20
Popular Culture Review
“stumbles, fumbles,” like Brick’s broken leg, may be multivalent symbols for
Williams’s own lament over his closeted/erased homoeroticism as well as a
reminder of society’s inevitable punishment for such behavior in the
conservative Eisenhower years wiien Cat premiered.
Williams’s later plays occasionally introduce sports but almost always
within the context of the Theatre of the Absurd, or, as Linda Dorff has argued,
“within the two dimensional aesthetics of the cartoon” (16). In The Gnadiges
Fraulein (originally published in Esquire in 1965), for instance, Williams spoofs
the sport of fishing by having the Fraulein (a vaudeville singer), wearing an
‘‘aureole o f bright orange curls^^ and a “large blood stained bandage"’' over one
eye (23 OX battle the “parasitical” cockaloony birds each day on the
southernmost Florida Key. As a “permanent transient” (227) at Molly’s
roominghouse, the Fraulein has “to deliver three fish a day to keep eviction
away” (239). But her fishing is portrayed as an absurdly unconventional sport.
Competing with the cockaloonies for “throw-away fish,” the Fraulein
“sham elessly runs to the docks. “When a fish-boat whistles and the
cockaloonies waddle rapidly forward, out she charges to compete fo r the catch"'"
(239). But the birds pluck out her other eye and tear her flesh apart in Williams’s
parodic reversal of angler and bait. In foolishly competing with the birds, the
Fraulein becomes the catch that at the end of the day a fisherman unhooks and
cuts open. In a wickedly hilarious reversal of the fisherman’s story of “the one
that got away,” a cockaloony chases the Fraulein off the docks and back into
Molly’s roominghouse. For many critics, Williams’s fishing story is a parable of
the cruel fate of the artist (the Fraulein) at the hands of critics (the birds).
References to sports, athletes, and “physical culture” played an
important, symbolic role in Williams’s life and canon. Sports participate in and
articulate the paradoxes at the heart of many of his works. An avid, lifelong
swimmer who averred aggressive, contact sports, Williams nonetheless relished
the gory spectacle of bullfighting, writing about perfume and death in the
afternoon. Reflecting the extremes found in physical exercise, his two most
significant lovers were Kip, the delicate ballet dancer, and Frank Merlo, the
hefty sailor. Williams’s plays for the most part ironically link failed dreams of
success, romance, Hollywood stardom, or even fi*eedom with past athletic
victories or boasts of “physical culture.” Yet Williams deflates the mythos of
all-American sports to reveal the vulnerability and defeat of the players wlio
enshrine such myths. The garlands of yesterday become the bitter ashes of
defeat f ܈