The Material Heart of Mendacity

An Introduction

Written during an era which Tennessee Williams saw as being plagued by an infatuation with systems of post-war American capitalism, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof emerged as a revealing representation of the mendacity that the playwright characterises as corrupting the social fabric of his time. The plantation setting is one that relies on the continued exploitation of the patriarch’s subservients, as is exemplified in the requirement for women to conform to and perform the role of ‘breeder’, thereby working to vicariously support the perpetuation of patrilineal descent and power. The cost of these performances, however, is made clear, as the familial relationships become combative, and characters like Big Daddy are ultimately neglected, disappearing off-stage to suffer in a “long drawn cry of agony” as the trauma of suppressed truth and emotional tenderness becomes “malignant”. Thus, Williams positions audiences to sense the caustic system of materialism that is present throughout the play, as well as the damage it causes not only within the family, but, by extension, in Williams’ 1950’s society as well.

The Antebellum South

In the Notes for the Designer depicting the play’s locale in a “plantation home in the Mississippi Delta”, Williams immediately establishes the historical antebellum South setting and the sordid exploitation of the historical black slave population that it represents. This world of the Pollitt clan is, for the playwright, one that relies heavily on the exhaustive manual labour of its “field-hands”, picking the crop in order to satisfy the material demands of production. Not only in this moment are their identities in this moment conflated with their function within this establishment, but the “Negroes”, here, become fragmented subjects throughout the play. Indeed, as a stage direction points out in Act Two, “Lacey or Sookey” are rendered spectral and interchangeable throughout the central discussions of the family, relegated to the peripheries of the play and thereby evoking a sense for audiences of how the white Pollitt family keeps this avaricious exploitation of black labour at the margins of its own story, so as not to interrupt the far more comforting life of conspicuous material wealth that they enjoy. Indeed, when these marginalised characters are on-stage, it is no coincidence that they wear “white jackets”, required to don the constrictive role placed on them by the “white”-man’s expectations and to fulfil the indulgent and garish desires of the Pollitt clan, in this case, “an enormous birthday cake” and “champagne”, symbols of an almost gluttonous bourgeois consumerism. Here, the playwright strives to capture how the plantation restricts black slave-worker agency by, in some senses, white-washing their identities in place of dutifully satisfying the excesses of such consumption. As the critic Michael P. Bibler of Tulane University posits in his article A Tenderness which was Uncommon: Homosexuality, Narrative and the Southern Plantation in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the 2002 Mississippi Quarterly, the plantation’s twin imperatives of production and consumption mean that “everyone on the plantation appears to have a well-defined place in a rigid hierarchy under Big Daddy”, and the plight of the slave workers in becoming disembodied subjects defined in principle by their capacity for manual exertion is no exception. It is of course cruelly ironic, that in Act 3 as the patriarch’s death comes to light and he begins to confront the brevity of the “system” of mendacity that he lives in, the field hands are heard singing the slave tune ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’, thereby insidiously suggesting the link between the slaves’ exploited work and the perpetuation of the plantation’s material wealth, right up to Big Daddy’s passing. All of this is, in Mae’s words, done “fo” him as she gleefully claims, yet the message for audiences here is a far more sinister one, as Williams implicates, as Bibler hypothesised, that the plantation’s obsession with materialism has caused it to naively push the black slave workers away from the central foci of their clan, in a bid to avoid being faced with the harrowing implications of their presence.

