From Parmenides' insistence that language instead of empiricism could lead us to immutable truths, to Plato's form of a cat as the ideal rather than any living cat, to Descartes' distrust of an evil genie who deceives his senses, and to Kant's sense of isolation, the human being trapped in his body without ever knowing what another body thinks and feels, Western rationality has regarded the flesh as an impediment and an imposter, a troublemaker thwarting the mind's awareness of the self and the world. Nowhere in modern theater is this split examined and evaluated as effectively as in the work of Tennessee Williams. What has often been regarded as a critique of the remnants of Victorian repression in the South (Falk 70-71) is in fact a running dialogue, a much deeper ambivalence about whether the mind and body can communicate or even coexist. That the battleground for this apprehension is often sexual transgression, at least as defined by the last decade's standards, should not mislead readers into thinking that Williams is solely a moralist.