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Tennessee Williams may be one of the "representative southern writers [who] have used the trope of eating, with its corollaries of cooking and dining, to undermine conceptions of identity and value" (Evans 142), but the attention paid to the use and patterns of such tropes in his work, both dramatic and narrative, has been limited. There is evidence of the ubiquitous inclusion of culinary references in Williams's theater in W. Kenneth Holditch's comprehensive list of "Food and Drink in the Plays of Tennessee Williams," which adopts a biographical point of view to emphasize how Williams's own acquaintance with food, for example during his upbringing in Mississippi or his stays in New Orleans, is reflected in a choice of viands and beverages that endows his plays with a realistic Southern character and reproduce typically Southern associations between food, class, and ritual. Another association that seems quite inevitable in Williams's plays is the combination of food and drink motifs and sex, although Holditch hardly devotes two pages to it, focusing mainly on the double entendre of the references to Stanley Kowalski's "meat" and the soda boy's "cherry" in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Previous scholarship, however, has dealt extensively with the overlapping discourses of food and sex but restricted its attention to their most extreme realization: homosexuality-as-cannibalism in the short story "Desire and the Black Masseur" (1946) and the play Suddenly Last Summer (1958). Seminal studies have made manifest Williams's deployment of tropes of orality and consumption to signify, in a quite controversial way, the dynamics of homosexual desire.1
Yet the appearance of alimentary references in Williams's work does not simply realize a metaphorical transformation of people into sexually desirable or edible things, nor is it restricted to polemic texts about homosexual desire. This essay will look at how references to food, eating, and orality in Williams's work display a transversal consistence and reveal alimentary discourse to reflect issues of gender and power. Although not exhaustively, it will consider the repetition of a series of symbols and patterns that can help to disentangle the implicit meaning of other food allusions. For, although "the use of food and eating as a deliberate sexual metonymy or metaphor is a long-established tradition, especially for suggesting human flesh and...