Journeys from Frustration to Empowerment: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and its Debt to García Lorca's Yerma

Journeys from Frustration to Empowerment: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and its Debt to Garda Lorca's Yerma CHRISTOPHER BRIAN WEIMER YERMA Some things don't change! There are things locked up behind the walls that can never change because nobody hears them! . .. But if they suddenly exploded, they would shake the world!' MAGGIE When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a ftre doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in si1enc~. becomes malignant.:! The extent to which Federico Garcia Lorca's works influenced Tennessee Williams's creative output remains a largely neglected question, one often passed over in favor of Williams's debt to Anton Chekov and D. H. Lawrence . However, Lorca (1899--1936) was one of the authors whom Williams (1911-1983) studied intensively during his college years,' while a 1947 New York Times interviewer reported that "among his favorite writers are Chekov and the Spanish poet and dramatist Garda Lorca, and it is probable that they, more than any others, have contributed to his own particular style."4 Nowhere is Lorca's influence more apparent than in Williams's early one-act The . Purification, a rural tragedy in verse clearly \llodeled after the Spanish author's Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding).5 A better-known Williams play to which Lorca's contribution has gone previously unexplored is the 1955 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, even a brief consideration of its similarities to Lorca's Yerma (1934) will indicate the earlier drama's importance as a source for Williams's Broadway success. Paul Binding describes Lorca's subject in Yerma as "frustration in a restricted society,,,6 words that would also serve as an apt description of Cat's stifling emotional atmosphere. Each work revolves around a central female figure, a Modern Drama, 35 (r992) 520 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Yerma 521 woman whose dilemmas give the drama momentum and whose resolution of those dilemmas brings down the final curtain: Yerma and Maggie the Cat. Like Yerma, Maggie is a faithful woman who yearns for children but is trapped in a childless marriage. Just as Yerma's husband Juan dismisses her maternal desires, Maggie's spouse Brick likewise refuses to accept or act on her feelings. The essential conflict in both plays results from the clash of wills between husband and wife, and each clash is resolved when the woman takes control of her situation lhIough decisive action: Yerma kills Juan, while Maggie blackmails Brick into bed for the express purpose of siring a child. This paper will explore Cat's debt to Yerma further and in greater detail, in hopes of illuminating fresh aspects of the later playas well as Williams's creative process. Extending Binding's description of Yerma's dramatic essence to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof would be impossible if the two dramas did not take place in similarly restrictive societies. As Reed Anderson emphasizes, Lorca sought "to represent in his tragic theater the complex interaction between the individual consciousness of his characters and the material and social circumstances of their lives."7 What, then, are those circumstances? Juan and Yenna are members of the rural peasantry in Andalusia, and Anderson makes it clear that two vital aspects of their tragedy stem from their socioeconomic status: their bondage to the land they own, and their bondage to the rigid honor code along with its demanding set of gender role expectations. Although Juan owns property and should therefore be its master, he is in fact its slave, because only his continual, back-breaking labor persuades it to produce. Yerma tells him, "You work hard, and you aren't strong enough for so much work" (p. 79), just as Juan himself admits his frustration with his toil and his resultant inability to enjoy its fruits (p. 104). And while Yerma is a supremely faithful wife to Juan, her refusal to sequester herself within his house...