Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 67

Tennessee Williams, “Mother Yaws,”
and AIDS*
Tennessee Williams’s short story ‘‘Mother Yaws,” first published in Esquire
(May 1977) and later included in his Collected Stories (1985), is a crucible of the
playwright’s symbolic characters, sexually charged landscapes, grotesqueries, and
also his outrages. It is vintage Williams but with a bitter, contemporary twist. The
story is not necessarily his best fiction, but it may offer some historical and popular
epidemiological evidence about the onset of the AIDS epidemic in America.
A blighted mother, Barle, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, is thrown
out of her home by her husband and children when they discover she has a
suspicious, contagious growth on her cheek. Banished to a clinic miles away for
diagnosis, Barle is verbally attacked by a patient fearful that her children will be
infected: “One fat, sweaty woman...stared at Barle with undisguised repugnance
and [to evict her from the waiting room], pounded heavily on [the doctor’s door]
till the doctor’s nurse appeared.” Even the nurse “stood back a good distance [from
Barle] with a look that contained no comfort” (Williams 548). When admitted
back into the clinic, Barle is also callously treated by the doctor who straightaway
sends her to the hospital for observation. Bereft of any hope for a cure, Barle
returns home where she is confined in a “storeroom” on a ‘"pallet” only overnight,
and then she is put out for good. An exile, she seeks retreat in the ‘"woods on Cat’s
Back Mountain” (551) where, approaching some baby wildcats with a smile on
her face, she is immediately devoured by the cubs’ mother.
Many of the grotesqueries associated with Tennessee Williams jump out
at the reader in “Mother Yaws.” Barle’s “terrible sore on her face” (Williams 547)
is a quintessential Williams symbol for the larger sickness engulfing character,
family, and the community (in this story, ironically named Triumph, Tennessee).
In some fashion or another, all of Williams’s characters suffer from some physical,
festering infirmity; but Barle’s dilemma claims a special stigmata. The reception
she receives'from her family mirrors their own pestulant cruelty. Her children—
the two daughters and son Tommy Two—show their fox teeth when they hear or
talk about their mother. Tommy unforgivably ‘"chuckle[s]” at his mother’s infirmia.
The children refuse to eat anything she prepares; and when Barle ventures
downstairs to clean the dishes, one daughter observes: "‘I reckon she is ashame
[sic] to come back down” (Williams 546). Barle’s husband, a snarly and penurious
dry goods store owner—Tom McCorkle—refuses to pay for his wife’s medical
expenses and records everything he does for her, even the bus trip to the doctor in
Gatlinburg, in “a black notebook.. .purchased for no other reason” (546). Focusing