Sweet Bird of Youth

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The text explores themes of youth, beauty, aging and the inevitable passage of time. It also touches on themes of purity, corruption, love, obsession and pleasure. The main characters are terrified of getting old and losing their youthful beauty and vitality.

Some of the major themes explored include youth, beauty and time; purity and corruption; love, obsession and pleasure; escapism and denial. The text suggests that as people age they become desperate to hold on to their youth.

The lament, a melancholy strain of music, is used as a symbol. It represents underlying doubts, fears and unexamined emotions lurking within characters. The Cadillac is also a symbol - Chance wants to use it to impress others and appear successful, but it instead highlights his lack of independence.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

S W E E T B I R D O F YO U T H
JACOB TAN

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Themes ...........................................................................................................4

Youth, beauty and time ..............................................................................................4


Purity and corruption .................................................................................................6
Love, Obsession and Pleasure ....................................................................................8
Escapism and Denial ...............................................................................................10
Characters ....................................................................................................14

Chance Wayne .......................................................................................................14


Alexandra Del Lago / Princess Kosmonopolis ............................................................14
Heavenly Finley ......................................................................................................15
Boss Finley ..............................................................................................................15
Tom Junior ..............................................................................................................15
Miss Lucy ................................................................................................................16
Aunt Nonnie ...........................................................................................................16
Dr George Scudder .................................................................................................16
Symbols ........................................................................................................17

The Lament .............................................................................................................17


The Cadillac ............................................................................................................17

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THEMES
YO U T H , B E AU T Y A N D T I M E

In Sweet Bird of Youth, the inevitability of aging wears on characters who have come to
depend on a superficial kind of beauty. Chance, an aspiring actor, has no true talent as a
performer. Nonetheless, he has spent his life chasing the minor success he enjoyed as a
young man, always believing himself worthy of fame. A ladies’ man and gigolo (male
escort), he’s supported himself by exploiting his youthful vitality and appeal, but this can
only take him so far, as it’s clear his good looks will soon fade. This is perhaps why he
decides to blackmail the famous but over-the-hill actress Alexandra Del Lago: he’s desperate
to attain success before he loses his youthful beauty, which is his only asset. Interestingly,
Alexandra Del Lago willingly goes along with his scheme—she too understands what it’s
like to be terrified of aging, since she feels as if she’s recently lost her status in the
entertainment industry because she’s no longer young and relevant. Unable to accept the
inevitability of time and aging, then, both she and Chance turn to drugs and sexual
debauchery, grasping desperately for happiness. This is because both of them of them have
invested themselves in values that are, in the end, shallow. In turn, Tennessee Williams
satirizes the vapid sense of importance people place on youthful beauty, demonstrating that
it’s a mistake to invest oneself in something so fleeting.

Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago are in distinctly different situations, but the
problems they face are similar. Alexandra (the “Princess”) has at least enjoyed a successful
career as a Hollywood star. Now, though, she’s depressed because she’s no longer a
gorgeous young actress. Chance, on the other hand, has never actually gotten the fame he
wants, though he hasn’t completely lost his good looks. Still, though, time is having its way
with him, as his hair is thinning and his face is “ravaged.” Despite their differences, Chance
and the Princess both feel sorry for themselves and worry about their advancing ages.
However, Chance still wants to keep trying to become famous, whereas the Princess has
resigned herself to the fact that she has lost everything she ever cared about. After he tells
her that he wants to use her to become famous, she tells him, “At some point in your life,
the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then…you die, or find something else.”
Surprisingly, this sentiment suggests that the Princess is aware of how foolish she was to
invest herself so wholeheartedly in youth and beauty, which don’t last. Unfortunately for
her, there’s nothing left to “live for,” since she has focused all these years solely on her
career as star. Now, it seems, there’s nothing for her to do but “die,” unless she can “find
something else.” For her, this means throwing herself into a life of drugged stupor, as made
evident by the fact that she smokes hashish while issuing this advice to Chance. As such,

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she hasn’t truly “found” anything of value, once again suggesting that she simply feels lost
now that she can’t depend upon her youth, which is long gone.

