Liminality and Existentialism in Tennessee Williams’s Clothes for a Summer Hotel

Abstract

Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1983) stands as a prominent example of Tennessee Williams’s existentialist outlook and his experimentations with dramatic form. Subtitled as a “ghost play,” Clothes for a Summer Hotel depicts a fictional meeting of American authors F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in the afterlife, through a temporally and spatially nonlinear narrative, where the characters revisit moments from their past in order to resolve the questions that have gradually doomed their relationship. Using the framework of Sartre’s theatre of situations and Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, this paper aims to add a novel perspective to the existing scholarship on this Williams play, but, most importantly, to suggest a reconciliation between its form and content, as opposed to the dissonance argued in the play’s early reviews. Starting with an overview of Williams’s existentialist approach and the prevalent criticism on the play, this paper focuses on its dramatic form through an examination of the depictions of time and space. This is followed by an analysis of its thematic content, in particular the existentialist notions of bad faith (mauvaise foi) and the Other, to finally conclude with an argument on the correlation of the play’s form and content.