Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

THE CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
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Key Facts
full title · Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
author · Tennessee Williams
type of work · Drama
genre · Tragedy
language · English
time and place written · Written in New York, 1939
date of first publication · 1940; first production in New York, 1955 under the direction of Elia Kazan
publisher · New Directionsnarrator · None
point of view · Point of view is not located as there is no narrator figure
tone · Tragi-comic
tense · The play unfolds in the time of the present
setting (time) · Summer, mid-1950s
setting (place) · The bed and sitting room of Big Daddy's Mississippi plantation home.
protagonists · Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy
major conflict · Big Daddy has come home from the clinic on his 65thbirthday, and his children plan to tell him he is dying of cancer. Mae and Gooper have brought their entire brood in an attempt to jostle Brick and Maggie out of their share of the estate. Their marriage is childless and on-the-rocks; Brick has quit his job and taken to drinking upon the death of Skipper, a friend for whom he harbored sexual desire.
rising action · Big Daddy corners Brick andforces him to recount what really happened with Skipper, robbing him of his crutch, and bribing him with the promise of liquor.
climax · At the end of Act II, Brick admits Skipper's confession of love and reveals Daddy's cancer.
falling action · Gooper and Mae attempt to get Big Mama to sign a preliminary will; Maggie lies about being pregnant and attempts to force Brick to conceive a child withher.
themes · Manliness and homosexuality, the lie, the father and son, the cat on a hot tin roof
motifs · The children, the off-stage telephone, the exotic lands
symbols · The crutch, the bed, the console
foreshadowing · Maggie announces her plot to conceive a child at the end of Act I; Brick decides to reveal Daddy's cancer in return for the revelation of his homosexual desire-------------------------------------------------

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Context
Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911 to a family that his biographers are fond of comparing to the dysfunctional ones of his plays. Williams's father,Cornelius, was an inveterate gambler and drunkard whose indulgences kept the family constantly on the move. Williams's sister, Rose, was a schizophrenic ultimately forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy by their mother, Edwina. This event—recounted in Suddenly Last Summer—particularly horrified Williams, who became his sister's caretaker. In 1931 Williams left home to begin studies at the University ofMissouri. While at school, he both received the nickname Tennessee from a college roommate and decided to become a playwright upon seeing a production of Ibsen's Ghosts. Williams's plans were abruptly thwarted by his father, who demanded that he leave school to come work at his shoe factory. There, he befriended a man named Stanley Kowalski, who would later appear as the antihero of his perhaps mostfamous play.
Ultimately Williams resumed his schooling at Washington University, finishing his degree at the University of Iowa where he locally produced some of his plays. He then moved on to New Orleans where he staged his first major success with The Glass Menagerie (1945). Steeped, like many of Williams's works, in what irresistibly appear as biographical references, the play imagines thetumultuous struggles between of a son, his disabled sister, and their controlling mother Amanda. Shortly after Menagerie closed, the playwright went to work on a new piece about a woman stood up by her fiancé, producing his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Another Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, followed in 1955. The crux of this latter work concerns the...