ABSTRACT
My title’s reference to the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), points out what Blanche DuBois’ character represents: The plight of an English teacher who loses most everything, including her (closeted) husband, her job, her physical security (she is likely raped), and her mind (she ends up in a mental hospital). The drama is queer because peppered with improprieties associated with such socio-legally marginalized sexual practices as female prostitution and sex between men. But unlike Williams’ heavy take on such practices and their consequences, another southern American writer was, around the same time and place (Mississippi and New Orleans in the near post-war period) taking a much more optimistic view of similar subjects: Eudora Welty. Welty’s fiction is a queer choice for examining the relationship between rights, humans, and sexuality. Her aesthetic preoccupation with the obliquity of desire makes her writing a queer refuge for human sexuality as an ethics of unreadability. In such works as “No place for you, my love” and “The hitch-hikers,” Welty shows desire is a humanizing quiddity. Welty’s own theory of writing is that it “affirms… by the nature of itself. It says what people are like. It doesn’t, and doesn’t know how to, describe what they are not like, and it would waste its time if it told us what we ought to be like, since we already know that, don’t we?” (emphasis in original, “Must the novelist crusade?” p. 81). Thus, Welty frees us from both prescriptions for the future “ought” and prohibitions of the past “not.” People are what they are and want what they want. Desiring the “what-ness” of others without reprisal, retaliation, and incarceration is the right she writes. Long before same-sex marriage began to relegate those who desire otherwise to the status of being dangerous to the body politic, Welty peopled her worlds with tramps, single salesmen, and married individuals who have intimate encounters with strangers. Thus, Welty makes the illegibility of desire – the difficulty of and pleasure in struggling to “read” desire – into the condition for kindness between strangers.
