Abjecting and Embracing Healing and Haunting Specters of Aging in Tennessee Williams’s “The Angel in the Alcove” and “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”
Tennessee Williams has mostly been acclaimed for his plays, while his short fiction has often remained underrated. In spite of the relevance that aging plays in Williams’s short pieces, so far little attention has been drawn to this subject in his short fiction. Two of Williams’s short stories, “The...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2026
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Tennessee Williams has mostly been acclaimed for his plays, while his short fiction has often remained underrated. In spite of the relevance that aging plays in Williams’s short pieces, so far little attention has been drawn to this subject in his short fiction. Two of Williams’s short stories, “The Angel in the Alcove” (1948) and “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (1954)—even if there is evidence that the latter story was written before the former—portray the figure of a haunting as well as a healing specter that arises as the aging other whom the protagonist respectively exorcises and embraces. By means of psychoanalytic notions in the framework of aging and gender studies, this article offers a juxtaposed analysis of two of Williams’s stories that deal explicitly with the specter of the aging other. |
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