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4.2 Economic Awareness 15
5 Conclusion 17
Bibliography 18
1 Introduction
Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has always been regarded as one of the powerful plays in American literature. And Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has won The Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a story of a Southern family in crisis, especially the husband Brick and his wife Margaret (often called Maggie or “Maggie the Cat”), and their interaction with Brick’s family over the course of one evening gathering at the family estate in Mississippi. The family party is hold for patriarch Big Daddy Pollitt to celebrate his birthday. Big Daddy, the Delta’s biggest cotton-planter, and his return from the Ochsner Clinic with what he has been told are a clean bill of health. All members of this family (except Big Daddy and his wife, Big Mama) are aware of Big Daddy’s true diagnosis that he is dying of cancer. His family members have lied to Big Daddy and Big Mama to spare the aging couple from worry and pain on the patriarch’s birthday. But, throughout the progress of the whole play, it becomes clear that Big Daddy’s family has long constructed a web of deceit for itself.
Maggie, charming and determined, has get rid of a childhood of poverty and marry above herself, but she finds herself unfulfilled. The family finds that Brick has not slept with Maggie for some time, which has threatened their marriage. Brick, who is an aging football hero, infuriates her by ignoring his brother Gooper’s attempts to gain control of the family fortune. Brick’s indifference and his often intemperance escalates with the recent suicide of his intimate friend Skipper. Maggie fears that Brick’s malaise will ensure that Gooper and his wife Mae end up with Big Daddy’s estate.
To prevent Gooper and his wife from controlling the family property Maggie knows a baby is important to herself, and she can acquire higher family status. A baby can urge Brick to pay more attention to her and to the whole family. It also can threaten Gooper and Mae. Even though Gooper and Mae both know this is a lie, Big Mama and Big Daddy believe that Maggie “has life”. When Maggie and Brick are alone again, Maggie locks Brick’s liquor away and promises him that she will “make the lie true”.
As a heroine of this play, Maggie has often been the topic of its readers and scholars. There have been many arguments in regard of her character and her fate. Some people think that her character and her fate assist her with the status and property in the family, but others hold the point of view that her character and fate ruined her life because she got her ideal life by means of lies and cheat. This paper attempts to help readers analyze this play in the perspective of feminism to illustrate some new viewpoint on it. This paper also tries to analyze the attitude of modern women through analyzing Maggie’s attitude towards life in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
2 The Development of Feminism
In the history of human beings, the conception “the right of man” only refers to the right of the men rather of the women. That is the reason for feminism to come out. In 1872, the words “feminism” and “feminist” first appeared in France and the Netherlands. In 1890, it was spread in Great Britain, and it got the popularity in the United States in 1901. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1852 as the year of the first appearance of “feminist” and 1895 for “feminism”.
2.1 Feminist Movement
During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the first-wave feminism broke out. And in the U.S. and U.K., feminism focused on the promotion of equal contract, marriage, parenting, and property rights for the woman. By the end of the nineteenth century, activism focused primarily on fight for gaining political power, particularly the right of woman’s suffrage, though some feminists were positive in campaigning for woman’s sexual, reproductive, and economic rights as well.