Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Restoring Tennessee Williams’s Production of the 1950s Primal Scene

Abstract

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Restoring Tennessee Williams’s Production of the 1950s Primal Scene” explores the productive exchanges between the domains of drama and psychoanalysis by removing the “primal scene” from its embeddedness within psychoanalytic theory and resituating it within a contemporary drama, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the playwright put the primal scene to the work of countering the dramaturgy of the Cold War state. Pease specifically resituates Freud’s theorization of the primal scene in the Wolf Man case within the dramatic context of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to restore what Pease calls the primal scene of 1950s masculinity constructions.