...In the 1950s, many books were written that conveyed ideas controversial to popular belief. However, of the all the books written, two books stood out more than any others. Catcher in the Rye and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were read more among anyone ranging from teenager to senior. Even though both began arguments, these two both books were mostly popular because of their rebellious influence. Over time, they have shaped and formed today’s society. From the 1950s to the 2010s, Catcher in the Rye and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have spurred both controversial and rebellious altercations. Published by J.D. Salinger on July 16th, 1951, the Catcher in the Rye has been popular among people of all ages and races. Meant to be a controversial novel originally...
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...Gender role analyzation in William's Cat “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” Written by Tennessee Williams deals with several abstract relationships throughout the entire play with buried acts of deception, conflict and conmunication tension. Along with these problems comes sexuality and gender role problems. During the 1950’s, the role of women was decidedly fixed as child-bearers and doggishly loyal trophy wives, while men were prescribed as bread-winners and archetypically masculine in nature. (Müller 28) As such, the relationships and behavior of Williams’ characters follow the patterns described by their gender. As each character works to fulfill the role attributed to their gender, the barrier between them are blurred. The gender conflict between Maggie and Brick is the most import aspect of the play. Maggie and Brick are couples in the play who have two completly different feeling about each other. Maggie says to Brick “You look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool”(Williams 10) The quote presents Brick to be represented to the audience as a man who is self contained, cool, and perfectly masculine. (Class Discussion) He physically embodies a real man. While Maggie see’s herself as a women who is dissatisfied, ignored, and exhausted from sharing her desires. (Fellows 2) In the case of Maggie and Brick, he reminds her they are simply living together and married only by name. She seems to be in constant torture because she cannot experience intimacy (physical or emotional)...
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...Fiction Vs. Reality: Tennessee Williams’s Influences “There is a fine line between a fictionalized autobiography or memoir and autobiographical fiction. In both cases, the author uses tidbits about his or her life. The difference is to what extent” (Houston par. 1).Tennessee Williams was a man who had many stories to share of his experiences and all of the different influences he has had throughout his life. In both Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he bases his characters off of his own mother, sister, and homosexuality. Tennessee Williams grew up with his mother and grandparents being his biggest influences of people to look toward because his father was a traveling businessman and not around much. His...
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...Change in dealing with discrimination regarding homosexuality: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof & All Mothers are Working Mothers Homosexuality refers to sexual attraction that one possesses for the person of his/her same sex. It is a tabooed term in most of the society and is often dealt behind the closed door. The reasons due to which homosexuality is considered a taboo vary from society to society. Sometimes it is the culture of a certain society that discourages homosexuality and sometimes it is the religion that forbids people from adopting same sex relationships. Either ways, this attitude of the society towards the homosexuals forces many people to suppress their homosexual identity and lead an unwanted life. Yet there are few people who rise above this suppression and become successful in observing their lives according to their freewill. A better picture of this situation can be drawn from the comparison of societies’ attitude towards the homosexuality and the counter response of protagonists regarding it in Tennessee Willaiams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Sangita Rayamajhi’s All Mothers are Working Mothers (2005). This paper thus aims to compare the societies’ responses towards the homosexual lifestyle of Brick and Shiela and show that although the settings of these two plays are different, the societies in which these plays are set displayed similar discriminative approach towards the protagonists’ homosexual identities. However, due to the increasing acceptability of...
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...Mendacity is the trend to lie. In the case of A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, the Pollitt family is living in deception. Living in mendacity can cause competition in between family. The Pollitt are an un-united family. They don’t have communication, the family lacks honesty. Mendacity plays a big role in Brick’s life; on the play he blames falsehood for the cause of him becoming an alcoholic and marrying Maggie under certain circumstances. Big Daddy the wealthiest man in town needs to play the good man, lying that he stills loves Big Mama. There’s no communication neither love in their marriage. “That’s right, a ball a ball! Hell! I slept with Big Mama till, let’s see, five years ago, till I was sixty and she was fifty eight, and never even liked her” (Williams 70). In a trip with Big Mama to Europe where wanted to buy everything, made him feel uncomfortable about her behavior. As well in that trip he encountered a five years old girl, who went to zip his pants for money and which made him feel disgusted. Big Daddy knowing he is sick, he plays around making everybody thinks he is fine. “Who said I was leaving this place to Gooper or anybody? This is my sixty-fifth birthday! I got fifteen years or twenty years left in me! Ill out live you! I’ll bury you an’ have to pay for your coffin” (Williams 94). Big Daddy prefers Brick instead of his other son Gooper. Even though, Big Daddy and his son have no communication. He tries to have a conversation with Brick the day...
