Rose Williams
Rose Williams was the sister of American playwright Tennessee Williams, who devoted much of his life to her care. She was the inspiration for several of the characters in his plays and other works. She inspired his short story, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, which in turn inspired his own play The Glass Menagerie, with Rose the inspiration for the character Laura Wingfield. Rose was born in 1909, two years before her brother, and they were childhood playmates Columbus, Mississippi. As Rose grew older, she began to exhibit symptoms of paranoia.
She also developed digestive disorders, which may have been psychosomatic, and the limited medical and psychiatric resources of the time repeatedly diagnosed her wrongly. Her brother noticed and wrote in his diaries of what he referred to as her “little eccentricities”. By the 1930s she was making more and more trips to hospitals, for increasingly lengthening stays. Her mother wrote in a letter of visiting her during one of these stays, and of her looking, “…so yellow and bloated and she was so full of delusions”.
Rose was diagnosed with schizophrenia in June of 1937 and a violent episode the following month led her to accuse her father of attempting to rape her. She screamed that she was going to kill him in reprisal, and her parents had her sent to a private sanitarium briefly. She was later removed from the sanitarium and sent to the state mental hospital in Farmington, Missouri. Over the ensuing months, her delusions and violent mood swings worsened and increased in frequency. During lucid periods she maintained a correspondence with her brother, by then an accomplished and increasingly famous writer.
In 1943, as Rose’s condition continued to worsen, she was given a lobotomy. Following the surgery she was able to write to her brother, indicating that she was doing well. She would never fully recover and remained depressed and delusional. She continued to be institutionalized. The operation had not been voluntary and it was her mother Edwina Williams who requested it is performed. Her father had no objection, after the violent episode in which his daughter had accused him of attempted rape he effectively washed his hands of her care.
For the rest of her life, Rose Williams remained institutionalized, incapable of caring for herself and her brother paid for her care. When he died his estate established a trust to ensure that she would have everything she needed. She was eventually moved to an institution in Tarrytown New York, to make it easier for Tennessee Williams to visit her. It was there that she died in 1996 of cardiac arrest.