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Tennessee Williams's scientific knowledge of the natural world that richly invigorates the symbolic text of Suddenly Last Summer is drawn from his frequent visits to Forest Park located near his family's suburban residence at 42 Aberdeen Road in the central west end of St. Louis. In one of many letters to his grandfather, the Reverend Dakin in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Tennessee encourages him to visit: "you would enjoy living in this location. It is within walking distance of the art-museum and zoo -just one block from the park."1 After the 1904 World's Fair several buildings in the Park were converted into art and history museums as well as indoor reptile, mammal, and bird-house exhibits for the St. Louis Zoo. Taking advantage of this menagerie, Williams has Laura, his fictionalized sister Rose, enjoying the warm sheltered exhibits in Forest Park on cold winter days. She confesses to her mother that instead of attending the Rubicam business school: "I went in the art museum and the bird-houses at the Zoo. I visited the penguins every day! ... Lately I've been spending most of the afternoons in the Jewel Box, that big glass house where they raise tropical flowers."2
While Forest Park provided a quiet haven for Rose, it also cultivated Williams's curiosity of science and later, provided the symbolic and functional framework of Williams's play Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The St. Louis Zoo provided an informal study of ornithology with both outdoor and indoor bird houses. A range of bird species and their vocalizations play a prominent symbolic role throughout Williams's canon. In Suddenly Last Summer birds sing instinctive melodies of tranquility that contrast periodically with shrill chaos. South of the bird house, the reptile house featured exhibits of exotic lizards and snakes. In this house: "there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings and thrashing sounds ... as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents ... all of a savage nature" (5). About a half-mile west of the Zoo in Forest Park, the Jewel Box was Williams's "Treasure Box" of botanical symbols/gems to personify his characters and to expose their desires in the creative format of abstract literary art. The all-glass constructed Jewel Box is also the geographical setting of Suddenly Last Summer and places Williams's characters within...