Understanding Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and Williams’ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’
Song of Myself
Whitman’s grand poem is, in its way, an American epic. Beginning in medias res—in the middle of the poet’s life—it loosely follows a quest pattern. “Missing me one place, search another,” he tells his reader, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” In its catalogues of American life and its constant search for the boundaries of the self, “Song of Myself” has much in common with classical epic.
While “Song of Myself” is crammed with significant detail, there are three key episodes that must be examined. The first of these is found in the sixth section of the poem. A child asks the narrator, “What is the grass?” and the narrator is forced to explore his own use of symbolism and his inability to break things down to essential principles. The bunches of grass in the child’s hands become a symbol of regeneration in nature.
The lavish eroticism of this section reinforces this idea: sexual contact allows two people to become one yet not one—it offers a moment of transcendence. As the female spectator introduced in the beginning of the section fades away, and Whitman’s voice takes over, the eroticism becomes homoeroticism.
Having worked through some of the conditions of perception and creation, Whitman arrives, in the third key episode, at a moment where speech becomes necessary. In the twenty-fifth section, he notes that “Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, / It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically.”
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Plot Overview
Brick is taking a shower in the bedroom he shares with his wife, Maggie. While undressing, Maggie complains that his brother Gooper and wife Mae have been having their monstrous children perform for Big Daddy, incessantly reminding him of their own childlessness. Now that Daddy is dying of cancer, Mae and Gooper are trying to cut them out of the estate. The doctors have lied to Daddy and Mama, claiming that Daddy only suffers from a spastic colon, but tonight the truth will be revealed.
Manliness and Homosexuality
Like many of Williams’s works, “Cat” concerns itself with the elaboration of a certain fantasy of broken manliness, in this case, a manliness left crippled by the homosexual desire it must keep in abeyance.
The Lie
As Brick pronounces to Big Daddy, mendacity is the system in which men live. Mendacity here refers to the mores that keep what Williams dubs the “inadmissible thing” that is repressed at all costs.
The cat on a hot tin roof refers to a particular fantasy of femininity and feminine desire. The play’s primary cat is Maggie, a typically hysterical, dissatisfied Williams heroine who prostrates herself before Brick. Maggie’s loneliness has made her a “cat,” hard, anxious, and bitter.
The Father and Son
In “Cat,” the father and son appear in a decidedly narcissistic relation. Daddy’s narcissistic love for Brick is clear. As Williams notes, Brick bears the charmingly masculine indifference Daddy must have had in his youth. As Mama will note at the close of the play, Daddy wants above all that Brick provide him a grandson who is as much like his son as Brick is like himself.
The Children
Against the beautiful, childless couple, the image of the family, and the mother in particular, will appear hilariously grotesque. Mae and Gooper have spawned a litter of “no-necked monsters” fit for the county fair; Mae, the cotton carnival queen besmirched by proxy, is a “monster of fertility”; and the sounds of the screeching children continually invade the scene. This side of the family will continually stage burlesques of familial love and devotion, such as Daddy’s birthday party.