Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams

First published: 1948

First produced: 1947, at the Gulf Oil Playhouse, Dallas, Texas

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Glorious Hill, Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• The Reverend Winemiller, a minister
• Mrs. Winemiller, his demented wife
• Alma, their daughter
• John Buchanan, Jr., a physician
• John Buchanan, Sr., also a physician
• Rosa Gonzales, the daughter of the owner of Moon Lake Casino
• Nellie Ewell, Alma’s pupil
• Roger Doremus, Alma’s friend
• Archie Kramer, a traveling shoe salesman

The Play

Summer and Smoke calls for a fixed set. On the viewer’s left is the interior of a rectory, in the center a fountain with a kneeling stone angel, and on the right the interior of a doctor’s office. A sky cyclorama, always visible, records afternoon, evening, and night, and together with music and lighting indicates changes of scene and time of day.

In the prologue, John Buchanan, the doctor’s son, startles ten-year-old Alma, daughter of the Episcopal minister, with a peashooter. He wants to return her gift of handkerchiefs, which evidently embarrassed him, but she mollifies him and shows him the angel’s name on the fountain, “Eternity,” which she says is “what people’s souls live in when they have left their bodies.” Her own name, she explains, means “soul” in Spanish, and he admits that he has been called “devil” at home. The scene ends as John kisses her roughly and runs off, snatching her hair ribbon.

Part 1, “A Summer,” begins on July 4, 1916, about fifteen years later. Band music is heard in the background, and fireworks light up the sky. Alma, now a music teacher about to sing at the town’s celebration, is announced offstage as “The Nightingale of the Delta.”

While John has become a restless young physician with “the fresh and shining look of an epic hero,” Alma is prematurely spinsterish, with a nervous laugh and gestures. Her social life seems to be confined to a pathetically small literary group that meets Wednesdays, whereas John is one of the “wasters, drunkards and lechers” for whom, according to his father, the medical profession has no room. John’s affair with Rosa Gonzales, the provocatively sensual daughter of the owner of the gambling casino at Moon Lake, soon becomes an object of town gossip.

John still teases and embarrasses Alma as he did when they were children, but now he also gives his professional opinion. Her frequent attacks of “heart trouble,” he believes, are caused by her nervous swallowing of air, a symptom of her “doppelgänger,” a term he refuses to explain. When he hurts her by telling her that some people find her speech and manner affected, Alma explains that she was forced at too early an age to assume many of the duties of a minister’s wife because of her mother’s incompetence. Her demented, perversely childish mother has deprived her of her youth, and she grew up surrounded more by older people than those of her own age.

When Alma reminds John of his forgotten promise to take her riding in his automobile, he makes amends by reluctantly accepting her invitation to a meeting of her club, but he makes his escape as soon as he can. When she consequently has one of her attacks late that night and goes to consult his father, she finds John with Rosa. John is sympathetic, gives her sleeping pills, and arranges to pick her up Saturday for the long-promised ride.

That Saturday, at the Moon Lake Casino, he tells her of his desire to go to South America to escape the depressing life of a doctor, and they discuss the nature of life and love. John denies the existence of the soul, while to Alma love is a matter of the heart as well as the body. When John invites her to a room above the casino, Alma, appalled, calls for a taxi, and he lets her go home alone.

Part 2, “A Winter,” has the town gossiping about the orgiastic goings-on at the doctor’s house while the elder Buchanan is in Lyon fighting an epidemic. John and Rosa have been celebrating their imminent departure for South America, and Rosa and her father are both in the doctor’s office when Dr. Buchanan returns and tries to drive them out. The drunken Gonzales shoots him, and John blames Alma, who telephoned the elder Buchanan and prompted his return. Furious, he confronts her with the life-size anatomical chart in his office, challenging her to show him the location of the soul. Nevertheless, he confesses that he could not have made love to her at the casino, because he is even more afraid of her soul than she is of his body.

John’s behavior changes abruptly after his father’s death. He finishes his father’s work abroad, while Alma gives up music and becomes a sickly recluse. When he returns, now a town hero, she refuses to see him. When she finally does call on him, she at last confesses her lifelong love for him and offers him the physical love she has previously withheld. She has learned that “Doppelgänger” means another person who lives within her, one she now acknowledges. The girl who said “no” to him at the casino “died last summer—suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.” Tormented by her confession, John tells her that she has won their argument; he now believes, as she once did, in “an immaterial something—as thin as smoke” that adds value to this “unfathomable experience of ours.” Alma recognizes that “the tables have turned with a vengeance”: John has become a “gentleman” just as she is ready to give up being a “lady.” He has also, meanwhile, chosen Nellie Ewell, the youngest, prettiest, and least gifted of Alma’s former pupils, who has none of Alma’s ambivalence. Blinded by tears, Alma bids him farewell as Nellie bursts in happily to announce the engagement.

In the final scene, Alma flirts with a young traveling salesman at the fountain. She takes one of the pills John gave her for her nerves, and when the young man asks her why she is nervous, she explains that she won an argument that afternoon that she had not wanted to win. They exchange some banter in Spanish before hailing a taxi to take them to Moon Lake Casino. The background music turns grave, and Alma gives the stone angel a valedictory salute as they exit.

