Abstract
Tennessee Williams’ 1958 play (and subsequent film) Suddenly Last Summer resonates strongly with many of the themes and plot details of Euripides' Bacchae. Much of the action in both plays turns on the consequences of a perverse sexuality born of repression (manifested among other ways as a disturbing sexual connection between mother and son). Other shared themes include the son's search for a god he sees as a Destroyer, the irresistible pull of eros, the consequences of the psychological fragmentation of an individual, the struggle between those who seek to reveal truth and those who are determined to conceal it, and the participation of a mother in the destruction of her own child. Each male protagonist is pursued, ripped apart, and consumed by the members of a community he sexually infiltrated. The truth about each sparagmos (rending) and omophagia (raw-eating) is uncovered in similar scenes between “psychotherapist” and amnesia victim. But while the truth brings destruction to each murdered man's mother, only in Suddenly Last Summer is anyone saved by the awful revelation.
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References
“Suddenly Last Summer, with Something Unspoken, were presented together under the collective title of Garden District at the York Theatre on First Avenue in New York on January 7, 1958, by John C. Wilson and Warner LeRoy. It was directed by Herbert Machiz; the stage set was designed by Robert Soule and the costumes by Stanley Simmons. Lighting was by Lee Watson and the incidental music was by Ned Rorem” (The Theater of T. W., Vol. 3, 345). See Maurice Yacowar's Tennessee Williams and Film, ser. Ungar Film Library (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 50, for some similarities linking the two plays.
Bernard F. Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston Twayne, 1983), 114.
As is true of much of Williams' writing, many of the play's details are taken from his own life experience: the unnecessary lobotomy of a troubled girl, the overbearing mother, the absent father, the Southern Gothic environs and mystique, the anonymous and predatory homosexual encounters of the male protagonist, even the desperately needed European getaway. In an interview conducted in 1975 (and first published ten years later), Williams cites Suddenly Last Summer as “the first work that reflected the emotional trauma, that of my life, very deeply” (“Tennessee Williams” by Charles Ruas as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams, Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin, ed. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986], 284–295; quotation at 287). Debusscher (“Creative rewriting: European and American influences on the dramas of Tennessee Williams” in: M. C. Roudané, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ser. Cambridge Companions to Literature [Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 167–188; at 178) points out similarities between Hart Crane, Williams himself, and the fictional Sebastian.
Williams took four years of Latin in high school and studied classical literature in at least two of the three universities he attended (Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Iowa). I am preparing a separate study of the influence of classical literature and culture in general on the writing of Tennessee Williams.
This is Gilbert Debusscher's [above, n. 4] (“, 180) explanation for the correspondence between Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. The explanation seems equally appropriate here. Williams undoubtedly read the Bacchae, like The Seagull, in translation. His transcript from Washington University in St. Louis reveals two failed attempts to learn Attic Greek: he earned a D grade in Greek I in Fall 1937 and an F when he retook the course the following spring (telephone conversation with the university registrar, March 8, 2004). The recent 2004 discovery by Professor Henry Schvey of Williams' 1937 examination blue book (in a New Orleans bookstore) confirms both Williams' poor performance on his Greek exam and, apparently, his despair at flunking it: included in its pages is a 17-line poem entitled “Blue Song.” See http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normla/5005.html.
Quotation from a letter to Herbert Machiz dated 25 November 1958 as cited by Brian Parker (“A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958),” Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998], 303–326; quotation at 321).
Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2001), 159. In addition to this most recent study by Lower and Palmer (see 153–159 and 165–167), other critical comparisons of the play Suddenly Last Summer with the film Suddenly, Last Summer include: Yacowar, Tennessee Williams and Film (above, n. 2), ser. Ungar Film Library (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 49–59; Gene D. Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams (Philadelphia Art Alliance Press, 1980), 173–196; and Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n. 3), Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston; Twayne, 1983), 113–119.
Both Williams (in James Grauerholz, “Orpheus Holds His Own: William Burroughs Talks With Tennessee Williams” as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4],, 299–307; quotation at 304) and Vidal (in Robert J. Stanton and Gore Vidal, eds., Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal [Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1980], 132 and in Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. [New York: Harper and Row, 1987], 117) claim that Williams had no part in writing the screenplay, despite the film credit to the contrary. But Brian Parker's (above, n. 7) research into primary documents leads him to conclude that “[Williams] did collaborate with his friend Vidal till quite late in the process, and most of the ingredients added can be traced to Williams's own discarded play drafts” (321).
