Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Many would argue given the title of the play that Maggie is the central protagonist. Although Williams has made it clear on numerous occasions that he “sympathised with her and liked her,” to place such a label on her would miss the point of the text and her role within it. At the opening of the play the audience sympathises with the “pretty young woman, with anxious lines in her face” who in contrast to her husband’s apathy seems lively and affectionate; we are led to believe she is undeserving of the cruel lack of intimacy returned by Brick.

However, stuck observing the painfully eclectic dialogue between Brick and his father, the second act encourages the audience to recognise the immense alienation of Brick, a man who has lost his closest friend because of his own rigid social conditioning. By the time Maggie tells her lie, the exploitation she resorts to by removing the alcohol from the room until Brick sleeps with her seems absurdly immoral, revealing her to be disgustingly manipulative and self-centred. Not only do the implications of this decision further alienate Brick, it also compounds Maggie’s isolation from the man she supposedly loves.

KEY POINT :
For readers of the text as opposed to an audience watching the play, this manipulative side of Maggie is hinted at from the start, as Williams refers only refers to her by her real name Margaret, as opposed to the other characters for whom Williams uses nicknames.

Williams certainly frames Maggie as an idyllic representation of femininity, and mostly empathises with her in his stage directions, but he also simultaneously signals her manipulative tendencies with her “vocal tricks of a priest.” This becomes relevant following Big Mama’s exit in Act 1 as Maggie feels “completely alone” and has a short-lived identity crisis as she looks in the mirror and struggles to recognise herself. This represents a crucial point in Maggie’s character development as she fully embraces the “Maggie the cat” persona and decides to use her beauty as a means of manipulation. As such, the duality of Maggie and Margaret acts as a juxtaposition of beauty and the desperation it encourages, a conflict that reaches its climax as she turns out the light, seemingly successful in her devious scheme and showing pity for the “weak, beautiful people” who “give up.” Despite her insistence she loves Brick, his scepticism is validated as the play comes to a close and Williams communicates that the system of mendacity encourages self-serving attitudes that are simultaneously self-isolating.
It is fitting that the play ends with a lie; Maggie’s deliberate deception of the characters mirrors her deception of the audience, whose sympathy Williams uses to express his concern that the overemphasised presence of beauty and wealth were corrosively removing truth and authenticity in 1950s America.

In this sense, Maggie can also be considered the antagonist of the text. She is just as greedy as any of the play’s other characters, and is possibly willing to stoop to even lower depths to get what she wants. She is a product of a society that has left her desperate, and is a representation of America’s superficial obsession with beauty and wealth being the only vessels for fulfilment, an idea Williams uses the play to dismiss.

Pre-dating second-wave feminism, Maggie is also considered quite a progressive characterisation of a 1950s woman, particularly for her open expression of her sexuality. Still suffering from an overly patriarchal influence, the sexual desires of women were mostly viewed as less important than their male counterparts, if discussed at all. Williams depicts the contrast of these ideals with the interaction between Maggie and Big Mama, who expresses the clearly problematic idea that the success of a marriage is dependent on the pleasure of the man. Interestingly, Williams also uses Maggie to dismiss the rigidity of gender constructs in his stage directions by using the “range” and “music” she speaks with as a conduit for the image that she was “playing boys’ games as a child” and as such further transcends the typical submissive archetype expected of her.

While Maggie’s view that a fairer dynamic between the two genders is certainly progressive for Williams, by today’s standards she is far from an embodiment of female empowerment. Entirely dependent on her husband for validation, Maggie expresses little sense self-worth beyond her marriage. While aware of her beauty, her vanity and self-absorption with her image fail to contribute towards a sense of fulfilment and she sees virtually no pathway for self-reliance, instead quite morbidly depending on an inheritance from Big Daddy.

Although some elements of her character may be progressive, she is still clearly not too far removed from Big Mama’s mindset, and Williams further exposes this regressive attitude as Maggie talks about how men react to her in a worryingly self-objectifying monologue. The apparent contradictions and duality of her character is further emphasised by the information the audience receives about her upbringing. While she is “the only one there who is conscious of and amused by the grotesque” of the wealthy occupants of the bedroom and has been “poor” her whole life, her self-righteous claim that her ancestors “freed their slaves ten years before abolition” reveals that she was not as low on the social hierarchy as she often suggests.