As a child and teenager, Chance was incredibly attractive. Because of this, he believed he
deserved a special, spectacular life. In fact, not only did he think he deserved this, but he
simply assumed everything would work out for him, thinking his beauty would attract good
things. Having returned to his home of St. Cloud, he looks condescendingly at his peers,
who lead ordinary lives. “The girls are young matrons, bridge-players, and the boys belong
to the junior Chamber of Commerce and some of them, clubs in New Orleans […],” he
explains to the Princess. “I wanted, expected, intended to get, something better…Yes, and I
did, I got it. I did things that fat-headed gang never dreamed of.” The fact that Chance
“expected” to get “better” things than the people he grew up with just because he was
handsome proves his rather shallow belief that beauty naturally leads to happiness and
value.

But despite Chance’s expectations, he didn’t go on to “get something better” than his peers.
In reality, he garnered only the most minor of successes in the theater world, and his main
claim to fame was as a gigolo, which he refers to as “maybe the only [vocation he] was truly
meant for.” Regarding this, he says, “I gave people more than I took. Middle-aged people I
gave back a feeling of youth.” In this moment, Chance frames youth as a valuable
commodity, something that people seemingly need and will pay to get (an idea the Princess
reinforces by agreeing to help him get famous as long as he sleeps with her). Given this
framework, it’s no surprise that he finds himself distraught at the idea of aging.

By the end of the play, Chance finally faces the fact that he can’t stop the passage of time.
“Time—who could beat it, who could defeat it ever?” he laments. By this point, he
understands on some level that he’ll never be famous, that his looks are gone, and that they
were never even enough to make his life extraordinary in the first place. Faced with this
realization, he has little to “live for,” which is why he says, “Something’s got to mean
something, don’t it, Princess?” As the critic Lanford Wilson writes in an introduction to the
text, this is a play about “the tragic loss of youthful beauty and innocence when that’s all
one has to offer.” Even the Princess, who did have fame, has lost the “youthful beauty” that
defined her life for so long. As such, both she and Chance find themselves reaching in vain
for meaning in the wake of their faded youths. In this way, Williams warns that the passage
of time remains uninfluenced by superficial concerns of youth and beauty, thereby
suggesting that people ought to invest themselves in more authentic, meaningful values.

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PURITY AND CORRUPTION

In Sweet Bird of Youth, the antagonistic Boss Finley sets forth bigoted notions of racial
purity as well as patriarchal views regarding womanhood. Not only does this politician
believe whites and blacks shouldn’t integrate or copulate, but he also thinks his daughter
Heavenly has been corrupted—defiled—by her pre-marital sexual exploits with Chance
Wayne. In other words, Boss Finley loathes what he sees as impurity, and so he brings his
racist and misogynistic agenda to bear on the people around him. In turn, this leads him to
promote unconscionable acts of violence. By portraying Finley as such a blatantly evil man,
then, Williams warns against using the idea of purity to justify hatefulness.

Early on, Boss Finley warns Heavenly that her actions affect his political career. In particular,
he scolds her for consorting with Chance Wayne, whom he hates and believes unworthy of
his daughter’s love. Because of this dynamic, Chance has always felt he needs to become
rich and famous so that Boss Finley will finally relent and allow him to marry Heavenly. To
do this, he has spent the last several years trying to become a well-known actor, but because
this hasn’t worked, he has resorted to what is essentially prostitution, working as a gigolo to
earn money. During his last visit to St. Cloud, he transmitted an STD to Heavenly, forcing
her to have a surgical operation that unfortunately went wrong, leaving her sterile for the
rest of her life. To Boss Finley, this is the ultimate corruption of his young daughter’s purity.
To make him even more furious, people have been taunting him at rallies by referencing
Heavenly’s operation, which is why he decides that she must come to his next event dressed
in all white. “You’re going to be wearing the stainless white of a virgin, with a Youth for
Tom Finley button on one shoulder and a corsage of lilies on the other,” he says. “You’re
going to be on the speaker’s platform with me… to scotch these rumors of your corruption.”
Boss Finley is so horrified by the idea that his daughter has been “corrupted” that he tries to
overcompensate, dressing her up to communicate a message of purity and innocence to
voters. Of course, it’s clear the people of St. Cloud already know Heavenly’s secret, but Boss
Finley still insists that she radiate the stereotypical incorruptibility of an unmarried young
woman, desperately wanting his daughter to at least act as if she too holds his same ideas of
purity in high esteem.