Interview with Gore Vidal in the video documentary Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage, dir. Merrill Brockway (Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995).
Bernard F. Dick (The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal. [New York: Random House, 1974]) 92. Dick (Joseph L. Mankiewicz [above, n. 3], Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 119), again refers to Violet's “Olympian lift” in his 1983 book-length study of the film's director.
Gene D. Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams (above, n. 8), (, 195.
In this important way, Violet's ability to manipulate others falls short of her divine model. In Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), Helene P. Foley argues that, “The god [Dionysus], unlike the tragic hero, never confuses representation with reality; instead he controls reality through representation” (243).
Judith J. Thompson, Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies 54 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 100.
Roger Boxhill (Tennessee Williams, ser. Macmillan Modern Dramatists [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987]) notes that the name Cabeza de Lobo (Wolf's Head) “puns on the surgical procedure in question” (126), Catharine's lobotomy. Also see Kevin Ohi, “Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and the Scene of Analysis in Suddenly, Last Summer,” Cinema Journal 38:3 (Spring 1999), 27–49; at 49 n. 16.
Similarly, in 1970 Williams claimed that he planned to bequeath the bulk of his fortune to endow the “Rose Isabelle Williams Foundation for creative writers” (Tom Buckley, “Tennessee Williams Survives,” as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4],, 161–183; quotation at 177).
Maurice Yacowar, Tennessee Williams and Film (above, n. 2),, 54.
For the similarities between Suddenly Last Summer's “Violet and Sebastian” and Twelfth Night's “Viola and Sebastian,” see mary Lynn Johnson, “Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, Scene One,” Explicator 21 (April 1963), item 66 and Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n. 3) Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston; Twayne, 1983), 115.
This equivalence between a poet's life and work is a perversion of Williams' own view: “A writer's work … is his escape from his life—at least mine is” (Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams [above n. 8] (Philadelphia.: Art Alliance Press, 1980), 175).
Biographer Donald Spoto notes that the “Dionysian, demoniac … persistence” (words of Clark Mills, a college friend of Williams) Williams brought to his writing was “soon matched by wildly promiscuous sex … [and] drug addiction” (The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams [Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1985], 49). In a 1971 interview, Williams explained how even the mock-poet Sebastian's artistic paralysis that final summer symbolized the kind of failure that he himself feared (and to a great degree experienced in the 1960's, his self-proclaimed ‘Stoned Age’): “Sebatian? He is completely enslaved by his baser nature and this is what destroys him. His death is a ritualistic death, symbolic. And when he fails, when he is unable to write his poem that summer, then he is completely lost” (“Meeting with Tennessee Williams” by Jeanne Fayard, as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4] Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin ed. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986], 208–212; quotation at 210).
On this observation also see Parker, “A Tentative Stemma of Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above, n. 7), Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998], the entry marked “A.2.a” on page 307.
“In 1973 Mankiewicz described Suddenly Last Summer as 'a badly constructed play based on the most elementary Freudian psychology and one anecdote [the final horror story],’ ” (Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz [New York: Scribner's Sons, 1978], 293). Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n 3) Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston: Twayne, 1983), points out how Sebastian “plays the devoted son to his doting mother but uses their blatantly Oedipal relationship as a means of attracting his own kind” (114).
See Athena Coronis, Tennessee Williams and Greek Culture With Special Emphasis on Euripides (Athens, Kalends, 1994), 75–94 for similarities between Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides' Hippolytus, another play with “Oedipal” conflicts. Ruby Cohn (Dialogue in American Drama [Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1971] posits that Williams' 1945 one-act play Autoda-fé is the “seed” of Suddenly Last Summer because of the similar “intense mother-son involvement” (115–116).
Eros is “the strongest Greek noun for sexual desire” (Esposito ad. Ba. 813 [above, n. 1]) (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998).
This line, written by Vidal, was featured in trailers for the film. But Williams thought Taylor was terribly miscast as Catharine: “But it stretched my credulity to believe that such a ‘hip’ doll as our Liz wouldn't know at once in the film that she was ‘being used for something evil.’ I think that Liz would have dragged Sebastian home by his ears, and so saved them both from considerable embrrassment that summer” (“Five Fiery Ladies,” Life Magazine [February 3, 1961], 86–88; quotation at 88). Also see Williams', 1970 interview with Don Lee Keith, “New Tennessee Williams Rises From ‘Stoned Age,’” as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams (above, n. 4) Literary Conversations Series, Albert, J. Devlin, ed., [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986], 147–160, esp. 154.
