Sweet Bird of Youth

The concluding act opens with the sight of “something burn[ing] in the Palm Garden: an effigy, an emblem?” (111). This symbolic and menacing sight has multiple resonances. It could be another “hideous straw-stuffed effigy” of Boss Finley burning (108), like the one that was burned at Boss Finley’s last provocative speech in protest of his racist views. The sight of something burning on a lawn also evokes the crosses that the KKK would burn as a threat against those who pursued racial justice. Its image is a reminder of the racist dimensions of the play’s sexual violence—specifically, castration, which is one possible fate that awaits Chance when the curtain falls at the end of the play.

In their final moments together, Chance and the Princess’s dialogue elaborates on the theme of The Destructive Pursuit of Youth and Fame. The Princess is preparing to abandon Chance to his fate and justifies her decision by describing them both as “monsters” who are willing to pursue fame at any cost, even at the cost of companionship. She tells him, “I climbed back up alone to ogre’s country where I live now, alone” (120). The metaphor suggests that in show business, people must be ruthless and self-serving in their pursuit of fame. Chance cannot accompany her because he would hinder her success, his own opportunity having come and gone: “[Y]our time, your youth, you’ve passed it” (120). She was only dangling the possibility of his stardom to further her own ends, in keeping with the play’s interest in The Universality of Exploitation and Transactional Relationships. Chance is forced to recognize that she is correct. He admits to her, “I couldn’t go past my youth, but I’ve gone past it” (122). However, the play does not let the Princess herself go entirely “unpunished” for her manipulations. She, too, is subject to the growing pressure of fading youth and the end of stardom. While she has been spared this time, “both are faced with castration, and in her heart she knows it” (122). This stage direction once again highlights the connection between The Tragedy of Impotence and Envy and the inability to “perform,” whether due to lack of talent or lack of opportunity as one ages.

Indeed, the play’s closing moments frame this fate as both universal and tragic. The Lament, already associated with loss and grief, now sounds alongside a clock ticking—an explicit allusion to the passage of time. Then, at the end of the play, just before Chance’s implied castration by Tom Junior and company, Chase “advanc[es] to the forestage” to deliver his final lines (124). Although it is not clearly indicated as such, this is typically where an actor stands onstage to deliver asides. The movement thus draws the actors and the audience together as mutually implicated by “the enemy, time, in us all” (124). It is a moment when the play “breaks the fourth wall.” Chance the character is appealing to Tom to understand that he felt driven to what he had to do due to his innate and destructive pursuit of youth and fame, while Chance the would-be actor is appealing to an audience to recognize his performance. The line equally applies to the actor playing Chance, a young but aging performer who has also pursued a career in theater. Finally, given the connections between the character of Chance and the playwright, the final line can be understood as an appeal by Tennessee Williams himself for the audience to recognize their common humanity in the face of the relentless march of time. 

However, the tragedy is not simply the inevitability of aging, as a trio of remarks underscores. The first is Chance’s claim that he is “ancient” because of the “rot” with him; the second comes immediately after, as he reflects that “saints and heroes” might cheat aging (123). Finally, there is the depiction of time as something internal—an “enemy […] in us” (124). “Rot” is the same term that the Princess used to describe the STD that Chance passed to Heavenly; it thus suggests Chance’s shame over what he perceives to be sexual immorality, which has aged him prematurely by exposing him to illness. The implication, however, is that it has also aged him figuratively, via moral “corruption,” and it is this metaphorical form of aging that the passages collectively evoke—the moral compromises that tend to accumulate over the years, except among those of near superhuman virtue.