Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 play by Tennessee Williams, an adaptation of his short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game.” COAHTR is one of his most famous plays and was his personal favourite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.
Set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” (Williams, page xv), COAHTR explores themes of social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity vs the truth, family dysfunction, sexual desire, and death. Much of the writing uses eye dialect to capture the feel of the local southern accent of the US.
The original stage production starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret (“Maggie the Cat” of the play’s title), Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt, and Ben Gazzara as Brick, Margaret’s alcoholic husband, with Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. the 1958 film adaptation kept Ives and Sherwood in their roles, but had Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret and Paul Newman as Brick.
Here is a link to quotes from the play, and here is one to quotes from the 1958 film adaptation.
A number of social issues dealt with in this play–family dysfunction, greed, superficial displays of love and morality, the marginalizing of blacks and homosexuals, etc.–can be seen to centre around one big social issue in particular: class. Big Daddy owns the plantation home mentioned above, and he’ll die soon, so many in the family are hoping to get their grubby hands on his property when he dies.
The set of the play is the bed-sitting room of the plantation home. The style of the room hasn’t changed much since it was the home of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, two old bachelors who shared the room and, it is strongly implied, if not stated more or less explicitly, were gay (Williams, page xv).
Since Williams himself was gay, COAHTR, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, has a gay undercurrent mixed into the plot, something excised from both film adaptations for obvious reasons. Brick, a former football hero turned sports commentator, has become an alcoholic over his grieving from the suicide of his close friend, Skipper, who had a homosexual attraction to Brick that Brick rejected.
This issue is an example of marginalizing in the plantation home, as is the use of black servants (e.g., Lacey and Sookey), who are in no way developed characters and are just there to do whatever their employers, the white Pollitt family, want them to do. In the film, during a scene in the basement of the house, Brick complains to Big Daddy that he’s so out of touch with people, as a man occupied only with money, that he doesn’t even know the servants’ names!
Brick’s grief over Skipper’s suicide has poured over into his marriage with Margaret. He won’t make love with her, meaning they’re childless and therefore won’t produce an heir to pass Big Daddy’s plantation onto. Maggie the Cat is frustrated with this situation, since she knows that Mae, Sister Woman, and her husband, Gooper (Brother Man, Brick’s brother, played by Pat Hingle in the original production, and by Jack Carson in the film), with all their spoiled brat children, whom Maggie calls “no-neck monsters” will inherit the plantation instead, an inheritance that that big part of the family greedily covets. Even worse, though, is Maggie’s sexual frustration…yet she doesn’t want to leave Brick.
She is the cat on a hot tin roof: her feet are burning on it (unfulfilled sexual desire), but she can’t jump off (can’t leave Brick and the rich Pollitt family), because if a cat jumps off a roof, it will injure itself. Maggie the Cat left a childhood of poverty to marry into the Pollitt family, so leaving Brick will mean going back into poverty (jumping off the roof and injuring herself). In this predicament, we can again see how class is the centre of everything in COAHTR.
As of the beginning of the play, we understand that Brick, almost always with a glass of an alcoholic drink in one hand, is hobbling around on crutches. This is because, prior to the beginning of the play, he, drunk the night before at the high school athletic field (page 4), tried to run and jump hurdles, only to fall and break his ankle. In the film, we see him do this. He was trying to relive his old jock hero days, and he failed miserably.
The symbolism here is apt: Brick, a pun on break, is a broken man, broken by his alcoholism and his bittersweet memories as an athletic hero of his old high school days, memories made all the more bitter by Skipper’s tragic end. He can’t move on with his life because of his emotional brokenness, so he limps on crutches from his physical brokenness, with only booze to help him forget the pain.
As for Maggie, the play begins with her in the bedroom (while Brick is in the bathroom finishing a shower), complaining because one of those “no-neck monsters” has dirtied her clothes with a hot buttered biscuit, so she has to change. An equivalent scene is shown near the beginning of the film, just after the one with Brick breaking his ankle.
Maggie’s hatred of those “no-neck monsters,” whose fat little heads and fat little bodies have no connection where she could put her hands and wring their necks, is based of course on her envy of their existence, as opposed to her and Brick’s childlessness. If only Gooper and Mae were the childless ones; then Maggie and Brick, having kids, could get at Big Daddy’s property!