Bernard F. Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n. 3) Twayne's Filmmaker Series (Boston.; Twayne, 1983), 115 In the play, however, it is the doctor (SLS 350) and Sebastian (SLS 414) who both wear all white.
This line does not appear in the published version of the play. But in an alternative draft, possibly one seen by screenwriter Vidal, the doctor himself identifies his scientific experiments in lobotomy as a “search for God.” Williams later edited this line out, possibly to eliminate any possibility of comparison between the doctor and Sebastian. For a discussion of this important revision, see Rita M. Colanzi's short note (“Tennessee Williams's Revision of Suddenly Last Summer,” Journal of Modern Literature 16∶4 [Spring 1990], 651–52) and Parker's more substantial 1998 study, “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above n 7) Modern Drama 41∶2 [Summer 1998].
“The important word theo-machos appears three times in the Bacchae and nowhere else in Greek tragedy. Resisting the gods always ends disastrously” (Esposito ad Ba. 45 [above, n. 1] (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998).
George Devereux, “The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 90 (1970), 35–48. For subsequent psychoanalytic studies of Euripides' Bacchae, see William Merritt Sale, “The Psychoanalysis of Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides,” Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972), 63–82; Charles Segal, “Pentheus and Hippolytus on the Couch and on the Grid: Psychoanalytic and Structuralist Readings of Greek Tragedy,” Classical World 72.3 (1978), 129–148; and Judith Hubback, “Tearing to Pieces: Pentheus, the Bacchae and analytical psychology,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 35 (1990), 3–18. Michael Parsons broadens the discussion in “Self-Knowledge Refused and Accepted: A psychoanalytical perspective on the ‘Bacchae’ and the ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, “Journal of Analytical Psychology, 35 (1990), 19–40.
In both play and film Catharine receives an injection before the session. In the film, after administering the “truth serum,” the doctor admits that “there is no such thing”.
George Devereux, “The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae” (above, n. 29), 37.
Dementia praecox—a now-antiquated synonym for paranoid schizophrenia—was also the diagnosis that led to the debilitating lobotomy of Tennessee Williams' sister, Rose (Tennessee Williams, Memoirs [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975], 121), Characters in two earlier (1938) Williams plays also suffer from dementia, praecox: Sailor Jack in Not About Nightingales (Tennessee williams: Plays 1937–1955 [New York: The Library of America, 2000], 97–188; 117) and Hertha in Spring Storm (ibid., Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 [New York: The Library of America, 2000], 1–95; 72). Remarkably, in “The Psychoanalysis of Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides” (above, n. 29) Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972), 63–82. Sale diagnoses Pentheus as exhibiting “all the signs of dementia praecox: the crumbling away of the personality and its defenses through a violent assault of libidinal feeling in the face of a situation, a temptation with which the individual simply cannot cope” (71).
E. R. Dodds, ed. Euripides, Bacchae (2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960) ad Ba. 1264–7. Devereux, “The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae” (above. n. 29) Journal of Hellenic Studies 90 (1970) 35, argues that this scene is “the first surviving account of an insight-and-recall oriented, psychotherapy” and credits “Cadmus' flawless psychotherapeutic strategy.” Valdis Leiniecks disagrees, calling Cadmus' interaction with Agave simply a very good example of the use of persuasion, a “verbal cure” (The City of Dionysos: A Study of Euripides Bakchai., Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 88 [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1996], 121–122).
“What he fears is allowing the Bacchae to triumph over him; that would be the ultimate mockery” (Esposito, ad ba. 842 [above n. 1]) (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998).
See Helene P. Foley, Ritual Irony (above, n. 13), 243–244.
E.g., Bernd Seidensticker, “Sacrificial Ritual in the Bacchae” in: Arktouros: Hellenic Studies presented to Bernard M.W. Knox on the occasion of his 65th birthday, ed. Glen W. Bowersock, et al. (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 181–90.
This range of possible translations is presented by Esposito (above, n. 1) (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998), ad Ba. 934.
Here I have not followed Esposito, who translates the Greek as “most terrifying.”
