Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll And Pure Sexuality - The Indefinable Sexual Allure Of The Select Few

De Joan Merchant was born and raised in a dry spit of land in the middle of Eddy Lafourche a cypress tangle of alligators, swamp rats, and cottonmouths where her father dredged, fished, trapped and netted every live thing that lived in that backwater.  Every morning after cornpone, fatback, and coffee he set out into the swamp to check his trap line.  If he was lucky he might come upon a panther, raccoon, or opossum, but usually came back with a haul of catfish and a water snake or two. 

Alvin Merchant often wondered why he stayed put, waterlogged and penurious in this forgotten place, but his family had always lived in or near the swamp, denizens of it no different than crocodiles, alligators, and black bears. It might have been different if his children had been restive, anxious for New Orleans or Charleston; but they seemed to take to the watery life. De Joan was a good helper, a real trooper, and Alvin relied on her for her sharp eyes, willingness to work, and good spirit. 

The Merchant place was not the only cabin in the woods and were not alone in the swamp. Other families clustered on the land, built a church and a school, ferried goods to and from the swamp, and lived a happy though meager existence.  The residents were not bothered by taxes, limits, or revenuers and in a way lived in a forgotten idyll. 

Yet the charm, the simple allure of a quiet, natural life began to fade once De Joan reached early adolescence.  Most girls mature slowly, evenly, progressively into womanhood, but it all came at once to the Merchant girl who found herself in full womanhood before she was out of he fifth grade. As remarkably she was fully aware of her sexuality, that particular female potency that comes to very few at such a young age. 

She toyed with the boys of her age, a sexually diffident lot, attracted older ones who sniffed out a female in heat as sharply s a black bear, and had sex with Harper Ward, wholesaler and landowner from Lanier who visited Eddy Lafourche in the Spring and Fall. 'Come visit me', said Harper, and one day De Joan took the outboard through the swamp to the bayou and to the small own of Lanier. 

Tennessee Williams wrote about Baby Doll Meighan in his screenplay for Baby Doll and she could have been De Joan Merchant.  'A voluptuous girl under twenty, on a bed, the covers thrown off' is Williams' opening liner notes. She is simple and uneducated, but with a languor and irresistible feline sexuality no man can refuse. 

 

Williams was fascinated with sex and sexuality, perhaps best expressed in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley is a sex object, the male version of Baby Doll - a simple, man with a primitive virility - a sexual allure which overcomes notions of class, intelligence, or sophistication.  He for Williams is male sexuality, undiluted, unrestrained, and unaffected by opprobrium or dissent. 'We've had this date with each other since the beginning', he tells Blanche.  Stanley's pure machismo and Blanche's matching sexual desire make sex inevitable.  There is an ineluctable potency to the attraction, a pre-human, animal need; something beyond debate or consideration. 

Baby Doll is the feminine version of Stanley - sexually desirous, infinitely desirable, and irresistible to all men.  She represents the purest, unadulterated female sexuality.  There is only the sexual urge, the desire to be taken, the irrepressible need for sexual satisfaction.  

Like Baby Doll, De Joan Merchant had no idea what drove her to Lanier and into the bed of Harper Ward except for his intent. Some men are like that, wrote Williams, incapable of restraint, invulnerable, and driven only by desire for women.  Blanche calls Stanley a brute, barely evolved from the apes, an evolutionary throwback, a primitive; and she is right. He is more animal than human, a proto-male, an unstoppable sexual desire. 

So it was not surprising that De Joan motored her launch out of the swamp to Ward's bed.  She could smell him five miles off through the twists and turns in the swamp, past the nests of water moccasins, the burrows of voles, and fox lairs, through the cypress roots, the narrows where moss and wild lilie.  s clogged her way, out to open water and the bayou to tie up at the Ward dock. 

Vaccaro, Baby Doll's lover wants her as a woman but also as the instrument of vendetta.  Her husband has burned down Vaccaro's cotton mill, and taking his wife was the ultimate vengeance.  The play is one of deliberate, canny, practiced seduction highlighting another one of Williams' frequent themes - sex has its consequences, usually ignored because of the nature of sexual desire.  Yet Baby Doll is powerless, so aroused by male pursuit is she. 

 

'Saint or sinner' has been the male take on femininity since the beginning, and the most adept women have blended the two into an irresistible, indistinguishable mix; but the Baby Dolls and De Joan Merchants of the world - and their Stanley Kowalski male counterparts - are far less devious and complex.  They are throwbacks, sexual creations alone, primitive in nature only but expressively mature in their understanding of their desire and its effect on others. 

Woody Allen, an admirer of Tennessee Williams created a Baby Doll-De Joan character in his movie Match Point.  In a cafe scene, the future lover of the Scarlett Johannsen character says 'You realize the effect you have on men, don't you'.  She replies, 'No one has asked for their money back'.  

She is irresistible in a Baby Doll way - soft, pliable, welcoming, infinitely desirable - and her lover cannot stay away. 

Most women are circumspect in their desire.  They are looking for a proper mate; and most men may dally with insignificant women, they have their eyes on the prize.  The very few do not deny that part of their nature which makes them indelibly male or female, accept that it is what defines them, determines them, and completes their design. 

Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita creates what he calls a nymphet, a young girl with a preternatural sexuality- a sexuality that describes and motivates her more than anything else; and in parallel creates an older man who cannot resist her - a man with the same indefinable male desire as that of Stanley, a desire which becomes an obsession. 

D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover creates the same scenario but with a more oblique obsession. The two lovers want 'sexual mutuality', that coming together which Lawrence considers epiphanic.  Sex is not only on everyone's mind, it is the be-all and end-all of human experience. 

Baby Dolls rarely end up well.  Baby Doll Meighan is used by Vaccaro, De Joan Merchant was passed from lover to lover and ended up back in Eddy Lafourche catching swamp rats, catfish, and beavers; but this does not deny the principle - they were Darwinian prizes.