Southern Decadence

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Hornby, Richard

ALTHOUGH FEW CRITICS RATE IT AS AMONG HIS BEST, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is my favorite Tennessee Williams play, so good that I hardly know where to begin to praise it. The plot is simple enough: A wealthy Mississippi planter nicknamed "Big Daddy" is dying of cancer, a fact withheld from him and his wife, called Big Mama. Big Daddy's birthday party brings the family together, but it is actually a deathwatch. One of Big Daddy's sons, Gooper, is desperate to get his hands on the estate, but he is opposed by his sister-in-law, Maggie. Her husband Brick, however, is a washed-up athlete and repressed homosexual who is rapidly drinking himself to death. Nonetheless, Maggie prevails, and, after Big Daddy learns the truth about his condition, she even convinces him that she is pregnant. Brick will inherit the estate, which will pass on soon enough to "Maggie the Cat."

Behind this decadent Southern tale of greed and lust are powerful levels of significance: First there is the level of the daring social problem play, dealing with the issue of homophobia at a time when the very word homosexual coula not be uttered on the stage. (It is not in the published text, not even in Williams' revised version of 1974.) The brilliant maneuver here is that Williams makes the gay man, Brick, the homophobe in the play. Although Cat takes place in 1955 and in Mississippi to boot, Brick's parents and even his wife Maggie not only accept but actually admire his relationship with his beloved friend Skipper, now dead. Brick, however, continually denies the obvious, railing against "sissies" and "queers," contemptuous even of his family's tolerance.

Next there is the psychological level. Brick's tragedy, his refusal to recognize that his love for Skipper was actually the finest part of his life, is a stunning psychological insight for Williams, but even more so is his characterization of Maggie the Cat, a highly-sexed woman who nonetheless is drawn only to her husband. Brick refuses her advances and actually encourages her to have an affair, but she cries, "I can't see a man but you!" She longs for her husband's love, longs to have his child, yet realizes the hopelessness of it all. Williams' insight into female sexuality is often related to his homosexuality, but men, whether gay or straight, are rarely like Maggie, so passionately, relentlessly, bleakly monogamous. (Certainly she is unlike Williams himself, who did have one great love in his life, Frank Merlo, but was promiscuous all during their long relationship.)

Next, there is the mythic level. Brick is frequently compared to a Greek god or hero, with his perfect athletic body (despite his heavy drinking) and noble features. His broken foot recalls Oedipus, Philoctetes, or Achilles, while his love for Skipper, as Maggie points out, recalls the ancient Greek ideal of love between men. Related to the theme of myth is that of ritual. There are numerous social rituals enacted in the play or spoken about, and every one ends in a fiasco. The play begins with Big Daddy's birthday party, offstage but partly audible. It is an ironic flop from the start, since he is actually dying of cancer, but made all the more disastrous by the disruptive behavior of the five children (one of them throwing a hot buttered biscuit at Maggie at the dinner table) of Gooper and his wife Mae. Gooper and Mae are forever trying to suck up to Big Daddy by having the children put on a wide range of precocious recitals, but Big Daddy is so disgusted he orders them sent to the kitchen. The party eventually continues onstage, in Brick and Maggie's bedroom (Brick's bad foot prevents him from going downstairs), but the toast, the gift-giving, blowing out the candles on the cake, and yet more performances by Gooper and Mac's "no-neck monster" children all are interrupted, fade, or are obviously bogus from the start. Later, in the final act, Gooper calls a family meeting, without Big Daddy, to discuss the disposition of his property, but Big Mama calls the meeting to a halt. At various times throughout the play, we hear of a football victory party that actually had to celebrate a defeat; of a Cotton Carnival parade in which a drunk spit tobacco juice from a hotel balcony into the face of the Carnival Queen; and of Brick jumping hurdles on the high school athletic field to recapture the feeling of athletic triumph, only to end by breaking his ankle. The rites and customs of the Old South no longer work. CM, like Eliot's "The Wasteland," is ultimately about the decline of a traditional culture, which Williams, like Eliot, reacts to with a mixture of sadness and glee.

Finally, there is the marvelous level of poetic language. If there were a contest for the most poetic American dramatist, Williams would come in first, second, and third. No one else comes close. In fact, most American playwrights do not even bother to compete. Williams, however, loved the traditional Southern dialect, filling notebooks with resonant names and phrases. Consider the names in Cat on a hot Tin Roof. Brick, Maggie the Cat, Gooper, Big Daddy, Big Mama. They are as unforgettable as the names in Shakespeare; you may have trouble remembering whether the hero of a Mamet play is Ricky or Dicky or Nicky, but who could forget someone named Big Daddy? The nickname is actually taken from a real person Williams met in his youth, who was otherwise nothing at all like Big Daddy in the play, but the name obviously stuck in the playwright's mind. Even the name of Cooper's wife Mae has its connotations-May, the month of spring, for a woman whom Maggie describes as "a monster of fertility" with five horrible children and another on the way. Like all the other mythic symbols in the play, this fertility goddess is an inversion, a caricature.