Tennessee Williams Maggie the Cat - A Shakespearean Woman

 

I have written (From my blog Shakespeare’s and Tennessee Williams’ Women) before about the women in Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and expressed my admiration for Shakespeare:

Shakespeare’s women were all subservient to men and in today’s lingo “second class citizens”, but all of them understood that they could achieve great power within this system.  They schemed, they fought, they protected their interests and especially those of their children.  In other words, it is hard to have sympathy for the wilting and shrinking violets of Williams when the women of Shakespeare were heroic.  Think of Margaret who fought for the instatement of her son to the throne of England, despite the machinations of her weak husband, Henry VI.  Think about the mother of Richard III and Edward IV who was strong and outspoken in her virulent condemnation of Richard.  Think of the mother of Elizabeth, the wife of Edward IV; or the mother of the murdered (by Richard) Henry VI.  Think of Cleopatra; Portia, the wife of Julius Caesar; Lady Macbeth; Goneril and Regan; and perhaps especially Cordelia who mounts an armed invasion to vindicate her father although he has spurned her.  And then there is Joan of Arc, La Pucelle.  The list goes on.  These women were all born, raised, reared in a “repressive” society and rather than wilt under its repression, thrived under it.  Whether they were successful or not, they were undaunted in their aims.

Maggie the Cat, heroine of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is very Shakespearean and unlike any of the “wilting and shrinking violets” of Williams.  She embodies not only the ambition of  the above-cited women, but of the men in Shakespeare as well – especially Richard III; but also Iago, Edmund, and Aaron the Moor.  These characters all reflect the philosophy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, characters endowed with an indomitable will to succeed, to overreach beyond the constraints of conventional morality. 

Maggie, in Williams’ own words, is obsessively in love with Brick and will do anything to keep him; and, like her Shakespearean counterparts, eliminated all competition.  By forcing the homosexual, but conflicted Skipper into a sexual encounter she knows he will not be able to complete, he commits suicide, presumably because of the final recognition of the sexual reality he has been trying to hide; and by Brick who, in his own sexual confusion, rejects his close friend.

In a lengthy speech of justification, [Maggie] describes how she ended the dream by confronting Skipper about his homosexual love for Brick, "telling him the truth," which ultimately destroyed him.  It was … she recalls, Skipper's "pitiful, ineffectual little attempt to prove that what I had said wasn't true". Brick's response to this is violent. He twice attempts to strike his wife and finally "hurls his crutch at her" in an impotent rage and ends up sprawled on the floor. Kenneth Elliot 2010

Despite Maggie’s revelation and the fact that she has been the principal catalyst for Skipper’s death, Maggie continues in her obsessive love of Brick, and in the final act locks up the liquor cabinet of her alcoholic husband, and blackmails him into sleeping with her and resuming their married life.

Much has been written about Brick’s suffering and pain, his nobility and the noble, pure, friendship he had with Skipper, about his conflicts, his moral angst about mendacity and the ways of the world, but in reality he is a weak, indecisive, crippled person just as his friend Skipper was.  Even in an era of sexual repression, revelation of a fact that must have been obvious to him, should not have been cause for Skipper’s suicide.  Williams does not explore the nature of Skipper, and he is used as an unseen vehicle to propel the action of the play; but we have to assume that a more normal, health individual – homosexual or straight – would not have been driven to such despair.  Skipper must have been imbalanced, unable to deal with reality, and weak.

Brick is a frustrating character.  Throughout the play, he thumps on the stage with his cast and crutch, drinking, or looking for a drink, and offering cynical comments about life, mendacity, and responsibility.  Yet, he does nothing.  What is noble about this kind of whining suffering, this search of the elusive ‘click’ which is no more than a desire for alcoholic oblivion?  What is noble or strong about his capitulation to Maggie. “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?”, he says in response to her “I do love you, Brick.  I do!”

