On Freedom In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'

An Introduction

As Maggie defeatedly maps out the combative “cage” of her relationship with Brick, one defined on his end by a “contract” rather than any sort of tender romance, Williams reveals the extent to which the characters of his text are constricted, stuck within the confines of their commodified relationships and expectations to conform. Writing in an era marred by a regression into social conservatism and the insistence on the normative behaviours that post-war and emergent Cold War fears dictated, Williams works to interrogate the potential for such suffocating forces to preclude the cultivation of individual agency. Despite Maggie’s alluring dominance in Act One, the female characters find themselves occupying, at times, the marginal spaces of the plantation setting - a locale which foregrounds the incessant drive of William’s society for material acquisition - and are thereby rendered ‘breeders’, unable to escape the prescribed expectations this role mandates. Of course, the way in which Big Daddy feels validated in vitriolically demanding the women of the text to be “QUIET!” captures a sense of how the head of the clan enjoys a more expansive presence in the household, a freedom validated by his world’s patriarchal presumptions of subservience to the patriarch. However, such liberties in this moment come at the cost of further suppressing the voices of those around him. And whilst Williams certainly charts the limits of the disenfranchised female subject, his society’s obsession with regimented gender roles also impose themselves on the men, as they, too, feel required to perform the identity of the stoic heterosexual male, the type aggrandised by the emergent 1950’s image of the hard-working American professional. Ultimately, it is this performative thread that erodes the sanctity and emancipated privacy of the “bed-sitting room” in which the play takes place, a corruption that denies attempts of free expression and genuine connection.

The Shackles of Womanhood

The society Williams lived in was one delineated by a regressive patriarchy and its demands of strict functions for the individual in sustaining, however dubiously, the hierarchy that perpetuates its existence. Maggie’s exacerbated claim that since she and Brick have not had any children, she is “therefore totally useless”, captures the pervasive reaches of such an ideology, given how her absolute lack of function in her eyes seems to logically follow from being “childless”, despite the underlying sarcasm in her voice, which only really serves to deflect the hurt or anxiety induced by such judgment. In light of the 1950’s reliance on the imperatives of capitalism in order to sustain its economic growth, the use of the adjective here augments the link between the self and the societal constraints placed on them – what they “are” appears to emerge from what their world defines as their function. Indeed, the almost humorous juxtaposition throughout the play of Maggie’s infertility against the “monster of fertility” Mae sustains for audiences a sense of how myopic the perceptions regarding the capacity of the female is to breed and thereby support the patrilineal transmission of power. That is, the fecund women of this text, at least in the eyes of the plantation household, cannot escape their expected role of ‘breeder’, a proposition that imposes itself on their attempts to define themselves outside such a binary as the one Mae and Maggie occupy. Whilst such an animalistic epithet is no doubt borne out of Maggie’s jealousy for her sister-in-law, Williams’ point nonetheless remains the same – in his eyes, women are forced to cede their agency in deference to meeting the required quota of “producin’” babies, as it is commonly described in the play. Hence, they become dependent cogs in the grotesque machine of capitalism, whilst at the same time feeling forced to reduce what should be a supportive dynamic between two aspiring young women to one characterised by an enervating combativeness. In Big Daddy in Act Two asserting how “fertile… Gooper’s wife” is, the confronting parallel emerges between the plantation setting, with its desire for inexorable pecuniary gain, and the function of the female within this establishment. Beyond being possessively chained to her husband, Big Daddy’s nonchalant tone and insistence that Brick “got to admit” the assertion of Mae’s abilities to breed underscores the one-dimensional perception of the female subject. Like the ‘crop’ which the patriarch grows, they become vessels through which he can successfully extend his legacy into perpetuity, yet as a consequence, characters like Mae and Maggie appear to have little defined identity and agency outside of this function, coerced in many ways by the confining boundaries of their 1950’s gender role to vicariously support the patriarchal establishment.

Bigger Is Better

Admittedly, even though men in Williams’ era were of course free to wield great power and authority, particularly via the constant suppression of voices challenging the patriarchal assumptions that underpinned their control, the play captures an attendant sense of how the male’s prescribed function nonetheless shackles and confines him. Big Daddy in many ways epitomises the 1950’s American man – a strong patriarch who commands the plantation’s grotesque extension of the nuclear household, as well as being an active participant in both the spheres of male virility and materialism. Indeed in Act Two, he sees his “worth” as emerging out of his wealth, the “ten million in cash” and “twenty-eight thousand acres of the richest land this side of the Valley Nile”. In line with the idolised veneration of systems of capitalism in the playwright’s world, that Big Daddy’s tone here is pervaded with a gleeful exuberance speaks to an enthusiastic effort to project his conspicuous assets outwards, thereby conforming to the expectation of excessive and conspicuous consumption. It is the desire to make things “bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger”, that he spoke of, yet in the awkward length of the five-fold repetition Williams not-so-subtly subverts such bombastic declarations and forecasts a latent insecurity within the Pollitt patriarch, and uncertainty he attempts to resolve by this overreaching affirmation of his personal grandeur. It is this conflict of his, on the one hand feeling as if he can finally “breathe” and “loosen these doubled up hands” of a suffocated and pent-up frustration, whilst on the other being plagued by the “same old fox teeth in his guts”. Though Big Daddy may confidently assert his own liberation, this imagery of internal consumption seems to symbolise the erosive reaches of his own obsession with materialism. The audience is aware at this point of his imminent death, and thus Williams’ premature denouement asserts the limits of Big Daddy’s freedoms, as he is bound to a decisively unsatisfying and corrupted end, as the “eerie greenish glow” and hollow fricative of the “puff” of fireworks that follow his statements of wealth evince. Williams extensive use of stage directions thus allow him to augment the suggestion that Big Daddy’s efforts to conform to the prescribed roles of his era, and thereby downplay perhaps his own cultivated identity, have caused this cancer of his to metastasise and become terminal. As the patriarch says, man “is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys”, with the assonance evoking an aural link between the pursuit of the material and a form of death. And so, even as he seems at times palpably disturbed by the ephemerality of material pursuits that he as partaken in, Williams nonetheless suggests his inability to detach himself from this realm, given how his society’s idyll of the virile patriarch necessarily requires his active participation in this ‘game’ of wealth acquisition.

