Sweet Bird of Youth

“PRINCESS [laughs breathlessly]. Yes, for God’s sake, take it away. I must look hideous in it.

CHANCE [taking the mask]. No, no, you just look exotic, like a Princess from Mars or a big magnified insect.”

This exchange between Chance and the Princess highlights the pitfalls of their transactional relationship, developing the theme of The Universality of Exploitation and Transactional Relationships. The Princess is desperate to use Chance to reassure her that she is still young and beautiful; she is fishing for a compliment when she remarks that she “must look hideous” in her oxygen mask, a sign of her failing health. Chance is quick to reassure her that she simply looks “exotic”; it is left ambiguous whether this is how he sincerely feels or whether he is simply saying what he knows she wants to hear to manipulate her, but the unflattering similes he resorts to (e.g., an “insect”) imply the latter.

“CHANCE. I like you, you’re a nice monster.

PRINCESS. Your voice sounds young. Are you young?

CHANCE. My age is twenty-nine years.

PRINCESS. That’s young for anyone but an Arab. Are you very good-looking?

CHANCE. I used to be the best-looking boy in this town.”

The Princess’s Orientalist comment that Chance is “young for anyone but an Arab” gestures toward the queer coding that is present in their relationship. In the 1940s and 1950s, wealthy white gay men from Europe and the United States would go to places like Morocco to have sex with very young boys and men. Her comment here is seemingly an allusion to that practice. In this dialogue, Chance also recognizes that his looks have faded and that he is no longer the handsome youth he once was, a feeling that gradually intensifies over the course of the play.

“PRINCESS. There’s no more valuable knowledge than knowing the right time to go. I knew it. I went at the right time to go. RETIRED! Where to? To what? To that dead planet the moon…

There’s nowhere else to retire to when you retire from an art because, believe it or not, I really was once an artist. So I retired to the moon, but the atmosphere of the moon doesn’t have any oxygen in it. I began to feel breathless, in that withered, withering country, of time coming after time not meant to come after, and so I discovered [hash].”

The Princess’s monologue here succinctly summarizes the theme of The Destructive Pursuit of Youth and Fame. Feeling that she is no longer able to pursue her passion, acting, due to her advancing age, the Princess copes with her feelings through self-destructive behavior such as smoking hash. This excerpt also exemplifies the Princess’s elliptical, lyrical manner of speaking, suggestive of drug and alcohol use. She repeats words and phrases and uses highly figurative language, such as comparing her life offstage to living on the Moon.

“PRINCESS. When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, AND IT WILL NEVER BE ME.”

When confronted with Chance’s demands for her money, the Princess finds strength and focus, indicated here through the use of emphasis. She also characterizes the mutually transactional and manipulative nature of her relationship with Chance as a zero-sum game where she will come out the winner. This foreshadows the ending of the play, where the Princess does indeed get what she wants, while Chance is left penniless and alone.

“CHANCE. I was a twelve-pound baby, normal and healthy, but with some kind of quantity ‘X’ in my blood, a wish or a need to be different… The kids that I grew up with are mostly still here and what they call ‘settled down,’ gone into business, married and bringing up children, the little crowd I was in with, that I used to be the star of, was the snobset, the ones with the big names and money. I didn’t have either… […] What I had was […]

PRINCESS. BEAUTY! Say it! Say it! What you had was beauty! I had it! I say it, with pride, no matter how sad, being gone, now.”

The Princess recognizes in Chance the same vanity and reliance on beauty. She likewise recognizes that they are both fighting a losing battle against the fading of their looks and thus the loss of what they rely on to survive.

“CHANCE. In a life like mine, you just can’t stop, you know, can’t take time out between steps, you’ve got to keep going right on up from one thing to the other, once you drop out, it leaves you and goes on without you and you’re washed up.”

Chance is here referring to his life as a conman and sex worker, but it could just as easily apply to the life of an actor or artist. The Princess, for example, feels pressure to remain in the spotlight as long as possible for fear it will move on. This double meaning points to the blurred lines between actor and sex worker.

“CHANCE. Princess, the great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor or the good and the evil, the biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones that had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love, but just watched it with envy, sick envy. The spectators and the performers.”

This extract sets up a series of parallel dichotomies: rich and poor, good and evil, spectators and performers. This creates a lyrical rhythm that ends with “the spectators and the performers,” emphasizing the importance of this dichotomy within the worldview of the play. The “performers” here are those who “have pleasure in love,” implying that those who cannot “perform” are figuratively castrated. The passage thus develops the theme of The Tragedy of Impotence and Envy, associating powerlessness in love with Chance’s failed stage career (via the language of spectators and performers).

“BOSS. Discreetly, like you handled that operation you done on my daughter, so discreetly that a hillbilly heckler is shouting me questions about it wherever I speak?”

