Grotesque Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

3138 Words13 Pages
Although the Southern dialect, mannerisms, and setting apparent in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reveal Tennessee Williams' usual regional focus, the ideas and emotions which the drama involves are by no means geographically restricted but, on the contrary, are of universal import. The play depicts the feelings and consequences of greed, frustration, guilt, desire, and hypocrisy, but most importantly it deals with the conflict between appearance and reality and its resolution in truth. Williams is concerned with man's drive to escape his problems either by totally ignoring them or by effecting a facade of illusion. He emphasizes this need in the opening of the work with a symbolic stage prop--the "huge console combination of radio-phonograph, TV set, and liquor cabinet"--which he describes as "a very complete and compact little shrine to virtually all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide from such things as the characters in the play are faced with." It is this veil of illusion that permits human beings to cope with the "slow and implacable fires of . . . desperation," and Williams intensifies the growing despair in this play by giving it a stifling, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Time and setting are extremely confining; the entire action takes place during one hot summer evening in a single bed-sitting-room of a plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Maggie refers again and again to the lack of privacy in this wealthy Southern family, to the "cage" which is their home. Such a feeling of tightening circumscription only heightens the frantic attempts of these characters to avoid reality and increases the likelihood of an inevitable, shattering destruction of illusion. As Gooper points out, "A family crisis brings out the best and worst in every member of it." Thus the pervading theme of Williams' drama involves the tension between truth and mendacity,
Open Document