Homosexual Panic in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Abstract

Brick's behaviour in Tennessee Williams's Cat on at Hot Tin Roof has been understood in a variety of ways by critics. In this article, I argue that he exemplifies “homosexual panic,” as this concept was developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Epistemology of the Closet. Confronted with the possibility that his idealized relationship with his football buddy Skipper may be homosexual, he shuts down sexually altogether. In this respect, he resembles the Victorian bachelor who, according to Sedgwick, took refuge from the double bind of male bonds that were both prescribed and proscribed by retreating into what she calls “sexual anesthesia.” I argue that the character she cites to illustrate this behaviour, Marcher in Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle, bears a significant resemblance to Brick. I suggest that a character in the grip of homosexual panic cannot convincingly be portrayed as escaping from this condition, and that this explains the problems Williams had with the last act of Cat. In his final version of the play, he shows Brick as unchanged after his scene with Big Daddy, a choice that is thematically right but dramatically unsatisfying.