Journeys from Frustration to Empowerment: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and its Debt to Garda Lorca's Yerma

Abstract

The extent to which Federico Garcia Lorca's works influenced Tennessee Williams's creative output remains a largely neglected question, one often passed over in favor of Williams's debt to Anton Chekov and D. H. Lawrence. However, Lorca (1899—1936) was one of the authors whom Williams (1911—1983) studied intensively during his college years, while a 1947 New York Times interviewer reported that "among his favorite writers are Chekov and the Spanish poet and dramatist Garda Lorca, and it is probable that they, more than any others, have contributed to his own particular style." Nowhere is Lorca's influence more apparent than in Williams's early one-act The Purification, a rural tragedy in verse clearly modeled after the Spanish author's Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding).