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PATRIARCHY AND RACIAL PREJUDICE IN THE DEEP SOUTH: RE-READING
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Vidya Hariharan
Assistant Professor
Department of English
SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce
Sion (West)
Mumbai - 400022
Abstract
Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was written during a period of
immense prosperity as well as socio-political upheaval in 1950s North
America. The feminist as well as the Civil Rights movements were
gaining rapid ground in many states in the USA. However, the Southern
states of America seem to have been left in a time warp. This paper will
attempt a racially sensitive and feminist re-reading of Tennessee
Williams’ popular play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in order to gauge the extent
to which the Southern women in the play are victims of patriarchy and
also to reveal the racial prejudice casually and comfortably implicit in the
narrative.
Keywords: patriarchy, feminist, racial prejudice, Southern America,
Post- World War II America
Tennessee Williams’ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ was written in the 1950s America of economic
boom, eager materialism and social conservatism. The post Depression era’s unprecedented
economic growth and easy availability of goods led to the beginnings of a thoughtless
consumerist bourgeois mentality. The McCarthy era was also a period of middle class morality
and anti-communist fervour. Every ‘American’ was busy in the pursuit of his unashamedly
capitalist ‘American Dream’. In the arena of international politics, the fall of Empire was
reiterated by several humiliations meted out to erstwhile powerful colonizers – the Suez Canal
imbroglio where England and France were seen to have lost face, America’s involvement in the
Korean war, the Western axis against the Communist nations led by the USA – the result of
which was the positioning of the US in the forefront of international economic and socio-
political affairs, in which position it continues to this day. So the mid 20 th century saw the
beginnings of the rise of an ‘Empire’ of another kind, a benign though insidious one that ruled
through coercion and international finance.
All this was true of 1950s ‘white northern America’. What, then, was happening in southern
America?
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The Deep South
The Deep South occupied its own isolated space within the American nation and imagination.
Whether it still occupies this position even in present day Unites States or is fully integrated is a
matter open to debate. In a study conducted by Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya
Sen from the University of Rochester, it was revealed that although slavery was abolished 150
years ago, its political legacy is alive and well. These researchers who performed a new county-
by-county analysis of census data and opinion polls of more than 39,000 southern whites found
that without slavery, the South today might look fairly similar politically to the North. ‘Although
slavery was banned, the economic incentives to exploit former slaves persisted well into the 20th
century. "Before mechanization, cotton was not really economically viable without massive
amounts of cheap labor," explains Sen. After the Civil War, southern landowners resorted to
racial violence and Jim Crow laws to coerce black field hands, depress wages, and tie the tenant
farmer to plantations.’ (Aiken 1998) In the 1950s, blacks, who made up a sizable population of
the Southern states, lived and worked in deplorable conditions. Most black families lived and
worked on cotton, sugarcane and tobacco plantations. All the plantations were owned by white
Americans. And they used their power ruthlessly to keep the blacks from participating in politics
or wielding voting rights. The Great Migration from the poor and racist rural South to the
northern industrial belt, which began in the 1940s continued into the 50s and 60s (though a
reverse migration began in the 1970s). In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the
nation. An astounding majority of all non-white families lived below the national poverty line.
This was the socio-political background in which the troubled characters in Tennessee Williams’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof try to work out their issues of inheritance, homosexuality , infidelity ,
alcoholism, marital disharmony, ‘mendacity’ and attitudes to illness and death .
A recollection of colonial history will serve to remind us that the slave trade to the
colonies of the Americas and the Caribbean through the ‘middle passage’ was originally
accomplished due to the necessity for cheap labour to work in large plantations owned by white
English colonizers. Another important factor to keep in mind is that since early in the 19th
century the South's proportion of foreign born has been lower than any other region of the
country. And because significant immigration to the United States from countries outside Britain
did not occur until the 1840s, the overwhelming majority of southern whites are of British
descent. So the two long-term resident populations are British and African in ancestry (beside the
Cajuns of southern Louisiana and several American Indian groups). In contrast, the Northern
states of America were home to diverse migrant groups and so celebrated a more multi-ethnic
populace.