Tennessee Williams uses Southern vernacular language to characterize Boss Finley. In this quote, Boss Finley uses the irregular “done” instead of “have done” and says, “shouting me questions,” instead of the standard “shouting questions at me,” drawing on the popular association of nonstandard English with lack of education or intelligence to paint Finley as vulgar. This use of language is in keeping with Williams’s characterization of Boss Finley as a stereotypical Southern man; it also indicates his hypocrisy, as Finley himself speaks a dialect associated with “hillbillies.”

“NONNIE. Violence don’t solve problems. It never solves young people’s problems. If you will leave it to me, I’ll get him out of St. Cloud. I can, I will, I promise. I don’t think Heavenly knows he’s back in St. Cloud. Tom, you know, Heavenly says it wasn’t Chance that—She says it wasn’t Chance.”

Throughout the play, Chance asserts that he is on the side of “love,” not violence. Nonnie’s dialogue here places her on his side when she states that “violence don’t solve problems.” She also introduces the idea that Chance was not responsible for Heavenly’s pregnancy. The idea is not explored further in the play, and Heavenly may simply be trying to shield Chance. However, it raises the possibility that Chance is being scapegoated just as the nameless Black man who was castrated was scapegoated, both of them only guilty for providing pleasure and provoking “sex-envy.”

“The sea wind sings, Heavenly lifts her face to it. Later that night may be stormy, but now there is just a quickness and freshness coming in from the Gulf. 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.”

These stage directions use elements of atmospheric Romanticism to conjure Heavenly’s sense of hope despite her awareness of the tragedy of her situation. She turns her head west to take in the “quickness and freshness” of the sea wind, symbolic of her optimism. “That night may be stormy” metaphorically foreshadows the coming conflict and tragedy that await the man she cares for, Chance.

“BOSS. You’re still a beautiful girl.

HEAVENLY. Am I, Papa?

BOSS. Of course you are. Lookin’ at you nobody could guess that—

HEAVENLY [laughs]. The embalmers must have done a good job on me, Papa.”

Boss Finley opens his dialogue with his daughter by commenting on her looks. This illustrates that he values her youth and beauty, which will naturally fade with time. However, like Chase, who feels “the level of […] rot” in him has made him “ancient” (123), Heavenly feels her operation has left her metaphorically dead despite her literal youth, her looks only preserved by “embalmers.”

“BOSS. Last week in New Bethesda, when I was speaking on the threat of desegregation to white women’s chastity in the South, some heckler in the crowd shouted out, ‘Hey, Boss Finley, how about your daughter? How about that operation you had done on your daughter at the Thomas J. Finley hospital in St Cloud? Did she put on black in mourning for her appendix?’”

Boss Finley is only concerned with his daughter’s well-being as far as it impacts his political standing. This statement reveals that he has been running for office on a racist argument about the supposed threat Black men pose to the sexual purity of white women. Because he has an exploitative and transactional understanding of the father-daughter relationship, he does not sympathize with what his daughter has gone through; in fact, he sees it as a liability that undercuts his campaign message.

“They’ve noticed a tall man who has entered the cocktail lounge. He has the length and leanness and luminous pallor of a face that El Greco gave to his saints. He has a small bandage near the hairline. His clothes are country.”

The heckler is a minor character in the play, but this stage direction illustrates the significance of his symbolic role. The allusion to El Greco’s (a 17th-century painter) saints indicates that the Heckler is a force of good: He is one of the few with the courage to vocally contest Boss Finley’s racist views or, more broadly, his hypocrisy. The word choice also anticipates Chance’s later remarks about “saints” and aging, suggesting that the heckler’s rare moral clarity allows him to stand outside of typical human time.

“NONNIE. Oh, Chance, why have you changed like you’ve changed? Why do you live on nothing but wild dreams now, and have no address where anybody can reach you in time to—reach you?”

Nonnie’s assertion that Chance has “no address where anybody can reach [him]” is at once literal and metaphorical. He is literally a vagabond without a fixed address due to his carefree lifestyle, but his selfishness and single-minded pursuit of pleasure also make it hard for those who genuinely care about him, like Nonnie, to “reach” him emotionally. He has effectively isolated himself in his destructive pursuit of youth and fame.

“CHANCE. I said, oh, Heavenly, no, but she said yes, and I cried in her arms that night, and didn’t know that what I was crying for was—youth, that would go.”

One of Chance’s central flaws is his transactional approach to relationships. Thus, even when offered grace in Heavenly’s arms while they have sex for the first time, he did not reflect on the comfort or joy of that moment but rather focused on himself—specifically, his fleeting youth.

“CHANCE. I go back to Heavenly, or I don’t. I live or die. There’s nothing in between for me.

