The "Thundercloud of a Common Crisis" of Williams' America

An Introduction

As post-war America and its insistence on conformity to nullify the emergent fears of subversion came to the fore, Williams’ play emerged as an examination on the suffocating forces that are bound within such a system. The “thundercloud of a common crisis” transforms the tranquil softness of the bed-sitting room as described in the Notes for the Designer into a “bird cage”, an a cold metal environment imbuing constriction and combativeness into the hot air of a Mississippi Summer evening. Indeed, each character seems caught up in this game, suppressing their own shortcomings and moral quandaries in their efforts to fulfil the myopic mandates their world appears to coerce out of them through a complex and contradictory structure of materialism and gendered roles. So, as Gooper asserts the cancer of Big Daddy as the “failure of the body to eliminate its poisons”, Williams exacts full effect from this self-reflexive statement to cast critique over the Pollitt clan themselves and the American body politick at large, collectives that, too, have become sick with their own cancers that metastasise inexorably under their self-denial and ignorance. In a world driven by the institutions of capitalism and the reliance on material status this portends, the playwright thus distils the manner in which abnegation not only ignores the body’s own faults - both those of the individual and of American culture at large - but the tenderness of genuine affection and tolerance that vital to the human existence that lapses and then quickly dissolves within such social mores.

The Tales of Greek Legends

The restrictive definition of the 1950’s American man and its refusal to ingest anything “uncommon” is made readily clear in the Pollitt establishment, as Brick feels compelled to rebuke any insinuation of his relationship with Skipper being anything but “clean and decent”. Williams was of course undoubtedly aware of the blurred line between male homosexuality and homosociality, an ambiguity that he works to sustain in Brick and thereby augment his corrosive self-denial. As he hesitantly proclaims to Big Daddy that “people” are “disgusted” by the very idea of homosexuality, he not only exposes a deep-setaed homophobic sentiment under the guise of a pious social moralism, but as he demands the pledge to “git off campus” Brick doubly displaces himself from any allegations of his own sexuality. Tragically, as he rejects this possibility, his conversation with Big Daddy becomes increasingly fractured - “Now just -” / “ducking sissies…is that what you - “ / “Shhh.” - a figurative or syntactical form of disconnect that echoes the way in which “he turns away from his father”. In denying the complexities of his own identity and fueling the “conventional mores” of contempt regarding homosexuality, Brick’s “cool air of detachment” consequently gives way to “volcanic flame”, an anger that seems in the moment to only isolate him from the patriarch’s apparent tolerance towards and longing for a tender “hold” on his son. In conjunction here, he callously subverts Maggie’s declarations throughout the play of her love for him - “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” - in an attempt to once again erect a wall between himself and the alleged falsehood of her supposedly performed affection, this moment synthesises the empty and loveless existence he leads under the guise of social expectations to deny, it seems, his genuine identity. Even as he preaches his “disgust with lying” across the text, his twin refusal in these instances to acknowledge his own tenderness, if not his potential culpability in Skipper’s death, still manifests itself in his withdrawn cocoon of self-abnegation, as he desperately longs for the mechanical “click” to bring “peace”, a sound which subtly alludes to the end of the last phone call between the two. What Williams articulates here, then, is the metaphorical “glass box” in which Brick finds himself, at once suffocated and isolated by the confines of his detachment from the ‘game’ of mendacity the rest of the family partakes in. So, just as the pervasive reaches of the playwright’s era demanded conformity, the text establishes how such forces can coerce the individual into a state of denial, one that so often leaves them in an emotional crisis, “watching” from afar.

