Social Mores And How They Shape Williams' "Cat"

The plantation setting in which the play develops at once mirrors both the orthodox, genteel South and the reliance on capital production that shaped the conservative climate of Williams’ era. Throughout the play, the text works to establish the inherent conflicts that are threaded into this locale - the requirement for the individual to uphold the conservative, falsely pious, moralisms typical of this world whilst at the same time being forced to partake in the “catty” and combative ‘game’ of wealth acquisition that holds the key to any form of potential power within the family. Indeed, even as the play’s three acts seem to uphold the conventional classic unities of theatre lore, the mandated ‘resolution’ is purposefully withheld; the “black thing” not only of Big Daddy’s cancer, but more generally of a climate of intolerance, has infected the body and the household and in Williams’ eyes, America, thereby precluding any genuine, tender affection which might allow characters to be alleviated from the destruction of their “bird cage”.

Tainted Love

The world of the play is one that, in its prioritising of male homosociality, mirror the prevalent fears in Williams’ era of the ‘lavendar scare’, the potential for such relations to be corrupted by the allegedly corrosive existence of homosexuality. In Maggie asserting the dynamic between Brick and Skipper as the sort found in the “Greek legends”, she plays into the conventionally glorified idyll of male friendship, something distinctly “clean”, yet, in its syntactical proximity to “dirty”, one is implicitly directed to how such relationships are easily fractured and polluted in the eyes of Williams’ audiences. Their bond is something that “had to be kept on ice”, an image that initially posits a form of purity and cleanliness perhaps, but at its core allows the playwright to foreground what he sees as the necessary sterile emotionless couched within this partnership. Indeed, the faintest hint of any alleged corruption at in the play is vitriolically met with defiant anger, through the violent threat of a lifted crutch in Act One, or, when Big Daddy once more breaches the topic with him in Act Two, the sudden transformation into a “volcanic flame”. In this last image of an impassioned release, the playwright subtly reminds audiences of the way in which Brick’s purported “cool air of detachment” masks his more volatile emotions under a cloak of apathetic indifference. As his name suggests, Brick comes to us as a reticent, spiritually paralysed man. Given how his world predicted great things of him as an archetypal all-American athlete, the text thereby establishes a corollary between these conservative values that shape the heart of Brick’s identity and his continued suppression of his ambiguous sexuality. Whilst he fervently defends the “inadmissible” truth of his culpability in Skipper’s death, his heavy alcoholism and ever-present desire for the “mechanical click” in his head, itself subtly alluding to the final call between the two men, allow Williams to craft an image of a psychologically, not just physically, broken man. Not only does he seek to satisfy his emotional trauma via therapeutic means, but his constricted tensions, once released, distance him from those who genuinely care for him, those who, like Big Daddy in Act Two, want to “take hold” of him with “concern and affection”. Whilst the motives of the patriarch here might be in reasserting material control over his ‘assets’, it it thus the oppressive yoke of social expectations, one insistent on propagating only the normative, heterosexual identities that had supposedly formed the backbone of American 20th-century ascension and the nuclear family that leave Brick emotionally distraught and alone, confined in his “glass box” of isolation.

