48 pages • 1 hour read
Tennessee WilliamsSuddenly, Last Summer
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Violet Venable
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 The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment.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.
A wealthy widow who presides over a palatial estate in New Orleans’s Garden District, Violet is the main antagonist of Suddenly Last Summer. Domineering, predatory, and callous, she spent decades devoted to her only child, the recently deceased Sebastian Venable, whom she lauds as a prodigy and a poet of genius. After Sebastian’s mysterious death in Spain, she adopts the role of the keeper of his flame, fiercely protecting his “legend” from any and all aspersions against his character—most notably, the story that her niece, Catharine Holly, has told about Sebastian’s death. To this end, she has had Catharine committed to a mental home and now seeks to bribe a young neurosurgeon (Dr. Cukrowicz) to lobotomize Catharine to shut her mouth for good.
Despite her ruthlessness, however, Violet is more pathetic than evil. Her delusions about Sebastian, around whom she structured most of her life, reveal her to be both idealistic and vulnerable. Her treatment of her son as a surrogate lover suggests The Cost of Sexual Repression and a lonely, unhappy marriage; her grandiose claims for Sebastian’s poetic genius and elegance, which she compares to that of “the great Renaissance princes,” are absurd (362). She fails to recognize the way she has tried to live through her son, repressing him and smothering him with her emotional needs, ambitions, and thirst for attention. She has also willfully ignored her son’s orientation, believing him to be perfectly “chaste”; much of her urgency to have Catharine lobotomized is to silence her claims to the contrary. Most of her hatred for Catharine, however, seems due to (unconscious) sexual jealousy dating from the previous summer, when her son spurned her as his traveling companion in favor of his young and beautiful cousin. By destroying Catharine’s mind—and her memories of Sebastian—Violet hopes to dispose of her romantic rival and reclaim her dead son solely for herself. In the end, though she seems to have lost her case, her desperate illusions still have not cracked, making her a tragic figure.
Catharine Holly
The fate of Catharine, the courageous heroine of Suddenly Last Summer, is the central crux of the play. Catharine’s name associates her with St. Catherine, and like a saint, she must defy numerous threats and pressures—familial, societal, monetary, and judicial—to speak her truth to power. For repeating her story of what happened to her cousin Sebastian in Cabeza de Lobo, Catharine has come under attack from all sides: from her rich and powerful aunt, from the psychiatric profession (including the nuns of her mental hospital and the doctors of Lion’s View), and from her own immediate family members, who stand to lose a big inheritance if she does not hold her tongue. Through it all, she clings to her truth, at the risk of great censure and a lobotomy. During her interview with Dr. Cukrowicz, she reveals her longtime hatred of lies and hypocrisy in her story of confronting a lover who turned out to be married, tarnishing her reputation in the eyes of the Garden District society.
Catharine is also the only one of the play’s principals who does not use other people for selfish reasons; rather, she gives generously of her affection, empathy, and sexuality. Even in her moments of greatest peril and in the presence of her enemies, she shows compassion, such as when she defends Miss Foxhill to her aunt. Unlike Violet and Sebastian, Catharine is completely open in her affections and freely expresses her attraction to both Sebastian and Dr. Cukrowicz. One aspect of her saintliness is that she uses her affection to try to “save” others—particularly those she senses to be lonely or wounded. Unfortunately, she could not save her cousin Sebastian, who pulled away from her both emotionally and physically. Though Catharine has been confined to a mental hospital, she shows much greater insight into others, and into herself, than any of the play’s other characters: She knows how and why Violet and Sebastian used each other, and she recognizes how Sebastian tried to use her as well. Nevertheless, she feels no ill will toward him—only horror at his need to sacrifice himself to a “cruel god.” She and Sebastian are both named for martyred saints, but Catharine clearly represents the nobler self-sacrifice: one rooted in truth and love.
