Alma stands in contrast with John, the one she loves. She stands for the spiritual aspect of man while he stands for the physical. She is
...the soul, or smoke of the title- the exponent of something "immaterial as this smoke", as John says of her- while he is represented by everything that refers to the body, to summer's heat, and to the plain, flat acceptance of physicality which he recommend to her and which he literalizes in his profession as a doctor.( Spoto 151)
It is completely clear that everything about Alma is " too removed from the things of earth and body; everything about John is too involved with the earth and body " (152). She has always believed that the role of a woman is to bring her heart and soul to marriage and transfer it from " something no better than the coupling of beasts" into something purely emotional.
"…there are some women who turn a possibly beautiful thing into something no better than the coupling of beasts!-but love is what you bring to it. … some people bring just their bodies. But there are some people, there are some women, John, who can bring their hearts to it, also- who can bring their souls to it." (Part one: A Summer, scene vi)
But now her ideas have changed completely. Now "the tables have turned " as she begins to think in the same way as John.
Alma now rejects false love, as it has never achieved her dreams of marrying John. She faces the reality and begins a new stage in her life by confessing her love to John, who refuses it. The crisis that leads her to such a change is the feeling that her youth is slipping away. While John begins in flesh and ascends to the spirit, Alma begins in spirit and descends to flesh.
In the tragic irony of Summer and Smoke these two characters need each other to be a whole, but instead each is transformed into the other, John sacrificing his capacity to reveal for Alma's earnstness, Alma sacrificing her belief in the soul for John's capacity to experience the passion of flesh.(Ross 131)
She is now able to experience her full humanity after succeeding in facing reality. She moves from being a hysterical, prim priest's daughter to a woman who has sexual liberity. The play ends with a scene where Alma's sexual awakening, after too long period of supression, drives her into the arms of strangers. She wills to find her transient fulfillments in this kind of sex. Therfore, she finally she realizes that the spiritual can only be reached by making a union with the physical. "The body cannot, however Alma might wish otherwise, be completely bypassed or ignored in the search of what lies beyond "(Adler 116) .
The Rose Tattoo exhibits another example of a woman who is able to sail back from illusion to reality. Serafina Delle Rose is a Sicilian seamstress who is married to Rosario, a truck driver who had a rose tattoo on his chest. Her existence centers upon their marriage. She adores him to the extent that she refuses his burial after death. She had his body cremated and keeps it in an urn infront of the statue of the Madonna in her house. She always refers to it as "the urn of blessed ashes, those ashes of a rose"(Act 1,scene 5). She lives totally in her past days with her dead husband. She even imagines having sex with him. All the time she is satisfied just to remember.
When she knows about the harsh news of her husband's infidelity all over the past years, Serafina refuses to believe. She says:
"...They want the marble urn broken; they want me to smash it. They want the rose ashes scattered because it had too much glory. They don't want glory like this in nobody's heart…"(Act 2, scene 1)
She is constantly entreating the statue of the Madonna to give her a sign that Rosario was faithful to her. She needs to be fully aware that "the ashes are clean" and that the memory of the rose is perfect. The sign came through the entrance of Alvaro, a truck driver, who is completely similar to Rosario. This leads her to have sex with him, imagining that he is her husband. She says to her daughter,
"He was a Sicilian: he had rose oil in his hair and a the rose tattoo of your father. In the dark room I couldn’t see his clown face. I closed my eyes and dreamed he was your father… "(Act three. Scene three)
After Serafina realizes the reality of Rosario's unfaithfulness, she breaks the urn that includes his ashes and blows out the Madonna's light. She doesn't believe in the Madonna, who gives her a wrong sign,any more,"...I forgot you the way you forgot Serafina". She begins a new era in her life. She faces reality. She changes from "a wife whose life centers upon martial love to a ferocious yet dependent widow, to an emotionally charged expectant lover who again becomes pregnant" (Griffin 111). Finally, she is totally freed from her repressions and illusions through a new man who enters her life acquiring a rose tattoo in imitation of Rosario. Although he is dead now, Rosario pushes her to face reality and free herself from the memory of his assumed unfaithful love.