For the connection between interrupted dialogue and the fragmentation of a character's psyche in Williams' work, see Thomas Adler (“The Dialogue of Incompletion: Language in Tennessee Williams's Later Plays” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 [Feb. 1975], 48–58), David Savran (Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], 133–135), and Ruby Cohn (“Tennessee Williams: the last two decades” in: The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4], 232–243; at 236–238).
Judith J. Thompson, (Tennessee Williams' Plays: Memory Myth, and Symbol [above, n. 14] (, 118–119) suggests the Attis-Cybele cult as the classical model for Suddenly Last Summer. Her conclusions expand the earlier research presented in doctoral dissertations by Leonard Quirino (The Darkest Celebrations of Tennessee Williams, DAI, 25, no. 08, Brown University, 1964: 4706) and Constance Mary Drake (Six Plays by Tennessee Williams: Myth in the Modern World, DAI, 32, no. 01A, Ohio State University, 1970: 0426). But as even Thompson concedes, Sebastian's “ultimate ‘sacrifice’ is neither voluntary nor regenerative” (118). Some aspects of the Attis-Cybele cult seem present here only because of its conflation with Dionysian cults in antiquity (they are even linked in Ba. 79).
For this view see Foster Hirsch, A Portrait of the Artist: The Plays of Tennessee Williams, Literary Criticism Series (Port Washington: Kennika, 1979), 57; John Clum, “The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth” in: The Cambridge Companion to Tennesse Williams (above, n. 4), European and American influences on the dramas of Tennessee Williams” in: M. C. Roudané, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tenneessee Williams, ser. Cambridge Companions to Literature [Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 128–146; at 128; Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams (above, n. 8), The Films, of Tennessee Williams (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1980), 180; and Andrew Sofer, “Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Performance and the Body in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer,” Modern Drama 38 (1995), 336–347, esp. 341–346. For the equally flawed argument that Sebastian chooses to atone through violent suffering, see Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1961), 254; Francis Donahue, The Dramatic World of Tennessee Williams (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964) 186; and Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers (above n. 20) The Life of Tennessee Williams [Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1985], 123.
“Does [Pentheus] see the truth of the situation? We do not know but it seems improbable” (G. S. Kirk, The Bacchae of Euripides: A Translation with Commentary, Prentice-Hall Greek Drama Series, [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970], 117).
Williams indulges in this conceit again in his 1972 film-play entitled “One Arm” (Stopped Rocking and Other Screenplays [New York: New Directions 1984], 193–291): “Those johns are hungry, they're ravenous for you” (210), a character explains to the protagonist a young male street hustler. Williams' earlier draft of this film-play, written in 1948 as a short story of the same name (One Arm and Other Stories [New York: New Directions, 1948], 7–29), does not include this line. Curiously, however, the idea does appear in a private correspondence with Donald Windham, dated to the same year (April, 10, 1948):” … [Frankie] says that Florence is full of blue-eyed blonds that are very tender-hearted and ‘not at all mercenary’. We were both getting an appetite for blonds as the Roman gentry are all sort of dusky types. It sounds good to me” (Donald Windham, ed., Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham: 1940–1965 [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977], letter #108, quotation at 215).
In his poem “Miss Puma, Miss Who?” (1973), Williams compares a real predator of the jungle to Suddenly Last Summer's Sebastian: “She was a continual menace, a silk hand in the iron glove, and though she fucked what she could, there was no discussion of love. She fucked and would eat what she fucked, à la Sebastian, you known, but thus far had met no come-uppance, no running up street quid pro quo” (Antaeus 11 [Autumn 1973], 23). In the end, Miss Puma's permanent absence brings social stability. When questioned, Miss Monkey—the last to see Miss Puma alive—relieves her fellows of conducting an investigation by denying that the predator ever existed at all: “… Miss Who?”
The cinematic rendering of Sebastian's flight and death has been compared to that of Frankenstein's monster in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935) (video documentary, The Celluloid Closet, prod. Columbia/Tristar Studios, dir. Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, 1997). But an even more similar pursuit scene appears in the science-fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). In Body Snatchers, an alien-possessed mob chases the protagonists up a hill as they run for their lives. The similarly named site of each pursuit (the town of Santa Mira in Body Snatchers and a sea-side café named Bar Miramar in SLS) suggests purposeful homage. Despite plot-level differences, the mob in each film seeks to neutralize a threat to its social integrity. Both films end with a psychiatrist at a state mental hospital considering the poosible truth of an outrageous tale told by a patient originally deemed to be psychotic.
