Cat on a Hot Tin Room - Essay
Eric Shapiro - Modern Drama - Professor Cahn - Spring 2012
Introduction
In an article for The English Journal in 1948, John Gassner describes Tennessee Williams as “a painter of a segment of the American scene, a dramatist of desire and frustration, and a poet of the human compensatory mechanism” (Gassner 390). All of these descriptions are appropriate, but the last one in particular cuts to the heart of Tennessee Williams’ art. Many of the playwright’s works are concerned with the ways human beings cope with realities they deem unacceptable, and how they attempt to hide the truth from themselves and others.
The members of the Pollitt family are deeply damaged individuals who refuse to face the problems that prevent them from living happy, fulfilling lives. True to reality, Williams does not furnish the play’s characters or his audience with easy solutions, but neither does he suggest that transcendence for his troubled characters is impossible. Confronting one’s ostensible problems does not necessarily force them to go away, as the common cliché insists. In some cases, it only serves to make things even more unbearable.
Many of the problems characters face in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire are of a sexual nature. Dilemmas arising from sexuality, far from remaining confined to the bedroom, contribute to the everyday dynamics of Williams’ hapless characters. Whether male or female, requited or unrequited, overt or implied, gay or straight, the specter of frustrated sexuality is a constant presence in the playwright’s work.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof introduces us to several characters, each embodying distinctive variations on this theme. Taken alone, it serves as a more than suitable introduction to Williams’ oeuvre. A comparison with another of Williams’ plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, yields a fuller understanding of the common themes that bind the playwright’s works together. Accordingly, this essay will commence with a brief discussion of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as a single work, focusing on how its characters cope and fail to cope with unpleasant realities. It will then go on to examine how the experiences of homosexuals in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire reflect this phenomenon and illuminate an important thematic purpose of Tennessee Williams’ work.
Part I
The narrative of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ostensibly chronicles the efforts of two siblings and their significant others vying for possession of the family fortune following the death of their ailing father. However, it soon becomes clear that Williams is far more concerned with the Pollitts’ relationships than he is with who gets the money. The family members all spend their lives trying to hide from undesired realities, often of a sexual nature. Unfortunately, their methods of doing so give rise to an unhealthy family dynamic that only exacerbates the individual insecurities of its members.
Like Blanche, Maggie changes clothes or “transforms” into a different person in response to being spurned by her lover. In the stage direction in Act I, Tennessee helpfully notes: “it is constant rejection that makes [Maggie’s] humor bitch” (Williams 20). The consequences of Maggie’s sexless marriage are equally unsatisfactory, as is apparent when her niece Dixie points out: “You’re just jealous because you can’t have babies” (Williams 46). In order to cope with this rejection, Maggie undergoes a “hideous transformation,” becoming “hard and frantic” (Williams 22). Referring to her constant struggle to live with her dissatisfaction, Maggie compares herself to “a cat on a hot tin roof” and later consciously adopts the identity of Maggie the Cat (Williams 25).
Meanwhile, her husband Brick relies on alcohol to help him forget his best friend and romantic interest Skipper, who committed suicide after revealing he was gay. In contrast to his wife, Brick admits defeat, withdrawing from the world to take refuge in a drunken haze. Brick explains that he drinks for “this click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it. It’s just a mechanical thing” (Williams 73). From this statement and in light of subsequent revelations, it is clear that Brick’s problems go beyond alcoholism. In calling his drinking a “mechanical thing,” he effectively banishes the tragedy of Skipper’s death in favor of a less painful explanation.
Brick’s reflexive, alcohol-induced apathy allows him to keep up the appearance of stoicism despite his inner turmoil. In Williams’ words, “Brick has the additional charm of that cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle” (Williams 17). Brick’s “crutch” symbolizes his powerlessness and inability to face up to reality.
Not to be surpassed in delusion by his children, Big Daddy goes so far as to deny the fact of his oncoming death. Unwilling to confront the reality of his demise, Big Daddy latches onto Brick as a surrogate. He tells his favorite son: “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto… Hold onto your life,” but it is clear that he is really talking to himself (Williams 63). Believing himself to have survived a near-death experience, Big Daddy reveals certain insights into how he has coped with his own mortality. Again, he speaks of the generic “human animal” that tries to buy happiness, rather than using the first person.
Big Daddy’s denial reaches an absurd extreme when he points out his own delusion while refusing to admit that he is talking about himself: “Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death” (Williams 68). The irony here is that Big Daddy cannot face the prospect of his own death, talking of future plans in order to keep alive the delusion that he has recovered: “Now that shadow’s lifted, I’m going to cut loose and have, what is it they call it, have me a–ball!” (Williams 70).
Part II By contemporary standards, the sexual content in Tennessee Williams’ plays is provocative, but not altogether shocking. The drama of today features far more explicit material, sometimes even requiring actors to simulate sexual acts. In the context of the mid-20th century, however, such things were anything but ordinary. Critics were torn over whether Williams sometimes went too far in his portrayal of sexuality, particularly between members of the same sex. Even dealing with such subject matter as homosexuality would have been controversial, but Williams went one step further, accepting it as a valid expression of love. Indeed, the plight of closeted homosexuals is an apt example of when individuals are compelled to erect illusions. When these illusions shatter, death seems to be the way out.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example,Brick and Skipper’s relationship – consummated or otherwise – is the closest thing Williams offers to true romance. In refusing to cast a conventional moral judgment on the two aforementioned characters, the playwright permits a neutral, perhaps even favorable, view of homosexuality. In Williams’ plays, homosexuals are not deviants to be pitied, but simply individuals with needs and desires like everyone else.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick and his deceased lover Skipper are, if anything, portrayed in a more sympathetic light than the play’s heterosexual couples. Brick and Margaret are in a sexless marriage, and Big Daddy and Big Momma are also not physically intimate, and would probably not be even if the former was not on the edge of death. Coincidentally, the only sexually active straight couple in the play is thoroughly repulsive. Gooper and Mae, whose brood of “no-neck monsters” runs wild in the Pollitt household, lend heterosexual relations and fertility an unappealing, even grotesque, quality (Williams 16). Far from displaying a favorable view of heterosexuality, the two of them are petty, manipulative individuals that cynically exploit their fertility, using it as a tool to further their claim to the family fortune.
In a journal article titled “Tennessee Williams,” Desmond Reid takes issue with the playwright’s frank portrayal of sexual topics, particularly in such controversial forms as homosexuality. He asserts that such obvious exploration of taboo topics is not appropriate for the stage and not essential to William’s work:
“Most people of sane and moral upbringing (even those private offenders) are repelled by obscene conversation on stage. I cannot see that Tennessee Williams’ plays would have suffered unduly had he curbed his characters in this matter. His dramatic sense, his power in building up atmosphere and his incisive, repetitive dialogue do not depend on this doubtful assistance.” (Reid 442)
Contrary to the puritanical standards of his time, Williams does render harsh judgments on his characters for their problems. Reid refers laudably to the “gentle compassion” Williams’ harbors for even the worst representatives of humanity in his lexicon of serial transgressors, provided that it does not extend to the realm of sexual conduct.
When it does is another matter. Reid claims that the playwright is wrong to depict, much less implicitly condone, such so-called deviant behavior as homosexuality. Subsequently, he criticizes the playwright for taking said compassion too far and neglecting to hold his characters accountable for their moral lapses. Reid claims that an absence of moral standards in the name of compassion is the most “dangerous element” of Williams’ work, going on to criticize the notion that: “individuals have taken right or wrong paths not by choice but by necessity, driven willy-nilly by themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents” (Reid 437).
Applied broadly, Reid’s point is a valid one. Williams’ plays do indeed encourage us to see characters’ flaws as a product of their circumstances. That being said, his assertion that the playwright should refrain from portraying non-traditional forms of sexuality in anything but a condemnatory manner is ludicrous. A large part of Williams’ originality and appeal is his frank, non-judgmental treatment of human sexuality. To be sure, his characters suffer the consequences of their actions.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the revelation ofBlanche’s chronic promiscuity drives away Mitch, her last chance at happiness, shattering her carefully maintained illusions of glamour and landing her in a mental institution. Nevertheless, we still sympathize with Blanche because we know how she became the empty shell of a woman that she was when we first met her in Act I. Not-so-coincidentally, Blanche’s fundamental problem, like that of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, stems from society’s treatment of homosexuality. In Scene 6 we learn that Blanche’s original husband committed suicide after being exposed as homosexual. Blanche describes her reaction to the suicide in abstract terms that evoke everlasting damage: “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than – the kitchen candle–…” (Williams 96). Brick’s friend and lover, Skipper, killed himself for virtually the same reason.
Williams’ homosexual characters, like his heterosexual ones, are obsessed with keeping a humiliating secret at all costs. Blanche’s husband conducts affairs with men in secret, all the while appearing publicly with his beautiful wife. Skipper, on the other hand, denies his homosexuality even to himself. Either way, the revelation of this secret has particularly fatal consequences. In a sense, both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire are about the fallout of gay men choosing to end their lives to avoid living with the shame of being exposed. Although Brick and _____ are both only mentioned posthumously by other characters, their deaths continue to haunt their loved ones, ironically forcing them to live with painful truths of their own.
Desmond Reid’s words, well-intentioned though they might have been, are a testament to why Tennessee Williams’ work was so necessary. By confronting audience members with the devastating personal costs of homophobia in the lives of fictional characters, the playwright also invited consideration of the effects it was having in the real world. Williams could not fully address the full range of human experience without considering the implications of sexuality in the lives of his characters, and to claim otherwise is to miss out on an important theme of his work. Of course, unacknowledged homosexuality is only one of many topics prevalent in Williams’ work. However, it is worthy of special mention because it so appropriately embodies the playwright’s broader exploration of the elements that compel individuals to create illusions that shield them from the truth.
Introduction
In an article for The English Journal in 1948, John Gassner describes Tennessee Williams as “a painter of a segment of the American scene, a dramatist of desire and frustration, and a poet of the human compensatory mechanism” (Gassner 390). All of these descriptions are appropriate, but the last one in particular cuts to the heart of Tennessee Williams’ art. Many of the playwright’s works are concerned with the ways human beings cope with realities they deem unacceptable, and how they attempt to hide the truth from themselves and others.
The members of the Pollitt family are deeply damaged individuals who refuse to face the problems that prevent them from living happy, fulfilling lives. True to reality, Williams does not furnish the play’s characters or his audience with easy solutions, but neither does he suggest that transcendence for his troubled characters is impossible. Confronting one’s ostensible problems does not necessarily force them to go away, as the common cliché insists. In some cases, it only serves to make things even more unbearable.
Many of the problems characters face in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire are of a sexual nature. Dilemmas arising from sexuality, far from remaining confined to the bedroom, contribute to the everyday dynamics of Williams’ hapless characters. Whether male or female, requited or unrequited, overt or implied, gay or straight, the specter of frustrated sexuality is a constant presence in the playwright’s work.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof introduces us to several characters, each embodying distinctive variations on this theme. Taken alone, it serves as a more than suitable introduction to Williams’ oeuvre. A comparison with another of Williams’ plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, yields a fuller understanding of the common themes that bind the playwright’s works together. Accordingly, this essay will commence with a brief discussion of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as a single work, focusing on how its characters cope and fail to cope with unpleasant realities. It will then go on to examine how the experiences of homosexuals in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire reflect this phenomenon and illuminate an important thematic purpose of Tennessee Williams’ work.
Part I
The narrative of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ostensibly chronicles the efforts of two siblings and their significant others vying for possession of the family fortune following the death of their ailing father. However, it soon becomes clear that Williams is far more concerned with the Pollitts’ relationships than he is with who gets the money. The family members all spend their lives trying to hide from undesired realities, often of a sexual nature. Unfortunately, their methods of doing so give rise to an unhealthy family dynamic that only exacerbates the individual insecurities of its members.
