The Male Homosocial Desire In Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams is a unique figure in the history of American literature. His plays are always controversial for its abundance of issues like violence, promiscuity, homosexuality, bibulosity. Regarded as the summit of Tennessee Williams' works, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won the Pulitzer Award as well as the critics' concern. The research works on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof both at home and abroad mainly focus on its homosexual implication, the psychoanalysis of the main characters, and the comparison of the two versions of act III. Tennessee's identity as a homosexual, and a writer who often wrote about gay men makes it not surprisingly at all that homosexuality and homoeroticism have been a subject of much critical inquiry in the analysis of his plays. Along with the publication of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the concept of 'homosocial' begins to be applied in the criticism of literary works involving male intimacy. The present thesis studies Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Sedgwick's theory of male homosocial desire, which serves as a supplement to the previous study that mainly concentrates on the biological aspect of male intimacy.The first part of the thesis makes a general introduction of the life experience of Williams which left a clear vestige in most of his works and the traits of his drama. In Chapter One, Sedgwick's theory which is of utmost importance in this thesis is introduced. First, Eve Sedgwick defines "homosocial desire," a term borrowed from the social sciences, as a continuum along which one may describe the social bonds among either men or women. Sedgwick notes, the maintenance of a patriarchy is dependent upon heterosexuality; it is not, however, dependent upon heterosexism. The second concept is the erotic triangle, both patriarchy and heterosexuality are based in what Gayle Rubin calls "the traffic in women." From this viewpoint, women are seen as exchangeable property for the cementing of bonds between the men who "possess" them. All this leads to Sedgwick's central idea in Between Men: that heterosexual relations are strategies of homosocial desire. That is, heterosexual relations exist to create, ultimately, bonds between men; such bonds, she furthers, are not detrimental to a concept of masculinity but actually definitive of it. Sedgwick identifies the strategies of homosocial desire as "erotic triangles," relationships in which there is rivalry between two active members for the attentions and affections of a "beloved" third.In the third part of Chapter One, the root of homosocial desire is analyzed with Freud's theory. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Freud's Oedipal triangle is established at an early stage of life when a child attempts to situate itself with respect to a powerful father and a beloved, subservient mother. The last part of Chapter One makes a general analysis of Williams' gay plays, in which not only open gay characters but also those masculine heterosexual characters like Stanley Kowalsky in A Streetcar Named Desire also embrace male intimacy under the disguise of homosocial bond. Chapter Two explores the male homosocial desire on the plantation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof through the analysis of such a surrounding as the bed-sitting room of the play, and the words and behaviour of Big Daddy and Brick, etc. In Chapter Three, the essence and root of male homosocial desire in this play is the main concentration. Under a patrilineal surrounding like the southern plantation, homosocial desire even open homosexuality is harmless to the masculinity of the white male for the origin of the plantation is a homosexual couple. And the question of inheritance focuses on whether the heir belongs to the same kind as the present patriarch instead of whether he is straight or not as long as he produces descendants through heterosexual intercourse. Chapter Four studies women, mainly Maggie the cat in the erotic triangle. Maggie's loneliness lies in her near-total exclusion from the bond between her husband and Skipper. Maggie resents the fact that her husband can share an emotional bond with his male friend at a higher level of intimacy and intensity than the one he shares with his wife. However, even if she manages to get Brick into bed, her status as the medium in the erotic triangle still remains the same. According to the studies above, the thesis concludes that male homosocial desire is a universal phenomenon in patriarchal society. Williams as a gay writer depicts such a bond in a more subtle way than his description of those fragile homosexual characters. Women in such an erotic triangle always find themselves in an embarrassing status, for sexism exerts its influence to a larger extent than heterosexism in a male-dominated world. \...