Citation:
Date Published:
2 January 2023Abstract:
Examining the alternative tropic imaginaries—demonic and Edenic, respectively— governing the oeuvres of playwright Tennessee Williams and director John Huston this article argues for the convergence of these visions in the context of the latter’s film, The Night of the Iguana (1964). As a means of grounding the distinction between these divergent philosophical, ideological and aesthetic traditions, I turn to the writer whose depictions of exotic, Pacific locales might be considered seminal for American literature, and foundational for both the playwright’s and the film-maker’s tropic sensibilities. Herman Melville’s depictions of the Pacific islands, whether or not they originate the American literary imagination’s readings of the exotic, at least definitively articulate and encode those readings—from the degenerate to the sublime—within literary discourse. Williams’ allusions to Los Encantadas (1854), in Suddenly Last Summer, reveal Melville’s influence upon the playwright’s treatment of the tropics' pathology. Huston, meanwhile, had first stumbled upon the Mismaloya peninsula, where he shot The Night of the Iguana, while searching (albeit abortively) for a suitable location in which to film Melville’s first novel, Typee (1846). The salvific vision of Mexico, refined throughout Huston’s oeuvre and imbued with the spirit of Typee’s tropical fantasy, complements the new optimism detectable in Williams’ Iguana, where renewal and revitalization fall within the realm of tropic possibility.
Alex Feldman is an Alon Fellow and Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) in the English Department at the University of Haifa. He completed his doctorate at Merton College, Oxford and has held posts at the University of Texas at Austin and MacEwan University, in Alberta, Canada. His research, which has been published (or is forthcoming) in Law & Literature, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, Modernism/ modernity and elsewhere, is concerned with the representation of history, and most recently, legal history, on stage. He published his first book, Dramas of the Past on the Twentieth-Century Stage: In History’s Wings with Routledge in 2012, and he is currently working on two further book projects: a co-edited collection of essays, with Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway, University of London) on the plays of Terence Rattigan, currently under contract at Cambridge University Press, and a monograph provisionally entitled The Rigging of the Law, concerned with the development of jurisprudential drama in the modern and contemporary theatre.