Maggie, on the other hand, never wavers, and although her success – reinstating her marriage with a weak, romantic, drunkard – is slight compared with Shakespearean heroines, she at least has will, desire, and singular vision.  In away, she is similar to another of my favorite Williams’ women – Maxine of Night of the Iguana.  Both women are earthily sensual, strongly heterosexual, and direct and clear in the purpose of claiming the men they love.  Again, in the case of Maxine, it is not clear why she wants to reclaim a broken-down, defrocked, weak whisky priest; but she does and triumphs in the end.  I also like Mrs. Venable, the smothering and destructive mother of Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer for the same reasons of singularity of purpose, will, and control.

There are a few strong men in Williams’ plays and attractive for their villainy – like Jake in 47 Wagons of Cotton; or Jabe in Orpheus Descending – and a few more with some allure, such as Val in Orpheus, the unseen Rosario, Serafina’s husband in Rose Tattoo; or the much more developed, but still inconsistent Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth; or Williams’ favorite, Big Daddy, in Cat who is less a dominant male character than a caricature of one; but a strong, male one nevertheless, and a refreshing presence in Williams’s world of ambiguous and weak men.

I prefer Shakespeare because of its balance of men and women, especially in the Histories where both are strong.  Both are important.  Both are decisive and focused.  Both are vying for power in their own ways within the social context of the times.  The balance is often undone in the Tragedies – Antony and Cleopatra seem equal but ultimately are not.  The women in King Lear are as strong or stronger than the men (not Lear himself, but Edmund, Edgar, Gloucester, Albany and Cornwall, Kent).  Lady Macbeth is stronger than her husband, but the tables turn.  Gertrude is the equal of her husbands and stronger than her son, Hamlet. 

I have liked the lyricism of Tennessee Williams.  Zhang Min has eloquently described the best of this lyricism as arias – individual flights of beauty and fantasy marginally connected to plot and movement.  I have liked the sets, the symbols, and the coherence of all elements of the plays.  But I do not like the characters, do not identify with their conflicts and crises.  After three months of immersion into the works of Tennessee Williams, criticism, and personal acquaintances (men and women who knew Williams), I vastly prefer Shakespeare.

Hedda Gabler, Tennessee Williams, and Shakespeare

 

As I have written in a previous blog (Shakespeare’s and Tennessee Williams’ Women), I have been immersed in Tennessee Williams for the last three months or so in preparation for the Centennial Festival of his birth here in Columbus, Mississippi.  I have loved his women for their delicacy, frailty, and sensibility.  Williams has said that these delicate women had strength and courage – Amanda for her efforts to keep her family together; Laura for her foray into the threatening outside world; Blanche for her battle of wills with Stanley; Alma for her struggles to break out of the world which has been defined for her; but I always think of them as frail, struggling with their idealism (Amanda) or mental weakness (Blanche, Alma, Laura ) and ultimately failing. 

Williams has, of course, created more classically strong women – Maggie the Cat is the most notable in her obsessive, manipulative love for Brick – but I like her less because they fall far from my theatrical ideal of the aggressive, compulsive women in Shakespeare who accepted their socially inferior role in life and in the palace, but who used every bit of intelligence, wiles, cunning, deception, and duplicity to get what they wanted.  In fact, there is no reason why women should be classified in their own sexual category.  Goneril and Regan, my Nietzschian heros as “evil” as Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Iago, or Edmund (or Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the ur-villain who inspired Shakespeare), are certainly the equal of their male counterparts in their ruthless, amoral, and ceaseless pursuits of power.

As I have also written, I re-read Chekhov’s Three Sisters because it was such an influence on Williams (as well as The Seagull, which he adapted).  The women in this play were not so much weak or debilitated by their fantasies and inability to cope with the real world; but unable to act to effect changes in what they clearly saw were the constraints on their intellect, spirit, and independence.  While they could have made dramatic changes – like return to the Moscow which had become their ideal – they did not.  Irina does make an attempt – she agrees to marry an older, spiritless man in her hope to change her life; but he is killed in a senseless duel.

