Suddenly, Last Summer

“DOCTOR. It’s like a well-groomed jungle…

MRS. VENABLE. That’s how he meant it to be, nothing was accidental, everything was planned and designed in Sebastian’s life and his […] work!”

Violet’s use of the passive tense (“everything was planned”) connotes that not all of the planning was Sebastian’s—i.e., that she herself may have wielded significant control over his life and work. This begins to establish the dichotomy of Art Versus Life; while Sebastian attempted to craft both carefully, life eventually proved wilder and more chaotic than art could capture. His gory death, evoked by the savage garden, was thus Sebastian’s final “poem” and entirely his own work—a fact that still angers his controlling mother.

“[She lifts a thin gilt-edged volume from the patio table as if elevating the Host before the altar.]”

Violet sees herself as the sole protector of her son’s legacy, which she has preserved under glass (the greenhouse panes). She venerates his hand-pressed volume of poems—to her, the precious sublimation of his essence—as if it were the Host, the wafer of sanctified bread that Catholics believe transmutes into the body of Jesus Christ. This simile foreshadows Sebastian’s ritual-like death by cannibalism, a grotesque parody of the Eucharist.

“MRS. VENABLE. He spent that whole blazing equatorial day in the crow’s nest of the schooner watching that thing on the beach of the Encantadas till it was too dark to see it, and when he came back down the rigging, he said, Well, now I’ve seen him!—and he meant God.”

Violet recalls the turning point in her son’s life, when he and she visited the Galápagos Islands so he could witness the hatching of the islands’ famous sea turtles. Both mother and son were horrified by the bloody spectacle that followed, when thousands of birds of prey tore apart and devoured the baby turtles. However, Sebastian embraced this spectacle of primal nature as a revelation, believing that he had glimpsed the true face of God and (therefore) of life itself. That he witnessed this scene from the “crow’s nest” identifies him as a newly hatched bird of prey.

“MRS. VENABLE. These two pictures were taken twenty years apart. Now which is the older one, Doctor? […] It takes character to refuse to grow old, Doctor—successfully to refuse it.”

Violet’s insatiable appetite for control over appearances extends to aging: She believes that she and her son, through sheer force of will and their loyalty to each other, arrested the flow of time and that only his betrayal of her led to his weakening and death. This passage also alludes to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose predatory antihero shows no signs of aging for 20 years due to an unholy pact.

“MRS. VENABLE. We were a famous couple. People didn’t speak of Sebastian and his mother or Mrs. Venable and her son, they said ‘Sebastian and Violet, Violet and Sebastian are staying at the Lido, they’re at the Ritz in Madrid.’”

Referring to her son and herself as a “couple,” Violet Venable obliviously suggests the incestuous nature of their relationship, developing the theme of The Cost of Sexual Repression. The way in which she alternates their names also depicts mother and son as interchangeable, as if they were one ageless being, hinting at Violet’s desire to subsume Sebastian. Their first names evoke Sebastian and Viola, the twin brother and sister of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who become virtually identical once Viola disguises herself as a man.

“DOCTOR. But there’s also the problem of getting right patients, not just—criminal psychopaths that the state turns over to us for my operation!”

Dr. Cukrowicz, whose specialty (lobotomies) is still in the experimental stage, wants to widen his pool of subjects beyond those who have committed crimes. His motive is (mostly) to test its effectiveness on less violent patients, but he would also like to gentrify lobotomy’s public image by performing it on members of good families (the “right patients”). As such, he feels pressure to lobotomize Catharine Holly for the same selfish reasons as Violet Venable—i.e., to rectify an image problem—as well as for her monetary donations to his hospital.

“MRS. VENABLE. There’s just two things to remember. She’s a destroyer. My son was a creator!—Now if my honesty’s shocked you—pick up your little black bag without the subsidy in it, and run away from this garden!—Nobody’s heard our conversation but you and I, Doctor Sugar.”

To badger the cash-strapped lobotomist into doing her will, Violet dehumanizes the prospective victim as a “destroyer”—as opposed to her son, who belongs to the order of “creators,” near sacred in Violet’s eyes. She conjures an image of Catharine as an iconoclastic vandal, wielding a “sharp tongue” like a “hatchet” against her sainted son’s statue-like image; ironically, Violet herself seeks to drive a literal destroying blade into Catherine’s head in the form of a lobotomy.

“CATHARINE. I loved him, Sister! Why wouldn’t he let me save him? I tried to hold onto his hand but he struck me away and ran, ran, ran in the wrong direction, Sister!”

Catharine—who, like Sebastian, is named after a saint—shows herself to be the only character whose generosity compels her to save others, often at her own expense. First, she tries to save Sebastian from his loneliness and misanthropy by way of love and affection, and then she tries to save his life by leading him downhill to safety. Both times, however, Sebastian rejects salvation because his urge toward predation and self-destruction is too strong.

“CATHARINE. Cousin Sebastian said he was famished for blonds, he was fed up with the dark ones and was famished for blonds. […] Fed up with dark ones, famished for light ones: that’s how he talked about people, as if they were—items on a menu.—‘That one’s delicious-looking, that one is appetizing.’”

