Suddenly Last Summer Literary Elements

One-Act Play

English

1936 New Orleans

Script, minimal stage directions

Nostalgic, unsettling, dark undertones

Catherine Holly is the protagonist, as she is the one trying to spread truth. Mrs. Venable is the antagonist, trying to hide the truth.

Catherine Holly tries to spread the truth about what happened to her cousin, Sebastian Venable. His mother, Violet, is willing to do anything to make sure that doesn't happen. She tries to convince Dr. Cukrowicz to perform a lobotomy on Catherine but has to settle on sending her to a private asylum with the help of Catherine's mother and brother, who want to suppress the truth so they can gain access to Sebastian's will.

Dr. Sugar injects Catherine with a truth serum of sorts and asks her to tell the story of what happened to Sebastian Venable last summer. She tells how Sebastian used his mother, and then her, to attract the attention of men. Repeating the phrase "suddenly last summer" she tells of how the hungry homeless people would crowd around Sebastian to receive the money he gave out as tips. Eventually, he became afraid of the large crowd, so they stopped going to the beach.

Catherine describes when they were out at lunch one day, how on the other side of the barbed wire fence, naked children were making music with makeshift drums and cymbals, and this unsettled Sebastian. He complained to the waiter, who drove away the children by beating them with clubs and skillets. Sebastian had walked out of the restaurant and started walking up the steep hill next to it when the music started getting louder and louder. The band of naked children attacked Sebastian, and Catherine ran down the hill screaming for help. When other people came out, they returned to find Sebastian's body shredded by the tin cans the children had been using as makeshift instruments, and even worse, they find that Sebastian had been cannibalized.

When Mrs. Venable is talking to the doctor, she says that Sebastian was chaste, spelled c-h-a-s-t-e not chased, but he was chased too, by pursuers of his good looks. This use of homonyms is one of the most important instances of foreshadowing because Sebastian was literally chased down because he was not chaste. The description of the devouring of turtles also foreshadows the cannibalization of Sebastian. Catherine also states that Sebastian described people as if they were items on a menu, calling them appetizing or delicious-looking.

Dr. Sugar says that "Miss Catharine had an injection that made her a little unsteady", when the injection served as a truth serum.

Some elements loosely mimic the myth of Attis and Cybele and the play Bacchae by Euripides.

During Mrs. Venable's recounting's of Sebastian he has a lot of Christian imagery attached to him. The color white is also important, as Catherine keeps describing the street and the sky during Sebastian's death as stark white. This opposes the sky turning black with flesh-eating birds during Violet's description of the sea turtles being eaten.

Catherine is portrayed as both the victim of Mrs. Venable's schemes and the partner in crime to Sebastian's schemes.

Catherine describes Sebastian's partially devoured body as "a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses had been torn, thrown, crushed!—against that blazing white wall..." She also describes the band of children as "flock of black plucked little birds", which references back to the black birds that ate the turtles.

Mrs. Venable describes the sand as alive while the turtles were being devoured.

After Catherine reveals Sebastian's true intentions with traveling with her or his mother, the stage directions indicate that "Mrs. Venable's gasp is like the sound that a great hooked fish might make", which indicates that Mrs. Venable was stuck on the hook of Sebastian's lies.