48 pages • 1 hour read
Suddenly, Last Summer
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Scene 4, Pages 384-404Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Scene 4, Pages 384-404 Summary
Violet enters in a wheelchair pushed by Miss Foxhill. Miss Foxhill hands Violet a cardboard folder containing the reports on her son’s death from the Cabeza de Lobo police, the American consul, and private investigators. Violet turns to George, who has offended her by “parading” her son’s wardrobe in front of her. Both he and his mother broach the subject of the will. Violet rises abruptly from her wheelchair and asks Miss Foxhill to summon the doctor. Miss Foxhill states outright that the doctor has been answering a phone call from Lion’s View, and Mrs. Holly reacts with horror.
Violet offers the justification that she has been paying over $1,000 a month to have Catharine treated at St. Mary’s. When Mrs. Holly thanks her for putting her daughter there, Catharine contends with Sister Felicity about her treatment; it emerges that she lost her “yard privileges” for signaling to passing cars to get out a “message” for her. Catharine says she became “panicky” because none of the many treatments they had given her were successful in quieting her; she feared that more drastic measures were coming, such as a lobotomy.
Dr. Cukrowicz enters, and Violet introduces him as a “specialist” from Lion’s View. Catharine asks him if he intends to cut into her brain, and Violet interrupts, implying that she will make that decision, as the Hollys are financially “dependent” on her. Catharine says the situation is clear to her now.
Dr. Cukrowicz suggests that Violet make an effort not to upset her niece, and Violet scoffs that Catharine deserves it. Catharine protests that the only reason Sebastian asked her to travel abroad with him last summer was because Violet had suffered a stroke and could not travel herself. Violet angrily denies this and denounces the Hollys, dismissing them as her late husband’s relations and saying that she has always detested them. She says that, to please her son, she went to the expense of giving Catharine a fancy debut, which was a disaster. No one liked Catharine, she claims, because of her “sharp tongue” and her habit of laughing in the faces of “decent people.” Catharine, she says, finally earned societal opprobrium after an incident with a young married man at a Mardi Gras ball; after that, no one would talk to her except Sebastian, who felt so sorry for her that he asked her to travel with him.
Catharine springs out of her chair, exclaiming that she can’t change the “truth” of what happened to Sebastian at Cabeza de Lobo. Simultaneously, Violet shouts that Catharine was “in love” with Sebastian. Catharine begs Sister Felicity to take her back to St. Mary’s, but Violet refuses to allow this and continues to harangue Catharine, blaming her for the death of her son. Dr. Cukrowicz asks to speak to Catharine alone; meanwhile, George takes hold of his aunt’s wheelchair to plead with her, warning her that if she sends Catharine to Lion’s View, everyone in the Garden District will find out about it. Violet orders Miss Foxhill to take her away, striking George with her cane to make him let go. As Violet is wheeled away, George collapses onto the bench next to his sobbing mother and puts his head in her lap.
Alone with Catharine, Dr. Cukrowicz makes excuses for her “sick” aunt, asking if Catharine hates her. Catharine says she doesn’t understand what hate is or how anyone can hate and still be mentally healthy. She reiterates the story of Violet’s stroke, explaining that the facial paralysis it caused meant that Sebastian couldn’t “use” her anymore. She adds that all people use each other, and that’s what they think of as love. Dr. Cukrowicz asks her how she felt about her cousin, and Catharine says that he seemed to like her, so she loved him, but in a motherly way—the only kind of love he would accept from her. She says she tried to “save” him from an “image” he had of himself. Struggling for words, she finally stammers that Sebastian saw himself as a “sacrifice” to a terrible god.
Catharine tells the doctor that her life has not seemed quite real for some time. The previous winter, she began writing her diary in the third person. This was after a young man asked to drive her home from the Mardi Gras ball and then stopped his car at a lover’s lane. Getting out of the car, he and Catharine ran through a misty field into the trees. After they made love, he treated her dismissively, saying his wife was pregnant. Shocked and devastated, Catharine followed him back to the ballroom and beat him angrily with her fists. Socially disgraced and feeling as if she had “died,” she became reclusive until Sebastian visited her one day and insisted that she travel with him that summer because his mother was too ill to make the trip.
Dr. Cukrowicz gently asks Catharine to remove her jacket so he can administer a shot of truth serum. She hesitates, noting the many injections she has received at St. Mary’s, but he finally wins her over. She says that the truth is the “one thing” she has never resisted and promises to tell him the full story. She begins to feel as if she were under a spell and claims that it is not the effect of the drug. Suddenly she sinks against the doctor, crushing her lips “violently” to his and crying for him to hold her. Her brother George enters and sees what she is doing. He shouts at her, and Mrs. Holly, entering quickly, asks the doctor if Catharine is ill. Covering her face, Catharine goes off into the garden.