In contrast to Catharine, who gives generously of herself to others—whether in the form of love, compassion, or sex—Sebastian consumes and discards people like “items on a menu.” Having witnessed the hungry birds destroy sea turtles, he sees himself as part of a primal, universal dynamic of eat and/or be eaten. Catharine resembles him in her willingness to be used, but she acts out of love and concern for others rather than predatory, self-destructive fatalism.

“CATHARINE. But, Mother, I DIDN’T invent it. I know it’s a hideous story but it’s a true story of our time and the world we live in and what did truly happen to Cousin Sebastian in Cabeza de Lobo…

GEORGE. Oh, then you are going to tell it. Mama, she IS going to tell it! Right to Aunt Vi, and lose us a hundred thousand!”

Catharine argues that Sebastian’s plight was universal, hinting at a human drive to use others, whether for one’s own pleasure and aggrandizement or for expiation. The name of the (fictitious) town where Sebastian was murdered means “wolf’s head,” which suggests the pack of children who killed and cannibalized him as well as the predatory nature of Sebastian himself; it also echoes “lobotomy,” a procedure that cuts (fanglike) into a patient’s head and threatens to destroy Catherine much as her cousin was destroyed. Catherine’s brother George, another “predator,” pressures her to recant her story so that she can be spared this operation and so she and her family can all profit handsomely from Sebastian’s will.

“GEORGE. I found a little Jew tailor on Britannia Street that makes alterations so good you’d never guess that they weren’t cut out for me to begin with!”

The tactless George boasts to his aunt that he has had her dead son’s perfect clothes “cut” for himself, which foreshadows the description of Sebastian’s bodily mutilations. His disdain for the “little Jew tailor” chimes with the marginalized, exploited status of Sebastian’s killers—unhoused children whom Catharine describes as “little” and “dark”—hinting that he may follow the same trajectory as his cousin.

“MRS. VENABLE. This is Dr. Cukrowicz. He says it means ‘sugar’ and we can call him ‘Sugar’ […] He’s a specialist from Lion’s View.”

Dr. Cukrowicz uses the nickname “Dr. Sugar,” the English translation of his Polish name, hinting at his susceptibility to become another morsel for the predatory Violet. The whiteness of sugar (and of Dr. Cukrowicz’s doctor’s garb) also connects him to the white-suited Sebastian, another angelic destroyer whom Violet used and controlled. The name of the hospital where he performs his lobotomies (Lion’s View) continues the motif of predatory carnivores, evoking the Christian martyrs who were fed to lions in Roman times as well as the biblical prophet Daniel, who was saved from the lions by an angel, as Catharine may yet be saved by Dr. Cukrowicz. Equally, Catharine may be the angel who saves Dr. Cukrowicz from the lion (Violet) who seeks to corrupt him.

“MRS. VENABLE. To please my son, whose weakness was being excessively softhearted, I went to the expense and humiliation of giving this girl a debut which was a fiasco. […] She had a sharp tongue that some people mistook for wit. A habit of laughing in the faces of decent people which would infuriate them […] But he, Sebastian, was amused by this girl.”

Catharine’s honesty and her impatience with the hypocrites of high society (such as the married man who seduced her) made her a social pariah in the Garden District, which is partly why Sebastian was drawn to her and chose her to replace his mother on his summer travels. Sebastian, himself wearying of hypocrisy and secretiveness, sought to break free of his mother’s repressive but protective respectability—to expose himself to the harshness of real life. In the socially marginalized, sexually frank Catharine, he found the ideal companion for his last adventure.

“CATHARINE. She had a slight stroke in April. It just affected one side, the left side, of her face...but it was disfiguring, and after that, Sebastian couldn’t use her. […] Yes, we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love, and not being able to use each other is what’s—hate.”

Violet’s stroke, which partially paralyzed the left side of her face, symbolizes the two-faced social hypocrisy that Sebastian recoiled from when he shunned Violet for the honest, open-faced Catharine and the world of nightclubs for the more natural setting of the beach. First, he used Violet for her elegant social connections in the beau monde; then he used Catharine for her youth, tolerance, and earthy sexuality, which facilitated his sexual exploitation of the poor. As Catharine notes, Sebastian was not alone in his willingness to use others. For 40 years, Violet herself used Sebastian to give her life purpose and a youthful glow of sophistication and artistry. Violet’s disfigurement also suggests the two-faced nature of “love” itself, which often hides a selfish, sinister side that Catharine now recognizes.

“CATHARINE. I tried to save him, Doctor. […] Completing!—a sort of!—image!—he had of himself as a sort of!—sacrifice to a!—terrible sort of a—

DOCTOR. —God?

CATHARINE. Yes, a—cruel one, Doctor!”

The saint-like Catharine has her own revelation into her cousin’s self-destruction, which she sees as a propitiatory self-sacrifice to a cruel god. Always fatalistic, the ailing Sebastian ran to meet his destiny rather than live and die in the shadows. Like St. Irene, who drew the arrows from St. Sebastian’s body and nursed him back to health but could not save him from his “second martyrdom” by stoning, the motherly Catharine fails to rescue her cousin from his self-martyrdom at La Playa San Sebastian.

