Chinese Cultural Influence on Hannah Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana*

WANG Xuding Shantou University

Abstract: This paper explores the Taoist influence on Hannah Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, who creates Hannah Jelkes and Maxine Faulk as binary oppositions in the play. If Maxine metaphorically stands for physical reality, Hannah clearly represents spiritual reality, thus “in a pitched battle between the spiritual and the physical,” Maxine is fighting mainly for the physical Shannon while Hannah is fighting chiefly for the spiritual Shannon, who is the fulcrum of the play. Williams creates Hannah as a spiritual savior whose appearance is serene and saintly, whose manner is refined and poised, and whose behavior is kind and compassionate. Hannah’s dramatic function in the play is to save Shannon from his spiritual limbo, and her ways of helping him are not only spiritual but also multidimensional, and all her ways indicate the important influence of Chinese Culture in general and Taoism in particular. With her acquired Taoist concepts, Hannah is able to help Shannon to endure his mental suffering, to turn his misery inside out, to see the cold reality, to fight against his haunting “spook,” to face the hard external world, and to finally come to terms with life. Thus Hannah’s saintly appearance, her courageously poised manner,her unfaltering fortitude, her kind behavior, her compassionate actions and her serenely educational talks to help Shannon all can prove the important influence of Chinese culture and Taoism that help frame the larger dramatic structure and the main development of the play.

Keywords: Hannah Jelkes’ dramatic function； The Night of the Iguana；Tennessee Williams； Chinese Taoist influence

The influence of literary works upon literary works is perhaps the most convincingly demonstrable type, and perhaps aesthetically the most interesting.

In an interview, Tennessee Williams highly praised Hannah Jelkes: “She’s a very, very modest person, Hannah, and in that case, to me, a very beautiful person. I mean Hannah, the part of Hannah Jelkes in The Night of the Iguana, almost is a definition of what I think is most beautiful spiritually in a person and still believable.”Williams’ high praise of Hannah clearly reveals that he bestows high values on her personality, and those values represent Williams’ own ideals.No wonder Signi Falk considers Hannah as Williams’ spokesperson: “Williams seems to speak through Hannah.”Indeed Hannah has a beautiful spirit, and in the play Williams creates her as a spiritual savior in three dimensions: she has a saintly image, a refined and poised manner, and a kind and compassionate heart.

In the larger dramatic structure of the play, Hannah Jelkes and Maxine Faulk are binary oppositions. If Maxine metaphorically stands for physical reality, Hannah clearly represents spiritual reality, but both characters are created for the same dramatic end: to save Reverent Larry Shannon. Maxine tries to help him from a realistic perspective and Hannah attempts to save him from a spiritual perspective. Thus Hannah’s dramatic function in the play is to save Shannon from his spiritual despair. Although Hanna tries to help Shannon in many different ways, all her ways of helping him are not only spiritual but also philosophical, and all her ways indicate the important influence of Chinese culture in general and of Taoism in particular.

Williams makes it clear that Shannon faces both external trouble and internal affliction, and the latter is tougher than the former. Thus the central dramatic development of The Night of the Iguana is twofold: saving Shannon from his external troubles and helping him sooth and pacify his internal affliction, as he has neither means nor power to save himself without outside help.While Maxine’s help is worldly with the open purpose to convince Shannon to stay with her,Hannah’s help is more “fantastic” or spiritual with human compassion rather than with any hidden agenda. In the play Maxine’s way of preventing Shannon from “going to swim out to China,” his metaphorical gesture of committing suicide,is to order her two hired young Mexican swimmers to catch him, “bring him back and tie him up” in the hammock (93). Thus Maxine’s help is mainly realistic while Hannah’s help is multidimensional in spiritual terms.

