Sweet Bird of Youth

In Act I, Scene 2, the tension between Chance and the Princess increases as they each attempt to manipulate the other into getting what they want, further developing the theme of The Universality of Exploitation and Transactional Relationships. Chance is focused on securing funds and a movie contract from the Princess, while she is focused on the companionship and sexual services Chase can provide. Their dynamic reflects the back-and-forth between their explicit and competing wants. In the scene’s opening lines, Chance chastises the Princess for not signing over her money to him more quickly, while she resists doing so because she doesn’t “want to be left alone” (50). When Chance does finally resolve to leave, she attempts to stop him by pursuing him, saying, “[C]ome here, kiss me, I love you” (57). In response, Chance “ducks under her arms, and escapes to the chair” before leaving with her Cadillac (57). At the end of the scene, it seems as if Chance has won the encounter: He has her money and her car, and she is left alone. However, by the end of the play, the Princess will have come out ahead: Her film is a success, while Chance is left alone to fend for himself. Although Chance and the Princess are similar in some ways—in particular, both are preoccupied with The Destructive Pursuit of Youth and Fame—the Princess’s ultimate “victory” in the tug-of-war highlights the power imbalance between them. The Princess is losing her youth but has money and celebrity, whereas Chance lacks these advantages. 

Indeed, Chance’s life as a sex worker places him on the margins of society. His monologue on this subject is set to the sound of “The Lament,” the term Tennessee Williams gives to the sound of the wind through the palm fronds. It is another example of how the Lament functions as a Greek chorus, here providing a cue for the grief and sorrow that this story represents. Chance’s tale of traveling to New York to pursue stardom but instead finding himself working as a sex worker to the rich and famous riffs on the trope of the struggling actor as well as on Western society’s longstanding conflation of actor and sex worker—itself a stock figure in Western theater. In the broadest sense, his story is a tragedy of disappointment and disillusionment that highlights the cost of trying to transcend the life one has been born into. 

However, Chance’s gender adds a further layer of pathos and social commentary while introducing the theme of The Tragedy of Impotence and Envy. Since the time of ancient Greece, this story of an actor-turned-sex-worker or actor-as-sex-worker has typically featured a woman (Pullen, Kirsten. Actresses and Whores: On Stage and In Society. Cambridge University Press, 2005). Here, Williams tells a similar tale but makes the central character a man, framing this as a form of exploitation that amounts to figurative castration. As he retorts to Princess in Act III when she warns that Tom Junior will castrate him, “You did that to me this morning [castrated me], here on this bed” (121), an allusion to the sex they had between Act I, Scene 1 and Act I, Scene 2. In the mainstream patriarchal interpretation of heterosexual sexuality, the man is to receive pleasure while the woman is to provide it. The figure of the male sex worker upsets these roles, which is why Chase feels the Princess is “emasculating” him. This dynamic also contributes substantially to Chase’s queer coding; while he has sex with women in both his personal and professional lives, he is “feminized” in the eyes of his conservative society, driven to survive on his wit, con artistry, and sex work. His concern about his age and his appearance functions similarly, again because it subverts traditional gender roles; in patriarchal heterosexuality, women exist to be looked at while men exist to look, rendering their physical sexual desirability irrelevant from a societal perspective. Such details allow Williams to implicitly explore aspects of gay life onstage at a time when possibilities for direct representation were limited.