Presenting his daughter as uncorrupted and pure isn’t Boss Finley’s only goal. In fact, he has
an ulterior motive driving his decision to have her stand next to him dressed in white—a
motive that aligns with his political campaign. “Lookin’ at you, all in white like a virgin,” he
explains to Heavenly, “nobody would dare to speak or believe the ugly stories about you. I’m
relying a great deal on this campaign to bring in young voters for the crusade I’m leading.
I’m all that stands between the South and the black days of Reconstruction. And you and

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Tom Junior are going to stand there beside me in the grand crystal ballroom, as shining
examples of white Southern youth—in danger.” Here, Boss Finley reveals that he wants to
use Heavenly to project the bigoted message of racial purity to Southern voters. Not only
does he see womanhood as something that can be made impure by others, but he also sees
the white race as something that is “in danger” because of the prospect of racial integration.
Under this racist interpretation, white Southerners are under threat because they might
soon come together with black Southerners. Instead of seeing this as a positive unifying
experience, Boss Finley sees it as a corruption of racial purity, investing himself in
homogeneity rather than diversity.

There are, of course, other bigoted people in St. Cloud who agree with Boss Finley’s racist
ideas regarding corruption and purity. As Chance’s old friend explains at one point, a group
of white men overtook a black man “and castrated the bastard to show they mean[t]
business about white women’s protection in this state.” This, it seems, is the violent agenda
advanced by Boss Finley’s racist rhetoric regarding purity and corruption. In his twisted
view, castrating a black man is justifiable as a protection of purity, which is why he threatens
to do the very same thing to Chance Wayne: he sees Chance as someone who has corrupted
his daughter’s purity. He even unabashedly endorses the use of violence in such contexts.
Indeed, when Heavenly ventures that he “wouldn’t dare” hurt Chance, he says, “A lot of
people approve of taking violent action against corrupters. And on all of them that want to
adulterate the pure white blood of the South.” In this moment, he conflates Chance Wayne’s
so-called “corruption” of his daughter with integration, making it clear that the two matters
are more or less the same to him even though Chance is white. After all, he believes that
both black people and Chance present a threat to purity.

This is obviously a very narrow-minded viewpoint that lacks even the slightest trace of
empathy, and the fact that Boss Finley uses such an absurd outlook to justify violence is a
clear indication of his lacking moral character. As such, Williams emphasizes the ways in
which bigotry and hate can lead to inexcusable behavior, demonstrating that people
sometimes claim that certain values (like incorruptibility or purity) are upstanding when in
reality they’re only using these values to advance divisive and violent agendas.

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LOVE, OBSESSION AND PLEASURE

Chance Wayne’s love of Heavenly drives him throughout the entirety of Sweet Bird of Youth,
encouraging him to not only endure a number of social disgraces, but also to face down
dangerous threats. The only reason he has worked so hard to become famous, he claims, is
so that he can return to St. Cloud and earn Boss Finley’s blessing to marry Heavenly.
However, because this never comes to pass—and because Chance and Heavenly never
actually share any intimacy in the course of the play—it’s hard to discern whether or not his
claims of love are genuine. Though most playwrights might allow a love story like Chance
and Heavenly’s to triumph over everything else, Tennessee Williams is more interested in
exploring how Chance’s attempt to court Heavenly actually drives him farther and farther
from her. By the end of the play, it’s unclear whether his refusal to comply with Boss
Finley’s orders to leave St. Cloud arises out of his steadfast love of Heavenly or the
headstrong vanity he has cultivated as a dashing gigolo and actor. In this way, Williams
intimates that the mere idea of love can overshadow a person’s actual romantic feelings,
ultimately becoming more of a mental fixation than a genuine emotional experience or
connection between two people.