Shannon’s external trouble derives from “sexuality and guilt” as Williams said in an interview, and his sexual problems not only get him “defrocked” by the Church, but also entrap him into a vicious circle of guilt that continually haunts him like a gnawing ghost that finally drags him down to a moral quagmire. In addition to his sexual problems, he is also expropriated of his last job as a tour guide, then he really comes to “the end of his rope” (24), as he does not have any financial means to survive in the material world like the tied-up iguana. Thus Maxine,the embodiment of physical representation in the play, is endowed with the dramatic function of saving Shannon from both his sexual problems and financial trouble, all of which are solved at the end of the play when Shannon finally agrees to stay with Maxine.

Metaphorically contrasted to the materiality is the dramatic motif of spirituality embodied in Hannah whose help to Shannon is, therefore, mainly psychological and spiritual. Shannon’s great spiritual conflict is: “He is torn between belief and disbelief, between sexuality and guilt.”The root of his “disbelief” is a “crisis in faith” that “springs from his conception of … a vengeful God,”who is “represented like a bad-tempered childish old, old, sick, peevish man” (55–6);therefore, he once shouted to his parish audience in his preaching: “All your Western theologies,the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent” (55). Yet,Shannon still believes in his own “personal idea of God” (56); that is why he has been struggling to go back to the Church since he was locked out by his church ten years ago: “I want to go back to the Church and preach the gospel of God as Lightning and Thunder” (57). Nevertheless he has never found his God; rather, he is completely lost in a spiritual limbo and becomes desperate.“In the midst of his spiritual crisis, the Christian minister is saved, ironically, not by Christ, but by Hannah Jelkes.”Indeed, it is Hannah who saves Shannon from his spiritual despair with her Oriental cultural experience and Taoist philosophy.

Williams creates Hannah’s spiritual function mainly in three ways: first Hannah’s saintly image invisibly but obviously affects Shannon in a spiritual sense; then Hannah’s unyielding and enduring lifestyle also has a spiritual impact on Shannon, and later Hannah’s various ways of helping Shannon are compassionate attempts to save Shannon from his spiritual despair. More specifically, Williams first bestows a saintly appearance on Hannah to attract Shannon’s selfpreoccupied attention, and by doing so he carefully creates Hannah with the qualities of a spiritual savior. When Hannah first appears in the play, Shannon is “suddenly pacified by her appearance”which “suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated” (18). As a spiritual savior, Hannah appears to be “l(fā)ike a guardian angel” (79) and “l(fā)ike a medieval sculpture of a saint” (91). More importantly, Shannon twice calls her “Miss Thin-Standing-Up-Female-Buddha”(98, 99). Shannon’s remark clearly reveals that Hannah’s spiritual function has a Chinese religious dimension that is of course spiritual, as the female bodhisattva who is called “Guanyin” in Chinese is a very popular goddess in Chinese culture. These statements clearly suggest that Hannah is a spiritual being, and her spiritual power to help Shannon is important for the dramatic development of the play. Further, Hannah’s generous, gentle and kind behavior not only attracts Shannon from his gloomy self-preoccupation like a bright spark but also moves him to tears. When Hannah shows her kind intention to help him, he is deeply moved: “he has tears in his eyes” (76). When Shannon asks for a cigarette, Hannah gives him the only two cigarettes she has “without a sign of reluctance” (76), Shannon voluntarily praises her: “I’m going to tell you something about yourself.You are a lady, a real one and a great one ［original italics］” (75). Hannah’s kind behavior effectively helps him release his spiritual anxiety. Clearly Williams’ main dramatic strategy is to develop Hannah’s spiritual qualities and give them a distinct function in the larger dramatic structure that enables her to help Shannon “l(fā)ive beyond despair and still live”in multifarious ways.