Ibsen, however, more or less a contemporary of Chekhov, gave his female characters strength and will.  Nora, in A Doll’s House finally overcomes her reticence, frustration, and strict notions of society and propriety to leave Helmer; but it is Hedda Gabler in the play of that name that rises to my ideal of evil stardom.  She is a true Nietzschian character – “For once in my life”, she says, “I want the power to shape a human destiny” –and she goes through any means to attain her goal.  Lovborg is her project.  Although Mrs. Elvsted has recognized Lovborg’s genius and devoted herself to reforming him from his profligate ways to restore his talents, Hedda has a much more insidious plan in mind.  When she realizes that she cannot take credit, as Mrs. Elvsted has rightly done, for Lovborg’s new book of revolutionary ideas, she decides she must destroy Mrs. Elvsted in a spiteful, hateful and disgraceful way:

HEDDA: (She throws part of the manuscript [Lovborg’s new book] in the fire and whispers to herself): Your child, Thea – your child and Ejlert Lovborg’s.  Darling little Thea, with the curly hair. (Throws more of the manuscript into the stove). I’m burning your child, Thea. (Throws in the rest of the manuscript).  I’m burning it – burning it -

In doing this she quite realizes that hopes of positively influencing the destiny of Lovborg (“vines in his hair” for glory based on his book), she becomes focussed on destroying him, but gloriously.  She gives him one of her pistols to honorably end his life.  He botches the affair, associates himself with a local prostitute in so doing, and ends whatever dreams of power Hedda has (One thinks of the botched suicides in Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, so we can’t be too harsh).   Hedda is quickly found out by Judge Brack who blackmails her about the ownership of the pistols, and Hedda replies:

That means you have me in your power, Judge.  You have me at your beck and call from now on.

She kills herself – shoots herself in the temple, in her way, a death and a statement.

Hedda’s plotting was a bit dodgy.  How could she not have thought about the incriminating evidence of the pistols; or perhaps figured out some way of using the recovered manuscript as an instrument of power?  She changed strategies in mid-stream – at first she thought she would be seen as the power behind Lovborg, and when that changed, she became arch-villainess.  I don’t hold this against her, or rather Ibsen.  He has created a woman beyond good and evil, and one of the more interesting characters in Scandinavian theatre.

In many ways, Hedda Gabler brought me full circle to Shakespeare’s Histories after this long interlude with Tennessee Williams.  Williams and I are too different, I suspect, in our sensibilities and outlook to have connected.  I love what Jan Kott has called The Grand Mechanism of the Histories – the unstoppable movement of events that are moved by power, greed, aggression, she-bear protection, and the abandonment of morality for personal gain.   Tennessee Williams is writing of a different environment.  The world is threatening and qualitatively worse than the inner worlds created by his characters.  For Shakespeare the world simply is, and it is the stage on which his players act.

Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ and Tennessee Williams

 

Tennessee Williams admired Anton Chekhov more than any other playwright, and when asked who were the three writers he admired most, he said “Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov”.  Williams is best known for his adaptation of THE SEAGULL (Notebook of Trigorin), but he also expressed admiration for Three Sisters, and I will therefore look at this play and the work of Williams, using the comments of three critics (especially Borny) as points of departure.

Juan Zhao gives a general summary of the influence of Chekhov on Williams:

Among his [Chekhov’s] innovations were his economical husbanding of narrative resources, his concentration on character as mood rather than action, his impressionistic adoption of particular points of view, his dispensing with traditional plot, and as Charles May declared in an essay collected in A Chekhov Companion, his use of atmosphere as “an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection.”

His elegant juxtaposition of the humorous and the tragic, his lonely characters,and his dark sensibilities, was a powerful inspiration for Williams. The newness of Chekhov was his portrayal of daily life and its encompassing crisis. He illustrated how the average person suffers, their imperfections, without making excuses for the characters.  ZHAO, Juan, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2010, pp. 35-38

I think that the ‘ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection’ is of particular interest.  Glass Menagerie is a play in which the external details are very clear, but always indirect.  The threatening, dangerous world of the alley below the apartment and the world beyond is the environment from which Laura withdraws.  The world of Amanda’s idyllic past in Mississippi is frequently evoked and is the backdrop for the smaller world she has created and is trying to preserve in her home.  The psychic projection is related to this context – Amanda is as much in her past world as the present; and Laura with innocence and ignorance projects herself into an outside world of love and normality. 