Cf. this stage direction from Williams' 1951 play The Rose Tattoo (The Theatre, of T. W., Vol. 2, 257–415): “[Suddently the women swarm down the steps like a cloud of attacking birds, all crying out in Sicilian. Estelle crouches and bows her head defensively before their savage assault]” (Acta 1, scene 3; 291). Later in the same play (Act 1, scene 4; 296), Williams uses bird imagery in stage directions to illustrate non-violent swarming too: “[The Sicilian women, now all chattering at once like a cloud of birds, sweep about her as she approaches].” In contrast, the predatory bird imagery that appears in Williams' 1950 novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (New York: New Directions, 1950) is individualized (e.g., “her frightened and aging face had the look of an embattled hawk peering from the edge of a cliff in a storm,” 11).
E. R. Dodds (The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 25 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951]) observes that “the carriage of the head in Dionysian ecstasy” is “repeatedly stressed in the Bacchae … But the gesture is not simply a convention of Greek poetry and art; at all times and everywhere it characterizes this particular type of religious hysteria” (273–74).
It is also tempting to interpret this scene as a typical Williamsian parody of the “pan de vida,” or Eucharist. For the argument that Sebastian's end is a perverted form of Christian communion, see Esther Merle Jackson (The Broken World of Tennessee Williams [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965]), 158; Clum, “The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female etc.” (above. n. 41), in: The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ser. Cambridge Companions to Literature [Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 128. and Boxhill, Tennessee Williams (above, n. 15) ser. Macmillan Modern Dramatists [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987], 130. But see Parker, “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above, n. 7) “Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998], 304 and 314, for a discussion of Catholic themes and symbols that Williams considered but ultimately deleted from this play.
Parker, l. c. “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)”, cites an excerpt from a Williams interview with David Lewin (“Desperation: An Interview with Tennessee Williams”, New York Telegram and Sun, 20 August 1960): “I got the idea from a tour of Europe. I saw so many Sebastians there, and then one night at a restaurant near the beach I saw the scene with the hungry children. They were kept from where people were eating by a barbed wire fence and they thrust their thin arms through and they, cried for bread” (n. A.2.f, 309).
See E. R. Dodds, (above, n. 33), ad Ba. 59 for an overview of musical instruments used in Dionysian ritual.
Sexually-suggestive references to Pan also appear in a romantic comedy Williams co-authored with Donald Windham, You Touched Me! (Binghamton, N.Y.: Vall-Ballou Press, 1942), 15 and 37–38.
For the challenges inherent in adapting Williams' musical and aural stage directions to a production of the play see J. Michael Walton, “Style and Music in Suddenly Last Summer”, Studies in Theatre Production 1 (1990), 5–21.
A typical Williamsian fusion of setting and scene, atmosphere and emotion (cf. Spring Storm; above, n. 31) Devereux, “The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides' Bacchae” (above, n. 29) Journal of Hellenic Studies 90 (1970), 37.
Cf. Ovid, Met. 3.715–716: “The whole crowd, furious, rushes against the one boy [ruit omnis in unum/turba furens]; from all sides they gather and chase him, terrified [cunctae coeunt trepidumque sequuntur]”.
Bernard Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, note 3), claims that Sebastian is “torn apart in a Dionysian homophagia (sic) or flesh-eating ceremony by the boys whom he had corrupted and who have now turned into perverse communicants” (114). I am grateful to an anonymous IJCT reader for bringing to my attention Dick's article “Lord of the Flies and the Bacchae” (Classical World 57:4 [1964], 145–6), in which he compares the details of the boys' attacks on the pig/Simon with the maenads' gruesome treatment of the cattle/Pentheus. Cf. Dick's William Golding (Boston: Twayne) 1987, 6–29. Also see Mark Roncace, “The Bacchae and Lord of the Flies: A Few Observations with the help of E.R. Dodds,” Classical and Modern Literature 18.1 (Fall 1997), 37–51.
Violet's description is an almost verbatim recitation of a passage in Melville's “The Encantadas or The Enchanted Isles” in: The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Random House, 1949), 49–54.
The theme of cannibalism runs through this scene, too, for Melville (above, n. 56) “, 53, explains that these turtles were once men: “[Most mariners] earnestly believe that all wicked seaofficers, more especially commodores and captains, are at death (and, in some cases, before death) transformed into tortoises; thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities, sole solitary lords of Asphaltum.”