As for Big Daddy, whose birthday is about to be celebrated, and everyone coveting his property is thus kissing his ass, there have been worries that he is dying of cancer. He understands that this is not so: he apparently just has a spastic colon, so he should have plenty of years left to live.
The ‘spastic colon’ story isn’t true, though. He’s been told this story to spare him the pain and allow him to enjoy his birthday. The family will break the hard truth to him and to Big Mama (Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production, and Judith Anderson in the film) at a later, better time. So the ‘spastic colon’ lie is the only well-intentioned one of the story…though Big Daddy will be no less upset to know the truth of his medical condition than Brick is about all of the “mendacity” in the world.
Though Gooper and Mae are Brick’s and Maggie’s enemies, Big Daddy dotes on Brick (page 4), as King Lear does Cordelia. Indeed, in some ways, COAHTR can be compared to King Lear, with Big Daddy corresponding to the old king giving away his land to his daughters, who in turn correspond to Big Daddy’s sons, Gooper (Goneril and Regan) and Brick (Cordelia). Gooper and Mae (the Duke of Cornwall?) put on acts of affection towards Big Daddy in their covetous attempt to get his property, as Goneril and Regan do to King Lear, with their pretty speeches of love for him at the beginning of that play; while Brick, not interested in Big Daddy’s property, sticks to the blunt truth, as Cordelia does.
One must find it hard to believe that Brick has no urge to sleep with Maggie, who is attractive enough that, according to her, at least, “Big Daddy harbours a little unconscious ‘lech’ fo’ [her]…” (page 5). She notes how “he always drops his eyes down [her] body…drops his eyes to [her] boobs an’ licks his old chops!” When Brick finds her comments “disgusting,” she dismisses his attitude as that of “an ass-aching Puritan”, and that Big Daddy’s adoration of her “shape…is deserved appreciation!”
Even if Maggie’s words here are just narcissistic wish-fulfillment, there’s also the choice of beauty queen Taylor to portray her in the film. Richard Brooks, who directed the film adaptation and co-wrote its screenplay with James Poe, had difficulty figuring out how to make it convincing that a man might not want to go to bed with a woman of Taylor’s beauty. This would have been especially difficult with the homosexual undercurrent censored from the story.
Brooks tried to portray Brick’s refusal to have sex with Maggie “because he holds her responsible for Skipper’s death,” but such an attitude is far from convincing. As far too many women have known (and suffered), a man does not have to feel love and affection for a woman, and also desire her sexually. He can have that desire while also feeling the utmost loathing and contempt for her. He can use sex deliberately to hurt her, and a man like Brick can treat even the raping of his wife as “His conjugal right. Her connubial duty.”
Now, while it’s never explicitly stated anywhere in the play, it’s strongly implied that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was more than just a close friendship. Brick may have rejected Skipper’s sexual advances, but that doesn’t mean Brick never felt the urge to return those feelings physically. As a play written by a gay man in the 1950s, long before Stonewall and contemporary gay liberation, COAHTR is going to reflect the social mores of the time, to which Williams would have been more than usually sensitive.
If Brick was gay, it would be only natural for him–in a society that morally condemned homosexuality with a virulence and disgust for “queers” that would make today’s homophobes seem sensitive in their prejudices by comparison–to be more than a little conflicted about his sexuality. Brick jumping into bed with Skipper, even if kept secret, would have been far less believable.
The film further dodges the gay undercurrent in a manner comparable to how the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire does with the suicide husband of Blanche DuBois: he’s portrayed as weak and cowardly, rather than homosexual. As I said in my analysis of ASND about Blanche’s husband, Skipper is all the gay stereotypes without the gay. And again, removing the homosexuality only makes the reason for the suicide unconvincing. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar observed, and they feel a lot of shame…but do they kill themselves over it? They’re too scared of getting hurt or dying…aren’t they, by definition?
In her jealous suspicions that Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship, Maggie provoked Skipper into trying to take her to bed ‘to prove that he was a man,’ but he couldn’t go through with it, only to reinforce her suspicions and his shame, hence his suicide (page 66).
