Staging the Adolescent Girl's Desire: The Rose Tattoo and Baby Doll

Revising the type of the “doom-ridden damsel” of other Williams’ plays, the teenage girls in The Rose Tattoo and Baby Doll become self-fashioning characters whose outspoken desires question the patriarchal culture they inhabit, while seemingly espousing its materialistic/consumerist values. Conflating racial and social otherness in their adolescent selves, and epitomizing the Fifties’ “discovery” of the teenager, they embody an irrepressible alterity that challenges their elders’ effort at containment – albeit to mixed results. The process of adaptation from stage to screen (and vice versa, as in the case of Baby Doll), as well as Williams’s reworkings of his previous versions of the texts, testify to the disruptive potential of the girls’ desire while also exposing – through the negotiations between playwright directors and producers, and the plots’ ambivalent endings – the contradictions and hypocrisies of postwar gendered discourses.