What Tennessee Williams Saw Before the Assisted Dying Trend
University of Rochester lecturer Robert Rich turns to Tennessee Williams’s final play to challenge a culture that regards the elderly as burdens—a view now finding expression in public policy.
Canada’s expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) in 2021 has been the source of a series of increasingly disturbing revelations. Concerns have been raised that the ability of MAID patients to donate organs may be acting as an additional source of pressure on eligible patients to end their lives; horrified parents have been informed of their adult children's decisions to apply for MAID, even when a possible mental health condition may have been a motivator; and there are reports that infants with deformities and people with mental illnesses could soon be considered eligible, as well as "emancipated minors between the ages of 14 and 17."
All of this has led to renewed calls for legislation to restrict MAID eligibility in Canada. But in other places, such as the American states of Delaware, Illinois, and New York, as well as in the United Kingdom, lawmakers have either passed or are in the process of passing new assisted-dying legislation.
As I see it, this debacle is not merely a matter of misguided policy but the logical conclusion of a culture that sees the elderly–and the weak more broadly–as a burden.
This concerning attitude toward human life has been a long time in the making. Nearly half a century ago, Tennessee Williams made it the subject matter of his final play, A House Not Meant to Stand, which premiered in April of 1982. One comes away from the play less surprised by the trajectory of contemporary assisted-dying policy.
The house referred to in the title is the dilapidated and leaky residence of Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, a couple in their “late sixties or early seventies,” in the Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi. (Williams also hailed from Mississippi.) The play opens with Cornelius and Bella arriving back from the funeral of their son, Chips. Their other son Charlie and his pregnant fiancé Stacey are upstairs when they arrive home, and their neighbors, Jessie and Emerson Sykes, separately drop in and out over the course of the play.
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
