Cat and Eros

Cat on the Hot Tin Roof and Eros the Bittersweet went very well together. I think Tennessee Williams play was a great example of love/desire as bittersweet. For Maggie she was married to someone that she truly thought was beautiful and was able to improve her social status through this marriage. However, she eventually had to face the realization that the person she loved did not love her back and did not want to be with her. This arrangement was both beneficial and pleasurable to her but also was depressing and hard to deal with at times. Cat also emphasizes the point that desire is the act of wanting and often once you have it you don’t want it any more. I think this was true of Brick towards Maggie and also Maggie towards Skipper. Once they had the object of their desires they no longer wanted those things.

Cat along with many of the other stories we have red such as Maurice and the Symposium expressed the idea that true connection was or could only be between two men. The Symposium spoke of how only relationships between two men could be “heavenly” and that women could never have this connection. Clearly in Cat the true connection that Brick felt was with Skipper and not with Maggie. This same idea was true of Brick and his relationship with his parents. He felt more connected or closer to Big Daddy, his father, and not his mother.