Dramatic Devices

Tennessee Williams’s stage directions for Summer and Smoke emphasize production details. The interiors of the symbolic set are suggested as minimally as possible, and the dominant sky is always visible through the mere indications of walls.

Central to the set, the angel seems to preside or brood over the ironically named town of Glorious Hill and over the crucial opening and closing scenes. The soul/body dichotomy is also reflected in the set itself. There is a suggestion of the Gothic, which Alma associates with cathedrals, around the rectory. In the doctor’s office, the most prominent feature is the chart that portrays the human anatomy, in which the soul is not visible. The external action of the play shifts back and forth between the two interiors at the opposite sides of the stage, just as its interior action emphasizes the polarity of the physical and the spiritual.

Williams explains that the set and lighting effects should evoke a mood; they are emphatically not to appear realistic. Lighting is also used symbolically, as when the light lingers on the anatomical chart after John puts out the office lights to embrace Rosa. When the reformed John returns from Lyon and passes the rectory, Alma, at the window, is struck by a shaft of light so intense that she staggers back and collapses on the sofa.

Another mood-enhancing device is the intermittent use of background music, a device routinely associated with film. Indeed, the episodic structure of the play is more cinematic or novelistic than conventionally dramatic.

Despite his insistence that this is neither a realistic nor a naturalistic play, Williams is extremely sensitive to nuances of speech and gesture. Consequently, his characters sometimes appear to act almost naturalistically within the confines of the highly symbolic, stylized set.

Minor characters as well as the principal ones serve symbolic functions and underline the play’s dualities. The Mexican Rosa, the flashily dressed foil to Alma, exudes sensuality and entirely lacks Alma’s reticence and cultivation. Young Nellie combines characteristics of both: Once a singing pupil of Alma, whom she still much admires, she resembles Rosa in her acceptance of her own sexuality. Unlike Alma, who seems to belong to a former, more elegant time, she retains all the freshness and boldness of her youth. Her mother, “the merry widow of Glorious Hill,” has a reputation for picking up traveling salesmen, just as Alma does in the final scene. Alma, who initially shares the town’s shocked reaction both to Nellie’s mother and to Rosa, ends up imitating the actions of the former and speaking the language of the latter, both literally and figuratively.

Contrasts are seen also in the male characters. Dr. Buchanan, Sr., the gentlemanly, nonviolent healer, is killed by the violent Gonzales, who has become rich from the gambling, sex, and cock fighting in his casino and by using his gun; and the powerfully built, physically oriented John is contrasted to the “sparrow-like,” intellectual, and ineffectual Bernard.

Critical Context

Summer and Smoke was the first of Tennessee Williams’s two dramatic treatments of Alma’s story. A substantial revision, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, was written in 1951 but not performed or published until 1964. Williams preferred it as less melodramatic than the earlier work, but what it gained in simplicity it lost in subtlety and the poignancy of Alma’s ambivalent torment in Summer and Smoke.

Summer and Smoke was a failure on Broadway in 1947 but became the hit of the season in 1952 in its Off-Broadway revival on an arena stage, when it made the reputations both of its director, José Quintero, and its star, Geraldine Page, who also played Alma in the film version. Such themes as that of the outsider and of a poorly integrated sexuality, both prominent in Summer and Smoke, inform many of Williams’s numerous plays. There is a particularly close connection, however, between three of them.

Virtually every critic commented on the kinship between Alma and Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire (pr., pb. 1947), both begun in 1945 and first produced in 1947. Both women desperately cling to notions of their own gentility that seems curiously, sometimes comically, outmoded. Each is disgusted at the Moon Lake Casino by a man she loves. Blanche’s loss of her love happened a long time ago; she has already lived the promiscuous life on which Alma is just embarking. Both encounter strong, virile men who ultimately destroy them, and both have made tormented attempts to suppress their own strong sexuality.

Alma’s other kindred spirits in Williams’s plays include Amanda and Laura Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944, pb. 1945). Like Alma and Blanche, Amanda is eccentrically old-fashioned, a faded southern belle, while her daughter, Laura, shares Alma’s and Blanche’s sensitivity and psychological frailty. Finally, Alma, Blanche, and Laura are all both outsiders and artists, not because of what they create but by temperament and taste. Alma sings, Blanche loves literature, and Laura collects delicate glass animal sculptures.

Summer and Smoke defies classification in a conventional critical category. Williams’s reality is a subjective one, so that a realistic treatment is anathema to his intent. To call the play an allegory or parable is to overlook the powerful individuality of its characters. Williams himself used the term “drama of sensibility” to describe the unique blend of the novelistic, psychological, subjective, poetic, and dramatic in his work.

Sources for Further Study

Bloom, Harold. Tennessee Williams. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999.

Boxill, Roger. Tennessee Williams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

Crandele, George W. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography. 2d ed. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991.

Kolin, Philip G. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

Weales, Gerald. Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.