As I said above, this taboo subject is an example of marginalization, made even more so in its being censored out of the movie. Other examples of marginalizing in the 1958 adaptation are, at the beginning, the kids’ marching band with Confederate flags, the above-mentioned black servants, and a little girl, one of the “no-neck monsters,” going around with a toy pistol and wearing a Native American headdress, a white girl who’s been raised to have no respect for aboriginal culture, having fun playing ‘cowboys and injuns.’
These forms of marginalization, combined with the Pollitt family dysfunction and coveting of Big Daddy’s property, all rooted in class divisions, are manifestations of social alienation. Maggie’s a cat on a hot tin roof because of her and Brick’s mutual alienation; Big Daddy may be fond of Brick, but he finds Big Mama, Gooper, and Mae to be annoying, just as Maggie feels about the “no-neck monsters.” There aren’t any real friendships here. Even Gooper often tells Mae to be quiet.
In Act One, Maggie’s wondering why Brick has looked at her a certain way that “froze [her] blood.” He says he wasn’t conscious of looking at her. She says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier–than living entirely alone!–if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…” (page 8). That is alienation.
At one point, Brick drops his crutch, and he asks Maggie to give it to him. She’d have him lean on her shoulder, but he just wants his crutch (page 11). Alienation. Finally, she gives it to him in exasperation.
She’d like him to leave the booze alone until after Big Daddy’s birthday party is over, but he’s forgotten all about it, so estranged is he from his family (page 12). He, of course, never bought a birthday present for Big Daddy, so Maggie’s bought one for Brick to give his dad. Brick isn’t even willing to write ‘Love, Brick’ on the birthday card, so averse is he to being untruthful.
He speaks of himself and his wife having made conditions by which he’ll agree to stay on living with her. She complains of not living with him, but rather of occupying the same cage with him.
Mae interrupts and complains about an archery set left around her precious children, blaming Maggie for having exposed her kids to the ‘danger.’ Then, Mae brags about the show her kids put on, with music and dancing. Big Daddy loved it, apparently (page 13). Maggie comes back by taunting Mae that her kids all have dogs’ names–Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, and Polly (this last apparently a parrot).
After Mae leaves the bedroom to attend a resuming of the kids’ show, Maggie complains to Brick of being like a cat on a hot tin roof, to which Brick replies that she can simply jump off the roof and land, as all cats do, on all fours, uninjured. What Brick means is that she can take a lover to deal with her sexual frustration (page 15), but of course she doesn’t want to do that for the reasons I gave above. She insists she loves him too much to leave him, and wishes he’d “get fat or ugly or something so [she can] stand it.”
Soon, Big Mama comes over to tell Brick and Maggie the good news that Big Daddy doesn’t have cancer, and he only has a spastic colon. Big Mama’s annoyed with the locked bedroom door, not being concerned with Maggie’s or Brick’s right to privacy (that is, she doesn’t respect boundaries…a typical problem in dysfunctional families–page 16). This would explain why the bratty kids come running into the bedroom with impunity.
Big Mama asks Maggie if Brick is still in much pain from his broken ankle (page 18), which is a metaphor for what seems his impotence. Not long after, Big Mama shows concern over whether or not Brick and Margaret are happy in bed, obviously putting pressure on the couple to produce grandchildren for her and Big Daddy (page 20). Once again, there is no respect for the couple’s boundaries or privacy.
When we accept the play’s strong implication that Brick is a closet homosexual (as opposed to the film’s senseless censoring of what was clearly Williams’s main theme of exploration, making him dislike the film), then not only is his not sleeping with her explicable, but also his urging her to find a lover. If she can get pregnant with a bastard child they can pass off as their own, then the pressure for Brick to get it up for her will finally be off.
Brick married Margaret for the same reason many gays married back in those days: for appearance’s sake. It’s yet another example of the kind of mendacity that Brick complains about.
Now, Maggie is as determined as Gooper and Mae are in getting Big Daddy’s estate when he dies, which they all know will come sooner than the ‘spastic colon’ story lets on. In fact, the Cat is so determined to get it that, at the end of the play, she lies that she’s with child in order to get in Big Mama’s and Daddy’s good graces. She plans to pressure Brick into getting the job done by depriving him of his liquor.
The sanitized film version shows Brick content to go along with getting the job done. Williams’s original ending–before Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway production, insisted Williams make changes to Act Three, which among other changes included a more sympathetic Maggie (pages 92-93)–is far preferable, in preserving a sense of the family’s dysfunction by having Brick passively acquiesce to her wish “to make the lie true” (page 91).