Brian Parker, “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above, n. 7) Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998], comments on marginalia found in a copy of the play's original production notes, in the handwriting of Hortense Alden (who played Violet Venable in the play's debut): “Perhaps the most interesting of Miss Alden's acting notes is “ORGASM” in large caps beside her account of the Encantadas” (n. B.5.a.iv, page 319).
“Kopfabschneiden=Kastrieren” [“to decapitate=to castrate”] (Sigmund Freud, “Das Medusenhaupt,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. Imago 25 [1940], 105; reprinted in: Freud, Gesammelte Werke 17 [London: Imago Publishing Co., 1941], 47; the English translation, “Medusa's Head,” by James Strachey, may be found in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 [London: Hogarth, 1955], 273–74). For Agave's decapitation of Pentheus as symbolic castration see Sale, “The Psychoanalysis of Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides” (above, n. 29), Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972), 78; Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 205; and Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (tr. Boleslaw Taborski and Edward Czerwinski) (New York: Random House, 1973), 189.
“We [modern writers] show both the light and the shadow, and the shadow is the violence which we live threatened by” (Tennessee Williams, from “Interview with Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, and Dilys Powell” moderated by Edward R. Murrow and originally broadcast on “Small World”, CBS-TV, New York, 8 May 1960; appears here as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4] Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin, ed. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986], 69–77; quotation at 77).
Yacowar, Tennessee Williams and Film (above, n. 2), 51.
See Brian Parker, “Tennessee Williams and the Legends of St. Sebastian,” University of Toronto Quarterly 69. 3 (Summer 2000), 634–659, for the influence of the written and iconographic tradition of St. Sebastian's martyrdom on Williams' plays and poems. For mostly undated fragments of drafts and revisions showing Williams' shifting interest in using the lore of St. Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, see Parker, “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above, n. 7) Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998], specifically notes A.1.d.ii (307), B.1.b.i (310), B.2.b.ii and B.2.b.iv (312), and B.4.f (317).
“[Art Director Oliver Messel] is one who seemingly understands the gothic aspects of Williams' dark-Darwin South even more than the author and Scott Slimon's set decoration, especially in Sebastian's room, is extraordinary: the room itself, with its masks, drawings and paraphernalia of a corrupted Dorian, seems to embody the character of the doomed poet” (Albert Johnson, Suddenly Last Summer,” Film Quarterly 133 [Spring 1960], 40–42; quotation at 42).
Ruby Cohn, Dialogue in American Drama (above, n. 23) [ unnecessarily questions this assumption: “Granted that Catherine is telling what she thinks to be the truth, how can she know that Sebastian was eaten?… We have only Catherine's word for it, and she did not see that grisly meal” (117).
See Judith J. Thompson, Tennessee William's Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol (above, n. 14), 113. However, in a 1966 interview with Walter Wager (“Tennessee Williams” as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams [above, n. 4], 124–133), Williams claimed, “I looked into may be a book or two of Freud but I never read any of it” (129).
See Annette J. Sadik's “The (Un)Represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williams's ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’ and Suddenly Last Summer,” Modern Drama 41:3 (Fall 1998), 347–354, esp. 352–53 for a discussion of Sebastian's victimization by his mother and the consequences of mental and physical fragmentation. In his Memoirs (above, n. 32) [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975], 219, Williams recalls asking (at the moment of his incarceration in a psychiatric facility), “Why do women bring children into the world and then destroy them?” Upon reflection, he adds: “I still consider this a rather good question.” It is all the more surprising, then, to find that Williams, a homosexual who would die childless, expressed interest at one time in fathering a child via artificial insemination (Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988], 442).
Rather than seeing Violet as a failed dea ex machina, Judith J. Thompson, Tennessee William's Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol (above, n. 14) suggests, “Dr. Cukrowicz assumes at the end of the play the structural function of the classical deus ex machina” (100).
Violet has much in common with other Williams heroines who seek to escape a painful (generally sexual) truth: the lonely young girl in Glass Menagerie (The Theater of T. W., Vol. 1, 123–238), the whore of The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (ibid. The Theater of T. W., Vol. 6, 81–89), the spinster in Portrait of a Madonna (ibid. The Theater of T. W., Vol. 6, 109–127), the rape victim of A Streetcar Named Desire (ibid. The Theater of T. W., Vol. 1, 239–419). W. David Sievers (Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama [Hermitage House: New York, 1955]), offers a conclusion concerning Blanche that is equally true of Violet, and almost true of Catharine: “Blanche is no less a tragic figure than Antigone or Medea—whether she is literally destroyed or whether it is only her mind seems but a technicality. It is a tragic experience in the theater to participate in the disintegration of a personality” (380).