Like Blanche, Maggie changes clothes or “transforms” into a different person in response to being spurned by her lover. In the stage direction in Act I, Tennessee helpfully notes: “it is constant rejection that makes [Maggie’s] humor bitch” (Williams 20). The consequences of Maggie’s sexless marriage are equally unsatisfactory, as is apparent when her niece Dixie points out: “You’re just jealous because you can’t have babies” (Williams 46). In order to cope with this rejection, Maggie undergoes a “hideous transformation,” becoming “hard and frantic” (Williams 22). Referring to her constant struggle to live with her dissatisfaction, Maggie compares herself to “a cat on a hot tin roof” and later consciously adopts the identity of Maggie the Cat (Williams 25).
Meanwhile, her husband Brick relies on alcohol to help him forget his best friend and romantic interest Skipper, who committed suicide after revealing he was gay. In contrast to his wife, Brick admits defeat, withdrawing from the world to take refuge in a drunken haze. Brick explains that he drinks for “this click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it. It’s just a mechanical thing” (Williams 73). From this statement and in light of subsequent revelations, it is clear that Brick’s problems go beyond alcoholism. In calling his drinking a “mechanical thing,” he effectively banishes the tragedy of Skipper’s death in favor of a less painful explanation.
Brick’s reflexive, alcohol-induced apathy allows him to keep up the appearance of stoicism despite his inner turmoil. In Williams’ words, “Brick has the additional charm of that cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle” (Williams 17). Brick’s “crutch” symbolizes his powerlessness and inability to face up to reality.
Not to be surpassed in delusion by his children, Big Daddy goes so far as to deny the fact of his oncoming death. Unwilling to confront the reality of his demise, Big Daddy latches onto Brick as a surrogate. He tells his favorite son: “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto… Hold onto your life,” but it is clear that he is really talking to himself (Williams 63). Believing himself to have survived a near-death experience, Big Daddy reveals certain insights into how he has coped with his own mortality. Again, he speaks of the generic “human animal” that tries to buy happiness, rather than using the first person.
Big Daddy’s denial reaches an absurd extreme when he points out his own delusion while refusing to admit that he is talking about himself: “Ignorance – of mortality – is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death” (Williams 68). The irony here is that Big Daddy cannot face the prospect of his own death, talking of future plans in order to keep alive the delusion that he has recovered: “Now that shadow’s lifted, I’m going to cut loose and have, what is it they call it, have me a–ball!” (Williams 70).
Part II By contemporary standards, the sexual content in Tennessee Williams’ plays is provocative, but not altogether shocking. The drama of today features far more explicit material, sometimes even requiring actors to simulate sexual acts. In the context of the mid-20th century, however, such things were anything but ordinary. Critics were torn over whether Williams sometimes went too far in his portrayal of sexuality, particularly between members of the same sex. Even dealing with such subject matter as homosexuality would have been controversial, but Williams went one step further, accepting it as a valid expression of love. Indeed, the plight of closeted homosexuals is an apt example of when individuals are compelled to erect illusions. When these illusions shatter, death seems to be the way out.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example,Brick and Skipper’s relationship – consummated or otherwise – is the closest thing Williams offers to true romance. In refusing to cast a conventional moral judgment on the two aforementioned characters, the playwright permits a neutral, perhaps even favorable, view of homosexuality. In Williams’ plays, homosexuals are not deviants to be pitied, but simply individuals with needs and desires like everyone else.
In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick and his deceased lover Skipper are, if anything, portrayed in a more sympathetic light than the play’s heterosexual couples. Brick and Margaret are in a sexless marriage, and Big Daddy and Big Momma are also not physically intimate, and would probably not be even if the former was not on the edge of death. Coincidentally, the only sexually active straight couple in the play is thoroughly repulsive. Gooper and Mae, whose brood of “no-neck monsters” runs wild in the Pollitt household, lend heterosexual relations and fertility an unappealing, even grotesque, quality (Williams 16). Far from displaying a favorable view of heterosexuality, the two of them are petty, manipulative individuals that cynically exploit their fertility, using it as a tool to further their claim to the family fortune.
