Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: The Uneasy Marriage of Success and Idealism

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: The Uneasy Marriage of Success and Idealism MARIAN PRICE In the psychological study of literature, it is assumed that a work of imaginative writing is always, to some extent, autobiographical; works of art, like dreams, are seen as enacting the author's psychological states, internal conflicts, and current concerns. Like the people in dreams. the various characters in astory or play can resemble significant others in the author's life, but each of them may ~lso stand for the author's self. The principal characters in Cat Ol! a Hot Tin Roof- Brick and Maggie - can be interpreted as representations of Tennessee Williams himself. In their evolution from their first appearance in a short story through the original and Broadway versions of the play, Tennessee Williams has symbolically worked through a turning point in his own life as an artist namely , the point at which he could choose either to shape his play according to his and others' ideas of a big hit, or to become paralyzed as a writer by the . weight offorbidden truths that he lacked courage to bring to light in his art. In this psychobiographical reading, Skipper stands for the suppressed truths, Brick is the artist immobilized by guilt, and Maggie represents the impulse toward artistic survival at any cost. In allegorical shorthand, Maggie is Success and Brick is Idealism. There is ample precedent for interpreting the dramas of Tennessee Williams as literary autobiography; to support the present argument, we need go no further than his own statements. In interviews in 1973 and 1978, he said, "I draw all my characters from myself'; "I draw every character out ofmy very multiple split personality.... My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created.'" He told a friend who had objected to an apparent portrayal in The Ramal! Spring ofMrs. Stone, "All those people are me. Not you, not others. And the worse they are the more they are me.,,2 Williams also acknowledged that some characters are modeled after actual people - Big Daddy after his father, C.c. Williams, for example,3 and Maggie after Maria Britneva St. Just, the Russo-English actress who was his Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 324 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 325 lifelong confidante4 This study touches on such parallels insofar as they are related to the central concern, which is the way the characters reflect Williams's inner life and artistic choices. The study of Cat on a HOI Tin Roofas a self-portrait is made more intriguing by Williams's decision to publish two versions of Act Three: the original ending (Call), in which Big Daddy is beaten down by cancer and Maggie blackmails Brick into bed by confiscating his liquor, and the Broadway ending (Cal 2), in which Big Daddy accepts his death sentence with dignity and resumes command, while Brick regains his sexual attraction to Maggie. Despite abundant critical comment on the revisions,S what they meant to the author remains problematic. There is little reason to believe that these alterations were forced on Williams by Kazan, as Williams implies in the "Note of Explanation" which he inserted between the two versions of Act Three. Kazan offered to return the play to its original form when he saw that Williams was not happy with the third act, but according to Kazan's account Williams replied, "Leave it as it is." Kazan comments that Williams passionately desired commercial success6 The allegorical reading of Cal on a Hot Tin Roof developed here supports the idea that Williams actively embraced the suggested revisions, made them his own, and confidently awaited the play's triumph. His reasons for later disowning the changes appear to be linked to the gUilt ofbetrayal, not only of a suppressed artistic vision but also of his homosexual lovers (particularly Frank Merlo) and of the friends and associates whose support enabled him to continue a productive life as a writer despite his considerable emotional handicaps . If we take Maggie and Brick to be warring but married sides of Williams's psyche, and if we identify the conflict as, broadly put, a...