Migrations transatlantiques latentes dans “The Yellow Bird” de Tennessee Williams

The literary transatlantic migrations in Tennessee Williams’ “The Yellow Bird” (1947) are studied from the point of view of parodic rewriting and recycling. The structure of the story produces polyphonic effects that create a dramatic tension between the tragic and the comic, the present and the past, the real and the imaginary, as they move to and fro between the Ancient and the New Worlds. The effects and ensuing tensions are achieved through the latent interposition of the phoenix, a symbol whose presence is periphrastically hinted at as early as the title: the “yellow bird” is a transatlantic figure out of British modernism (for Williams recuperated it from D. H. Lawrence’s work) which embodies rebirth and renewal. It takes under its aegis Alma, a minister’s daughter whom it accompanies in her metamorphosis into a prostitute. The article uses the concepts of heteroglossia and performativity to demonstrate that Alma’s transformation is due to her acting out the meaning of her name in various languages. Through this performance, Alma’s identity is diffracted into multiple facets from literal, acclimatized, or endogenous Puritanism to a transatlantic literary crossbreed. Eventually, by means of an inverted correspondence, Alma, the prostitute, proves to be a parody of the Virgin Mary. As Mary, Mother of God is mother to her own creator, so Alma is a metaleptical and metafictional figure of the author. Transatlantic migrations are thus part of a larger issue that concerns fiction in general and Williams’ oeuvre in particular. The story (like Williams’ work in general) questions the impermeability of the boundaries that define time, space, genders and genres to highlight the interdependence that develops between the individual and the community, realism and fantasy, reality and fiction