Throughout Sweet Bird of Youth, Chance’s determination to make a life with Heavenly
never falters. Until the very end, he tries to carry out a scheme that will make both of them
rich and famous, ostensibly enabling them to be together. As he does this, Boss Finley
threatens to kill or castrate him unless he leaves St. Cloud. Nevertheless, he doesn’t leave,
and in the final scene he finally allows himself to be overtaken by Finley’s goons, preparing
for extreme violence because he’s unwilling to give up. Judging by this, it’s easy to think
that his love for Heavenly is steadfast and authentic. However, it’s hard to overlook the fact
that he has only visited Heavenly periodically in the last several years, always swooping into
town for short stays, making love to her, and leaving again to resume his fast life as an
aspiring actor and well-known gigolo. During one such visit, he even gave her an STD he
picked up while working as an escort, and although he knew that he had it and that he had
probably given it to her, he didn’t say anything. “I thought if something was wrong she’d
write me or call me,” he lamely justifies to Heavenly’s brother, Tom Junior, who points out
that Heavenly couldn’t have reached him even if she wanted to, since he never gives her
reliable ways to contact him when he leaves. Not only does this behavior suggest that
Chance doesn’t care as much about Heavenly as he claims, it also emphasizes how much he
has been absent from his lover’s life. Although he might argue that he has been off trying to
become famous so he can provide for Heavenly, it seems more likely that he has simply

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come to enjoy his debauched lifestyle—so much that he doesn’t mind abandoning Heavenly
even after transmitting a disease to her.

Williams’s onstage treatment of Chance and Heavenly’s relationship is quite fleeting, yet
again suggesting that the supposed “love” flowing between them isn’t as strong as Chance
would like to think. Indeed, Chance spends the majority of the play talking about his
relationship with Heavenly, but the audience only gets to see them together for a few
seconds. During this moment, the stage directions note: “At this instant she runs in—to face
Chance…. For a long instant, Chance and Heavenly stand there: he on the steps leading to
the Palm Garden and gallery; she in the cocktail lounge. They simply look at each other…”
Before either of them can speak, Heavenly is ushered offstage again. This is the only
interaction they have throughout the entire play. After “a long instant,” during which they
don’t even speak, Heavenly leaves, essentially providing the audience with very little insight
into their relationship. Although this moment could be seen as an “instant” of intense
emotion, it also hints at a certain tension, as if Heavenly is confronting Chance with her
stare (this is, after all, the first time she’s seen him since he gave her an STD). Overall, it’s
difficult to discern whether or not true love exists in their relationship. At the very least, the
playwright’s decision to keep them from coming together onstage destabilizes the idea that
their love is strong, authentic, and capable of overcoming hardship. In turn, Williams forces
the audience to judge Chance and Heavenly’s relationship based only on Chance’s
interpretation of their love—an interpretation that, given his unrealistic expectations in
other areas of his life, comes to seem less and less reliable.

Part of what makes Chance’s supposed love of Heavenly seem inauthentic or unbelievable is
the way he conceives of love in general. In a conversation with Alexandra Del Lago, he says,
“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.” At first glance, this statement
seems rather wholesome, since Chance is arguing that love is something that defines a
person. However, it’s worth noting that he isn’t championing love itself, but rather the
“pleasure” that one can derive from love. As such, he approaches love in an unsentimental
and unemotional manner, primarily searching for a kind of hedonistic (pleasure-seeking)
gratification. If this is what’s driving him to work so hard to win Heavenly’s hand, it seems
he has overestimated his feelings. At the same time, though, sexual or physical pleasure can
naturally lead people to think they’re in love, so it’s unsurprising that Chance mistakes his
obsession with Heavenly as a genuine romantic experience. In this way, Williams
demonstrates that a person’s obsession with pleasure can overshadow—or even replace—
the desire to attain true and genuine love.

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ESCAPISM AND DENIAL

In Sweet Bird of Youth, characters like Chance Wayne and the Princess try to keep
themselves from facing difficult thoughts and feelings. Whether by using drugs or running
from city to city, they both actively avoid the fact that their deepest fears—of aging and
fading into irrelevance or obscurity—have come true. For the Princess, this means drinking,
popping pills, running away from her everyday life, and having sex with a younger man in
order to “forget” that her career has come to an end. Chance, though, is in a slightly
different predicament. While the Princess at least seems to grasp that she’s distracting
herself from a truth she doesn’t want to think about, Chance keeps himself in a state of
denial, insisting that he still has a shot at settling down with the love of his life and
becoming rich and famous. Even when it’s clear that Chance’s plans have only run him into
more trouble, he still doesn’t stop deluding himself, ultimately deciding to stay in St. Cloud
despite the fact that Heavenly’s brother and father plan to castrate or kill him. In this way,
Williams shows the audience that denial is capable of severely distorting a person’s
rationality. By comparing and contrasting the Princess and Chance’s attempts at self-
delusion, he suggests that while the desire to escape or “forget” about hardship is perhaps a
natural human impulse, denying reality altogether is dangerous and misguided.