Suppressed Desires

Just as Brick’s turmoil arose out of the conflicting societal demands of his world, so, too, does Maggie occupy a sphere that mandates a similar form of emotional self-castigation. The dual hierarchies of the plantation and the Pollitt patriarchy give rise toa setting that focus her to largely internalise her personal desire amidst conservative disgust for female sexualisation whilst simultaneously, and paradoxically, monetising and hence relying on her fertility and feminine allure to guarantee the extension of the patriarch’s material wealth into perpetuity via patrilineal descent. The oft-propagated idyll of 1950’s womanhood, particularly within the supposed spiritual richness of the Antebellum South, is thus imploded by Williams’ pervasive use of symbolic stage directions, ones that allow him to undercut the ulterior performances of the characters. Maggie must work insistently to sustain the lingering impression of a happy marriage with her husband Brick, an imperative augmented in its importance given how her world, conveyed in part through the values touted by Big Mama, holds her responsible when the “marriage goes on the rocks”. As the introduction to Maggie makes clear, therefore, though, the “liturgical chant” of her voice evokes a form of candid and spiritual vitality in her tone, albeit one undermined by the sense of contrivance conveyed in this description, this is set against her tense angst to continue “a little beyond her breath”, suggesting a frantic and enervating desire to avoid silence within the intimacy of the bed-sitting room and all the implications of unhappiness it threatens to reveal because of what it allegedly implies about her own femininity. This is a “catty” performance that she appears to successfully maintain throughout much of the text, yet it seems, in Williams’ eyes, to consistently come at the cost of her initial burgeoning strength that promised a subversive force for the playwright’s more orthodox audiences. In depicting Maggie as largely fragmented and objectified - “She raises a hand uncertainly to the base of her throat” - Williams crafts a highly sympathetic figure, one whose syntactical disembodiment reflects the destructive impact of the pretence she must sustain. Indeed, by the play’s conclusion, Maggie “exhales with relief” upon the exiting of her on-stage audience, clearly worn down by the atrophying demands of her equivocal identity and role. Nonetheless, she is perhaps the only member of the family who insistently refuses to let her suppressed existence completely subsume her. In a moment that foreshadows, tentatively, the subversive possibility of a future matriarch, it is Maggie who invokes the language of power in the ending of Act Three, “making” Brick satisfy her desires and taking “hold” of him, albeit “gently with love”. Given the prevalence of this motif throughout the text as a reflection of the suffocating mercenary grip of capitalism on the family, Williams’ tender inversion of it thus attests to the possibility of not only resisting the dictates of his society’s conservatism, but defying them, too.

The Bed-Sitting Room

Ultimately, however, Maggie seems an exception in her defiant strength, and so one cannot help but sense the play repeatedly gesturing towards the way in which the material setting of the text centralises pecuniary gain and thus marginalises any truly lasting discussion of “tenderness” and love. As the Notes for the Designer depict, the TV-set, a “monumental monstrosity”, proclaims centre stage throughout the play, an ever-present reminder of the pervasive reach of materialism, even going so far as to intrude on the spiritual and sexual intimacy of the bed-room. The conventional veneration of systems of American capitalism is thus brought to the fore, as Williams describes a grotesque “shrine” “behind which we hide from such things” as the emotional dissonance and fragmented core of the Pollitt establishment. This quasi-spiritual “monument”, combined with the artificial colour palette of “sepia” and “tawny gold” it produces, stands in direct opposition to the otherwise exotic and comforting surroundings - a room “with a touch of the far East”, a distinctively unorthodox quality. Furthermore, the spectral relationship of Straw and Ochello that haunts the locale, one in which things were “shared” and not fought for, or grasped, promotes a sense of legitimate equality and genuine intimate human connection, a softness supported by the natural implications of “tender light on weathered wood”. As the label of their affection as “uncommon” suggests, such tenderness seems to exist outside the vernacular of the present plantation context, whose inhabitants repeatedly neglect the historical allusion of romance and love generated by the setting in deference to resolving their individual traumas therapeutically. Like Brick, Big Daddy, tries to cure his “spastic condition” with alcohol in Act Two, attempting to temporarily soothe and suppress the disquiet he continues to experience during the paly. As a sentient man, he feels it necessary to “keep a tight mouth about” the destructive pains he endures, in doing so, attempting to maintain the emotional reticence required of him as the family patriarch. Indeed, by circumventing the “inadmissible thing[s]” that shape the fabric of the family’s crises, Big Daddy thus confirms the way in which the material foci allow the clan to avoid confronting the truths underpinning their lives. So, as he becomes belatedly aware of the pain endured by his emotionally broken son, and the unlikelihood of extending his own wealth into immortality, Big Daddy’s defeated admission of how he has “let things go” thus stands as a testament to the way in which a world, driven by consumption, denies itself the prospect of genuine spirituality. Repressed emotion, in this moment, isolates Big Daddy once more from his son, and moves the plantation further away from the “grace and comfort of light”, the truth about things, that formerly occupied it.