Several of Williams' other works play upon the theme of death. In Night of the Iguana, the innkeeper, Maxine Faulk, is a recent widow, as is the Sicilian mother Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. Suddenly Last Summer delves into the horrific events surrounding the death of Sebastian Venable, who like Blanche's husband, is a sexually confused young artist. In Summer, Mrs. Venable exalts the memory of her late son, saying that "he always had a little entourage of the beautiful and the talented and the young!" (I, i, 11). By doing so, she evokes a sense of nostalgia that is itself highly Victorian. Indeed, just as Victorian writers like Carlyle and Ruskin glorified the Middle Ages as a time of heightened civilization and morality in Europe, the characters in Williams' plays idealize the former grandeur of the American South. As noted by the critic Ruby Cohn, characters such as Mrs. Venable, Blanche, and Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie are all "nostalgic about [their] genteel [Southern] past[s] and minimally practical about [their] sordid present[s]" (Bloom, 59).
While trying to preserve the past and minimize present realities, Blanche devises a set of fabrications rooted in the Victorian tradition of aestheticism. She begins by maintaining that her younger sister Stella is actually "somewhat older that [she is]" (iii, 60). Blanche then hangs a paper lantern around a lightbulb in order to prevent its "merciless glare" from exposing her true age (iii, 61). Later, she refrains from telling the truth about a scandal that caused her to lose her teaching position in her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi. When confronted with these fabrications, Blanche asserts that she "never lied in [her] heart" (ix, 137). She professes to have told "what ought to be the truth," as opposed to what is "realistic" (ix, 135). In so doing, Blanche echoes the sentiment of the famed Victorian writer Oscar Wilde, who "praises the artist's imaginative victory over nature and mere fact" (Damrosch, 1858). Wilde was an adherent of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s, '70s, and '80s, which called for the cultivation of beauty and "pleasurable sensations" in the face of harsh realities (Damrosch, 1758). As a means of coping with the absence of beauty in real life, the Victorian critic Walter Pater urges his fellow aesthetes to "keep as a solitary prisoner[s] [their] own dream[s] of a world" (Damrosch, 1764). Such a dream, I would argue, is what Blanche aspires to achieve. Her fabrications can be perceived as aesthetically minded attempts to create a world of "magic, [y]es magic" and illusion that she hopes will insulate her from life's ugliness (ix, 135).