Get Busy Producing, Or Get Busy Dying

Even despite a character like Brick not being willing to confront his own potential defects, the rigid hierarchy of Cat is one that forces some of its members to engage in this sphere of performed truths in order to secure any tangible form of power or security, whether they like it or not. Under the conservative and materialist doctrines foregrounded by the Southern plantation setting, the role of matrimony is collapsed into the crude function of “producin’” an heir by which the patriarch Big Daddy’s legacy can vicariously extend. Maggie, as the expected subservient in her marriage, is required to sustain a pretence of contentment in her service to both her husband and the plantation at large, lest she meet the grave epithet of being “uncommon”. As she ruminates on how Brick was “a wonderful lover”, the complacent and emotionally reticent Brick, in conjunction with the claustrophobic “cage” that is the “stage” of the play, allows Williams to transform their this moment of the play into one of spurious self-justification, as she attempts to willfully convince herself of the “perfect calm” of their marriage through evocations of past experiences. Indeed, through this pervasiveness of the past tense, this act becomes all the more tragic as she futilely reaches back to some nostalgic, but irretrievable state of being, one that in its ephemerality is suggestive of clawing after a lost dream: perhaps, Williams may suggest, the American ‘dream’. Given her working class upbringing and lack of social command as a woman, she seems therefore necessarily compelled into rectifying what is quite clearly to audiences a fragmented, if not unrequited relationship. As the opening stage directions make clear, her voice is “both rapid and drawling”, her lines “continuing a little beyond her breath” as she not only tries to maintain the image of a seductive woman courting the ever-present male voyeurism, but also avoid the silence that betrays the void of “tenderness” in her relationship. Indeed, the extent to which she is prepared to jettison the ‘Truth’ of her situation is revealed in her idealised perception of Big Daddy’s “unconscious lech” for her, one that actively enables her perpetual objectification and at large the portrayal of women as sexual objects rather than patrons of genuine, mutual love. Even by the end of the play, after she seems to finally shed the lingering crisis of identity - “Who am I?” - that crippled her in Act One, to do so she must once again fracture herself from the tender possibility of legitimate love - to toss her pillow, and by association her “only companion” away - thereby discarding and hence sterilising the burgeoning allure she had developed over the course of the opening act. With that said, however, her bold and insistent desire to “take hold of” Brick endows her voice with a commanding timbre, one hitherto almost absent from the female lexicon in this play. As such, Williams suggests that her fervent belief that she will “make the lie true” offers the potential, however spiritually or morally dubious, for female usurpation of the suppressive climate of denial and the subsequent crisis of love that is embroiled within it.

Material Rot

Yet so pervasive are the pressures of conformity within the plantation establishment, that even Big Daddy, despite the seeming immense power he yields, deforms his identity in order to satisfy societal expectations. As he bombastically asserts his idealised dream to “let loose” and “smother” a future lover in minks, the patriarch earnestly performs the role mandated by the capitalistic undercurrents of his world, since even his sexual fantasies become subsumed by his wider pursuit of material largesse. Williams’ audience is, by this stage, well aware of Big Daddy’s condemnation of the corrosive powers bound within his society’s glorification of the material. He is seen to despise his own wife’s conspicuous acquisition of goods during the European fire sale, even to be so far as cognisant of the fragility of such consumption, as evidenced by his disgust at the finality of this “stuff” left “mildewin’” and rotting away. Nonetheless, his own hedonistic lifestyle appears to remain, hypocritically, as grand as ever, untouched by this disdain, as he promptly defines with much glee his “worth” as emerging from the “close on ten million in cash an’ blue chip stocks” that he possesses. It is unsurprising that he so enthusiastically denies any allegations of him “dying” or anyone else “taking over” and thereby threatening his constrictive, mercenary grip on his assets and by extension from the previous corollary, his own self. However, in the incantatory quality of the repetition in this moment with Big Mama, Williams subverts the superficial tone of authority by weaving a note of lingering uncertainty into his voice. Even as he finally declares that he will “loosen these doubled hands”, the detailed stage directions allow the audience to confront the inherent paradox at play here. Because, combined with the premature denouement of his death, the “fox teeth” that painfully plague him despite him supposedly being more free than ever, create a link between Big Daddy’s continued grotesque consumption and the cancer that has taken root within his “system”. Whilst feeling uneasy about the lingering “spasms of pain” that affect him, Big Daddy holds steadfast to his own immortality, the claim that he will “outlive” Brick by founding his own material empire that will, somehow, avoid the same fate as the wares from Europe and carry his legacy down the generations. However, as The Notes for the Designer point out, the play takes place as the day, a motif for life, “fades into dusk and night”, into the imminent and fated end of existence. In this moment, therefore, Williams reveals the tragic extent to which Big Daddy has become indoctrinated by a culture of materialism into believing the spiritual fulfilment to be found within the self-propagated American Dream. The patriarch is, in this play, decidedly mortal, and thus Williams challenges not only the individual, but the ‘body’ of American society that motivates and in many ways necessitates the denial of human ephemerality, of its capacity for giving love and its requirement to be loved, all in an effort to uphold conformity and prop up its own foundations of moral corruption.