In the play Hannah’s first spiritual influence on Shannon is suggested in the scene when Hannah courageously pushes her grandfather’s wheelchair uphill in the hot and humid tropical weather, and her unyielding and enduring spirit certainly impresses Shannon. It is a striking spiritual example for Shannon to learn to endure hardships in life. Then, by doing a sketch of Shannon, Hannah helps him open his mind’s eye to see the truth that life is not always a long endless dark tunnel where Shannon fails to find any hope. With her artistic observation, Hannah sees Shannon’s spiritual misery while sketching, and Hannah’s sketch is a psychological reading of his mental agony. “In the figure of Hannah, we see illustrated an existential faith in the power of human beings to create meaning through art and to bring salvation to others by means of the healing power of art”. It is during her sketching of him that Shannon tells her, “I was … locked out of my church” (54) ten years ago. This is the root of his crisis in faith that has been torturing him for a long time. Although he has struggled to go back to the Church in the last ten years, he has miserably failed, and his failure painfully gnaws his soul. From the beginning to the end, Hannah’s sketching is also a metaphorical healing process for Shannon to gradually turn his troubled inside out so that he may see some possible hope in his life. Thus with her own experience of “drawing to an inside straight” (75), Hannah succeeds in helping Shannon to release his internal agony first by touching his heart with her refined and kind manner, and then by sketching his inside misery out. The whole process makes Shannon see through the real nature of his spiritual suffering and prepares him to face the challenges of life.

Then, Hannah pacifies Shannon’s mental disturbance with some sedative “poppyseed tea”that she brews with “a little alcohol burner, a spiritual lamp” (109), and she tells Shannon “after you’ve had a full cup of the poppy-seed tea … you’ll be able to get the good night’s sleep you need” (112). Her way of calming Shannon down with the poppy-seed tea served with “sugared ginger” is a common practice of Chinese herbal medicine, and the “spiritual lamp” is obviously a pun on brewing the poppy-seed tea while lighting or brightening Shannon’s spirit up. Shannon recognizes the value of Hannah’s Chinese medical practice although he humorously jokes about the bitter taste of the poppy-seed tea: “Great Caesar’s ghost …. The oriental idea of a Mickey Finn, huh?” (112). The “oriental idea” is Chinese, as the Chinese proverb goes: bitter medicine cures sickness; unpalatable advice benefits conduct, and Hannah has acquired her “oriental idea”in her extensive travels in China with her grandfather Nonno.

Moreover, Hannah helps Shannon to survive his despair or “spook” with an Oriental concept of “endurance”: “Yes. I can help you because I’ve been through what you are going through now.I had something like your spook—I just had a different name for him. I called him the blue devil”(104). When Shannon asks her, “How’d you beat your blue devil?” She replies: “I showed him that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance…. Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect. And they respect all tricks that panicky people use to outlast and outwit their panic” (104). The Chinese have a historical reputation for endurance which derives from the Taoist philosophy of wu wei, a way of taking the consequences when they come, or accepting the inevitable, or letting nature take its own course. In Hannah’s own terms: one can beat the “blue devil”“just by … enduring” (105). Williams clearly suggests that the idea of endurance is Oriental or Chinese just as the poppy-seed tea is Oriental by letting Shannon ask Hannah to clarify it, “Like poppyseed tea?” (105) right after Hannah explains her endurance theory which also reflects Lao Tzu’s teaching of endurance to some extent: “One who does not lose his place will endure long. One who dies but does not perish will live long.”“Heaven will last, / earth will endure. / How can they last long? / They don’t exist for themselves / and so can go on and on. So wise soul / leave self behind / move forward and setting self aside / stay centered. / Why let the self go? /To keep what the soul needs.”“Peace: to accept what must be, / to know what endures…. / To know what endures / is to be openhearted … / following the Tao / the way that endures forever.”In other words, one can endure long if one does not lose one’s original nature, if one can follow the law of nature with an open heart, or if one can accept the inevitable consequences when they come—“to accept what must be.”More importantly, one can endure long when one can “l(fā)eave self behind /move forward and setting self aside.”Metaphorically speaking, Hannahs’ sketching of Shannon is her attempt to help him “move forward” by “setting self aside.”Indeed this is more or less what Hannah means to beat “the blue devil”“just by … enduring” (105), and this is Hannah’s effective tactic to tackle her own “blue devil” and her effectual education for Shannon to survive his “spook.”

