# 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.


On Freedom In 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'

# 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,


The Material Heart of Mendacity

# An Introduction
As the “bird cage” of the Pollitt household becomes infected with the “black” and cancerous lies of the family, Williams distils the system of mendacity that sustained his 1950’s society, one built around a relentless public scrutiny yet simultaneous lack of self-reflection. In the “monumental monstrosity of the TV set that becomes a quasi-spiritual “shrine” for the characters, the playwright crafts the heart of performance that occupies even the privacy of this “bed-sitting room”, as well as the possibility of deception and escapism implicit in this motif. However, whilst such self-denial no doubt acknowledges the lamentable necessity of such lies in saving face under this intrusive public eye, it offers little in the way of genuine therapy. As Gooper asserts, it is the body’s “inability to eliminate its poisons” that bring about the physical death of Big Daddy, a sickness that figuratively attests to the macabre and broken figures left in the wake of these falsehoods. So, as Big Mama asserts that the “alcohol” in Skipper’s system for “months an’ months an’ months” was “too much for his heart”, the playwright implicates the extent to which this mendacity colludes with the constricted and utilitarian function of the individual in this world to provide no such good health as is laid claim to in the play, instead it becomes a toxic and corrupting agent that atrophies both the personal and familial spirit.

# The Crutch and The "Click"
Brick’s alcoholism seems initially to function as a form of therapeutic relief not only from the oppressive and inexorable mandates of his prescribed identity but also from the “inadmissible” truths that rest hidden beneath his complacent exterior. Yet, as a recipient of society’s “early laurel” and as someone who “never liked bein’ kissed or made a fuss over”, a manifestation of his contempt for what he deems is performed affection of his family, Williams implicates how his performance constrict and cripple him under the weight of such pressures and withdrawal. The epithet ‘Brick’ allows audiences to figuratively glimpse an emotionally stunted and intransigent figure, one that, as the image of him “leaning upon the liquor cabinet with his faraway smile” suggests, can sustain a pretence of his “cool air of detachment” directly through his drinking – the alcohol appears therefore to not only buttress him physically but also enable his isolation and cold convictions, becoming in many ways his social “crutch”. Yet Williams undermines any lingering sense of genuine therapy found in the bottle, given how the stage directions allude to the violent and jarring “flashes” of “lightning” that threaten to spontaneously rupture his façade of certitude. Throughout the play, Brick seems to struggle painfully with the potential truths of not only his ambiguous sexuality, but also his culpability in Skipper’s death. Indeed, not only does he vehemently dislocate himself from these allegations – “his truth!” – but the tonal shift through Act Two from his initial apathy to the “volcanic flame” of vitriolic and pious disgust at the questions of his homosexuality projects forth the image of a man who is far from content to live out the life he is currently embroiled in. So, as he drinks in pursuit of the “mechanical” click that brings him peace, Williams depicts how lies in this household cannot be therapeutic, but painfully reside within the subject to the point where they necessarily search for something that “makes” them peaceful, an artificial endeavour, as the forced connotations of this verb suggest. In this moment, Williams subtly alludes also in this “click” to the final phone call between Brick and Skipper, thereby foregrounding a direct corollary between the possible lies which cover over the truth of their relationship and the desire for a therapeutic remedy for them. But as Brick painfully maps out the “glass box” he can only watch on from, the playwright captures figuratively, in this image of isolation and constriction, his “hobble[d]” and broken character, seated passively beyond the boundary of the “game” of life, thus communicating to audiences that such lies offer no form of longing escape, instead only atrophying away at the human psyche.