In the play’s opening scene, the Princess wakes up in a hotel room with Chance and doesn’t
seem to know where she is, who Chance is, or why she’s there. As the two characters begin
to talk, though, it becomes clear that the Princess has willfully imposed this amnesia upon
herself. She wants to forget that several weeks ago she had an embarrassing moment at the
first screening of her new film, which was supposed to be her “comeback” feature and
triumphant return to the entertainment industry. However, she thinks this has gone
disastrously, and so has run away, choosing to drift between luxury hotels in various beach
towns. When Chance references the embarrassing incident at the Princess’s screening, he
calls it a “disappointment,” to which she says, “What disappointment? I don’t remember
any.” In response, Chance asks, “Can you control your memory like that?” “Yes,” the
Princess admits. “I’ve had to learn to.” In this moment, she reveals her eagerness to escape
—and even deny—the hardships that have befallen her, somehow willing herself to block
out unpleasant thoughts. The fact that she has “had to learn to” do this suggests that she
sees her ability to “forget” as a defense mechanism, something that can be used as a tool to
cope (or avoid coping) with things she’s otherwise unwilling to face.

Despite the Princess’s efforts to completely forget—and thus deny—her “disappointment,”


it isn’t long before she’s forced to acknowledge again what happened to her at the screening.
“Oh God,” she says while looking out the hotel window, “I remember the thing I wanted not

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to. The goddam end of my life!” She then orders Chance to help her into bed and give her
some hashish so that she can smoke her memories away. She explains that drugs help her
“put to sleep the tiger that rage[s] in [her] nerves,” making it clear that she uses substances
to flee her inner demons. Though she can’t quite succeed in permanently denying her
troubles, she can try to run from them.

Unlike the Princess, Chance doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that he’s losing any hope
of stability or success. Instead of admitting to himself that his chances with Heavenly are
slim and his chances of getting famous even slimmer, he dupes himself into thinking that
change automatically means progress. As such, he’s able to convince himself that his
lifestyle as a gigolo drifter might actually amount to something. “In a life like mine,” he
says, “you just can’t stop… once you drop out, it leaves you and goes on without you and
you’re washed up.” Interestingly enough, Chance acknowledges that he might end up
becoming “washed up” someday. However, he doesn’t admit that this has already happened.
Despite the fact that his looks are fading, everyone in his hometown hates him, and he can’t
even spend a moment with his supposed lover, he still talks about becoming “washed up” as
if it hasn’t already happened. His escapist lifestyle enables him to deny the fact that he’s
already reached his peak. In this way, Chance justifies his life as a pill-popping, wayward
man, mistaking his attempt to deny failure for actual progress.

While the Princess’s attempts to “forget” her woes only go so far, Chance desperately clings
to his delusions. Unfortunately, it’s already too late by the time he finally shows any
awareness of the fact that he’ll never be able to improve upon his life’s many failures.
Indeed, at the end of the play, he begins to see that his attempt to blackmail his way to fame
and thus win Heavenly’s love won’t work, and so he becomes jaded and depressed, asking
the Princess how to go on when life has no meaning. “I mean like your life means nothing,
except that you never could make it, always almost, never quite?” he babbles. However, the
audience then sees that his delusional optimism hasn’t completely vanished, as he says,
“Well, something’s still got to mean something.” He says this even though it has become
obvious that none of his plans will do anything to help him. As such, even when he finally
faces the great disappointments he’s been running from his entire life, he still manages to
deny that his escapist techniques have all been in vain, instead insisting that they must
“still…mean something” after all.

This, it seems, is why Chance refuses to leave St. Cloud with the Princess, who tries to
convince him to accept his failure and get out of town before Heavenly’s father and brother
injure him: he would rather face physical pain than admit his own shortcomings. In turn,

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Williams shows the audience that denial and an inability to confront difficult emotions can
cause a person to behave self-destructively.