She insists that she loves him, and he “[smiling with charming sadness]” says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” His latent homosexuality would make this original ending (as opposed to Kazan’s urged rewrites or those of the film) far more believable; it would also bring home all the harder just how tragic this story is. It’s far from the straight ‘family values’ ending we get in the film; instead, gay Brick is being forced by the scheming Cat to sire a family so she can get at Big Daddy’s property. Brick has to be another Gooper. He’s being crushed by her mendacity.
While in much of Act Three of the play, Brick is in the gallery (as opposed to the bedroom where the bulk of the play is set), Big Daddy not reappearing at all until Kazan insisted on him coming back, another of the changes made to Act Three, in the film, there’s a lengthy scene of the two men in the basement (after a spell outside in the rain gets them wet) towards the end. Now, this basement scene is meant to create a sense of reconciliation between the two, to prepare us for Brick’s willing agreement to sleep with Maggie. As such, it’s another example of the film sanitizing the play to make it more ‘family-values’ oriented, taking away much of the bite of Williams’s social critique.
The faults of this scene’s inclusion, however, don’t mean that it’s entirely without merit. Its exploration of Big Daddy’s character and motivations dovetail with how his social rank and wealth result in alienation.
He speaks of how all his wealth has allowed him to buy lots of gifts for his family, supposedly proving how much he ‘loves’ all of them. Brick expresses his disgust at such ostentation masked as generosity. One cannot buy love. Brick says that Big Daddy owns his family rather than loves them. Capitalism alienates people by making commodities out of them.
Big Daddy hopes his plantation empire will live on after his death through his heirs, Gooper and Brick. Brick denies this possibility because of the inherent alienation in a bourgeois family that treats its members as property. And we all know how capitalism leads to empire, in various forms…and look at all the toxic families that exist out there.
Big Daddy speaks of his own father, a hobo who hopped trains with his then-young son and left him nothing but a suitcase with a uniform worn in the Spanish-American War. Big Daddy brags of how he built up his plantation from nothing,…though any Marxist worth his salt knows the real way business empires are built: with the blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited working class. Success has made a failure of Big Daddy’s home.
To go back to comparisons between COAHTR and King Lear, Big Daddy–upon learning that, indeed, he does have terminal cancer, and that the ‘spastic colon’ story was a white lie meant to allow him to enjoy his birthday–goes into a rage, shouting “Lying! Dying! Liars!” at the family that gave him his false hope (at the end of the original Act Two, or at the beginning of the Act Three revised for Kazan, whichever). Like Lear, Big Daddy is upset over having to confront the ultimate loss, that of his life, which Lear loses onstage at the end of the final scene of Act Five.
As I explained in my analysis of the play (link above), Lear loses everything, one by one: his kingly authority, his one hundred knights, the ability to trust his daughters, shelter, his sanity, his one true daughter, Cordelia, and finally, his life. In knowing he’s losing his life, Big Daddy is losing it all in one fell swoop. When Mae gets Gooper’s briefcase (page 106) so he can get at the legal papers pertaining to what he sees as his and Mae’s rights to his father’s estate, Gooper and Mae are demonstrating their “avarice, avarice, greed, greed!” (page 107), as Maggie judges (not that she’s really any better), that Big Daddy’s lost his ability to trust them.
If only, in all of this alienation, class conflict, and loss, Big Daddy could have a moment to reflect as Lear does in his own loss:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (Act III, Scene iv)
In Williams’s original version, Big Daddy sympathizes with Brick, in spite of prevailing prejudices against homosexuality: if only he could extend that empathy to the poor, as Lear does.
Of course, just as Lear is, for a while, happy to have regained Cordelia after realizing she is the one true daughter, so is Big Daddy happy to have regained something (even though it’s just a lie): Maggie is apparently pregnant with Brick’s child–“this girl has life in her body” (page 115). In the hope of having life in an heir he’d rather pass his estate on to, Big Daddy imagines he won’t be losing life–and all his property–after all.
How sad that the man fooled by lies is still letting himself be fooled by them. And in linking his life and happiness to his private property rather than to people whom he could help with it, people he’s alienated from, he sadly also won’t show the heavens more just.
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1955
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