Consuming Hart: Sublimity and Gay Poetics in "Suddenly Last Summer"

Abstract

Of all Tennessee Williams's plays, few appear more straightforward in performance than Suddenly Last Summer.' This illusion of dramaturgical forthrightness stems, in large part, from the fact that the play is easily identified as an example of Gothic melodrama. Its very setting-an exotic, tropical garden within a Victorian Gothic mansion (9), looking like a well-groomed jungle (11)-establishes the familiar Gothic dialectics of overrefinement and wildness, fastidious artifice and dangerous nature that are common to the genre. The garden serves as the setting for a Gothic tale, as we are led to ask what did happen to Sebastian Venable in Cabeza de Lobo? and are rewarded with an exotic and sensational answer. The story is revealed to us through a familiar Gothic opposition-the rich, ruthless Violet Venable and her poor, victimized niece, Catharine Holly. Yet Suddenly Last Summer may well be Williams's most deceptive play, for underneath its neat surface oppositions and familiar Gothic conventions, it is as dense and difficult to interpret as any of his more overtly experimental works of the late 1960s and 1970s. For Suddenly Last Summer is not only this dramatist's most extensive exploration of the aesthetics of the Sublime, but also his recasting of Edmund Burke's concept of the Sublime, with all its heterosexual male assumptions, within a gay subjectivity. To accomplish this recasting, Williams superimposes two plot triangles, each manifesting a different treatment of the Sublime. In the first triangle, the play dramatizes the struggle of Violet and Catharine over Sebastian's posthumous reputation. This struggle comes to focus on Dr. Cucrowicz, who is put in the position to judge Catharine's account of Sebastian's last summer and death. In the second triangle, the play narrates as exposition the rivalry of Violet Venable and Catharine Holly for the role of travel companion to Sebastian Venable.