According to his own story Big Daddy, the patriarch of the Pollitt family, left home in
1910 when he was 10 years old. He lived a hobo life till… “I hopped off a yellow dog freight car
half a mile down the road, slept in a wagon of cotton outside the gin… Jack Straw and Peter
Ochello took me in, hired me to manage this place, which grew into this one.”(62) Assuming he
took over as overseer in 1920, Big Daddy must have had to work extremely hard in the period
between1920 to 1950 not only to maintain the plantation but to turn it into the wealthiest
property in the Delta region. This era in the history of the South, as we know, was not a peaceful
one. Slavery was officially abolished, but segregation was widely practiced. Any attempt by
blacks to rise in protest was subdued, often violently. Lynching in America: Confronting the
Legacy of Racial Terror – a report by the Equal Justice Initiative speaks about how EJI
researchers documented 3,959 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina,
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Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 – at least 700 more lynchings of black
people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching
to date. Seen in this context the presence of the bow and arrow that Mae’s daughter ‘the no-neck
monster’ waves around is ominous. Why did Brick and Maggie feel the need to learn archery?
This leads to the question - how was order maintained on ‘the biggest plantation this side of the
Nile’? Maggie refers to Big Daddy as a ‘Mississippi redneck’. What image does the word
‘redneck’ actually call forth from the periphery? Although in the beginning the term was meant
to refer to a poor white southern farm worker, it later came to mean ‘a bigoted, ultra-conservative
lout’.
Silence and resistance-
The blacks, who worked and lived on the plantation, probably for generations, are not given any
visual space in the play, although audiences can hear their singing voices. What did their music
convey? Historically, the beginning of blues music is attributed to the American Deep South.
This genre is a fusion of traditional African music and European folk music, spirituals, work
songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. It is melancholic
and the narrative contains tales of suffering at the hands of whites or the police or some deep
personal woe. It is also believed to have its origins among the African Igbo tribe when they were
enslaved in the American plantations as they had a melancholy outlook and this was reflected in
their music. So the pain and repression of a class of people is given voice through music.
In the New York production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Act 3 contains direct conversation
between Big Daddy and the domestics, Lacey, Brightie , Sookey and Small. So was it the
imperatives of place and time as well as the audience that decides on action and dialogue? In Act
3 of the New York production there is more engagement by the black servants in the domestic
life of the main characters, for e.g. “Daisy and Sookey sing to comfort the children” (110) when
the storm rages outside. They are also heard referring to Big Daddy as ‘Cap’n’.
Another set of black men and women work inside the main house and take care of the needs of
the Pollitt family. They are seen performing peripheral acts - they answer phones, wait in the
sidelines to bring in the birthday cake and cover the garden furniture when it begins to storm.
Their voices are unmistakably heard talking, cackling, affectionately interrogating and singing.
In contrast, the white land-owning family’s voice is strident and unhappy. It is a fact that
Williams has portrayed the voices of the blacks as untroubled ones. They go about their tasks
like cogs in a well-oiled machine, not questioning or commenting on the pain and turbulence
they witness among the family they serve. There is no meaningful exchange between the two sets
of people – the masters and the slaves.
The Grand Tour: Culture and consumerism
The Grand Tour was usually undertaken by wealthy young Englishmen between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries to study the culture of Europe. The Grand Tour had more than
superficial cultural importance. In a parody of the Grand Tour, the Southern redneck, Big Daddy
and his wife, Big Mama visited post-war Europe to indulge in a shopping spree,”Everywhere she
went on this whirlwind tour, she bought, bought, bought.”(45) It is ironic that the European
artefacts they purchased were not even unpacked, stored in the basement they went “under water
last spring”. Big Daddy is thankful that he is a rich man and therefore able to bear the cost of this
mindless extravagance. But the economic power to buy up hitherto valued artefacts in the post-
war European “fire sale” is granted by black labour. So seen in this context, Big Daddy is a
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symbolic replacement of the avaricious empire-building European of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
In a funny reversal of the colonizer’s bigotry towards the ‘civilization’ of the Orient, Big
Daddy’s attitude towards Europe’s history, culture and architecture mirrors the colonizing
Westerner’s denigration of the places and people he encountered in his ‘civilizing’ mission. He
tells his son ‘…those gooks over there, they gouge your eyeballs out in their grand hotels”.(45)
The islands of Hawaii that Captain Cook inadvertently ‘discovered’ in his attempt to locate a
Northwest Passage around the American continent to the Orient, held indigenous people who
practiced their own esoteric religious rites. To a reader who is unfamiliar with the Americanism
“gouge your eyeballs out”, taken literally, would sound like a barbaric practice. The Urban
Dictionary defines “gouge your eyes out” as “conveying extreme hatred”. So the Pollitt’s, with
their buying power, were perambulating in enemy territory.
