwina, and Laura's powerful but bottled-up sexual desires - a theme he explores in his play Summer and Smoke, currently being revived on Broadway. 6 of cardiac arrest at age 86 at a hospital in Tarrytown, N.Y.īorn in 1919 and raised in the same stressful household as her brother Thomas (later Tennessee), she spent most of her life from 1943 on in mental institutions following a prefrontal lobotomy authorized by her mother, Edwina. Rose Isabel Williams, Tennessee Williams' sister, who was the model for the character of Laura Wingfield in 'The Glass Menagerie' and who echoed in many other Williams characters, died Sept.

Rose williams