“Nothing but time”: Retirement, Social Isolation, and Temporality in Tennessee Williams’s Short Stories
Few American writers have written so extensively about aging and old age as Tennessee Williams. In his plays, short stories, and poems, the subject broadly resurfaces as a narrative of decline, one in which the body is viewed as a site of infirmity and disease and in which the mind struggles with co...
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| Wydane w: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| 1. autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Język: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2026
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| Dostęp online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Streszczenie: | Few American writers have written so extensively about aging and old age as Tennessee Williams. In his plays, short stories, and poems, the subject broadly resurfaces as a narrative of decline, one in which the body is viewed as a site of infirmity and disease and in which the mind struggles with cognitive impairment and its concomitant vulnerability. Within a glass coffin of existence (to borrow from the title of one of his late plays), those living through extreme old age appear more dead than alive, their final days played out in meaningless routines that highlight their incapacities. Yet in stories written some twenty to thirty years apart, Williams provides more positive images of independent men negotiating retirement and discovering physical pleasures later in life. Toying with both readers’ and other characters’ assumptions, the narrators of “Every Friday Nite Is Kiddies Nite,” “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio,” and “Hard Candy” expose the way in which aging and senescence, like homosexuality, are often read as limiting, if not contemptible. This essay explores the ways in which these stories validate retirement/partial retirement—a still quite recent phenomenon when they were written—as a time of comparative freedom and agency, despite, in the case of “Every Friday Nite,” the restrictions of the Depression; and how the conventional view that old people seek the proximity of, and security afforded by, family and community has been subverted. Drawing on theories of temporality, the essay will insist on the empowerment of alternative rhythms in a chronocracy, and the way in which the protagonists of Williams’s stories harness youth, in person and through film imagery, to achieve a private form of fulfillment. |
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