Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

He is indifferent to Maggie which is worse than hate. Then we have Brick who married Maggie to prove that he’s straight, so that any homosexual rumours would be squashed. Here we see another case of unrequited love with Big Mama’s obsession with her husband while he regrets not being able to be with other women.

Big Mama needs Brick to have children so that Big Daddy’s legacy will live on. They are childless because Brick is repelled by her but she is so desperate to have security, she lies to Big Mama about being pregnant. One of the reasons why she needs to stay with Brick even if he doesn’t want her is so that her future is assured. Being unloved has made her bitchy and ruthless, bitter and negative. When the play opens, we see her still trying to save her marriage. In Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Brick and Maggie’s marriage falls apart after she suggests that Skipper might have feelings for Brick. The comparison of these themes will be on the similarities they share as well as the dissimilarities.

Some of the mutual themes the two plays have are that of the past or looking back in anger, the hollow institution of marriage, disillusionment with society and masculinity. But the more you go back to it, the more similarities you find in the two plays. We have Big Daddy who has no idea he is dying of cancer, his son and daughter-in-law, Gooper and Mae eyeing the inheritance, and Maggie and Brick at another corner having their own tragic storyline.Īt first glance, the play doesn’t seem to have any common ground with Osborne’s play.

Then we have Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof which is more of a generational plot with the whole Pollitt family reuniting at Big Daddy’s estate to celebrate his birthday. In turn, we see how Alison, symbolizing the upper class is made to suffer due to Jimmy’s jilted ego. The whole play is about his dissatisfaction with life due to the poor promises made by the British government which have stunted their social hierarchy. Osborne’s Look Back In Anger follows the life of Jimmy Porter and his failures which affects his wife, Alison and his friend, Cliff. Even though this genre is seen mainly by the middle class British playwrights, we do see a semblance of it in Williams’ hero, Brick Pollitt. Williams was Osborne’s contemporary and in fact, wrote his play a year before Osborne wrote his and introduced the concept of the Angry Young Man. It will mainly deal with the themes of the past, marriage and love, society and the concept of masculinity. This assignment is looking at some themes shared by John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger and Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams