“You are kinder than you think”: Circe as the Spectral Mother in Tennessee Williams’s “Man Bring This Up Road”
This article explores Tennessee Williams’s 1959 short story “Man Bring This Up Road” by focusing on the Circe meta-story that nurtures the encounter between Flora Goforth and the wandering poet, Jimmy Dobyne. It analyzes Flora not only as another example of what Henry Popkin called the Gargoyle-chal...
שמור ב:
| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2026
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| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | This article explores Tennessee Williams’s 1959 short story “Man Bring This Up Road” by focusing on the Circe meta-story that nurtures the encounter between Flora Goforth and the wandering poet, Jimmy Dobyne. It analyzes Flora not only as another example of what Henry Popkin called the Gargoyle-challenging-Adonis pattern but also as a spectral mother (“the demonic old woman” with phallic/tooth attributes, in Jungian terms) who deprives the young man of food and protection while demanding some sexual response before banishing him from her abode. In order to discuss the aging female character’s commingling of antithetical aspects in tune with the ambivalent ID forces (libidinal advances and castrating threats), the author means to demonstrate how Williams breaks the androcentric narrative of the Western myth by repeating the discourse with a difference in the direction pointed out by Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodern parody. The story rewrites Ulysses’s monomyth by undoing the male superiority of the hero whose quest for identity (or homecoming) results not in his return to Ithaca but in his desperate request to stay with Circe forever. Bearing in mind that Circe is a death-wielding goddess (Neumann), the hero’s decision to embrace the uncertain territory of the unknown makes it possible to interpret the poet’s choice to stay in the sorceress’ land as a telltale sign of his conviction that, paradoxically enough, creation must spring from the destructive forces of the unconscious. Simultaneously, this contribution interprets the protagonist’s immaturity, his longing for forgetfulness and complete lack of resources as an illustration of the queer aesthetic of failure (Halberstam) which attempts to challenge—and deviate from—the logic of success and productivity of dominant scripts. |
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