Dr. Cukrowicz
A young surgeon at Lion’s View Hospital who specializes in lobotomies, Dr. Cukrowicz has been called to New Orleans’s Garden District to determine whether Catharine’s stories about her late cousin Sebastian and the manner of his death are true. If not, he will “relieve” her of these delusions by way of a lobotomy. In the quasi-courtroom drama that drives the play, Cukrowicz acts as judge, and the fate of the young, vulnerable Catharine hangs on his decision. As the arbiter of Catharine’s mental health, however, the doctor struggles with a conflict of interest; Catherine’s aunt has offered him a hefty bribe in the form of a large donation to his hospital. That he reproaches her for this offer, if only discreetly, suggests he has some integrity. However, he takes it in the spirit of an “innocent” gaffe, knowing better than to alienate a potential benefactor. He is also very frank with her about the risks of this new surgical technique, which he has thus far performed mostly on people convicted of crimes. All the same, he is interested in testing it on patients from respectable families, which might help him sanitize the public image of both his specialty and himself. These multiple appeals to his self-interest raise the stakes of the drama since Catharine seems an ideal guinea pig for his purposes and has no money or position to defend herself with.
The stage direction describes Dr. Cukrowicz as “very handsome,” and he charms those he meets: Within minutes, both Catharine and her aunt show signs of being attracted to him, partly (it is implied) because he resembles Sebastian. Suavely, he asks Violet to address him as “Dr. Sugar,” the English equivalent of his Polish name. However, in a play replete with symbols of predation and cannibalism, a name like “Sugar” evokes the danger of being “consumed”—i.e., used.
In his gentleness with Catharine, Dr. Cukrowicz seems to be sensitive, honest, and sincerely truth-seeking. At the same time, he betrays no strong emotions, such as love, pity, or anger, that might affect his scientific neutrality. Williams’s play is not a romance, and Dr. Cukrowicz’s cautious pronouncement on the credibility of Catharine’s story leaves the final outcome—Catharine’s fate, and the doctor’s feelings for her—ambiguous.
Sebastian Venable
Though never physically present in Suddenly Last Summer, Violet’s late son Sebastian is in a sense its protagonist, serving as the prime mover of the play’s action and the subject of almost every conversation. All the same, he remains a shadowy figure, as the two sources of information about him (Violet and Catharine) not only contradict each other but seem potentially unreliable: Violet Venable appears to be deluded and self-serving, while Catharine has undergone electric shock, insulin shock, and other debilitating therapies. Nevertheless, the two women agree in their depiction of Sebastian as a handsome, cultured, and charismatic—if “shy”—aesthete who saw himself as a poet and visionary. Abstemious, sexually discreet (Catharine suggests that he was gay), and extremely fastidious for most of his life, Sebastian radically changed his habits around the age of 40, when he replaced his surroundings from posh nightclubs and hotels to a public beach and his sexual companions from “beautiful people” of his own social set to impoverished children. According to Catharine, this was because he was getting old, could no longer write, and was seeking to “sacrifice” himself to his own dark conception of God.
It was during this summer that Sebastian finally broke from his mother, Violet, who had always dominated his life. Violet had recently suffered a stroke, which may have triggered his own sense of mortality, as well as a macabre fatalism (Sebastian, whose heart was weakened by rheumatic fever at age 15, did not expect to live into old age.) Early in the play, Violet shares that Sebastian had a moment of revelation in his youth, when he saw the face of “God” in a horrific scene on a Galápagos beach: a mass of hungry birds feeding on newly hatched sea turtles, few of whom survived. This apocalyptic vision of the swift and strong devouring the weak spoke to something deep within him, as Catharine claims that Sebastian proceeded to feed off of others, regarding people as nothing more than “items on a menu” (375). At age 40, with death looming, his attractiveness fading, and his poetic well run dry, Sebastian threw off all restraints and began to “prey” openly and dangerously, ultimately dying at the hands of his birdlike victims. It is his grotesque death by mutilation and cannibalism that drives the action of the play since it is the bone of contention between Catharine and Violet, who would gladly destroy her niece to protect her son’s saintlike “legend.”
Related Titles
By Tennessee Williams
