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.
Scene 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 1 Summary
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, potentially 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 The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment.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.
The set, which does not change throughout the one-act play, simulates the interior of a “Victorian Gothic” mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District, incorporating a garden that suggests a stylized “prehistoric” tropical jungle full of “violent” colors and giant tree flowers that resemble bodily organs. The sound design features animal cries, hisses, and thrashing sounds. Shortly after the curtain rises, the sounds fade, but they occasionally swell and reverberate to punctuate the play’s action.
The season is late summer or early fall sometime in the mid-1930s. A lady enters with the help of a cane, accompanied by a doctor. Her hair is obviously dyed, while the doctor is young, blond, and handsome. The lady (Mrs. Violet Venable) is clearly attracted to the doctor’s “icy charm.” She tells him that they are standing in “Sebastian’s garden” and shows him a Venus flytrap that her son Sebastian used to feed with special fruit flies. The doctor, whose name is Cukrowicz, suggests that Violet call him “Dr. Sugar,” the English translation of his Polish name. He notes that her son’s garden resembles a “well-groomed jungle,” and she agrees, saying that her son planned everything in his life and “work”—that is, his poetry, which (she thinks) deserves worldwide fame. His poetic genius, she suggests, was inseparable from that of his life.
It emerges that Violet has planned a meeting with the woman she holds responsible for Sebastian’s death. She has been looking forward to this meeting for months and has had the woman brought to her house because Violet couldn’t make the trip to the mental hospital where she is a patient. She says the woman’s “lies” will collapse when confronted with Violet’s “truth.” She is determined to defend her son’s good name with all of her remaining life and energy. She adds that when Sebastian was 15, his heart was weakened by rheumatic fever; predicting that his mother would outlive him, he told her that “it” would be in her hands. She believes that he meant his artistic legacy. Violet holds aloft a slim volume that she says is her son’s life’s work: a book of poems titled Poem of Summer. Sebastian wrote only 25 poems, one per year, and printed them himself on an 18th-century hand press in the secrecy of his atelier in the French Quarter. He composed each poem on the annual summer trip he took with her; the other nine months of the year were “only preparation” for the poem’s crafting, of which she was an essential part. This past summer, she says, he went abroad without her and consequently wrote no poem. Sebastian’s “last poem” was his death that summer.
Violet tells the doctor about a long-ago trip she and Sebastian made to South America’s Galápagos Islands, inspired by Herman Melville’s The Encantadas. Sebastian timed their visit to the islands so they could witness the hatching of the famous sea turtles and watch them crawl to the safety of the sea. Instead, she and Sebastian were horrified to see thousands of flesh-eating birds flip the baby turtles onto their backs and feast hungrily on their defenseless flesh. Proclaiming that he had finally seen “Him”—“God,” according to Violet—Sebastian fell into a fever, and soon afterward joined a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. Violet says she rescued him from this spartan existence, staying by his side until he agreed to return home even though it meant refusing her husband’s last request that she come to his deathbed.
From then on, she and Sebastian shared a life of opulence and artistry, surrounded by beautiful young people. Showing the doctor two photos of Sebastian taken 20 years apart, Violet claims he looks no older in the later one, saying that it takes discipline to remain youthful and that Sebastian was rigorously ascetic, eating and drinking little and keeping himself perfectly “chaste”; she insists that Sebastian, though roughly 40, was a virgin. She and her son, she says, were well-known in Cannes, Venice, Madrid, and Biarritz. Their devotion to art, of which their shared life was a supreme example, was like that of the “Renaissance princes”; by contrast, the woman who has tried to besmirch Sebastian’s reputation is a “vandal” who wants to demolish his “legend.” She questions her son for trusting this woman, whom she describes as both mentally ill and ungrateful for the family’s charity. Admitting that she has not heard the woman’s full story, she complains that her attempts to stop the woman’s “babbling” by confining her to St. Mary’s have so far been unsuccessful.
Dr. Cukrowicz asks Violet about a financial grant she has tentatively offered his own hospital, Lion’s View. She elaborates that she has set up the Sebastian Venable Memorial Foundation solely to assist needy young scientists like himself. Dr. Cukrowicz is a lobotomist at Lion’s View and has had some trouble establishing himself due to the extreme risks and experimental nature of his specialty. So far he has performed lobotomies primarily on people convicted of crimes, but he looks forward to expanding his pool of subjects. He cautions that those subjected to a lobotomy will probably always be mentally “limited.” Violet counters that the “peace” it gives them must surely outweigh any such impairment and hints that the money she is offering Dr. Cukrowicz is a bribe to shut the woman’s mouth with a lobotomy.
The woman, whose name is Catharine Holly, appears in the window of the house, looking out at them. Miss Foxhill, Violet’s secretary, enters the garden and tells her that Catharine has arrived. Violet turns, sees the woman in the window, and recoils in shock. A nun (Sister Felicity) escorts Catharine into the garden. After gazing at Catharine, Dr. Cukrowicz walks into the house, leaving his black bag on the ground. Sister Felicity tells Catharine to sit down and wait for her family.
