Collision And Destruction:An Analysis Of Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof From Hegel’s Collision Theory

Tennessee Williams (1911-1981) is acknowledged as one of the three great American dramatists in the20th century, along with Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of Williams’s best-known works and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in1955.This play, in essence, is a tragedy with multi-collisions. All characters suffer from the one-sidedness of their solid wills and encounter different kinds of collisions, with social surroundings, with family members, as well as with their own acts, the joint force of which contribute to the tragedy. Based on previous studies and researches, this thesis would analyze the conflicting sides of collision in the play according to Hegel’s theory on tragedy, so as to expose multi-reasons which lead to the tragic destination of those characters.The introduction part gives a general picture of the playwright Tennessee Williams and the plot of Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, as well as Hegel’s collision theory and a review of the criticism on the play.Chapter One scrutinizes the collision between men and social circumstances. To keep the order and moral standard of the society, men ought to suppress anything deviating from its original path, among which homosexuality is intolerable by general public at that time. The play sets in a transitional social background, under which old and new civilizations, as well as values undergo strong and unavoidable conflicts. Every one living in that society would be influenced by the change of values and social environment. From the repressed homosexual desire of Brick and Big Daddy, the social influence imposed on individuals has been realistically reflected. The misfortune or collision brought by society is likewise only an external factor and serves as an occasion for further collisions.Chapter Two investigates the collision between men and social relations, which belongs to the second kind of collision in Hegel’s theory. In this chapter, the collision regarding kinship, right of inherence and differences of birth have been further discussed. Those three main collisions grounded in social relations lead to collisions of substance only to the extent that they induce individuals who are gripped and dominated by the exclusive power to turn against what is justified and fall into a conflict of a pro founder kind.Chapter Three concentrates on the collision between man and his own act, which belongs to the third kind of collisions according to Hegel and sets the protagonist Brick as the focus of analysis. In this play, the collision between Brick and his family members forms the connecting point for further oppositions, that is, the spiritual collision within Brick himself. The real nature of this collision is the antagonism between Brick’s intentional and unintentional act and later consciousness of what the act really is. He ends with the lost of his intimate friend Skipper and a bigger liar in front of the family about Maggie’s pregnancy. The ideal friendship is destroyed by Skipper’s death, and his disgust with mendacity is ironically stopped by his compromise to Maggie at last.The thesis ends with a conclusion that tragedy is caused by collisions, among which the collision between man and his own act serves as the fundamental reasons. The comprehensive studies on the causes for tragedy will not only help us better understand the play, but also contribute to a comparatively new approach to study modern drama.