Further, besides the “poppy-seed tea” and endurance, Hannah also applies the Taoist concept of emptiness to help Shannon to fight his “spook.” As Shannon is too selfpreoccupied with his own personal trouble to notice anything outside himself in the external world, he is trapped in a bottomless pit of his own making. So how to save Shannon from his spiritual abyss becomes the main dramatic concern of the play, and Hannah’s important role in Williams’ dramatic strategy is to help Shannon come to terms with life with her own personal experience of surviving her “blue devil” by looking out of herself for the light at the far end of the “l(fā)ong black tunnel.” Her personal experience is a good example to illustrate the Taoist concepts of endurance and emptiness:

But I was lucky. My work—painting and doing quick character sketches—made me look out of myself, not in, and gradually, at the far end of the tunnel that I was struggling out of I began to see this faint, very faint gray light—the light of the world outside me—and I kept climbing toward it (107).

Obviously Hannah’s lesson for Shannon to learn is a philosophical idea that in order to endure hardships in life, one needs to empty oneself within. Hannah’s experience clearly indicates that only by turning one’s attention away from the self—self-interests, self-conflict,self-suffering, or self-preoccupation, can one endure spiritual agony and hopefully discover“the light of the world outside,” and can one finally save oneself from the dark despair in a philosophical sense. Hence the “l(fā)ight of the world outside” is certainly the hope of life,and the opposite is despair—the sign of the “l(fā)ong black tunnel that you thought would be neverending” (107). But Hannah makes it clear that “the light of the world outside” is not God as she clearly confesses: “I was … far from sure about God” (107). Then what is it and where does it come from? Hannah’s answer is that the light comes from endurance rooted in self-emptiness, for one can discover it only after enduring the “l(fā)ong black tunnel” in despair and the fountain head of endurance is self-emptiness.

Self-emptiness is an important Taoist philosophical concept, as Lao Tzu discusses it many times in The Tao Te Ching. In Chapter Four, Lao Tzu starts, “The way is empty, / used, but not used up.”In her translation of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin gives a subtitle to Chapter Five “Useful Emptiness,” and translates the conclusion of the chapter like this: “Heaven and Earth / act as a billows: / Empty yet structured, / it moves, inexhaustibly giving.”In Chapter 6, Lao Tzu praises emptiness as the spirit of the valley and metaphorically compares it with“the mother of all things”: “The spirit of the valley never dies; / It is called the mysterious female.”“The valley is an analogy of emptiness; its spirit indicates the function of emptiness”and the mysterious female “is the mother of all things,”and“is called the root of Heaven and Earth.”In Chapter Sixteen, Lao Tzu emphatically begins, “Be completely empty. / Be perfectly serene.”Lao Tzu’s teaching simply suggests that only by being completely empty within, can one achieve perfect peace or serenity in the soul. Peace and tranquility are exactly what Shannon really needs in his spiritual crisis, and what Hannah tries to teach him is to acquire them by emptying one’s self. In Chapter 28, Lao Tzu claims: “Knowing the honor and keeping to the mean, one will be the valley of the world. Being the valley of the world, one’s constant virtue is complete; one returns to simplicity”Wu annotates his translation of the chapter: “‘Valley’ means that the mind is empty of desires.”In Chapter 41, Lao Tzu metaphorically regards valley as supreme virtue:“Supreme virtue looks like a valley.”Wu further annotates: “Those who have great virtue act humbly; they are like the valley that symbolizes inner emptiness of desire.”In short, emptiness is indeed an important Taoist principle, and Lao Tzu talks about it no less than 26 times in The Tao Te Ching: 虛 5 times, 沖 2 times, 淵 3 times, 谷 16 times.

In the play, Shannon’s external problems are tough, but his internal agony and misery are tougher. If Maxine is designated to help him with his external problems, Hannah is surely assigned to save him from his spiritual despair. From the beginning of the play, Williams gradually build up Shannon’s inner suffering and misery that make him so deeply self-preoccupied that he can hardly notice anything outside of himself. It is the kind and compassionate Hannah who helps Shannon turn his self-preoccupation out for the sake of emptying his inner suffering and agony. Even the self-preoccupied Shannon can see her kind effort: “I’m going to tell you something about yourself.You are a lady, a real one and a great one …. It isn’t a compliment, it’s just a report on what I’ve noticed about you at a time when it’s hard for me to notice anything outside myself” (75). Hannah also frankly reveals Shannon’s desperate inner struggle: “Just been so much involved with a struggle in yourself that you haven’t noticed when people have wanted to help you” (76). Even the stage instruction at the end of Act Two metaphorically implies what Shannon needs is to empty his internal self and to reach out for the external horizons beyond himself:

Shannon lowers his hands from his burning forehead and stretches them out through the rain’s silver sheet as if he were reaching for something outside and beyond himself. Then nothing is visible but these reaching-out hands. A pure white flash of lightning reveals Hannah and Nonno against the wall …. A clear shaft of light stays on Shannon’s reaching-out hands till the stage curtain has fallen, slowly. (78)Shannon’s metaphorical gesture of “reaching for something outside and beyond himself”is another example echoing Lao Tzu’s Taoist teaching that calls on any “wise soul / ［to］ leave self behind / move forward and ［to］ set self aside.”“Shannon’s reaching-out hands”are also a symbolic gesture of not only turning his burning agony out for the rain to cool it off, but also reaching out for his God, who is the “Lightning and Thunder” in his mind, as he told Hannah earlier: “I want to go back to the Church and preach the gospel of God as Lightning and Thunder”(57). Yet ironically Shannon’s idea of “God as Lightning and Thunder” (57), the “pure white flash of lightning ［only］ reveals Hannah and Nonno against the wall”; “nothing ［else］ is visible.”This clearly suggests that Hannah and Nonno, rather than God, are Shannon’s spiritual saviors. Both Hannah and Nonno save Shannon from his spiritual agony and suffering with Taoist philosophy instead of Christian beliefs. All these textural references suggest that Shannon can be saved only by emptying his deep self-preoccupation of suffering and agony, and it is Hannah who is able to help Shannon with her Taoist theory and practice that derive from Lao Tzu’s and Chuang Tzu’s teachings. Indeed both Hannah and Nonno are Shannon’s saviors, as both teach him “how to live beyond despair and still live”with their Taoist theory and practice. For ten years, Shannon has been searching for his God but desperately failed, yet he has finally found Hannah and Nonno who help him beat his “spook.” This is exactly why George W. Crandell claims: “As several critics point out, however, Shannon’s spiritual quest leads not to God, but to acceptance of the human condition.”

One of the Taoist examples that Hannah uses to educate Shannon to overcome his despair and courageously and tranquilly face life and death is the inspiring story of the old penniless dying at “the House for the Dying” in Shanghai (107). The fearless, peaceful and serene manners of those old penniless dying Chinese obviously mirror Taoist philosophical concepts of endurance,emptiness and natural acceptance, and they are indeed good examples to prove Lao Tzu’s teaching: “Peace: to accept what must be, / to know what endures…. / To know what endures / is to be openhearted … / following the Tao / the way that endures forever.”Facing death, these old penniless dying Chinese have peace and tranquility simply because they know death is “what must be,” and they have opened their hearts to accept death simply because they “know what endures is to be openhearted.” They follow the Tao, so they will be able to endure till death comes to take their lives. In their peaceful manners, there are no shadows of fear, despair, agony, or “spook,”or “blue devils.” They can do this, as they are able to empty their worldly selves, and their behavior clearly reflects Lao Tzu’s teaching: “Practice emptiness ultimate. / Maintain tranquility sincerely.”The moral of Hannah’s story of the dying old Chinese also teaches Shannon to live his life naturally rather than to throw his life away recklessly by “going to swim out to China,”his metaphorical gesture of committing suicide. Hannah urges that like those old dying Chinese,Shannon should learn “to accept what must be,”“to know what endures” with an open heart.