The Stoic Male

It appears more generally, therefore, that the men of this text aren’t able to freely engage with their own emotions and identity, particularly in the sexual sense, as they feel coerced into a state of emotional reticence in keeping with the image of the stoic American man. Brick seems to wholly conform to notions of the athletic heterosexual male, yet it is the Act Two stage directions describing the “early laurel” that society crowns him with, in their insistence on a glorified and idealised masculine stereotype which at the same time discourages anything that might exist outside of this scope, that prohibits him from openly confronting his own ambiguous sexuality. When he asks Big Daddy if he knows “how people feel” about the idea of homosexuality, Brick channels the regressive sentiment of Williams’ own world, one that upholds moral disgust in front of allegedly non-normative orientations. Of course, to tolerate its existence would mean, in his eyes, to somehow tarnish the dignified image of the All-American athlete and thereby relinquish his “pure” grasp on it. So, in not only telling the fraternity pledge to “git off campus” but also broadcasting his reactions through how “they”, the people, see things, Brick manages to twice remove himself from any allegations of his own equivocal sexuality. Yet as his pained voice admits the difficulty in having to “sit in a glass box” and watch the game of football from afar, there is a sense of how his attempts to dislocate himself, not only via the vernacular of homophobia – “ducking sissies” and “fairies” – but also his reserved “cool air of detachment”, leave him isolated in the “box” of his performed identity. Combined with the subtle imagery of players “sweating out their disgust and confusion” generating a possible subtext of homosexuality, American football becomes, perhaps, another realm in which the homosocial relations such as that described between Brick and Skipper could be maintained without conflict, a time in Brick’s life that remains irrevocably in the past for him. It seems, therefore, that he is caught up in a perpetual struggle to reclaim this former self, one that could participate in the game of football, a sport lionised in the South as a domain for heterosexuality, whilst also holding on to his connection with Skipper. In essence, though Brick appears to exude all the traits expected of him as a man in 1950’s America, Williams nonetheless works to communicate how his insistence on meeting these standards not only heightens the textual ambiguities and conflicts regarding his sexuality, but leaves him feeling forced to get at some more nostalgic past as a consequence of his present anxieties and disquiet.

Williams and Metacommentary

Ultimately, then, the “bed-room setting” on which the text is centred mirrors the plight of the characters in their lack of private freedoms, and thus the audience senses Williams’ efforts to recreate the 1950’s interest in and desecration of the personal realm. In Act One, Maggie’s yearning to assert that she, the ‘Cat on the Hot Tin Roof’, is indeed “alive” is constantly undermined by voices from outside the room, thereby fracturing her agency and her attempts to cultivate a performance of conviction. On one occasion, this intrusion comes in the form of a rendition of ‘My Wild Irish Rose’, with the motif of flowering female fertility serving to latently remind audiences in this moment of her imminent requirement to procreate even as she actively assert her liberation. At another time, it is Dixie who suddenly interrupts with a firing gun – “Bang, bang, bang” – that again undermines her declarations of liveliness and independence whilst on top this patriarchal ‘roof’. The critic David Savran in his 1991 piece for Georgia University “By Coming Suddenly into a Room that I Thought was Empty: Mapping the Closet with Tennessee Williams” writes that “The stage directions [are] the most revealing example of Williams’ practice of fracturing the coherence of both the Realistic text and the ostensibly stable subject that resides within it”. Indeed, rather than the private setting allowing Maggie to flourish in her own burgeoning female identity, the confines of the locale seem to constrict her voice of any such certitude. As Savran further posits, the bedroom is “at once a refuge from the world…yet one whose privacy is always being violated”, an assertion that is confirmed by the expansive “double bed” that should be “raked to makes figures on it seen more easily”, which meta-theatrically exposes this intimate setting and allows it to be “penetrated” by the audience’s gaze. So, given the anxieties the homosexual playwright Williams would no doubt have harboured during his era, the violent intrusions endemic to this period of McCarthyist black-listing are thus evoked in the way the sexual closeness of this space becomes exploded open by a prying public eye. The characters of the this text are thus forced not only to conform to the rigid dictates expected of their gender, but to suffer the undignified unmasking of their most fundamental freedoms, those of love and sexual identity.