Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant.”

Maggie addresses her and Brick’s marital problems—specifically, the silence surrounding Brick’s relationship with Skipper. However, this quote speaks to all the characters’ preferred method of dealing with problems—by avoiding and concealing them. Many characters prefer silence because their secrets are considered “unacceptable,” like death or attraction to members of the same sex. Additionally, the use of the word “malignant” echoes Big Daddy’s cancer and later assertion that his spastic colon originates from the lies surrounding his life—suggesting silence does cause illness.

“Hell, do they ever know it? Nobody says, ‘You’re dying.’ You have to fool them. They have to fool themselves. […]

Because human beings dream of life everlasting, that’s the reason! But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.”

Maggie explains to Brick that lies are necessary because humans are unable to face their impending death. This is the first of many instances in which death is referred to as something which must be avoided being spoken about at all costs.

“He hasn’t turned gentleman farmer, he’s still a Mississippi redneck, as much of a redneck as he must have been when he was just overseer here on the old Jack Straw and Peter Ochello place. But he got hold of it an’ built it into th’ biggest an’ finest plantation in the Delta.”

In this quote, Maggie describes Big Daddy. She admires him because, unlike many other characters, he doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not. Likewise, she harbors genuine affection for Big Daddy, something that other characters feign to advance their own agendas.

“You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it. You’ve got to be old with money because to be old without it is just too awful, you’ve got to be one or the other, either young or with money, you can’t be old and without it.

—That’s the truth, Brick.”

Unlike Brick, who grew up privileged, Maggie was raised in a poor family with a father who struggled with alcoholism. She has since moved up in the world, marrying into money. However, she sees the life she built slipping away, and is determined to hold on like a cat on a hot tin roof.

“This time I’m going to finish what I have to say to you. Skipper and I made love, if love you could call it, because it made both of us feel a little bit closer to you.”

Maggie is determined to make Brick talk about Skipper. The quote suggests it is a subject she has tried to broach before, and is tired of his avoidance. Her insistence that she and Skipper slept together out of a desire to feel closer to Brick indicates his indifference predates Skipper’s death. Perhaps because of his fear of losing his masculinity, Brick pushes away those who care about him.

“It was one of those beautiful, ideal things they tell about in the Greek legends, it couldn’t be anything else, you being you, and that’s what made it so sad, that’s what made it so awful, because it was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly.”

This description of Brick and Skipper’s connection reaffirms the complex relationship between reality and illusion in the play. Maggie suggests their love was so real that it became fantasy, due to Brick’s inability to accept love from those closest to him. Real love could never survive in a society built on deception.

“One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true!—I had friendship with Skipper.—You are naming it dirty!”

Whenever Skipper comes up in conversation, Brick immediately and vehemently defends his heterosexuality. However, the two characters who press Brick about Skipper—Maggie and Big Daddy—do so without judgment. Brick, with his internalized anti-gay bias, is the one vilifying his relationship with Skipper.

“—In this way, I destroyed him, by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told?”

Maggie suggests she played a role in Skipper’s death by forcing him to face his sexuality. She voiced something that society insists on hiding, and this destroyed him. Her mention of Brick’s world suggests he is suffering from a similar secret.

“Because I used to jump them, and people like to do what they used to do, even after they’ve stopped being able to do it.”

Brick explains to a niece why he was jumping hurdles on a high school track. In his youth, he was a star athlete, secure in his identity and place in society. However, his college injury and loss of Skipper caused doubt, so he tries to reclaim certainty by revisiting his past. Brick’s broken ankle thus symbolizes the impossibility of living in the past.

“I been through the laboratory from A to Z. I’ve had the goddam exploratory operation, and nothing is wrong with me but a spastic colon—made spastic, I guess, by disgust! By all the goddam lies and liars that I have had to put up with, and all the goddam hypocrisy that I lived with all these forty years that we been livin’ together!”

In this quote, Big Daddy tells Big Mama that he will no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of their marriage. He argues disgust with this hypocrisy has caused his illness, an ironic statement considering his family’s collective lie. Big Mama, who genuinely loves Big Daddy, is hurt by his accusation. He is so accustomed to putting on appearances that he cannot recognize her authenticity.

“[The] human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!—Which it never can be.”

Big Daddy addresses the human tendency to avoid fear of death and cling tightly to life with endless purchases. However, he has learned that money cannot buy life. He understands the inevitability of death, but willfully believes the lie about his spastic colon and ignores the suspicious pain in his stomach.

“Well, sir, ever so often you say to me, Brick, I want to have a talk with you, but when we talk, it never materializes. Nothing is said. You sit in a chair and gas about this and that and I look like I listen. I try to look like I listen, but I don’t listen, not much. Communication is—awful hard between people an’—somehow between you and me, it just don’t—.”

In this quote, Brick addresses the characters’ collective struggle to communicate. He admits communication is difficult in general, but suggests it is particularly challenging for him and his father in their shared detachment. While some characters make an effort to speak truth, Brick himself abandons conversations in favor of drinking in silence or singing to himself.

