Suddenly, Last Summer

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 The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment.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.

According to Violet, Sebastian was drawn to the Galápagos by a passage in Herman Melville’s The Encantadas describing the “extinct” purity of the islands’ desolation. However, he was both terrified and enthralled by what he found: not the tranquil timelessness he expected based on Melville’s work but rather thousands of ravenous birds who preyed insatiably on defenseless sea turtles who had just hatched on the sand. In this slaughter, Sebastian saw the face of “God”—that is, the essence of nature and of life. For the young aspiring poet, this revelation brought him face to face with the toothlessness of the written word in capturing the truth of life and death; as Catharine later notes, humans have long tried to “spell” God’s name with the “wrong” alphabet blocks. This conflict within himself—a writer who struggled painfully to produce a single poem each summer, trying and failing to capture the full breadth of experience—hastened his dissolution and death. Sebastian’s martyrlike fate, modeled partly on that of the mythic poet Orpheus, suggests metaphorically that his is a universal plight for artists.

The insufficiency of language is evident from the play’s first lines, in which Violet notes sadly that the Latin names of the exotic plants in her garden are fading from their labels. Her remark hints at the failure of words to affix lasting meaning or description to the vivid elements of life. Later, Violet tells her secretary to bring her the voluminous police records and investigators’ reports into her son’s death, but all are inconclusive and perhaps censored; only Catharine, who witnessed it (just as Sebastian experienced the indescribable horror at the Galápagos) knows the truth. Sebastian himself seems partly modeled on the antihero of Oscar Wilde’s supernatural novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, an aesthete who tries to escape death by rarifying himself into an ageless work of art. Like Dorian, Sebastian showed no signs of aging for 20 years, but also like Wilde’s doomed protagonist, Sebastian found that art—including the “art” of his life itself—could not hold death at bay forever.

The play’s exploration of art’s futility extends to Sebastian’s poems. These are described as an elaborate artifice, adorned with gilt edge and gold leaf and hand-printed on an “eighteenth-century hand press” (353), creating an illusion of pedigree. These elegant works, fussily crafted under Violet’s protection and control, could not be farther removed from the reality he glimpsed at the Galápagos, and eventually, he recognizes his failure. The blank pages of his “Blue Jay” notebooks have been eating away at him, and at Cabeza de Lobo, he turns decisively away from art and rushes headlong into life—which, of course, entails death as well. At La Playa San Sebastian, he reenacts the truth he witnessed in the Galápagos, which neither he nor Melville could cast into words. The final lines of Sebastian’s “last poem” (his death) find him crucified against a blazing wall as “white” as the empty pages of his notebook or the faded labels in his monstrous garden of life. Against this blankness, Sebastian’s ravaged, flesh-and-blood body takes the place of the impotent words that failed to express his being.