Scene 1 Analysis
Suddenly Last Summer has been criticized for the extravagant aspects of its plot, but its opening scene’s stage direction suggests that it is not meant to be taken completely literally. The “unrealistic” set establishes the symbolic, expressionistic nature of the play, which relies heavily on allusion and layers of meaning, and introduces the theme of Art Versus Life by calling attention to the work’s status as a play. The stage direction calls for the set to be as stylized as that of a “ballet,” and its primitive, primal colors suggest Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which deals with prehistoric humanity and human sacrifice. Though the play’s action and characters present a veneer of modernity, science, and civilized life, the play’s set and sound design, violent animal imagery, and allusions to mythology, Christian rites, and martyrs all evoke a deeper, more primal narrative about humanity’s baser drives.
Many of those drives are sexual, and the play uses its dense symbolism both to mirror the layers of denial involved in The Cost of Sexual Repression and to expose the characters’ submerged desires. For example, the play’s mythological allusions begin with the Venus flytrap, a carnivorous and vaginal-looking flower that Sebastian doted on. The predatory plant, named for the Roman goddess of love, foreshadows Catharine’s epiphany that “we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love” (396). It also evokes the myth of Venus and her mortal lover, the beautiful youth Adonis, who was torn apart by wild animals after abandoning his divine protectress—the story of Sebastian and his mother in a nutshell. The predatory (and flower-named) Violet, who uses her own son as a way of extending her youth and then tries to exploit Cukrowicz and the Hollys to protect her son’s “legend,” is an obvious counterpart of the flesh-eating flower. However, it applies equally to Sebastian himself, who uses his mother for her wealth and social connections and preys sexually on children. The flytrap’s rarified diet—imported fruit flies—echoes Sebastian’s own fastidious tastes.
Incest figures prominently among the illicit sexual desires the play explores. Violet, who has constructed a shrine to her murdered son, parodies not only Venus (and the Roman vegetation goddess Proserpine, who kept a garden of deadly flowers in her underworld kingdom) but also the Virgin Mary. Holding aloft her sacred relic of Sebastian—his book of poems—“as if elevating the Host” (353), she resembles the Pieta but also foreshadows the ritual-like eating of Sebastian’s flesh by the children of Cabeza de Lobo. Her bond with her son also alludes to the twins Sebastian and Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Flipping her name interchangeably with his as she dreamily recalls their triumphs as a “famous couple,” she seems psychologically to have reabsorbed her grown son into herself, becoming a single, dashing, ageless entity. She has rationalized her predatory control over him by way of the hallowed demands of “art,” arguing that only she could facilitate his poetic genius. The nine months of “preparation” for each summer’s poem, during which her son sheltered in her womb-like garden, suggests her fantasized role as his lover and impregnator.
Violet fails to recognize either the sexual tenor of her relationship with her son or the violence implicit in her desire for him. The play, however, consistently associates sex with violence; the link between the two is pivotal to Sebastian’s brief, devastating glimpse of “God” in the Galápagos. What Sebastian described as divine revelation was the notion that all creatures are ultimately fodder for each other’s hunger or lust. The sexualized skewering of the motherless sea turtles by the hungry beaks of predatory birds resonated with something within Sebastian, who tried at first to turn away from life and from his own dark nature by becoming a Buddhist monk. Later, under the repressive influence of his youth-obsessed mother, he traveled widely but moderated his predatory urges. Under her wing, he cultivated a fastidious aestheticism, a methodical but torturously slow writing life, and a rigorously closeted sexual appetite, which fed quietly on the beautiful, rich young men he met through his mother. Sebastian and Violet’s vampiric feeding on each other lasted until his 40th year, when Violet had a stroke, her illness suggesting her inability to remain a “predator.” Sebastian therefore left her behind in favor of the young Catharine, but he saw his own mortality reflected in his mother and soon fatalistically embraced the role of prey himself.
Partly because Catharine has had a revelation of Sebastian’s true nature, but also (and relatedly) because Violet views her as a sexual competitor for Sebastian’s affections, Violet has summoned Dr. Cukrowicz to destroy her niece’s mind and memories. Though done under the civilized, legal cover of medical treatment, this too would be an act of violence, further exposing the primal drives that lie just beneath the surface of high society. Complicating Dr. Cukrowicz’s decision over whom to believe is Violet’s considerable financial pull. In a play full of food imagery and predatory consumption, Dr. Cukrowicz’s nickname of “Dr. Sugar” suggests the danger that he will succumb to bribery and be swallowed up by Violet’s insatiable will. His slight chilliness makes him an ambiguous figure, drawing out the suspense. The stakes of his decision would be high even without the threat of lobotomization: Since Catharine regards her love for her cousin as “motherly,” the central conflict is not just her struggle of self-defense but a spiritual battle of two mothers over the body of a son.
Despite its reputation as iconoclastic and surreal, Suddenly Last Summer draws on several well-established literary genres. Because Dr. Cukrowicz must listen to both women before making his decision, the play takes the outer form of a courtroom drama with Dr. Cukrowicz as the judge. Additionally, as presaged by Violet’s “Victorian Gothic” mansion, the play is also a Gothic romance, with an ingenue (Catharine) caught up in a chamber of horrors (St. Mary’s and her aunt’s malevolent garden) and grappling with macabre family secrets. In this context, the handsome, brooding Dr. Cukrowicz resembles a Byronic hero, auguring a possible love affair with Catharine.
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