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...Peter Tim Soriano Mr. Chalmers ENG 4U 16 December 2013 Illusion and Mendacity In Tennessee Williams’ plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, several characters suffer by lying and by being unaware of reality. Both plays demonstrate and signify the themes of illusion vs. reality and mendacity through past trauma, alcohol abuse, and through strained family and marital relationships. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick is an example to all of these factors through his past with his friend skipper, his abuse of alcohol, and the lack of love he shows for his wife, while in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche encounters similar problems as Brick with her past trauma and her alcohol problem. The two plays share many similarities in terms of themes but at the same time also share significant difference. In the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick is troubled with his past memories that he tries to keep a secret. He mourns the death of his best friend Skipper and the death pushes Brick into a world of imagination and mendacity. He avoids talking about Skipper and when his wife Margaret who is been trying to fix her relationship with Brick brings up the memory of his friend Skipper. Brick gets upset and says, “One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true! – I had a friendship with Skipper. – You are naming it dirty!” (Williams 44) Brick is furious with Margaret as he threatens her with physical abuse before he mentions the one greatest...
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...Name: Date: Southern Contemporary Fiction and the Issue of Race Thesis: Southern contemporary fiction contained a lot of truths about the race relations between Black and White Americans in the twentieth century. Introduction Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a significant shift in the focus of southern literature, both fiction and nonfiction. In the nineteenth century, most Southern fiction works were mainly on the Civil War and the Reconstruction. However, as that generation died away, the new crop of authors who had never experienced the civil war or the Reconstruction became more objective in their writings about the South. Contemporary Southern writers such as Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner wrote fiction, but the stories written had a lot of truth about the way communities in the American South lived like in the twentieth century. As a result, one cannot fail but notice that there is one recurring issue in almost every novel in contemporary Southern fiction; the issue of race. (Sundquist 1994) Authors usually write stories which are a reflection of the attitudes and the norms of their time and contemporary Southern fiction reflects this. The southern part of the United States has always had a large percentage of people of African descent living there. At the beginning of the twentieth century, two states actually had an African-American majority; South Carolina and Mississippi. However, the White community...
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...Play of Choice I chose to read The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams as my play of choice. I wanted to read another play by Williams because I was really impressed with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, this story centers on a rather dysfunctional family, the Winfield’s. Amanda Wingfield is a single mother to her two children Tom and Laura. That concept is rather ahead of its time, as the play takes place in 1937. Tom is the narrator of the play which is referred to as a “memory” play, as it comes from his memory and perspective. I liked the fact that the play had a narrator. It gave more depth to his character and I feel that any time something is narrated you receive more information. It is also much easier to read a play that is narrated because less is left to your imagination. Our textbook had very good information on set design for this play. It included pictures from an actual production and also gave an artists’ rendering of the Broadway set design. The entire play is set in the tenement apartment of the Wingfields’ which was nice. Because the entire play was set there, it gave me plenty of time to imagine the details of the set. I began to form pictures in my mind of the apartment and the fire escape. I will call Laura Wingfield the main character of the play. It is her that the story seems to revolve around. The character of Laura is one that I believe any audience can have empathy for. She is a “cripple”, a term that her mother despises...
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...Many plays and books have been adapted into a movie. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, is one of the plays who have been made into a movie. It takes place in the 1940s in New Orleans. The main character in the movie is Blanche DuBois, a women with a questionable behavior. In A streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois is described in detail through symbolism by drunkenness, light, and music. Drunkenness is one of the most obvious symbolisms in the movie. It represents escape for Blanche when things go wrong or she feels uncomfortable. When she firsts arrives to New Orleans, she finds herself at a bowling alley, and orders drinks so she can explain where she believes she has been. The same thing occurred when Mitch confronts Blanche...
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...Glass Menagerie is a play written in 1945 by Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams was a major American playwright and one of the greatest playwriters in the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. The name "Tennessee" was a name given to him by college friends because of his southern accent and his father's background in Tennessee. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition to those two plays, he also won award for The Glass Menagerie in 1945. The Glass Menagerie is a touching play about the dreams of a southern family and their struggle to escape reality. The play is set in an apartment in St. Louis in 1937. Tom Wingfield serves as the narrator as well as a character in the play. Tom is determined and hard working man who works in the Continental Shoemaker’s factory. Tom lives with his Southern mother, Amanda, who is proud and confident woman and his shy and crippled sister, Laura. Another character is Jim O’Conner who is a friend of tom from the factory who tom invites to dinner and Laura’s first gentleman caller. The main action of the play is about Amanda's search to find Laura a gentleman caller. The Glass Menagerie's plot is parallel to the actual events in the author's life. The central theme of the play is escape from reality and many symbols in the story support this theme. Tennessee Williams adds life to the play by using symbols. The...
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...The Broadway Version Significance:- When Tennessee Williams made the decision to take Big Daddy, the pivotal personality of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, off stage for the entire final act of the play, it was a bold choice, so bold a choice, in fact, that the original Broadway director, Kazan, forced Williams to rewrite the last act to fix it. | | | | | | | | | After their long association Williams greatly respected Kazan, and trusted his instincts. Williams writes in the explanatory note of the published edition of the play that a playwright can hand a director an absolute final play without allowing him access to drafts, or he can find a director who will cave to the writer's every request – and neither is desirable. In Kazan, Williams said, he had found a director he could trust to give perceptive and meaningful notes early on in the process. And Kazan had major reservations about the first completed draft of the play, the one that is still printed in published editions. As summed up by Williams in his explanatory note, these reservations were: 1) Big Daddy was too vivid and important a character to disappear from the play 2) The character of Brick should under go some apparent mutation as a result of the virtual vivisection that he undergoes in his interview with his father in Act Two. 3) The character of Margaret should be, if possible, more clearly sympathetic to the audience. Williams did not agree with these edits – especially the second...
