Essay Questions

Suddenly Last Summer is obviously a very symbolic play, but there is a literal storyline to which the symbols are attached. What exactly does Violet Venable want?

Violet desperately wants to protect her dead son Sebastian’s reputation (and, by extension, her own). Violet has spent a lifetime creating, nurturing, protecting and most importantly selling this idealistic portrait of Sebastian as a pure aesthete freed from any concerns of the flesh. Catharine’s story does not just threaten this image of the purity of her son, it obliterates it, leaving behind a horrific stain on Sebastian, Violet and the family name which can never be cleansed. In order to stop this from happening, she first gets Catharine committed to an asylum and as the play opens is trying to find a doctor who will perform a lobotomy in order to literally cut the memories out of niece’s brain.

Despite Violet’s insistence of Sebastian’s purity, what clues indicate that she was fully aware of his sexuality long before last summer?

Violet’s response to the doctor’s first question probing into Sebastian’s private life is electrifyingly defense. First she attempts a kind of gaslighting of the doctor in trying to confuse him about the story Catharine has been telling by changing the worse “chased” into “chaste.” Then, to underline this editing of the narrative, she even spells out the word chaste letter by letter. This manipulative effort to control the message is upended by, perhaps, her own subconscious when she admits: “we had to be very fleet-footed I can tell you, with his looks and his charm, to keep ahead of pursuers, every kind of pursuer!” And then suddenly, as if the will of her conscious mind has caught up to will of the unconscious, she catches herself and pivots right back to the imprinting the concept of Sebastian’s purity upon the doctor again, even going so as to spell out, for the second time, “chaste.” The implication is that no only was Violet fully aware of her son’s sexual deviancy, but she used to play the part of procurer eventually taken over by Catharine.

What symbolic evidence most convincingly suggests that Violet’s desire to cut the memories out of Catharine’s brain is just part of a life-long attempt to avoid the truth by hiding it?

When the doctor asks Violet for a picture of Sebastian, the choice she makes is quite telling. She actually chooses to show him two photographs with specific intent to make one point that winds up making another unintentionally. She shows the doctor two images of Sebastian in two different costumes worn at the same masked ball hosted twenty years apart. She tries to make her point about the almost immortal purity of Sebastian by asking which one was taken twenty years earlier. When the doctor replies “this photograph looks older” Violent again tries to make her point by leaping on the semantics, pointing out the doctor said the photographer looks older, but not the subject. She then muses on the idea that Sebastian looks the same because he simply refused to grow older; he remains in a perpetual state of innocence, in other words. The fact that Sebastian is disguised by a costume in both and presents a false façade by wearing the masks combines with Violet’s willful disregard for the reality of the changing effects caused by the passage of time to reveal a woman with steely intent on blinding herself to the truth and comforting herself with the illusion.