Gilbert Debusscher's (“Creative rewriting: European and American influences on the drama of Tennessee Williams” [above, n. 4], 177 description of Williams' sister Rose's bilateral prefrontal lobotomy.
Benjamin Nelson, Tennessee Williams: The Man and His Work (above, n. 41) (, 221, and paraphrased by Phillips, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n. 8) Critical Essays with an Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2001), 180.
For the putative connection between Catharine and her namesake saint and the issue of her own sacrifice, see Sofer, “Self-Consuming Artifacts etc.” (above, n. 41) The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth” in: The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, 344, Thompson, Tennessee William's Plays: Memory, Myth and Symbol (above, n. 14) University of Kansas Humanistic Studies 54 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 120–124, and Kenneth Tynan's review of the original stage production of Suddenly Last Summer (The Observer: Sept 2, 1958). Catharine is a rare addition to the Williams oeuvre not simply because she is “a normal human being” (Signi Falk, Tennessee Williams, Twayne's United States Authors Series 10 [New Haven: College and University Press, 1961, and New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961], 151), but also because she finds a way to overcome the kind of adversity that crushes others.
Alma (in Summer and Smoke, in: The Theater of T. W., Vol. 2, 113–256) and Serafina (in The Rose Tattoo, ibid. The Theater of T. W., Vol. 2, 257–415) are two other Williams heroines ultimately set free by Truth.
In the play, this line is delivered by Dr. Cukrowicz (SLS 423), but in the film a slightly altered line is assigned to Dr. Hockstader: “There's every possibility that the girl's story is true.” Theater critic Elizabeth Hardwick (“Disgust and Disenchantment: New British and American Plays,” Partisan Review 25. 2 [Spring 1958], 282–284) however, remained unconvinced: “The revelation had to do with the son's flesh being eaten by starving young urchins. The white doctor decides not to drill a hole in the girl's head and turns to tell us, the audience, that her story may be true. At this point we in the audience can only shout back at the playwright, “Lies, lies, lies!’” (283).
Falk, Tennessee Williams (above, n. 71), 151; Tom F. Driver, “Accelerando,” The Christian Century 75 (January 29, 1958), 136–137, quotation at 136; and Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 315, respectively. Dick, The Apostate Angel (above, n. 11), A Critical Study of Gore Vidal [New York: Ramdom House, 1974], 144, cites Vidal's opinion of Tyler: “‘I used to read his criticism and howl.’”
Charles Ruas, “Tennessee Williams” (above, n. 4), 287, Brian Parker, “A Tentative Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Suddenly Last Summer (1958)” (above, n. 7), Modern Drama 41:2 [Summer 1998] notes the existence of “three typed pages of an (unpublished) introduction to the two plays [Something Unspoken and Suddenly Last Summer together comprising The Garden District], titled A Personal Message to You (“to God” having been deleted) and signed and dated ‘Tennessee Williams/November, 1957’” (n. B.4.b.i, page 316).
“Desire and the Black Masseur,” an early Williams short story that also features cannibalism, is often misunderstood as having the same theme as Suddenly Last Summer. For example. I find the conclusion of John Clum, “The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female etc.” (above, n. 41) 135 concerning these two Williams works applicable only to Suddenly Last Summer: “Like the mad extremes of Euripides' Bacchae, these works offer a Dionysian vision of human experience.…” Unlike Suddenly Last Summer or The Bacchae, “Desire” tells the story of perfectly fulfilled reciprocal needs: one man's search for vengeance, another's desire for punishment. For further discussion, see Parker, “Tennessee Williams and the Legends of St. Sebastian” (above, n. 62) University of Toronto Quarterly 69. 3 (Summer 2000), 634–659.
In Williams' 1975 novel, Moise and the World of Reason (New York: Simon and Schuster) the title character articulates this fear from an artist's point of view: “I've heard of or read of recluse persons confined with pets who devoured the recluse when the recluse no longer provided for them with anything but his own flesh, living or dead. That end to my existence would be such a scandal that it would obliterate all memory of my work” (176).
