Sweet Bird of Youth

Directors, adaptors, and even the playwright himself have suggested that Sweet Bird of Youth has an Act II problem. Act II, Scene 1, is the only scene set outside the Royal Palms Hotel, and it does not include the two putative leads, Chance and the Princess. Elia Kazan, director of Sweet Bird of Youth’s Broadway debut, argued that Sweet Bird of Youth seems like “two one-act plays” that were roughly hewn together. Indeed, “Williams said that he was unable to come up with a satisfactory Act II because he had no interest in Boss Finley or Heavenly as characters, and he was in ‘a terrible state of depression’ at the time” (Murphy, Brenda. “How to Fix a Second Act The Summary Film and Television Adaptations of Sweet Bird of Youth.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, no. 15, 2016. p. 74). 

Boss Finley and Heavenly are indeed flat characters, at least in comparison to the depth and complexity of Chase and the Princess. Boss Finley is a broadly drawn Southern patriarchal political boss committed to racial purity politics and his own power, while Heavenly is characterized largely in terms of her feelings of emptiness due to her abortion and hysterectomy—that is, in terms of her relationship with a man and her ability to become a mother, both stereotypically womanly preoccupations. However, her flatness has a thematic function: As her name suggests, her primary narrative role is as an impossible ideal for Chance to chase. In this sense, she is not meant to be realistic.

Moreover, the scene’s interpersonal dynamics do provide a degree of psychological depth while developing themes of The Destructive Pursuit of Youth and Fame and The Tragedy of Impotence and Envy. Boss Finley is revealed to have a mistress, Miss Lucy. His pursuit of her both “broke” his wife’s heart and results in his humiliation when Miss Lucy publicly proclaims that he is too old to satisfy her as a lover. It is suggested that he envies Chance’s youthful fulfillment of his daughter’s sexual desires, particularly as the stage directions note that Boss Finley’s affection for Heavenly is partially the result of a sublimated desire for his late wife. This incestuous dynamic also contextualizes Boss Finley’s racist depiction of Black men as sexual predators—and, by extension, the rhetoric surrounding white women’s “purity” broadly. Williams paints this concern as hypocritically rooted in white men’s own illicit and potentially violent sexual appetites. 

Though framed in more tragic and sympathetic terms, Heavenly is likewise the victim of her sexual desires, as her sexual relationship with Chance has resulted in her sterilization. Heavenly’s response to her hysterectomy parallels the castration anxiety that plagues Chase: Just as he fears emasculation and the inability to continue to provide and receive sexual pleasure, Heavenly feels reduced and defeminized. Without the ability to conceive, she feels “like an old woman” (73)—a remark that evokes the fears of aging that similarly plague her father, Chance, and the Princess.

Act II marks a shift in genre as well as characterization. While the other scenes of the play contain a mix of melodrama and social realism typical of Tennessee Williams, Act II, Scene 1 is overwhelmingly melodramatic. It relies on a stock plot of melodrama: two lovers driven apart by a disapproving father. The dialogue and stage directions explicitly take the staging in a “neo-romantic” direction, with Williams using the Gulf coast setting to highlight Heavenly’s thwarted desire and tragic awareness: “Heavenly is always looking that way, toward the Gulf, so that the light from Point Lookout catches her face with its repeated soft stroke of clarity” (69). Heavenly looks West, which in the American tradition typically represents hope and possibility; here, it also represents Hollywood and the life of an actress that she may have once desired and that is now inaccessible to her. Her awareness of this tragedy is symbolized in the lighthouse light that flashes periodically upon her face. The symbolic use of landscape is a hallmark of melodramatic Southern “local color” stories such as those of Hart Crane, whose poem “Legend,” about the sexual desires of a young man, is used as the epigraph for Sweet Bird of Youth.