48 pages • 1 hour read
Tennessee WilliamsSuddenly, Last Summer
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Greek Myth
Content Warning: Suddenly Last Summer features brief descriptions of murder, mutilation, and cannibalism. An unseen character is also implied to be both gay and a pedophile, playing into stereotypes about gay men. The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment. The guide also references suicide.
Suddenly Last Summer uses allusions to Greek myths, including those of Orpheus and Pentheus, to reinforce the dreamlike, metaphorical dimensions of the play and the life and death of its protagonist, Sebastian. Sebastian’s poetic vocation and his strong attachment to his mother, who dropped out of his life shortly before his violent death, mirror the mythical Greek musician and poet Orpheus, a beautiful youth known for songs that seduced men and women alike. After the sudden death of his wife, Eurydice, whom he was forced to leave behind in the underworld, the grieving poet spurned the advances of the Maenads, a pack of women devoted to Dionysus, the god of wine; in a fury, these women tore him limb from limb. Likewise, Sebastian’s mother Violet, who describes her son and herself as an inseparable “couple,” was abandoned by him after her stroke; later that summer, Sebastian failed to fight off a mob of wild boys whom he had victimized, leading to his mutilation and death at their hands.
The Maenads also feature macabrely in the myth of Pentheus, a young king who was torn to pieces by the followers of Dionysus in the exact same manner as Orpheus. In Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae, this happens shortly after Pentheus has ordered his men to arrest the Maenads and to bind their god in chains—just as Sebastian tried to have the boys at Cabeza de Lobo beaten and restrained by waiters. Moreover, Pentheus dies trying to defy his mother, who has joined the Maenads, just as Sebastian perishes as a result of rebelling against his mother’s controlling presence. Sebastian’s death, according to his cousin, was also a fatalistic self-sacrifice to a “cruel god” whose brutal demands were obliquely sexual in nature. With these mythic allusions to bloody retribution in the name of a sexually voracious god, Suddenly Last Summer invokes the turbulence of erotic desire and transgression and the ties between religion, sexuality, masochism, and sacrifice.
Saints and Hagiography
Sebastian, who dies violently at a beach (La Playa San Sebastian) named for his name-saint, is partly modeled on the Christian martyr St. Sebastian. Artistic depictions of St. Sebastian, which have made him a popular gay icon, typically portray him as a beautiful, passive-looking youth pierced by multiple arrows and gazing heavenward in supplication. In Suddenly Last Summer, Sebastian and his cousin, Catharine Holly, embody subversive conceptions of sainthood—conceptions that diverge but that also both demonstrate rebelliousness and self-sacrifice, which Williams posits as traditional saintly qualities. For instance, Sebastian’s defiance of social norms and his brutal self-immolation to his own notion of God mirror both the courage and the fatalism of his namesake’s depictions in art. However, he also parodies his namesake, embodying a dark, mostly negative version of sainthood: His rebellion victimizes others (the impoverished boys he preys on), and his self-sacrifice is nihilistic. Through Sebastian, Williams hints that the intensity, ruthlessness, and self-sacrifice of storybook saints might be seen as mental illness or monstrosity in the modern world. Their hagiographies, too, may be no more reliable than Violet’s expurgated “legend” of her sanctified son.
Catharine Holly embodies the generous, angelic opposite of her cousin’s demonic sainthood. Catherine, who tries to coax Sebastian out of his loneliness and writer’s block and fights to rescue him from his attackers, resembles St. Irene, who nursed St. Sebastian back to health after his “first martyrdom.” Her name, however, connects her with the (several) St. Catherines, particularly St. Catherine of Alexandria, whom the Romans threatened with torture and death by means of a spiked wheel before beheading her. Catherine Holly’s dozens of needle punctures from St. Mary’s evoke her namesake’s spiked wheel, while the brain surgery with which her aunt hopes to silence her—a lobotomy—seems a modern equivalent of decapitation. Both Catharine and Sebastian, like their saintly namesakes, have rebelled against their families, society, the religious establishment, and the state, defying threats of torture and death to follow their truths. However, Catharine has “used” no one but has instead given generously of herself to those in need. The Catholic saint she most resembles is St. Mary Magdalene, traditionally (though without evidence) imagined to be a “fallen woman” who became a companion of Jesus Christ and who bore witness to his death and resurrection. Through its subversive dichotomy of “saints,” Suddenly Last Summer shows the different uses of self-sacrifice, courage, and carnal love, suggesting that sexuality, as practiced by the benevolent Catherine, can be as pure and holy as any sacrament.
Predators and Carnivores
In her private garden, Violet shows Dr. Cukrowicz a Venus flytrap, the first of the play’s many images of predatory, devouring beings. The wild garden seems Violet’s natural habitat (as befits her name), and throughout the play, she and her son are thematically linked with wild creatures that violently consume: lions, wolves, foxes, and birds of prey. Suddenly Last Summer uses these images of predation and consumption to allegorize the characters’ use and abuse of their fellow humans—particularly those weaker than themselves. As wealthy, self-styled “aristocrats,” Violet and Sebastian prey cynically on the powerless and marginalized; Sebastian on the homeless boys of Cabeza de Lobo (“wolf’s head”), whom he uses sexually, and Violet on her penniless niece Catharine, whom she tries to have lobotomized at Lion’s View Hospital to silence her. Like Violet’s garden, whose seeming wilderness has actually been carefully “designed,” their rapacity is calculated and coldblooded, and this includes their exploitation of each other and themselves.
Violet describes her niece Catharine as an ingrate who wants her “blood,” but it is she who resembles a vampire in her insatiable domination of her grown son, whom she exploits for decades to make herself feel young, artistic, and fashionable. (Notably, she looks “almost young” when she fondles her son’s book of poems in the first scene.) Sebastian in turn uses his mother as a “procurer” who provides entrance to high society and its lavish “menu” of attractive youths. When she can no longer perform this function, he coldly discards her in favor of his sexually attractive cousin Catharine, who can still attract young men. Eventually, Sebastian, who has long been haunted by his prophetic vision of birds devouring sea turtles at the Galápagos, sacrifices his aging body to the murderous hunger of the birdlike boys he has exploited. The predatory Sebastian has seen the face of “God” in the cyclic consumption of all life: For him, those who can no longer use must be used in turn.
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