Names or Labels?

What struck me almost immediately while reading Sweet Bird of Youth were the names of places and people in the play. It is pretty easy to discern certain meaning when Tennessee Williams’ has named his characters and the places they inhabit everything from “Heavenly” to “St. Cloud” to “Fly.” Of course the girl who is supposed to embody purity is named “Heavenly” and “Fly” is an irritating errand boy buzzing around looking for “Chance”…who took a chance by leaving St. Cloud (and his youth), and then took another by trying to return to it (St. Cloud and his youth).

I was tempted almost to roll my eyes at some of these naming choices Williams made. However, I started to think about it further and had a change of heart. I mean, what’s so bad about making the meaning you are placing on things and people apparent? Is it especially valuable to make symbols and representations hidden and obscure—so that only the meticulous readers can find them at all? By doing this, a writer is inevitably sacrificing the understanding of some, if not many.

Wholly apart from this realization, though, I found that the abstract names Williams employs added another sort of effect to the play. By giving his characters these abstract names—“Princess,” “Heavenly,” etc., he labels them; he tries to sum them up. In a way, he dehumanizes them by attempting to so simply characterize them, instead of treating them as complex individuals. We find, though, that these characterizations are as easily broken as they were imparted—“Heavenly,” for example, is not as pure as her father would like everyone to believe—serving then to show that people are more than archetypal.