AUNT NONNIE. What you want to go back to is your clean, unashamed youth. And you can’t.”

Chance believes that if he can win back Heavenly, he can win back the life he desires. He does not care about her as a person but rather as an avatar for his youth and beauty, making his pursuit of her not only selfish but also futile. Nonnie explicitly lays this out, but he appears not to listen to her, again illustrating his self-involvement.

“CHANCE. You know what that is, don’t you? Sex-envy is what that is, and the revenge for sex-envy which is a widespread disease that I have run into personally too often for me to doubt its existence or any manifestation.”

Upon hearing about the castration of the random Black man, Chance ascribes the motivation for the attack to “sex-envy.” This psycho-sexual dynamic is implied to be a driving factor behind Boss Finley’s political speeches about “protecting” the sexual “purity” of white women. Chance relates as someone whom Heavenly’s father and brother envy for providing sexual pleasure to Heavenly.

“PRINCESS. I did, I waited forever, I waited forever for you. Then finally I heard those long sad silver trumpets blowing through the palm garden and then—Chance, the most wonderful thing has happened to me […] Chance, please listen to me. I’m ashamed of this morning. I’ll never degrade you again, I’ll never degrade myself, you and me, again by—I wasn’t always this monster.”

This passage illustrates the Princess’s slightly scattered and recursive manner of speech, which suggests both her intoxication and her ongoing emotional crisis. She hears The Lament, the wind blowing through the palm fronds, as “sad silver trumpets,” which in biblical imagery denote the preaching of the gospel or the coming of the messiah. She takes this as a spiritual admonition to confess her “sin,” manipulating and taking advantage of Chance, in an attempt to redeem herself.

“CHANCE. Give your father that message. This is my town. I was born in St. Cloud, not him. He was just called here. He was just called down from the hills to preach hate. I was born here to make love.”

Boss Finley asserts that God “called” him to political office. However, Chance here frames Finley as a false prophet who “preach[es] hate” while Chance “make[s] love”—diction that subversively links Chance’s message of love to his role as a sex worker (and his sexuality more broadly). In the context of the play’s Easter Sunday setting, it suggests that Chance is a Christ figure, making his implied castration at the end of the play a figurative crucifixion, as well.

“PRINCESS. All day I’ve kept hearing a sort of lament that drifts through the air of this place. It says, ‘Lost, lost, never to be found again.’ Palm gardens by the sea and olive groves on Mediterranean islands all have that lament drifting through them. ‘Lost, lost’…The isle of Cyprus, Monte Carlo, San Remo, Torremolenas [sic], Tangiers. They’re all places of exile from whatever we loved.”

In this passage, the Princess evokes the landscape of the Mediterranean. This is fitting, as the Royal Palm Hotel has a “Moorish” design of the sort one finds in Tangiers and Torremolinos. This connects the setting with the ancient world and a universal story of “exile from whatever we loved.” In this passage, the Princess acts as an oracle who can translate the signs and portents, i.e., “the lament,” for the audience.

“Wind sweeps the Palm Garden; it seems to dissolve the walls; the rest of the play is acted against the night sky.”

This stage direction highlights the atmospheric Romanticism of the play and its staging. With a final gust of wind through the palms, the realistic elements of the stage are blown away, and all that remains is the melodramatic tragedy unfolding.

“PRINCESS. I listened to you this morning, with understanding and pity, I did, I listened with pity to your story this morning. I felt something in my heart for you which I thought I couldn’t feel. I remembered young men who were what you are or what you’re hoping to be. I saw them all clearly, all clearly, eyes, voices, smiles, bodies clearly. But their names wouldn’t come back to me. I couldn’t get their names back without digging into old programs of plays that I starred in at twenty in which they said, ‘Madam, the Count’s waiting for you.’”

The Princess connects Chance’s fading youth with her own fleeting time onstage. She situates him as an avatar for men who seek fame as actors but find themselves relegated to side roles—the servant or valet who would usher her, the young female lead, in to meet “the Count,” a reference to a lead romantic interest. The implication is that Chance has played a similarly marginal role in the Princess’s real life, harkening to the dichotomy established between “spectators” and “performers.”

“PRINCESS. The legend that I’ve out-lived…Monsters don’t die early; they hang on long. Awfully long. Their vanity’s infinite, almost as infinite as their disgust with themselves.”

Throughout the play, the Princess refers to herself as a “monster.” This illustrates her self-loathing, as in this excerpt, but it also frames her in mythical terms. This is emphasized here, where she describes her “infinite” vanity and self-disgust. This archetypal framing recalls both the play’s biblical allusions and its references to “saints” and “heroes”; more broadly, it anticipates the play’s final lines, which position Chance as a stand-in for humanity writ large.