Performative Relations

Contrarily, Williams also demonstrates in his play how the members of the family themselves perform and deceive in order to acquire financial status and power, thereby becoming synecdochical for an America that he perceives as becoming increasingly disingenuous in its upholding of the American dream and the supposed validity of it as an enterprise. Through Maggie’s likening of Mae and Gooper’s children to an “animal act in the circus”, the playwright conveys the ugly way in which the parents seem to have commodified their offspring for some kind of grotesque performance. Of course, on one level this comment may well be borne out of Maggie’s disdain for her fecund sister-in-law; the “no-neck monsters” Mae has produced and her own “useless” existence she feels they implicate. However, the song the children sing in Act Two for Big Daddy would suggest otherwise, with this “musical comedy chorus” becoming a humorous, if not lamentable, moment for Williams to affirm the way Mae and Gooper have objectified their children for their own mercenary interests in gaining the patriarch’s approval. The emotionally empty and perfunctory lyric “We love you” makes clear the hollow reality of the parents’ real intentions, certainly absent of a genuine affection for him but rather motivated by a material interest in the acquisition of land. This is, for Williams, indicative of how his society’s obsession with the material comes at the cost of familial relationships, dynamics that in the play become largely driven by trying to “take over”, as Big Daddy views the women of his household as “squaring off” over his rich and fertile plantation land. However, there is an underlying sense that the female characters are so caught up in this ‘game’ of pecuniary expansion because they, in many ways, require the social status that this wealth provides them. Maggie, in Act One, appears to audiences as a vibrant and lively figure of female vitality, stepping into a “slip of ivory satin and lace” that would have no doubt been confronting for audiences in her explicit seductiveness and flaunting of her sexuality. Yet, her attempts to embrace this effervescent promiscuity, to become the titular “Maggie the Cat”, are cruelly interrupted throughout this act by “children’s and grownup’s voices…below” singing ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ and thus painfully reminding her of the attendant need to fulfil the expectations placed on her to become fertile and thus support the plantation’s continuum of patriarchal power. Moreover, such disturbances also attest to the play’s deconstruction of the private sphere of the bedroom and thus the individual’s sexuality, a sphere that becomes dismantled by the incessant intrusions if not of other characters, then their voices as in this moment. One of the tragedies for audiences, then, is how she “holds the pillow forlornly” before she “throws it on the bed” in Act Three, signalling how she has perhaps finally given up on the romanticised possibility of maintaining her own flowering and private identity in the face of Brick’s cruel reticence and emotional impoverishment. Though this can be read as a moment of female empowerment, as Maggie reclaims the power of their dynamic, she is, in reality, succumbing to her desire to escape the vicious cycle of being “born poor, raised poor, expect[ing] to die poor” by playing into the defined role of the ‘breeder’. By turning off the “rose silk lamp” she is extinguishing the possibility of an idyllic relationship with her husband, instead conceding to the production of offspring to better her chances of obtaining material power on this plantation establishment.

Metastasis

Ultimately, Williams demonstrates in his play how the twin pillars of capitalism and materialism contribute to the painful system of mendacity that Big Daddy faces in Act Two. For the playwright, there is an underlying sense of futility and ephemeral mortality in the pursuit of material wealth. In Big Daddy answering Brick’s question of his “worth” with “close to ten million in cash an’ blue chip stocks”, the playwright captures how pervasive the pecuniary is in the patriarch’s life, that his value is measured solely through this economic lens. Forgotten here, of course, is any mention of “tenderness” or love of familial relationships that the romantic playwright Williams would have no doubt valued. Indeed, the “eerie greenish glow”, in its perhaps subtle allusion to the green of American banknotes and the open connotations of a sickly corruption that occupies the night sky, stands in stark contrast to Big Daddy’s wilful and zealously optimistic tone here. The “blooms” and hollow fricative of the “puff” of fireworks that follows also capture a link between his material wealth and the erosive cancer that has become malignant and metastasised, which is itself also ultimately thoroughly unsatisfying. The critic Claire Nicolay in her 2011 work for the Tennessee Williams Annual Review Hoboes, Sissies and Breeders: Generations of Discontent in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ suggests that this refusal to acknowledge the failings of his ‘American Dream’ are representative of how he doesn’t “question vast inequalities of wealth” that exist, even on his own plantation in the form of the black slave workers. Nicolay further comments that “Big Daddy clings to the idea of creating a blood dynasty so the wealth and power symbolised by the plantation will remain his in perpetuity”. This claim is entirely justifiable, given how the alcoholic, broken aspect of his favourite son Brick causes Big Daddy to contemplate how he has “let things go”, insofar as his vision of rendering his material empire immortal via patrilineal descent will be futile, if he cannot get through to his emotionally broken son. As the system of mendacity comes to light for Big Daddy, he exclaims his disgust with “crap” – both the material detritus he has surrounded himself with and the lies it causes, as the twin connotations of this favourite colloquialism suggest. His resulting “spasm of pain” therefore demonstrates the confronting and painful truth of coming to terms with a society that promised, falsely, satisfying patriarchal power, and a fulfilling spiritual life via materialistic means. Big Daddy’s cancer, consequently, can be seen by audiences as a consequence of the sickly and infected systems that the Pollitt patriarch has participated in. Contrary to delivering on its promises of nonmaterial satisfaction, the mendacious world of capitalism and the pursuit of the material has left Big Daddy with very little – no viable son to pass his fortune down to, and no satisfying connection with Brick who is clearly in need of emotional, not financial support. His final exclamation that he is sick and tired of the “crap” thus stands as Williams’ challenge to his 1950’s world’s reliance on materialism, and the caustic mendacity it propagates.

References

• M. P. Bibler, (2002) ‘A Tenderness which was Uncommon: Homosexuality, Narrative and the Southern Plantation in Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, The Mississippi Quarterly,