Man-eating monsters of classical myth include the Sphinx, the Sirens, the Stymphalian Birds, Cacus, the Minotaur, the Sow of Crommyon, the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the Mares of Diomedes, and Sciron's Turtle. The relatively rare human man-eaters are always victims of deception (the mythical Tereus, Clymenus, Thyestes and even Herodotus' Harpagus). Their meals are always cooked and served by someone with a personal motive of revenge.
Robert Gross (“Consuming Hart: Sublimity and Gay Poetics in Suddenly Last Summer,” Theatre Journal 47:2 [May 1995], 229–251, esp. 238) fails to account for the importance of omophagia in the ritual when he suggests divine Osiris—like Dionysus, dismembered, killed, and then resurrected, but unlike Dionysus, not ingested—as the mythic victim to whom Sebastian is most closely paralleled.
In addition to Agave and her sisters, the Minyads at Orchomenus and the daughters of Proetus at Argos are all forced into a similar situation.
The God of the Hebrew Bible also threatens the horror of familial cannibalism as punishment for disobedience: “… you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you” (Deut. 28:53, New Revised Standard Version).
Video documentary, Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage (above, n. 10), dir. Merrill Brockway (Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995).
Don Ross, “Williams on a Hot Tin Roof” (1958), as reprinted in: Conversations with Tennessee Williams (above, n. 4) Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin, ed [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1986], 50–53; quotation at 52.
Cecil Brown, “Interview with Tennessee Williams” (1978), appears here as reprinted in Conversations with Tennessee Williams (above, n. 4) Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin, ed. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986], 251–283; quotation at 264.
Bernard F. Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (above, n. 3) 114.
Henry Hart, Films in Review 3 (Jan 1960), 39–41; quotation at 41.
Gene D. Phillips, The Films of Tennessee Williams (above, n. 8) (, 187.
James Grauerholz, “Orpheus Holds His Own” (above, n. 9), 304. See Phillips. The Films of Tennessee Williams (above, n. 8) (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1980), 189, and Yacowar, Tennessee Williams and Film (above, n. 2) ser. Ungar Film Library (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), 49, for further discussion.
Nancy Tischler, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (New York: Citadel Press, 1965), 257.
Brown, “Interview with Tennessee Williams” (above, n. 84) (1978), Conversations with Tennessee Williams, Literary Conversations Series, Albert J. Devlin, ed. [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986, 274.
Charles Ruas “Tennessee Williams” (above, n. 4) 287.
James Grauerholz, “Orpheus Holds His Own” (above, n. 9) in: 304.
Video documentary, Tennessee Williams, Orpheus of the American Stage (above, n. 10) dir. Merrill Brockway (Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 1995). Cf. Howard Clurman's similar apologia: “Williams, it seems, has been made morbidly conscious of the horror and violence of certain of his plays. Has it not occurred to those who find fault with him on this score that some of the greatest literature—Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Dostoevsky, etc.—has been far more violent? There is no reason why the blackest violence, cruelty, disease and dismay should not be the subject of drama. What is important, in this area as with other subjects, is the content and ultimate significance of the violence” (“Theater,” The Nation 86 [January 25, 1958], 87–88; quotation at. 87).
Tennessee Williams, Foreword to Sweet Bird of Youth, in: The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 4 (New York: New Directions, 1972), 7.
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This essay developed from presentations at the 2003 meeting of the American Philological Association (New Orleans) and the 2003 Centennial Meeting of the Classical Association of Great Britain and Ireland (Warwick, UK). I have benefited greatly from the insightful comments of Diana Wright, J. Michael Walton, Wolfgang Haase, and the anonymous readers for the International Journal of the Classical Tradition.—A summary of this essay entitled “The Classical Side of Tennessee Williams: Euripides' Bacchae as Model for Suddenly Last Summer” was published in Theatron 2.2 (Spring 2004, 18–20), a semi-annual theatre journal published out of Washington University.
Translations of Euripides' Bacchae are from The Bacchae of Euripides, ser. Focus Classical Library, Stephen J. Esposito, ed. (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998).
Quotations from Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer are from the 1958 edition published in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 3 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 345–423. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Tennessee Williams' plays are from the same series, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, 7 vols. (New York: New Directions, 1971–1981). Lines that appear in the film but not in the published play are so noted.
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Siegel, J. Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer and Euripides’ Bacchae . Int class trad 11, 538–570 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-005-0018-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-005-0018-z