Some critics, such as Glenn Embrey,Judith J. Thompsonand Signi Falk, have recognized that Hannah’s noble virtues are closely connected with Oriental culture, but none of them realize that such noble virtues are mainly related to Chinese culture and Taoism. Signi Falk claims:“Hannah… in her work and acquaintance with the Orient has learned that the deepest religion lies not only in the perception of another’s suffering and in a willingness to ease his pain but also in the peace that comes with the acceptance of the inevitable.”But Falk does not realize that “the deepest religion” in the play is Taoism as I have analyzed earlier. Indeed Hannah’s most important way of helping Shannon is not only her Oriental experience gained in her extensive travels in China but also her effective Taoist moral: “Accept whatever situation you cannot improve” (115).It is obviously Taoist because it strikingly echoes Lao Tzu’s teaching: “to accept what must be,”and Chuang Tzu’s teaching: “To realize that nothing can be done about them and to accept them as fated is excellence in its highest form.”It does not only effectively sum up her own Oriental experience but also convincingly reflects the inspiring story of the old dying Chinese in the House for the Dying in Shanghai. Hannah’s main purpose of telling Shannon this Taoist moral is of course to teach him to “accept whatever situation ［he］ cannot improve.” The situation that Shannon cannot improve in his life is the miserable fact that he comes to “the end of his rope”(24). On the one hand, he has desperately failed to go back to the Church even though he has been trying hard to do it for ten years, while on the other hand, he cannot even survive financially after his last tour guide job is expropriated. He is completely broke, as he openly confesses: “Right now I don’t have my fare back to Houston or even to Mexico City” (87).

When Shannon asks Hannah: “well, you know we—live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really….” Hannah replies: “I would say both.” Shannon asks again: “But when you live on a fantastic level as I have lately but have got to operate on a realistic level, that is when you’re spooked” (69). After that Hannah tells him: “Mr. Shannon, you’re not well enough to travel anywhere with anybody right now” (117),Shannon reluctantly retorts: “You mean that I’m stuck here for good? Winding up with the …inconsolable widow?” Hannah says: “We all wind up with something or with someone, and if it is someone instead of just something, we’re lucky, perhaps … unusually lucky” (117). Hannah’s philosophical advice surely hints that he should accept the inevitable situation that he cannot improve in life. More specifically he should accept Maxine who can help him in realistic terms, as he has no other way to survive, and he is “unusually lucky” because he ends up with someone who honestly and earnestly tries to “wind up with” him. This is Hannah’s effective catalyst that finally helps him get rid of his despair and begin to face life by accepting the inevitable human condition,just as George W. Crandell rightly confirms: “Acceptance of the human condition and courage in the face of despair are Williams’s affirmative responses to the apparent meaninglessness of life.”The Taoist concept of accepting the inevitable human condition also logically results in the dénouement of the play: Shannon’s final acceptance of Maxine that naturally leads to their union at the end of the play.

In his reading of The Night of the Iguana, George Hendrick concludes: “The Oriental themes become hopelessly confused.”Hendrick reaches such a conclusion simply because he reads the play merely from a traditional Christian perspective which blindly denies the“Oriental themes” in the play. However, through the above careful examination of Hannah’s personality from a Chinese Taoist perspective, we can naturally see that the “Oriental themes”definitely do not “become hopelessly confused”; rather, they are very clearly and systematically developed. Hannah is the most important character in the larger dramatic structure and the development of the play. Her saintly image, her refined manner and her kind and compassionate heart make her a noble spiritual savior who saves Shannon from his spiritual despair. All Hannah’s multifarious ways of helping Shannon show that she is indeed influenced by Chinese culture, especially by Taoism. Thus Hannah distinctively functions within the center of Williams’ Chinese Taoist themes on which the larger dramatic structure is built and according to which the main dramatic actions develop.

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