Spaceships and vampiressexual dissidence in Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Knightly Quest’

  1. Mauricio Aguilera Linde 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Granada, España
Revista:
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

ISSN: 0210-6124

Any de publicació: 2012

Volum: 34

Número: 2

Pàgines: 67-83

Tipus: Article

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Altres publicacions en: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Resum

Notwithstanding Gore Vidal’s praise of the story as one of the best ever written by Tennessee Williams, ‘The Knightly Quest’ (1966), a dystopian fable with a spacefaring ending, has received sparse critical attention. Largely sketched during the 1940s, the novella, a hybrid of SF and Gothic, shows Williams’s awareness of the sexual deviant’s political resistance in a world verging on totalitarianism; and, simultaneously, illustrates the author’s use of counter-narrative strategies against the normative order. In choosing apocalyptic SF Williams is reversing the logic of the favorite Cold War genre. Here the threat does not come from an external space (the alien invasion or the Russian nuclear attack) but from within: the emergence of a nation which annihilates any form of alterity and dissidence. Likewise, by making a homosexual vampire (the quintessential expression of the Jungian shadow and the polymorphous perverse) the morally superior hero of a world in its death throes and the survivor in a future utopia, Williams is granting a privileged position to the demonized Other as the savior of the American dream of limitless individual freedom.

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