Suddenly, Last Summer

The play’s second scene features the first appearance of Catharine, the story’s “damsel in distress” and also the play’s moral center. Its subtext centers on her relationship with the medical establishment and organized religion, as represented by the nun Sister Felicity and the Catholic institution that employs her, the mental hospital of St. Mary’s. As in Scene 1, the stage direction calls for stylized effects: “dancelike movements” between Catharine and the nun punctuated by “quick music.” This stylization encourages symbolic reading of the nun’s efforts to snatch Catharine’s cigarette—a phallic symbol—away. The scene evokes the constricting, rules-centered praxis of religious life—especially for women and especially surrounding sexual behavior—which is further accented by the “crackling” sounds of Sister Felicity’s heavily starched habit. The humorless, joyless Felicity (whose name, ironically, means “happiness”) does show Catharine some gentleness, but her impulses of sympathy are limited by the draconian rules of St. Mary’s. This institution, which punishes unorthodox thinkers like Catharine with confinement, privation, and shock therapy, serves as a metaphor for the authoritarian excesses of organized religions in general. Tellingly, it operates hand-in-glove with the ruling class: It is the wealthy Violet rather than medical science or Christian goodwill who tightly manages Catharine’s treatment at St. Mary’s.

If St. Mary’s represents (among other things) sexual repression, Catharine embodies sexual freedom, allowing the play to explore the theme of The Cost of Sexual Repression through this foil pair. This makes the religious iconography that surrounds her more subversive. For example, ordered by Sister Felicity to relinquish her cigarette, Catharine burns the nun’s palm: a parody of stigmata, a “miraculous” injury linked with Christian saints, typically female ones (such as St. Catherine of Siena). Catharine is not the only character associated with sainthood whom traditional Christian dogma would condemn; Sebastian also derives his name from a saint. However, where Sebastian vacillates between sexual repression and predation, Catharine is framed clearly as “good”—a savior, but one who rescues others with love and sexuality. Her last name, Holly, encapsulates this blending of the spiritual and sexual, suggesting both “holy” and the holly plant, a pagan symbol of fertility. Contrary to the traditional Christian view of sex as sinful, Suddenly Last Summer deems sex as neutral; its morality resides in the way it is used, and Catharine uses hers to nurture, not to exploit. This underscores the play’s use of “saints” to distinguish two opposing forms of self-sacrifice. Catharine, the “true” saint, gives freely of herself to help others. By contrast, her cousin’s self-willed death is an act of fatalistic nihilism: the apotheosis of a bleak, predatory vision of life and “God.”

Catharine’s selfless disposition makes her failure to save either the life or soul of her cousin particularly traumatic. Catharine is haunted by how Sebastian pushed her away and ran off in both the literal and figurative “wrong direction,” just as he had earlier rebuffed her offers of love. Sebastian, Catharine tells the nun, customarily referred to other humans as if they were morsels to be consumed, further developing the motif of predation/cannibalism. Then she repeats a quote she has heard: “We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks!” (375). Presumably, some of these blocks are religion, while others are failed quests like Sebastian’s, which took him all the way to the Galápagos in search of “God” and ended in his embrace of violence and fatalism. Through Catharine, Williams suggests that “God” is much closer to home—in the selflessness of people like her. She is the play’s true visionary and “saint,” but she is also a rebel who must defy her family, the state, society, and the religious establishment itself to reveal her truth.