“CATHARINE. I think I got out of the car before he got out of the car, and we walked through the wet grass to the great misty oaks as if somebody was calling us for help there!”

Despite her tortured conviction that “we all use each other,” Catharine herself is distinguished by her overwhelming (if naïve) impulse to help others—not only her cousin but also the man who offered to drive her home from the Mardi Gras ball. When Catharine is cravenly discarded by her married seducer, she impulsively follows him back to the ballroom to expose his hypocrisy at the expense of her own reputation. Her social self-immolation parallels Sebastian’s murder at Cabeza de Lobo.

“CATHARINE. I’ve been stuck so often that if you connected me with a garden hose I’d make a good sprinkler.”

The battery of injections Catharine has undergone at St. Mary’s links her metaphorically with her dead cousin and his martyred namesake St. Sebastian, who was famously pierced with multiple arrows. It also recalls her own namesake, St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was threatened with torture and death by means of a spiked wheel; significantly, Violet, Catharine’s chief tormentor, sits in a wheelchair when confronting her. Eventually, St. Catherine was silenced by decapitation, much as Catharine faces a lobotomy.

“CATHARINE. Yes, something had broken, that string of pearls that old mothers hold their sons by like a—sort of a—sort of—umbilical cord, long—after […] All I know is that suddenly, last summer, he wasn’t young any more [sic], and we went to Cabeza de Lobo, and he suddenly switched from the evenings to the beach.”

Sebastian’s bond with his wealthy mother, which has long sheltered him from the savagery of life, breaks when he leaves her behind and takes Catharine abroad with him instead. Williams leaves it unclear exactly why Sebastian chooses this summer to radically alter his habits, but his mother’s stroke may have made him suddenly aware of his own aging and mortality. As Catharine says, he could no longer “use” his double (his mother); neither could he fully use his own youth, beauty, or creative powers, which seemed suddenly to be ebbing away.

“DOCTOR. Every afternoon last summer your Cousin Sebastian and you went out to this free public beach?

CATHARINE. No, it wasn’t the free one, the free one was right next to it, there was a fence between the free beach and the one that we went to charged a small charge of admission.”

The fence between the private beach and the free public one represents not only the social barriers that divide the haves from the have-nots but also sexual mores: i.e., (relatively) respectable sexual relations with one’s peers versus the risky, scandalous, more exploitative seduction of the poor. It also represents a barrier of self-control within Sebastian that has been breached by The Cost of Sexual Repression.

“CATHARINE. There were naked children along the beach, a band of frightfully thin and dark naked children that looked like a flock of plucked birds, and they would come darting up to the barbed wire fence as if blown there by the wind, the hot white wind from the sea, all crying out, ‘Pan, pan, pan!’”

The dark, birdlike children who augur Sebastian’s death recall the black birds of prey who feasted on the hatchling turtles in the Galápagos. Their cries of “pan” (bread) suggest a savage reenactment of the Eucharist, the Catholic rite that offers the “body” of Jesus Christ to be eaten in the form of bread. Additionally, “pan” evokes the Greek god Pan, a deity known for his lack of inhibition and for his indiscriminate sexual tastes, which mirrors Sebastian’s new incarnation as a seducer of impoverished children.

“CATHARINE. This was the first time that Cousin Sebastian had ever attempted to correct a human situation!—I think perhaps that that was his—fatal error…It was then that the waiters, all eight or ten of them, charged out of the barbed wire wicket gate and beat the little musicians away with clubs and skillets and anything hard that they could snatch from the kitchen!”

The urchins who serenade Sebastian with tin cans and paper bags constitute a sinister parody of the glittering orchestras that once performed for him in posh nightclubs, concert halls, and hotels. They also recall the cacophony of the birds at the Galápagos. Something about them resonates with the usually passive Sebastian, who takes violent action against them, which (perhaps by design) only whips them into a frenzy.

“CATHARINE. The band of naked children pursued us up the steep white street in the sun that was like a great white bone of a giant beast that had caught fire in the sky!”

The description of the sun as a burning “white bone” evokes not only Sebastian’s imminent death but also pagan sacrifices, which often involved the burning of animal bones. In addition, the bone’s phallic connotations hint at Sebastian’s predilection for sex tourism.

“CATHARINE. Torn or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs. There wasn’t a sound any more, there was nothing to see but Sebastian, what was left of him, that looked like a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses that had been torn, thrown, crushed!—against that blazing white wall.”

The feral children’s “fierce little empty black mouths” evoke the mindless, naked hunger of baby birds in a nest, and Sebastian’s white body suggests the soft underbellies of the hatchling turtles. Its whiteness also mirrors the hungry blank pages of his “Blue Jay” notebook—especially the simile of the “white-paper” wrapping that constricts his mangled form. These images of blankness hint at the writer’s block that has eaten away at him, culminating in the final tableau: his dead body crucified against a “blazing white wall” that resembles an empty page.