Williams is a master of creating external, unseen, or past worlds which become part of his plays.  We do not know where Val comes from, or what Serafina’s husband’s life was really like, or the life at Belle Reve, or the real relationship between Brick and Skipper; but we feel we know.  Chekhov in Three Sisters is equally evocative about a life and a past that is largely unseen.  Moscow is like Belle Reve or the past of Amanda.  It is the symbol of culture, elegance, and dignity that the sisters feel they have lost in the provinces.  Taking place at the turn of the century, the play evokes the aristocratic past of the Czars, but also looks forward to the coming Socialist revolution – both are dealt with through the characters of Vershinin who is forward-looking and Tuzenbakh who feels that plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Zhao comments on Chekhov’s portrayal of daily life and how the average person suffers. I don’t agree with this nor with any application to Williams.  The characters in Three Sisters are not ordinary – they are aristocrats or of the haute bourgeoisie and are dealing with very different issues than ‘average’ Russians; and in the cases of Tuzenbakh, Vershinin, and Chebutykin, dealing with philosophical dilemmas.  Williams’ characters are more ‘average’ in an American, practical sense – the families are working class even if some of the characters (Stella, Blanche, Amanda) have a more genteel past – but they are not at all average in their concerns. They are concerned with purity, honesty, integrity, love; and as such are more ‘down to earth’ than Chekhov’s characters; but they still reflect upon and speak about higher values than ordinary citizens.

Alison Christy offers more insight and detail about Chekhov and implicit reference to Williams’ Work:

In his case and that of the sisters, it is their refusal to accept modernity that leads to their suffering. By their resistance toward them, scientific advancements do have an effect on their lives.

Williams was very concerned about modernity and considered it a threat, and a factor in the degradation of life – at least the idyllic life he envisages in his plays, one reminiscent of his childhood in Mississippi before he moved to St. Louis.   However, Chekhov in Three Sisters, offers three different views of the issue.  Vershinin is the optimist, adopted by the Soviets as seeing the improvement if not perfectibility of man.  Tuzenbach is the realist/pessimist, believing that while there will be changes in the future, the basic unhappy lot of man will not change.  Chebutykin is the pessimist/defeatist/Existentialist believing that there is no meaning to life.  To quote Hobbes:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short Leviathan XIII "Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery."

It appears that Vershinin speaks for Chekhov in his optimism, but this interpretation is by no means clear, given the compelling passages of other characters. 

Christy comments that the characters in Three Sisters do not accept modernity, and this refusal results in inertia and ennui.  They are the practical counterpoints to the more philosophical men, described above.  The sisters have longings, frustrations, and dreams that are very much like Tennessee Williams’ women; but one cannot say that they reject modernity.  They simply have an idealized and idealistic view of the past.  It is the men who take philosophical sides on modernity.

In this sense, I do see a strong similarity between the women of Williams and Chekhov.  Again, Christy:

The characters [Three Sisters] also resist accepting the present. The play begins with Olga remarking, “It’s a year ago today that Father died” (259). She continues to detail the day of their father’s death. She remembers everything from the weather to what Irina was wearing. Olga and her sisters have fear of forgetting as time moves forward. When Tuzenbach arrives, he tells the sisters that he knew their mother. Masha replies, “I’m forgetting what she looked like. The same thing will happen to us. Nobody will remember us” (267). The sisters see time as a threat to their memory, the sacred place that holds their memories of Moscow and their parents. The looming threat of forgetting and being forgotten continues to the end of the play

The theme, in this case, is that refusal to accept modernity results in inertia and ennui. The Prozorov sisters often speak about returning to their beloved Moscow. They desire it and they have the means and social connections to do it, but they do not do it. The question is not what is keeping them in the provinces but, rather, what is keeping them from Moscow. The answer is to be found in the city itself, a place that the sisters left eleven years before. Three Sisters: Chekhov’s Warning
Alison Christy 2009

Geoffrey Borny echoes Christy in his observation about time, the wasting of time, and the resulting absurdity of the lives of Chekhov’s characters.  There is no such philosophical reflection on time in Tennessee Williams; and it is depicted principally as times past (Belle Reve and the loss of past idylls), time passing (the loss of youth and opportunity), and a looming sense of a threatening future.  Time provides an important context for the plays, but is not discussed per se as it is in Chekhov.

