Suddenly, Last Summer

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 The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment.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.

In 1958, when Suddenly Last Summer was first staged, its 46-year-old author had already established a reputation as one of America’s leading playwrights. Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams (1911-1983) launched his Broadway career in 1944 with the domestic drama The Glass Menagerie, a massive hit, which he followed up with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), widely considered one of the finest plays of the 20th century. Suddenly Last Summer was less well received, owing partly to its controversial subject matter (pedophilia and cannibalism, as well as relationships between men in an age when gay identity was stigmatized). Since then, however, critical consensus has granted it a place among Williams’s masterpieces. Like the two earlier plays, it draws some of its themes and characters from Williams’s early life, specifically in its portrait of Catharine Holly, the emotionally troubled heroine whose aunt threatens her with a lobotomy. Her character is modeled partly on Rose Williams, Tennessee’s older sister, who was lobotomized and ended her life in a mental institution.

In 1918, when Tennessee was seven years old, his parents moved the family from the rural town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to St. Louis, Missouri. His intelligent but withdrawn sister, who was 11, did not adjust well to the new surroundings and began to show signs of deep depression. Throughout her teens and twenties, her behavior became increasingly erratic, and in 1937 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. By this time, Rose’s once-close relationship with her brother had deteriorated, and he paid few visits to her. Deeply involved in his fledgling writing career, Tennessee was also beginning to explore his orientation as a gay man and had partially cut ties with his socially conservative parents. In 1943, his mother authorized a controversial new surgery, a prefrontal lobotomy, on Rose, and the effects were disastrous. A lobotomy involves severing the brain’s prefrontal cortex to make patients more docile. In doing so, it also robs the patient of much of their personality, emotional range, and cognitive function. Starting in the mid-1930s, the timeframe of Suddenly Last Summer, tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the United States, most of them (about 60%) on women. As in Rose’s case, sexual behavior was sometimes a factor in prescribing the surgery, especially in the American South and other conservative communities, where the operation became a means of insulating families from scandal. The lobotomy has since fallen into disrepute.

Tennessee Williams never forgave his mother for ordering Rose’s lobotomy, which was performed without his knowledge. A few years later, he wrote to a friend: “The great psychological trauma of my life was my sister’s tragedy, who had the same precarious balance of nerves that I have to live with, and who found it too much and escaped” (Jacob, Susannah. “Blow Out Your Candles: An Elegy for Rose Williams.” The Paris Review, 5 Dec. 2013). The Glass Menagerie debuted about a year after Rose’s lobotomy, and the doomed, fragile Laura Wingfield, around whom the play centers, bears a close likeness to Rose. Blanche DuBois, the troubled heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire who is sent to a psychiatric hospital at the end of the play, also draws from Rose’s tragic story, as do some of Tennessee’s other plays and early short stories. The author’s lifelong guilt over not protecting his sister also features in some of his works, particularly Suddenly Last Summer; the predatory Sebastian Venable has been interpreted as a veiled mea culpa from its author, whose budding social life took him far from his sister just when she was struggling the most (Falocco, Joe. “Gardens of Desire: Toward a Unified Vision of Garden District.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, no. 7, 2005, pp. 63-69). In the play, Sebastian’s sexual behavior leads directly to his cousin Catharine’s abuse at the hands of her family and the mental health establishment, and a lobotomy is proposed for her. As in the real-life South, a lobotomy becomes a tool to protect a family’s reputation.