Setting: Big Daddy’s plantation in the Mississippi Delta, 1950s → conservative south
Climax: Brick confesses that he hung up on Skipper when Skipper confessed his love to him.
Antagonist: Gooper and Mae
Tennessee Williams context:
- His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother was prone to hysterical fits. → highly
autobiographical play
- Written in New York in 1955
- Williams himself a victim of the patriarchal excesses since his childhood
- The strained relationship between his parents due to his father’s alcoholism and
violent fits of rage — which led his mother to constantly search for elsewhere where
she could belong — was his first exposure to the culture of toxic masculinity
Historical context:
- 1950s, deep south of the US
- Tension between white and black inhabitants pre- Civil War (early beginnings of Civil
Rights movement)
- Male-dominated society
- Mccarthyism → homosexuality seen as “un-american” → criminalized homosexuality
- Big Daddy=American dream
- Women enter workforce=change social relationships/stereotypical expectation →
battle of the sexes
Form:
● Genre: realist play → incorporating aspects of real life (gender roles, perpetuating
stereotypical relationships
● Family drama/tragedy: Tragedy: the characters seem like they are suffering from
some yet unknown terrible event
● Southern gothic: ‘grotesque’ literature that responds to the less attractive aspects of
the South.
- conscious use decaying architecture to symbolise advanced deterioration Southern
way of life not entirely at one with evocative ruins of European writers
- thematic preoccupation with death and insanity
● equally an American modernist, informed by a sensitivity that recalls the period of
the Romantics
- His work aspired to an honesty about sex and sexuality that challenged the hypocrisy
of the age and opened up some possibilities for a new, more tolerant, vision of human
relationships.
Climax: Brick confesses that he hung up on Skipper when Skipper confessed his love to him.
Antagonist: Gooper and Mae
Tennessee Williams context:
- His father was a heavy drinker, and his mother was prone to hysterical fits. → highly
autobiographical play
- Written in New York in 1955
- Williams himself a victim of the patriarchal excesses since his childhood
- The strained relationship between his parents due to his father’s alcoholism and
violent fits of rage — which led his mother to constantly search for elsewhere where
she could belong — was his first exposure to the culture of toxic masculinity
Historical context:
- 1950s, deep south of the US
- Tension between white and black inhabitants pre- Civil War (early beginnings of Civil
Rights movement)
- Male-dominated society
- Mccarthyism → homosexuality seen as “un-american” → criminalized homosexuality
- Big Daddy=American dream
- Women enter workforce=change social relationships/stereotypical expectation →
battle of the sexes
Form:
● Genre: realist play → incorporating aspects of real life (gender roles, perpetuating
stereotypical relationships
● Family drama/tragedy: Tragedy: the characters seem like they are suffering from
some yet unknown terrible event
● Southern gothic: ‘grotesque’ literature that responds to the less attractive aspects of
the South.
- conscious use decaying architecture to symbolise advanced deterioration Southern
way of life not entirely at one with evocative ruins of European writers
- thematic preoccupation with death and insanity
● equally an American modernist, informed by a sensitivity that recalls the period of
the Romantics
- His work aspired to an honesty about sex and sexuality that challenged the hypocrisy
of the age and opened up some possibilities for a new, more tolerant, vision of human
relationships.
