Tennessee Williams: The Great American Playwright says He Draws Every Character — e.g., Blanche DuBois — Out of His “Multiple Split Personality”

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (1911–1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller he is considered among the three foremost playwrights in 20th century American drama…His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. —Wikipedia

INTERVIEWER: When Flaubert was asked who was Madame Bovary, he answered that it was himself. Do you feel that way toward any of your heroines?

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: I think I draw every character out of my very multiple split personality. My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created. Now some people are persistently claiming that Blanche DuBois is a transvestite! This is ridiculous…Blanche is pure feminine just as this interior woman, this, what do you call it, Doppelgänger...the other self...There is within me, I seriously believe, a female Doppelgänger and that is why I create female characters. But that Doppelgänger, despite my physical appearance...is soft and beautiful (1).

1. Tennessee Williams. Interview by John Calendo in Interview, April 1973. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/new-again-tennessee-williams/print/