Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” was written by Tennessee Williams who was one of the few talented homosexuals acknowledged in the America of the first half of the XX century.
The personal experience of the famous playwright (which is accessible to us thanks to his memoirs and recollections of his friends) is very interesting and quite untypical: he never concealed anything about his life and passions, nor did he feel embarrassed speaking about his love life. Not so with Tennessee Williams’s characters, namely Brick: the main hidden conflict which basically determines the action in the play is homosexualism. Being unable to admit his homosexuality, Brick suffers because he himself does not understand his own feelings and emotions. And of course he would not stand the “dirty” broad hints of the members of his family concerning his friendship with Skipper.
It should be mentioned that Tennessee Williams’s own homosexuality pervades his creative work, though it practically always has the form of a hint. In his plays, he managed to let people know: homo- and bisexuals do exist, and this is the reality to be acknowledged and admitted by the society. Interesting is the fact that the writer managed to do it so accurately and softly that he himself has become, perhaps, the first gay in America whose success was officially recognised.
We shall leave apart such obvious things about Brick as his reluctance to sleep with his wife, his coldness to her (he confesses to Maggie that he “cannot stand” her) and his complete lack of interest in the financial matters of his family. All these can easily be attributed to his melancholy, alcoholism, or simple satiety of the family life itself. Brick denies passionately any hints to his homosexuality – but psychologists have long ago noticed that if a person attacks some event, idea or view too furiously, there is something behind this anger, and this “something” is often an attempt to conceal own propensities. We shall therefore try to penetrate deeper, into the unsaid but still implied by Brick – and Williams together with him.
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