Cat On a Hot Tin Roof - Characters
- Created by: gemmawilton
- Created on: 24-03-18 15:08
View mindmap
- Cat On a Hot Tin Roof - Characters
- Margaret
- The play's cat.
- Maggie's loneliness and Brick's refusal to make her his desire, has made her hard, nervous, and bitchy.
- The woman constantly posing in the mirror, Maggie holds the audiences transfixed.
- The exhilaration of the play lies in the force of the audience's identification with its gorgeous heroine, a woman desperate in her sense of loneliness, who is made all the more beautiful in her envy, longing, and dispossession.
- Brick
- The favorite son and mourned lover.
- Brick embodies an almost archetypal masculinity.
- At the same time, the Brick before us is also an obviously broken man because of his repressed homosexual desire for his dead friend Skipper.
- Big Daddy
- Brick's father.
- Affectionately dubbed by Maggie as an old-fashioned "Mississippi redneck," Daddy is a large, brash, and vulgar plantation millionaire who believes he has returned from the grave.
- Though his coming death has been quickly repressed, in some sense Daddy has confronted its possibility.
- In returning from "death's country," Daddy would force his son to face his own desire.
- Big Mama
- Brick's mother.
- Fat, breathless, sincere, earnest, crude, and bedecked in flashy gems, Mama is a woman embarrassingly dedicated to a man who despises her and in feeble denial of her husband's disgust.
- She considers Brick her "only son"
- Mae
- A mean, agitated "monster of fertility" who schemes with her husband Gooper to secure Big Daddy's estate.
- Mae appears primarily responsible for the burlesques of familial love and devotion that she and the children stage before the grandparents.
- Gooper
- A successful corporate lawyer.
- Gooper is Daddy's eldest and least favored son.
- He deeply resents his parents' love for Brick, viciously relishes in Daddy's illness, and rather ruthlessly plots to secure control of the estate.
- Reverend Tooker
- A tactless, opportunistic, and hypocritical guest at Big Daddy's birthday party.
- As Williams indicates, his role is to embody the lie of conventional morality.
- Note especially in Act III his off-hand anecdote about the colors of his cheap chasuble fading into each other.
- Doctor Baugh
- The sober Baugh is Daddy's physician.
- He delivers Daddy's diagnosis to Big Mama and leaves her with a prescription of morphine.
- The Children
- Mae and Gooper's children.
- They appear here as grotesque, demonic "no- necked monsters" who intermittently interrupt the action on-stage.
- Under Mae's direction, they offer up a burlesque image of familial love and devotion.
- The Servants
- The plantation servants appear throughout the play.
- Note Williams's references to "***** voices." In the birthday scene, they appear laughing at the edges of the stage, functioning to almost ornament the grotesque tableau.
- Margaret
Comments
No comments have yet been made