Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 68

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Popular Culture Review

on his own inconvenience rather than Barle’s pain, he even charges her for the
family’s health care, remarking contemptuously: “We all got to be tested to find
out if you have given us this yaws” (550). Reacting almost with Biblical selfrighteousness, McCorkle says of Barle’s malady: “Damn if it ain’t a punishment to
the eye” (545). McCorkle bears a strong resemblance to Jabe Torrance, another
dry goods owner, in Orpheus Descending^ a character Williams associates with
Pluto, death, and hell.
The response Barle encounters from the medical and religious communities
is not in any way more merciful than she receives from her husband or children.
Terrifyingly cool, the doctor informs her that “[t]his is a case that will be written
up in medical journals” (549), and gives her no succor. Nurses and doctors were no
friends to Williams, who often satirized them in frightening measure from his early
play Fugitive Kind (1937) to ^ Streetcar Named Desire^ Suddenly Last Summer,
Orpheus Descending, and This is a Peaceable Kingdom, and in his fiction as well.
The male night nurse in “Mama's Old Stucco House” (1965), for example, is a
lecherous and “repulsively coarse young man, red-headed, with arms as big as
hams, covered with fuzzy white hair” (390). Clergy, too, are often presented
satirically in Williams’s works, e.g., the Rev. Tooker in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or
the Rev. Winemiller in Summer and Smoke. Joining other officious and hypocritical
clergy, Barle’s father, the Lutheran pastor, hangs up a sign saying, “Barle, you
cannot enter” (551).
The clinical evidence and date of this story suggest that “Mother Yaws”
is far more significant than it has generally been viewed. The Gatlinburg doctor
diagnoses Barle’s “terrible sore'’ as a “thing called yaws” ( 549). Yaws is a skin
disease caused by a variant Treponeomapertinue, which is the causative agent for
syphilis, yet yaws is not a sexually transmitted disease. It occurs in endemic
proportions in tropical areas such as Africa, and also in New Guinea and the South
Pacific, though rarely in the U.S. In fact, the doctor asks Barle if she had ever gone
to Africa, which shocks her since she has probably never left the state of Tennessee.
He then immediately sends her on to the hospital; and from there she goes back
home without a word from anyone about her medical condition.
However, the medical reactions to Barle’s Yaws are suspicious of a
condition far more serious. The yaws infection can be readily cured with a “single
large dose of penicillin given by intramuscular injection” (“Yaws”). One medical
researcher noted: “A dramatic decrease in the prevalence of yaws followed the
national mass penicillin treatment campaigns in the 1950’s and 1960’s with the
support of the World Health Organization” (Blockhouse). The fact that Barle is
whisked away to the hospital, only to be discharged with a terminal sentence, and
is not given penicillin, which would significantly improve her condition, may point
to a disease more catastrophic and contagious than yaws of the late 1970’s. The