# Constriction of Performance
Furthermore, for the woman of the text, lies function as a form of relief from the constrictive yoke of societal expectations, as their performances, a form of veiled deception, allow them to escape the critical public eye. Though at times intended to court the invasive male voyeurism of the household and Williams’ audiences, Mae, for her part, appears as epitomising the demand to be constantly “producin’” offspring, as her ostentatious display of “no-neck monsters” humorously makes clear the extent to which her existence becomes predicated around this function, a deviation from a truer form of self that may have otherwise taken stage. Indeed, in depicting her “organising her children like a chorus”, Williams imparts her gleeful and active, and as such partially tragic, participation in her own role of the contented housewife, a metatheatrical comment that reinforces the mendacity and superficiality that is inherent to such performances. Moreover, far from either guaranteeing the patriarch’s inheritance - which would grant her material satisfaction - or allowing her to ably sustain this act - a form of spiritual panacea - the lie of Mae’s conservative gentility and conformity is ruptured by her “sudden” and devolution/ “transformation” into a “hideous grimace”. Even as she dutifully attempts to suppress her pretence in her “burlesque ballerina” act, the syntactical proximity of this to the “quick, hard, pole” and sibilant “hissing” erodes any lasting sense of her civility and renders her performed lie violent and grotesque. By way of contrast, Big Mama is portrayed as a figure capable of genuine affection for her Big Daddy - “I even loved your hate and your hardness” - yet even she struggles to sustain this conceived statement of her loving marriage and the therapy it provides. As the past-tense construction implies, she seems subliminally aware of the inability for ‘her truth’ of their relationship to survive in her present experience. So, as the news of Big Daddy’s cancer is revealed, Big mama’s voice rings with a lamentable yearnfulness to downplay the news - “that’s all it is, it’s just an awful dream”. Of course the true nightmare for Williams that the household is caught up in is not that of physical illness, but rather the metaphorical corruption of the spirit that emerges when its members seek comfort for their pains in the form of lies.

# Big Dreams
Ultimately, then, the evasion of truths in the Pollitt family serves only to provide a self-deceptive mask for the moral failings and lack of fulfillment inherent to their material lives. As his epithet suggests, Big Daddy embodies the 1950’s perception of a dominant virile male patriarch, one insistent on making his place “bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger”. In the five-fold repetition, however, Williams crafts not-so-subtly a sense of this character’s underlying hesitancy and uncertainties, discomforts he can only try, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to alleviate in this bombastic assertion of his wealth. Indeed, as he earnestly links to his “worth”, “close on ten million in cash and blue chip stocks”, the audience confronts a figure who unconvincingly reaches for material succour in keeping with his society’s veneration of the supposedly therapeutic spoils of the American Dream. Yet in the hollow fricative of the “puff” of fireworks and “eerie greenish glow” that lingers in the night behind them, Williams exposes, in this false light, the sun setting on Big Daddy’s delusions of security and material comforts which he is consoled and defined by. Similarly, earlier in the act when he repeatedly insisted he wasn’t “dying”, the incantatory repetition of this verb reminds audiences of a form of deceptive mantra, one that allows him to perpetuate a sense of his own immortality. This is of course a man introduced to audiences as “moving carefully not to betray his weakness…to himself”, depictions that evoke the artificial and in fact corrosive nature of his mendacious existence which invades not just his words, but is very identity. Contrary to finding any form tangible therapy in the lie of his good health, the “fox teeth” that pain him throughout the play make clear the message of self-denial central to the character, as he fervently distracts himself from the gnawing, dehumanising sickness of his own consumption that this image suggests. Thus, as the corruptive green nightscape returns in the moment after the truth of Big Daddy’s cancer comes finally to the surface, Williams implores audiences to cultivate the link between the lie of his cancer-free existence and the dubious remedy of materialism. As such, as Big Daddy’s “long drawn out cry of agony” is left off the stage in Act Three, the patriarch becomes the spectral embodiment of the myth of consumerist therapy that can potentially overcome the “inadmissible” things of one’s life, instead suggesting how such lies of self-denial metastasise into something worse, becoming, in the final, “malignant”.

Even as he acknowledges the “system” of mendacious performances central to his 1950’s America, Williams nonetheless offers in his text a rejoinder against such a society, in particular how such lies debilitate and fracture familial relationships and render the household void of “love”. In this way, therefore, the illusions of fulfillment that rest firmly at the heart of the clan portend no prevailing sense of therapy or closure, instead corrupting the members and leaving them detached and “alone”.


The Comfort of Lies Within 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.


Social Mores And How They Shape Williams' "Cat"

# 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.


CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

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