Scene 4, Pages 384-404 Analysis
The opening of Scene 4 lays the groundwork for Violet and Catharine’s confrontation via the continued motif of predation. Before greeting her niece and her family, Violet descends in an offstage elevator painted with “bird-pictures,” linking her to the birds of prey at the Galápagos. In this analogy, Catharine, fresh from St. Mary’s, takes the role of the hatchling sea turtles; it remains to be seen if she can defy the odds and escape to freedom and safety. In the beginning of the scene, Dr. Cukrowicz, who will act as judge, is on the phone with Lion’s View, the hospital where he performs his lobotomies. The hospital’s name evokes the Christian martyrs who were fed to lions, but it also alludes to the prophet Daniel, who was saved from the lion’s den by an angel: The question is whether Dr. Cukrowicz will show himself to be an angel or a devouring lion in his attitude toward Catharine.
Although the conflict between Catharine and Violet is the play’s heart, Scene 4 also shows Violet to be at odds with Catharine’s mother and brother, developing the theme of Family Dynamics and Manipulation. Violet derides her sister-in-law’s children as “worthless” and rebukes George for parading her dead son’s suit in front of her. George in turn boasts of having had her son’s perfect white clothes “cut” to fit his own measurements, which resonates and offends on multiple levels—reopening the wounds of Sebastian’s mutilation and murder as well as evoking Jesus Christ’s seamless white robe, which was stolen by gloating Romans after his crucifixion. It also raises the specter that Catharine might be lobotomized at Violet’s insistence, “cutting” her brain into a more acceptable form. While Violet has many reasons for wishing to see Catharine lobotomized, it is at least partly an assertion of power over Violet’s less wealthy relations.
The Cost of Sexual Repression also looms large in Violet’s motivations. When the lobotomist himself arrives, Violet accuses Catharine of “taking” her son from her, nakedly revealing her own sexual jealousy and the role it plays in her violence toward Catharine. In her anger, she claims that Catharine has always been troublesome, as evidenced by the fact that she “laughed” in the faces of “decent people.” Decency in this context refers heavily to sexual mores, as Catharine’s fuller account of the story of her night with the married young man makes clear. Her decision to sleep with him seems an impulse of her heartfelt generosity to the lonely or troubled: Running to their rendezvous, she imagined that she was answering someone’s call for “help.” Catharine, alone among her relatives, has never used anyone else; rather, her innocence and openheartedness have left her open to exploitation by others. She tells Dr. Cukrowicz that “we all use each other and that’s what we think of as love” (396), but her own love breaks the mold: It is absolutely sincere, free-flowing, and selfless. However, her own honesty, coupled with the disillusionment of learning that the young man was married, means she has little tolerance for hypocrites like Violet—presumably, the subjects of her “laughter.”
After her betrayal by the young man, Catharine began to write about herself in the “third person” as if to distance herself from her pain. This touches on the play’s theme of Art Versus Life: how art—e.g., writing—often mutes or censors the raw facts of life rather than truthfully expressing them. Similarly, Herman Melville’s The Encantadas, though hauntingly written enough to motivate Sebastian’s visit to the Galápagos, conveyed none of the violence and horror he would find there. Nor do the official records of Sebastian’s death at Cabeza de Lobo hint at the macabre reality witnessed by Catharine. Significantly, Sebastian stopped writing poetry that summer. The implication is that the artificiality of his work (which, his mother says, was inseparable from his carefully sculpted “life”) had begun to repel him: Time was running out, and he had never embraced his deepest knowledge of himself. This urge to strip away the artifice from his life may have led to the radical shift in his habits that summer.
The shot of truth serum that the doctor asks to give Catharine has both symbolic and narrative functions. Catharine’s response is to joke that she has already had so many injections that she would make a “good sprinkler.” The image connects her, once again, with saints: e.g., her cousin’s namesake, St. Sebastian, who was punctured with arrows, and her own namesake, the martyred St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was famously threatened with a spiked wheel. The truth serum is partly a device to assure the audience that Catharine’s story is the truth, at least as she sees it. However, it is also a double-edged sword: If Dr. Cukrowicz determines her story to be fantastical, he may take it as evidence of mental illness (since she believes it) and proceed with the lobotomy, raising the tension as the play builds toward its climax.
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