“Pirate Imagery and Outlaw Masculinity in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2026. 13 861 mots: Tom Wingfield, Pirate and Fugitive

Scientific interestAlthough Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has been extensively studied for its fugitive figures, autobiographical dimension, and coded queer aesthetics, the specific imagery of piracy that structures the play’s visual and symbolic economy has received little sustained scholarly attention. This critical blind spot is striking given Williams’s explicit use of the pirate ship and the Jolly Roger in the stage directions, as well as the centrality of maritime and outlaw fantasies to Tom Wingfield’s desire for escape. By foregrounding piracy rather than subsuming it under generalized metaphors of flight or adventure, this article addresses a neglected dimension of Williams’s dramaturgy and situates The Glass Menagerie within a broader Atlantic and maritime imaginary.Relevance and contributionThis article argues that piracy in The Glass Menagerie functions not as a decorative or romantic emblem of escape, but as a complex metaphor for outlaw masculinity, queer resistance, and alternative identity-making. Drawing on oceanic studies and on Margaret Cohen’s critique of literary hydrophasia, the study demonstrates how Williams mobilizes the pirate as a destabilizing figure that challenges landlocked, nationalist, and heteronormative models of masculinity dominant in the postwar United States.More specifically, the article shows (1) that Williams carefully distinguishes between the disciplined world of the merchant seaman and the insurgent symbolic charge of piracy, using the Jolly Roger to signal a latent politics of refusal rather than institutional escape; (2) that piracy operates as a coded, theatrical form of queer dissidence, allowing Williams to stage nonnormative desire and rebellion within the constraints of mid-twentieth-century realism and censorship; and (3) that the play ultimately dramatizes the limits of this insurgent potential, transforming the pirate into a spectral or “mock” figure whose radical promise remains unfulfilled.By reading The Glass Menagerie through the prism of maritime and pirate studies, this article contributes to ongoing debates on Southern masculinity, queer coding, and the aesthetics of resistance, while also inviting a reassessment of piracy as a critical trope in Southern and American literary studies more broadly.