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C HARACTERS
C H A N C E WAY N E

The play’s protagonist, an aspiring actor who has been in love with the beautiful Heavenly
Finley since he was a teenager. When he was growing up in St. Cloud, Chance planned to
use his strapping good looks to become rich and famous, deciding that he deserved
something more than the average middleclass life for which his friends were all destined.
With this cocky self-assuredness, he started acting, which is when he fell in love with
Heavenly. As high schoolers, their acting troupe traveled to a competition, and on the way
back Chance and Heavenly made love on the train. Since then, Chance has wanted to marry
Heavenly, but her domineering father, Boss Finley, has forbidden it, thinking Chance
unworthy of his daughter’s love. As such, Chance has spent his twenties trying to become
rich and famous so that he can return to St. Cloud and finally win Boss Finley’s approval.
Unfortunately, though, he has been unsuccessful as an actor, forcing him to work as a gigolo
and use his attractiveness to score money from rich women. In keeping with this, he has
recently returned to St. Cloud with a famous actress, Alexandra Del Lago, whom he tries to
blackmail into making him famous. By this point in his life, Chance’s hair is thinning, his
good looks are fading, he drinks heavily and takes drugs, and he carries a sexually
transmitted disease. Thus, he’s desperate to finally become famous before he’s too old to be
successful in the entertainment industry.

ALEXANDRA DEL L AGO / PRIN CESS KOSMON OPOLIS

An over-the-hill actress who has recently tried to make a comeback to the big screen. On the
night of her new film’s premiere, though, she became convinced that everyone thought she
was old and pathetic, so she rushed out of the theater and didn’t turn back, effectively
running away from her life. Because of this, she is now traveling under the moniker Princess
Kosmonopolis. At one point in her travels, she meets Chance Wayne, who joins her on her
journey from one fancy resort to the next, all the while devising a plan to force her into
helping him become famous in the acting industry. The Princess is a very peculiar character,
someone who is nearly capable of purging her memory to avoid the fact that she’s no longer
young and beautiful. To help herself do this, she drinks in large quantities and takes all sorts
of pills. As a result, it takes her a long time to discover that Chance is trying to blackmail
her. When she finally does learn this, though, she doesn’t seem to care very much, agreeing
to help him as long as he sleeps with her whenever she wants. By the end of the play, the

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Princess manages to—in a small way—accept the fact that she can’t reverse the course of her
life, but she’s unable to convince Chance to do the same.

H E AV E N LY F I N L E Y

The woman with whom Chance Wayne is obsessed. Heavenly has known Chance for a long
time—in fact, her first time having sex was with Chance when she was only fifteen. Perhaps
because of this, her father—a hard-hitting racist politician named Boss Finley—has always
hated Chance. To make matters worse, when Heavenly last saw Chance, they had
unprotected sex and Chance transmitted an STD to her without even mentioning anything
about the disease. As a result, Heavenly had to have an operation, which George Scudder
botched, making her sterile for the rest of her life. Incidentally, Boss Finley has arranged for
George Scudder and Heavenly to be married. Boss Finley has also forbidden Heavenly from
seeing Chance again. Although Heavenly never outwardly declares her love for Chance, she
does point out that if her father hadn’t refused to let her marry Chance, then Chance
probably wouldn’t have gotten an STD in the first place. Regardless, Boss Finley doesn’t
listen to her, which is rather typical in this play; though Heavenly’s presence and beauty
drives many of the characters in Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams does not give her much time
onstage, instead making her into a rather flat character who ultimately becomes more of an
abstract idea than an actual person.

BOSS FINLEY

A racist local politician, and Heavenly Finley’s father. Boss Finley is a rich man who believes
Chance Wayne isn’t good enough for his daughter. This is why Chance has spent his youth
trying to get famous: so that Boss Finley will finally lend him his approval. This, of course, is
an unrealistic dream, since Boss Finley is a stubborn and vindictive man, the kind of person
who remains wholeheartedly convinced of his own beliefs. In fact, he even claims that he
heard the “voice of God” when he was fifteen, insisting that God told him to fight to keep
“the pure white blood of the South” from mixing with other races. In keeping with this, he
does not condemn the white men who are currently going around St. Cloud castrating black
men, which he himself threatens to do to Chance if Chance doesn’t leave town immediately.
To this effect, he orders his son, Tom Junior, to track down Chance to do his dirty work.