Another interesting item in their itinerary is their foray into northern Africa, Morocco, to
be precise. The half-naked children begging in the streets of Spain and his encounter with an
Arab woman and her daughter seems to have evoked disgust in Big Daddy. Like the
‘enlightened’ European colonizer, Big Daddy imposes his own prejudices on whatever he views
and experiences in the ‘new land’. There is an explicit criticism of the prostituting mother in
Morocco and an implicit one in references to the fat clergy in Spain. So through the eyes of Big
Daddy the Western audiences share a vision of Europe and North Africa at best as different and
mysterious, and at worst as poor, degraded, immoral, and decaying. As Michael K. Walonen
writes in his work Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in
Expatriate and North African Literature, for expatriate Western writers like Paul Bowles, Gysin
and Burroughs the Maghreb was a ‘frontier’ space where there is a potentiality for change and an
escape from the mid-century, convention –ridden America which considered these group of men
‘sexually aberrant and mentally ill'. Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal were frequent travellers
to the Maghreb, during this period. For these men Morocco and Tangiers was a ‘wild west of the
spirit’ (28)
The Female Slave
‘There is no actress on earth who will not testify that Williams created the best women characters
in the modern theatre,' wrote Gore Vidal after Tennessee Williams' death in 1983.’(Benedict 1)
The imminent death of Big Daddy foregrounds the struggle for ‘inheritance’. The women in the
play-Big Mama, Mae, and Maggie, are disregarded as possible heirs. During Big Daddy’s illness
it is Big Mama who runs the plantation, thereby proving her administrative capabilities, which
Big Daddy denigrates publicly and vociferously. Big Mama laughs uproariously through every
insult although she is terribly hurt. Mae, paranoid about losing to Brick and Maggie, is malicious
throughout the play. Maggie bears the brunt of criticism for her husband’s alcoholism, impotence
and her aridity. Williams has portrayed these women as strong characters who make the best of
the situations in which they find themselves.
As a writer Williams is the most accepting of his Southern upbringing and heritage. Not
only does he not deny his Southern origins he practically revels in portraying the genteel, refined
and anachronistic South. In that self contained world patriarchy was ingrained and female
delicacy, grace and obedience were basic survival tools in every woman’s arsenal. As a
homosexual Williams would have empathised with the ‘outsider’ position of women in the rural
South, their struggle to break free of their circumscribed world; and as a result of his troubled
family background would have felt a deep sympathy for the abused women in his plays. Blanche
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in A Streetcar Named Desire, Serafina Della Rose in The Rose Tattoo and Amanda Wingfield in
The Glass Menagerie are three of the most memorable of Williams’ female characters: all
Southern belles, romantic idealists who find it difficult to come to terms with crass, modern
reality. Each of these women is a fighter, Blanche, Serafina and Amanda struggle to overcome
their tragic situations and emerge victorious.
In spite of being part of a traditional society with clear cut gender roles, each of
Williams’ female characters is strongly aware of their own sexuality. Maggie, the cat, differs in
various ways from the other women in Williams’ plays because of her aggressiveness, her
determination to dominate her husband, her ability to face the truth unflinchingly and her
unhidden greed. She also adheres to the typical Williams female mould in her beauty, her wit and
her stubbornness. She is the most self aware of Williams’ heroines- she is catty and mean to
Gooper and Mae because she knows that they are plotting to disinherit Brick, she is aware of Big
Daddy’s ‘lech’ for her and even appreciates Big Mama’s loud and crass jests. Brick’s repeated
rejection causes her to repress her strong sexuality and goads her into telling the lie about her
pregnancy. According to Robert Jones, ‘ In The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof, Williams portrays women with little sexual ambivalence...Serafina, Myra, and
Maggie are strong, loving earth mothers, who know and appreciate, and they are strong
"modern" women who find salvation, even when it is only temporary, in their sexuality. Yet, like
the latter heroines, they are basically stronger than the men with whom they come into contact,
and they essentially direct the action of the plays.’ (Jones 522)
In spite of the fact that she emerges as the true ‘hero’ of the play, there is a terrible
fragility about Maggie. This fragility is the result of her strength, her determination to dominate
Brick at tremendous cost to herself. This struggle, or war, between husband and wife reveals a
master-slave relationship, which problematizes patriarchal attitudes to issues of inheritance.