“Ignorance—of mortality—is a comfort. A man don’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death, that knows what it is. The others go without knowing which is the way that anything living should go, go without knowing, without any knowledge of it, and yet a pig squeals, but a man sometimes, he can keep a tight mouth about it.”

Big Daddy continues to discuss his newfound awareness of mortality. Here, he confirms Maggie’s claim that people can only face death by fooling themselves (Important Quote #3). He suggests lies are necessary to live with the painful realities of life, such as death.

“I’m going to pick me a choice one, I don’t care how much she costs, I’ll smother her in—minks! Ha ha! I’ll strip her naked and smother her in minks and choke her with diamonds! Ha ha! I’ll strip her naked and choke her with diamonds and smother her with minks and hump her from hell to breakfast. Ha aha ha ha ha!”

As Big Daddy attempts to bond with Brick, he reveals he plans to leave Big Mama for someone more attractive. This quote illustrates his violent objectification of women with words like “smother” and “choke,” and continued reliance on wealth to buy happiness. His renewed commitment to earthly pleasures like sex suggests he is clinging to life harder than ever after his brush with death.

“What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don’t you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a goddam book on it and still not cover the subject anywhere near enough!!—Think of all the lies I got to put up with!—Pretenses! Ain’t that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you don’t think or feel or have any idea of? Having for instance to act like I care for Big Mama!”

After Brick reveals he drinks out of disgust for the mendacity in the world, Big Daddy shares his own experiences with lying for the sake of conformity. He has long feigned love for Big Mama and Gooper, as mendacity is inescapable. To him, a man must learn to live with it, not try to escape it as Brick does with liquor.

“Don’t let’s—leave it like this, like them other talks we’ve had, we’ve always—talked around things, we’ve—just talked around things for some rotten reason, I don’t know what, it’s always like something was left not spoken, something avoided because neither of us was honest enough with the—other.”

For all his faults, Big Daddy makes a genuine effort to understand Brick—perhaps due to their similarity. He recognizes the miscommunication in their relationship and wants to correct it, unlike his callous dismissal of Big Mama and Gooper.

“Big Daddy, you shock me, Big Daddy, you, you-shock me! Talkin’ so— [He turns away from his father.] —casually!—about a—thing like that…—Don’t you know how people feel about things like that? How, how disgusted they are by things like that?”

As Big Daddy questions Brick’s relationship with Skipper, Brick again becomes defensive due to internalized anti-gay bias. Big Daddy is relatively open-minded, seeming to have no problem with the possibility that his son loved his best friend. However, again, Brick is the one attacking himself and his relationship with Skipper.

“Y’know, I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left out because she and me never got any closer together than two people just get in bed, which is not much closer than two cats on a—fence humping.”

Here, Brick suggests Maggie was always jealous of his and Skipper’s closeness. He never felt a deep connection with his wife, suggesting Maggie’s determination to stay in a loveless marriage has been an ongoing struggle of her own creation—which, again, could be Brick’s way of avoiding his own accountability.

“Anyhow now!—we have tracked down the lie with which you’re disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you’d face truth with him!”

In a key moment, Brick reveals Skipper confessed his love in a drunken phone call. Brick hung up, and they never spoke again. When Big Daddy learns this, he finally understands why his son drinks. Because of his fear of nonconformity, Brick rejected Skipper instead of accepting him, making him complicit in mendacity.

“In some ways I’m no better than the others, in some ways worse because I’m less alive. Maybe it’s being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful—I don’t know but—anyway— we’ve been friends…

—And being friends is telling each other the truth.”

In retaliation for being forced to face his role in Skipper’s death, Brick reveals Big Daddy’s cancer. Still, he apologizes to his father, suggesting he cannot lie because he is less alive than other people. This supports Brick and Big Daddy’s belief that mendacity is an unavoidable part of life, with the only escape possibly being death.

“That’s what lots of them do, they think if they don’t admit they’re having the pain they can sort of escape the fact of it.”

In Act III, Big Daddy’s cancer is finally revealed to Big Mama, and Dr. Baugh leaves a package of morphine injections before he goes home. Dr. Baugh’s experience with patients being unwilling to admit pain is another example of people’s tendency to obscure reality rather than face truth.

“Brick, I used to think that you were stronger than me and I didn’t want to be overpowered by you. But now, since you’ve taken to liquor—you know what?—I guess it’s bad, but now I’m stronger than you and I can love you more truly!”

When Brick and Maggie are finally alone, she takes control of their relationship. She confiscates his liquor and demands he sleep with her. Throughout the play, her devotion and determination to ensure their future do not waver. To achieve her goal, Maggie has accepted Brick’s weakness and embraced her strength.

“And so tonight we’re going to make the lie true, and when that’s done, I’ll bring the liquor back here and we’ll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into.”

Throughout the play, characters have used lies to distort truth. Maggie uses a feigned pregnancy to hopefully create a new truth. The conception of a baby as Big Daddy is dying represents a new chapter for the Pollitt family. However, as any baby born will be from deception, the family’s dysfunction will likely continue.