In a journal article titled “Tennessee Williams,” Desmond Reid takes issue with the playwright’s frank portrayal of sexual topics, particularly in such controversial forms as homosexuality. He asserts that such obvious exploration of taboo topics is not appropriate for the stage and not essential to William’s work:
“Most people of sane and moral upbringing (even those private offenders) are repelled by obscene conversation on stage. I cannot see that Tennessee Williams’ plays would have suffered unduly had he curbed his characters in this matter. His dramatic sense, his power in building up atmosphere and his incisive, repetitive dialogue do not depend on this doubtful assistance.” (Reid 442)
Contrary to the puritanical standards of his time, Williams does render harsh judgments on his characters for their problems. Reid refers laudably to the “gentle compassion” Williams’ harbors for even the worst representatives of humanity in his lexicon of serial transgressors, provided that it does not extend to the realm of sexual conduct.
When it does is another matter. Reid claims that the playwright is wrong to depict, much less implicitly condone, such so-called deviant behavior as homosexuality. Subsequently, he criticizes the playwright for taking said compassion too far and neglecting to hold his characters accountable for their moral lapses. Reid claims that an absence of moral standards in the name of compassion is the most “dangerous element” of Williams’ work, going on to criticize the notion that: “individuals have taken right or wrong paths not by choice but by necessity, driven willy-nilly by themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents” (Reid 437).
Applied broadly, Reid’s point is a valid one. Williams’ plays do indeed encourage us to see characters’ flaws as a product of their circumstances. That being said, his assertion that the playwright should refrain from portraying non-traditional forms of sexuality in anything but a condemnatory manner is ludicrous. A large part of Williams’ originality and appeal is his frank, non-judgmental treatment of human sexuality. To be sure, his characters suffer the consequences of their actions.
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the revelation ofBlanche’s chronic promiscuity drives away Mitch, her last chance at happiness, shattering her carefully maintained illusions of glamour and landing her in a mental institution. Nevertheless, we still sympathize with Blanche because we know how she became the empty shell of a woman that she was when we first met her in Act I. Not-so-coincidentally, Blanche’s fundamental problem, like that of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, stems from society’s treatment of homosexuality. In Scene 6 we learn that Blanche’s original husband committed suicide after being exposed as homosexual. Blanche describes her reaction to the suicide in abstract terms that evoke everlasting damage: “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than – the kitchen candle–…” (Williams 96). Brick’s friend and lover, Skipper, killed himself for virtually the same reason.
Williams’ homosexual characters, like his heterosexual ones, are obsessed with keeping a humiliating secret at all costs. Blanche’s husband conducts affairs with men in secret, all the while appearing publicly with his beautiful wife. Skipper, on the other hand, denies his homosexuality even to himself. Either way, the revelation of this secret has particularly fatal consequences. In a sense, both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire are about the fallout of gay men choosing to end their lives to avoid living with the shame of being exposed. Although Brick and _____ are both only mentioned posthumously by other characters, their deaths continue to haunt their loved ones, ironically forcing them to live with painful truths of their own.
Desmond Reid’s words, well-intentioned though they might have been, are a testament to why Tennessee Williams’ work was so necessary. By confronting audience members with the devastating personal costs of homophobia in the lives of fictional characters, the playwright also invited consideration of the effects it was having in the real world. Williams could not fully address the full range of human experience without considering the implications of sexuality in the lives of his characters, and to claim otherwise is to miss out on an important theme of his work. Of course, unacknowledged homosexuality is only one of many topics prevalent in Williams’ work. However, it is worthy of special mention because it so appropriately embodies the playwright’s broader exploration of the elements that compel individuals to create illusions that shield them from the truth.