Hegel’s elaborations on the master-slave relationship are seen working itself out in the Brick –
Maggie relationship. Although Brick is the ostensible hero – young, white, wealthy and virile,
Maggie his binary opposite (female, beautiful and heterosexual,) emerges as Big Daddy’s natural
heir at the end of the play. According to Hegel the master and slave are locked in a compulsive
struggle- unto- death. This goes on till the slave, who has a weaker will, and preferring life to
liberty, accepts his subjection to the master. When these two antagonists finally face each other
after battle, only the master is recognizable as the victorious one. The slave is now a dependent
‘thing’ whose existence is shaped by, and as the conquering other. Brick, struggling to come to
terms with his sexuality and betrayal of Skipper, uses alcohol to detach from reality and keeps
deferring all opportunities and attempts for a resolution. Maggie, the realist, has tried every trick
in the book to ‘fix’ an identity for Brick. It is Maggie who performs the act of ravishment,
overcoming, Brick’s reluctance, thus, proving she is the master. In the absence of a reciprocal
sensitivity she simply puts the male to a utilitarian function. In the end, ‘She combines the
motherly attention of Big Mama and the sexuality and aggressiveness of Big Daddy.(Tischler
504)
Williams has exposed the patriarchal assumptions casually embedded in Southern
attitudes in all his plays, however it is in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ that his revelation of women’s
ill-use at the hands of their male family members is made so visible. Loud, loyal and loving Big
Mama certainly does not deserve the treatment she receives at the hands of her loutish and
boorish husband. His illness does not excuse his insensitivity or his desire for a young mistress at
the age of sixty-five. Big Mama is crass but funny, she doesn’t have any time for social niceties
but is a naturally kind hearted woman. She runs the estate single-handedly during her husband’s
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illness and all the gratitude she receives for it is an unfairly virulent verbal attack. This becomes
obvious in his diatribe against Big Mamma’s perceived assumption of control in Act 1:” …and
you been gradually taking over. Bossing. Talking….you are just not about to take over.”(40) The
fear of his wife being a better manager than himself could be the motive behind the hurtful
diatribe.
Mae is a victim of her husband’s social ambitions; he marries her because she belongs to
old money. Though the family has fallen on bad times, they were wealthy at one time. She is the
mother of five ‘no-neck monsters’ with a sixth on the way. Both husband and wife hope that they
inherit, rather than the childless Maggie and Brick, due to their ‘charming’ and ‘talented’
children. Maggie, since she was childless, had to bear the brunt of Mae’s snide remarks. Hers is
the unhappiness resulting from envy and boredom. She does not exhibit any motherly instincts,
only her capacity as a brood mare.
Seen from the general feminist perspective, none of these women have any degree of
equality or emancipation. They are objectified and exploited by their husbands who do not value
them at all. Big Daddy tells his son, Brick, to get rid of Maggie if she doesn’t please him; he
loathes the sight of his wife and is disgusted by Mae’s fertility. All this reveals Big Daddy’s
misogyny and is a reflection of the attitude of the male-dominated Southern society as a whole.
Conclusion
Plantation owners in the Deep South had exploited slave labour for centuries and the attitude of
ownership and racial superiority was ingrained in them. The Civil War did not alter mindsets
overnight. Patriarchy was also a condition of life in the Southern states. The parallels between
slavery and patriarchy can be drawn on the basis of male attitude to both women and slaves –
both are treated as possessions without any individual will. ‘The abolitionist movement in the
1830s in which women were heavily involved drew their attention to the similarity of their
plight. Historian Aileen S. Kraditor wrote in her book Up from the Pedestal: “A few women in
the abolitionist movement in the 1830s . . . found their religiously inspired work for the slave
impeded by prejudices against public activity by women. They and many others began to ponder
the parallels between women’s status and the Negro’s status, and to notice that white men
usually applied the principles of natural rights and the ideology of individualism only to
themselves.”’(Mc Elroy 2008) So the socially superior, wealthy, Southern belles as well as their
black slaves were victims of the same patriarchal, feudal mindset. Williams’ attempt to hold up a
mirror to this deeply flawed world can be seen as his commitment to exposing the double
standards prevalent in contemporary society that women had to negotiate in order to survive.
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