Chekhov’s world….is deeply embedded in chronological time. His audiences are shown characters who are quite literally ‘wasting their time’. As I argued earlier, Chekhov’s play does not depict a world in which there is nothing to be done, but one in which ‘no one is doing anything’. Through their own inertia and passivity, the characters in Three Sisters make their lives absurd. They may abdicate their responsibility for action and even see themselves as ‘Beckettian’ fated characters…

However, Borny goes on to note:

…but this is not what the overall action of Chekhov’s play depicts. Chekhov employs the idea of time passing as a warning and, in this, is closer to Andrew Marvell’s concept of time than Beckett’s. Marvell was acutely aware of how short a time human beings have on earth and so wished to avoid wasting it.

This is indeed what Williams was writing about.

Borny goes on to say:

The play [Three Sisters] discloses a world in which people are lost … The active theme of the play is how people cope with failure, either by constructing fantasies of a future happiness, or withdrawing into cynicism, or by trying to pretend that all is well … There needs to be in performance too, an emotional danger, and a sense of a desolate emotional landscape…..Mike Alfreds’ ‘reactionary’ interpretation of Three Sisters delivered the clear message to the audience that hopelessness was the core feature of the human condition and that, as one reviewer put it, ‘Chekhov is really writing about the illusion of happiness, the absurdity of our quest for it’

I think this is very telling and appropriate for an interpretation of Williams.  Many of his characters are indeed ‘lost’, and do ‘construct fantasies of future happiness’ and do ‘withdraw’ (although not in cynicism); and yes, Williams also writes about ‘the illusion of happiness’, but not, in my opinion ‘the absurdity of our quest for it’.  I think that the quest for happiness, often if not always thwarted, does not deny the value of the quest.  Laura is deceived, disappointed with the outside world, so her quest is denied; and she returns to her narrow fantasy world; but in a way this disappointment has simply reinforced the fantasy world in which she lives.  Was this a totally bad outcome?  I don’t think so.

Borny writes about the influence of outside factors and that ‘human beings are as chess pawns in the hands of invisible players’.  While there are chance happenings in Williams plays – Val comes on the scene, a gentleman caller finally shows up at Laura’s house, Alvaro appears to Serafina – these are the chance happenings that occur all the time.  There is no sense of predetermination or destiny in their appearances:

The events of the play crept along even as life itself during this epoch, in a tired sort of way, without any visible logic. Human beings acted under the influence of chance happenings; they did nothing to build their own lives. Here is the substance of his first act: a birthday party, the spring, gaiety, birds singing, bright sunshine. And of the second act: triviality gradually takes into its hands the power over the sensitive, nobly inclined human beings. Of the third act: a conflagration in the neighbourhood, the entire street is aflame; the power of triviality grows intenser, human beings somehow flounder in their experiences. The fourth act: autumn, the collapse of all hopes, the triumph of triviality. Human beings are as chess pawns in the hands of invisible players. The absurd and the pathetic, the noble and the worthless, the intelligent and the stupid, are all interwoven

Certainly, the play continues the exploration of life as a constant struggle between hope and despair that had been so movingly dramatised in Uncle Vanya. It is easy to see why the tragic theme of loss and waste can easily overwhelm the theme of faith in a better future and lead directors to interpret the play as a lament. It remains important however to constantly attempt to present a balance between the darker and brighter elements of the play.  INTERPRETING CHEKHOV, GEOFFREY BORNY 2006