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...Analysis and Plot Summary of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams Before beginning this summary and analysis of “Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, it is important to point out that this play is not happening in the narrator’s (Tom’s) present, but it is based on his memories. The setting of “The Glass Menagerie” is a cramped apartment in a lower-class part of St. Louis in the year 1937. The main character and narrator of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, Tom, is in a merchant sailor’s uniform and he details the setting even further, telling us that America’s lower classes are still recovering from the Great Depression. In the early stages of the plot of the Glass Menagerie, we also learn that his father left the family a long time ago, even though there is a picture of him that is plain sight throughout “The Glass Menagerie”. While Tom is speaking (as well as throughout the play) pay attention to the screen which presents certain words and images important to the text and try to imagine how this might be if you were sitting in the audience. In these first few scenes of “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, we meet the mother, Amanda, who still seems caught up in her life as a former Southern belle. She chides both of her children about being odd (Laura wears a brace on her leg and is painfully shy while Tom writes poetry and disappears every night to go the movies and get away from the depressing house). Laura is a fragile figure and collects glass...
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...Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26th, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams wrote fiction and motion picture screenplays but is recognized for his plays. Thomas was the first son and second child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. He was named after his grandfather and he insisted on being called Tom by the age of ten. His siblings include an older sister named Rose and a younger brother named Dakin. Williams spent a great deal of time with his sister Rose because she was not very stable, emotionally or mentally. Daryl E. Haley once said that Rose "was emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions." His mother raised Tom because his father was a traveling shoe salesman. Edwina Dakin Williams was the daughter of a minister and very over protective of Thomas. She began to be over protective after he caught Diphtheria when he was five years old. His mother was also an aggressive woman caught up in her fantasies of genteel southern living. Amanda Wingfield, a character in his play The Glass Menagerie, was modeled after Williams' mother. Cornelius Coffin Williams, Tom's father, spent most of his time on the road. Cornelius came from a very prestigious family that included Mississippi's very first governor and senator. Mr. Haley also states that Tom's father was "at turns distant and abusive," that is, when he was actually around. Toms father also repeatedly favored his younger brother Dakin over both of his older children...
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... Many critics believe that “The Glass Menagerie” is one of Tennessee Williams finest literary pieces, and that like most of his work, it was a reflection of his own life story. Born as Thomas Lanier Williams III on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, he lived with his loving but possessive mother and his older sister, Rose, who later suffered a mental breakdown. His father was a hard man who tended to drink too much and who was often away from home due to his job as a traveling salesman. Through most of his childhood, Mr. Williams felt like an outcast due to both his delicate health and the ridicule he received for his southern accent after his father accepted a job in St. Louis. This ongoing theme of lack of self-worth throughout his life was in large part due to his sexual orientation and lifestyle both of which were not easily tolerated in the early part of the last century. Although Mr. Williams self-doubt is evident in much of his work, the rest of the literary world and his readers feel without a doubt that his work is award winning. His impact on the literary world can be seen by the many awards he received including his winning not one but two Pulitzer Prizes for “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1948 and for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1955; as well as the longevity of his work which is proven by its contemporary recognition. Therefore, due to his literary genius and personal life experience, Williams was able to use the powerful combination of style, symbolism...
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...THE COST OF ARTISTIC FREEDOM: CENSORSHIP vs. LIBERALISM IN HOLLYWOOD, 1940 – 1960 Destiny Adams History 734 – Seminar in American History Dr. Wintz – Texas Southern University Spring 2009 Table of Contents Part One 1.1 – Introduction – p. 3 1.2 – Social and Political Climate pp. 3-11 1.3 – Production Code Resolutions pp.11-15 Part Two 2.1- Production Codes – I, II, III and IV pp.16 2.2 – Production Codes V, VI, VII and VIII pp.17-18 2.3 - Production Codes IX, X, XI and XII pp.18 Part Three 3.1- Hollywood and Film making – 1940-1949 pp.18-21 3.2- Movies – Awarded, Nominated, Not Nominated pp.21 Part Four 4.1- Hollywood and Film making – 1950-1959 pp.22-26 4.2- Movies – Awarded, Nominated, Not Nominated pp.26 Part Five 5.1- Synopsis of Film making in the 1960’s – New Era pp. 27-28 5.2- Conclusion pp.28-29 The Red Scare of 1917-1920, was the primary influence for the emergence of censorship through McCarthyism and Anti- Socialist sentiments in filmmaking during 1940-1960. McCarthyism and three international wars enhanced Anti – Communist resentments within the United States. A brief emergence of Socialist organizations in America heightened the fervor of conservative versus liberal views within cinematography. Motion Movie producers and Distributors, in Hollywood, California were heavily encouraged to influence film directors, screenwriters and actors by incorporating strict codes within their artistic expression...
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