TOM JUNIOR

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Boss Finley’s loyal son, and Heavenly’s brother. Tom Junior has organized a group of rowdy
young men like himself in support of his father’s political campaign. In keeping with this
loyalty, he doesn’t refuse when Boss Finley orders him to track down Chance Wayne to
either kill or castrate him (both punishments are mentioned at various times throughout
the play).

MISS LUCY

Boss Finley’s mistress, who lives on his dime at the Royal Palms Hotel. Whenever Tom
Junior or Heavenly bring up Miss Lucy to their father, he pretends he doesn’t know who
they’re talking about, since his affair with her began before his wife died. Try as he might to
deny that he knows her, he ends up hearing that she recently wrote “Boss Finley is too old
to cut the mustard” on a bathroom mirror. Because of this, he pretends to give her a
beautiful diamond clip, but then snaps the jewel box on her fingers right when she’s about
to take it out, saying, “Now go downstairs to the cocktail lounge and go in the ladies’ room
and describe this diamond clip with lipstick on the ladies’ room mirror down there.” To get
her own revenge, Miss Lucy helps the heckler sneak into a Youth for Tom Finley event at the
Royal Palms Hotel.

AUNT NONNIE

Heavenly’s aunt, and the sister of Boss Finley’s dead wife. Aunt Nonnie has a soft spot for
Chance, so much so that she tries to warn him to leave St. Cloud before Boss Finley catches
him. Unfortunately, though, she’s unsuccessful, despite how hard she tries to convince him
that the town isn’t safe for him.

DR GEORGE SCUDDER

A doctor in St. Cloud who practices at the hospital owned by Boss Finley. Scudder is the first
person to visit Chance in the Princess’s hotel room, telling him that he should leave St.
Cloud before Boss Finley tracks him down and castrates him. He informs Chance that
Heavenly went through a “tragic ordeal” because of her contact with him. Although he
doesn’t reveal it in this moment, Scudder is referring to the fact that Heavenly contracted a
sexually transmitted disease after sleeping with Chance. Because of this, Scudder had to
perform a secret operation on Heavenly—an operation that went wrong and left her infertile.
Despite Scudder’s surgical error, Boss Finley has arranged for him and Heavenly to get
married.

PAG E 16
SYMBOLS
THE LAMENT

Throughout Sweet Bird of Youth, a “lament”—a melancholy strain of music—sometimes


issues faintly from the overhead speakers. The occurrence of this music usually marks a shift
in whatever emotional atmosphere the characters are navigating. For instance, when the
Princess and Chance talk about his unsuccessful acting career, The Lament fades slowly in:
“Something always blocks me…,” Chance says, referring to his acting. “What? What?” the
Princess asks. “Do you know?” Williams then notes that Chance rises, at which point The
Lament “is heard very faintly.” As the strains of music filter down, the Princess says: “Fear?”
This exchange shows how Williams uses The Lament to hint at deep insecurities and other
veiled emotional disturbances that lurk within his characters. When the Princess asks
Chance if fear is what holds him back from greatness, The Lament sounds around him,
signaling to the audience that this question has struck something raw and painful at his
psychological core. In this way, The Lament comes to represent an undercurrent of self-
doubt and unexamined emotion that plagues people like Chance and the Princess.

THE CADILL AC

When the Princess agrees to help Chance become famous, she allows him to take her
Cadillac for a drive around St. Cloud. When she asks why he wants to do this, he says: “I’m
pretentious. I want to be seen in your car on the streets of St. Cloud. Drive all around town
in it, blowing those long silver trumpets […].” Saying this, he openly admits that he wants
to impress his old friends and neighbors, who talk about him frequently and wonder where
he has run off to, since he’s always leaving St. Cloud. Despite his desire to use the Cadillac
as a symbol of success, though, people like Scotty—an old friend—see right through his
attempt to impress them. Indeed, when Chance and Scotty get into an argument, Scotty
says: “I don’t get by on my looks, but I drive my own car. It isn’t a Caddy, but it’s my own
car.” In turn, he makes it clear that nobody believes Chance actually owns the Princess’s
Cadillac. Because of this, the car doesn’t represent Chance’s newfound success and
prosperity—like he wants it to—but rather his irresponsibility and inability to support
himself.

PA G E 17
PAG E 18

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