“The readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white,” Toni Morrison observes in her groundbreaking work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark (xii). In this pivotal text, Morrison contends that the canon of American literature is permeated by an “Africanist presence” – a constellation of racialized tropes, images, and assumptions about Blackness that have long served to construct ideas about white identity and experience in opposition (6). Morrison suggests that by scrutinizing this strategic deployment of racial otherness within the literature, we can illuminate how white writers have covertly “played in the dark,” using depictions of Blackness as a symbolic foil to give meaning and moral valence to an idealized “whiteness.”
Applying Morrison’s incisive analytical lens reveals how Tennessee Williams’ celebrated 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof exemplifies this racial coding across both its text and subtext. Through the symbolic language and racialized power dynamics surrounding its central ensemble of Southern aristocratic white characters, the play reveals how cultural ideas of Blackness have been “used as a way to mediate between the present and ‘the tradition of the past'” (Morrison 39). In short, Cat draws on anti-Black racism and stereotypes not only to construct the white Pollitt family’s identities and worldview but to mythologize their very claim to power, wealth, and “Americanness” itself as the scions of plantation society. To understand how this racial mythos functions in Williams’ play, we can analyze the few explicit mentions of Black characters within its pages. In keeping with Morrison’s observation that Black characters are often silenced and their voices rendered unintelligible in canonical texts, the play’s Black field workers remain nameless, faceless, and voiceless figures lingering at the margins (52). They come into focus only when filtered through the perspectives of the central powerful Southern white characters.
When the imposing plantation patriarch Big Daddy invokes his Black workers, their presence appears as both visible and invisible – symbolizing labour subordinated to serve white capitalism while also functioning as an invisible threat to it. As Big Daddy smugly tells his son, Brick, “those nigras out there…they need someone like me to hang around for a while yet” (Williams 107). Here, the faceless Black characters represent the possibility of a social order disrupting Big Daddy’s entrenched systems of racial oppression and economic control – the “unspeakable” elements that Morrison argues that authors deployed Blackness to contain through dehumanization and exclusion (67).
Big Mama, Big Daddy’s wife, conjures similarly racialized imagery to position herself in nostalgia for the idealized white femininity of the plantation past. “I dropped my dolly, and it broke its head and I cried so hard my old Black mammy came and” Big Mama pauses, arranging her words carefully as she revises her language from “mammy” to more polite phrasing: “that my old nursemaid came and picked me up…” (Williams 77). Her flowery description continues, “I can just see her fat black face and big eyes like a piece of coal… big lips like overripe figs” (Williams 77). This recoiling from the racial slur “mammy,” followed by an effusive portrait drawing overtly on primitivist and dehumanizing stereotypes of Blackness as fleshy, overripe, and oracular, exemplifies precisely what Morrison highlights as the “hygiene of different fictions” at play (67). While her language initially gestures to the ugly history of slavery in describing her childhood nursemaid, Big Mama’s revisions and exaggerated imagery reframe her relationship with this Black woman as one of beneficent, saccharine nostalgia and idealized interracial intimacy. This dynamic parallels Morrison’s critique of how white writers have historically deployed Black characters like “rancid bombast” through “caricature” and stereotype, using them as “foils to dramatize” their contrasting characterization of white identity (67). By rendering the Black nursemaid’s voice and personhood invisible, the scene allows Big Mama to use this fictionalized, exoticized depiction of Blackness to construct her own identity as a civilized, virtuous Southern white woman. Her allusion to the lost “dolly” ironically equates her longing for this nostalgic racial vision with an innocent childhood game of “playing in the dark.”
Beyond these few direct references to Black characters, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is saturated with racially coded signifiers, binaries, and symbolic language that further reveal how Williams drew on “the metaphorical utility of race” to construct the play’s thematic exploration of family, sexuality, and identity (Morrison 63). Take Brick’s childhood friend Crome, who occasionally emerges as a sexually potent “irresponsible animal” figure standing in stark symbolic contrast to the repressed white masculinity embodied by Brick (Williams 59). While Crome pushes his friend to confront his disavowed queerness, his hypersexualized portrayal simultaneously codes him as a character corresponding to anti-Black stereotypes of excessive, unrestrained desire. When Chrome physically tries to break down Brick’s emotional numbness and frigidity, his advances veer into a lecherous and primitivist register dripping with racialized overtones: “Wouldn’t it be cool as hell if I could still make you…Christ, your wife can’t make you, at this rate, no woman can make you…” (Williams 60). The scene represents a proxy confrontation with the “phobias planted so seed-deep in the thick odds of two centuries of control of black labour,” as Morrison writes (63). By rejecting Crome’s attempts to engage his repressed sexuality, Brick reaffirms his allegiance to whiteness defined by restraint and stoicism in opposition to the feral Blackness represented by Crome. Even as the action centres queer desire, it remains haunted by the racial ghosts in the machinery embedded within Williams’ dramatic imagination.
Perhaps most crucially, Morrison’s analytical framework reveals how Cat on a Hot Tin Roof engages in what she terms “the construction of the racial self” when it depicts white characters like Brick struggling with a sense of masculinity in crisis due to the shifting social conditions of modernity (38). While the drama concerns a deeply “white problem,” it paradoxically renders symbolic Blackness both a constant presence and a shadowy absence within the family’s insular world and psychic disturbances (10). In Brick’s case, his alcoholism, emotional numbness, and apparent rejection of phallic masculinity function as character flaws that render him symbolically “tainted” or racially other within this hegemonic white world structured around capitalist determinism and patriarchal power. Channeling Morrison’s insights, we might read Brick’s inability to fulfil his role as the “heir” of the Pollitt dynasty by fathering children not only as a crisis of queerness but also of “whiteness” writ large defined against a lurking, abject threat of racial otherness from within. As Morrison articulates Hemingway’s fiction, Williams’ play “engages sexuality in startling ways…tying it, quite queerly, through interracial couplings, to questions of dominance, property, and social pornographies” (68).
Ultimately, Morrison’s scholarship equips us with a mode of interpretation attuned to the racial mythologies and fantasies subtly encoded into American cultural artifacts like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. While Williams’ play overtly concerns itself with very “white problems” of familial conflict, repressed sexuality and desire, and capitalist inheritance, Morrisonian critic Wesley Brichetto argues it “uses Blackness as though it were an internally discoverable truth by means of which to gain cultural authority” (xiii). Through presenting a hyperbolic portrait of a white Southern aristocratic family grappling with issues of masculine identity, power, money, and “whiteness” itself, Cat reflects the dominant American literary tendency to render “Nothing highlighted freedom…like slavery” (Morrison 38). Just as the Pollitts’ wealth and privilege stem from the inheritance of slave plantation, their fraught debates about what it means to be a man, a father, and a son take shape through an ever-looming, often silenced “Africanist presence” that reifies their very prerogatives, social standing, and ability to freely to choose to “play in the dark” in the first place.
Works Cited
Brichetto, Wesley. “Introduction.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison, Vintage Books, 1993, pp. vii-xvi.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New Directions Publishing, 1975. PDF file.
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