Research Guides: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Articles

Articles

'Echo spring': reflecting the gaze of Narcissus in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Studies the mythological analogues in the play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," observing that they serve to illuminate characters and to underscore thematic parallels. Contends that while critics have noted several of these analogues, they have failed to consider the similarities between Brick and Narcissus, suggested not only by Brick's favorite drink, Echo Spring, but by his patterns of self-destructive behavior. Observes Brick's personality traits are much like the features of "narcissistic personality disorder" and remarks of the history of discussions on narcissism by psychologists and psychoanalysts from Lasch to Freud to Havelock Ellis. Studies Brick's behavior in the play in relation to narcissistic personality
Hoboes, Sissies, and Breeders: Generations of Discontent in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
Given recent critical interest in the play’s McCarthy-era context and its complex treatment of homosexuality, the time seems right to reexamine Tennessee Williams’s use of history to discuss gender and inheritance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Cat not only observes Brick’s tortured love life and raises gay issues but also examines an array of human behavior across the spectrum of sexuality.
Homosexual Panic in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Brick's behaviour in Tennessee Williams's Cat on at Hot Tin Roof has been understood in a variety of ways by critics. In this article, I argue that he exemplifies “homosexual panic,” as this concept was developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet. Confronted with the possibility that his idealized relationship with his football buddy Skipper may be homosexual, he shuts down sexually altogether. In this respect, he resembles the Victorian bachelor who, according to Sedgwick, took refuge from the double bind of male bonds that were both prescribed and proscribed by retreating into what she calls “sexual anesthesia.”
Making the Lie True: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Truth as Performance
In an aesthetic reading of the short story collection, critic Robin Silbergleid argues that the apparent autobiographical form the novel takes directly reflects O'Brien's statements about the nature of truth as performative and ultimately unknowable. In his article "The Glass Menagerie and the Transformation of the Subject," Babcock writes that Williams, like Adorno and the Frankfurt School, recognized that American subjectivity was increasingly influenced and dominated by a culture industry that reinforced culturally acceptable norms through consumer culture.
Search for Conjugal Bliss in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The conjugal life of Maggie and Brick is on the verge of collapse because the former is heterosexual and the latter is homosexual but Maggie leaves no stone unturned to save such a life. She has to fight on two fronts. Firstly, she has to restore the broken masculinity of Brick into wholeness. She revitalizes Brick's passive and latent physicality with her aggressive sexuality. She tries to arouse his sexual jealousy by mentioning how other men show sensual desire for her. Secondly, her childlessness marginalizes her in the worst way. She passes through endless envy when she compares her childlessness with the five children of her sister-in-law and becomes catty whenever she faces them. It is true that she tells a lie about her pregnancy because she knows that truth will not work in the world she lives. Moreover, her love for her husband is so potent that she succeeds in convincing him to turn the lie into a reality. Maggie is blunt in her love and hatred. She is a strange mixture of kindness and cruelty. In this way she not only outwits all those ready to destroy her marital bliss but also rejuvenates the paralyzed sexuality of her husband with her aggressive sexuality. So love is a force with which Maggie faces her predicament and emerges stronger, happier and better off than before.

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