ENFJ 2w3 Characters

In Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth Taylor plays Maggie… one of the most dynamic and emotionally expressive characters to ever grace the Southern Gothic stage. Her intense desire to be loved, her fiery passion for life, and her relentless social intuition make her a textbook ENFJ 2w3. Whether she’s pleading for affection, scheming to save her marriage, or battling for her place in a world ruled by patriarchs and appearances, Maggie brings heart, charm, and ferocity to every moment. Let’s break down what makes “Maggie the Cat” purr… and scratch.

Extraverted Feeling

EFJs want to get discussions out into the open air so they can address their feelings and have them, and often alienate Fi-users in their attempts to convince the IFP to pay attention to social norms they do not care about. Both of these things seem to be the driving problem behind her communication problems with Brick. Maggie almost cheated on him with his best friend, which lead to the man’s suicide, and she wants to talk about it, but Brick is shutting her out instead. And while she turns up to family dinners and social events and wants Brick to “be sociable” even if he doesn’t feel like it, he refuses. Brick does not purchase his father a gift—she does it for him and then is horrified when others draw attention to it, since she understands the significance of appropriate gestures. Maggie cares a whole lot what his family thinks of both of them, she is embarrassed that she has produced no child yet (an equalizer in her society, and a way to compete for Big Daddy’s affections against Brick’s boring brother and his no neck little monsters). She goes out of her way to make social gestures, even if she doesn’t feel like it—turning up at the party, flattering Big Daddy, and constantly pleading with her husband to forgive her, and make love to her again. At the end, Maggie gets what she wants, because she lies about being pregnant, knowing Brick will have no choice but to follow through on it, to reconcile with his dying father’s wishes.

Introverted Intuition

She likens her situation to a “cat on a hot tin roof,” and says she doesn’t know whether to stay up there or get down. She calls her nieces and nephews “no-necked little monsters” behind their back. While Brick is content to drown his sorrows in a bottle, Maggie is scheming about how to get ahead in life. She is convinced his brother and his wife intend to get Brick “cut out of the will” and left penniless, and she intends to do all she can to prevent it. Where Brick had a strong affection for his (gay) best friend, Maggie saw through him, as she sees through a lot of the shenanigans around her. She points out how greedy his sister-in-law is, and what her intentions might be. Maggie is often thinking about and planning for her future, in which she does not intend to “go without.” While she almost slept with his best friend, she stopped herself because she thought about the future consequences of her actions (“about what it might do to us”).

Extraverted Sensing

Low Se can come in the form of aesthetics, an emphasis on beauty, and a desire for sexual connections, and that is where Maggie embodies it the most. She is a physical woman, who wants to love and be loved and who cannot understand how her husband can give himself over to being drunk all the time (a waste of a good life, and of her body). Nor why he won’t touch her, when she aches for him. She loves nice things, and often places herself physically into situations or reacts with a primal instinct, such as when one of her monstrous fat nieces hits her with ice cream, she slaps her face.

Introverted Thinking

Maggie is not wrong about a lot of her conclusions and suppositions, but she makes all of her decisions from her heart. She irrationally reasons that the only way to knock her husband’s best friend off his pedestal is to seduce him, and that will show Brick what kind of a man he is (in the original play, she knew he was gay, so he slept with her to prove he wasn’t). This is… interesting reasoning and it shows gaps in her logic that she didn’t think for a hot minute about what it might do to her marriage, to be the “cheater” involved. However… she wound up abstaining, because she DID think about how it might drive them apart.

The Enneagram 2

2s feel a sense of pride in being needed, and are fiercely competitive for the affections of their loved ones—and that’s what started this whole mess. Maggie could not stand her husband spending every waking moment with another man, so she had to take an interest in all of their activities, tag along to their ball games, watch her husband throw away a decent career to stand by his friend, and deal with him being less interested in her “than you should have been.” So, she got competitive and tried to take him down, only to ruin her marriage in the process. Now, she freely confesses that she only wants to be held and loved, that she needs sex and affection, but she refuses to give up on Brick. She feels she can win him over, and in the meantime, she “does” things for him. Cares for him, loves him when he doesn’t deserve it, even buys gifts for him to give his father, and demands he sign the card so no one knows he didn’t put in the effort himself.

The 3 Wing

Maggie is assertive and competitive. She is beautiful and takes great pains to make herself even more so, remarking that she doesn’t mind if Big Daddy looks her over, because “someone should” enjoy her. She is glamorous compared to her sister-in-law. She can also be deceptive, in that she doesn’t want Brick’s family to know the truth about their marriage and why it’s on the rocks; she wants to pretend everything is fine, that he is not an alcoholic, and to rush past his broody feelings in favor of being proactive (and making babies). Part of her ambition is that she refuses to be poor, and wants a share of his sizable inheritance.

The Schemer with a Heart of Gold

Maggie is more than just a cat on a hot tin roof; she’s a woman burning with love, shame, and ambition, doing everything she can to hold her marriage together in the face of emotional starvation. As an ENFJ 2w3, she’s driven by a need to connect, to heal, and to win, whether that means charming Big Daddy, outshining her sister-in-law, or lying her way to a second chance with Brick. Her tragedy lies in how fiercely she loves, and how hard she works to be someone worth loving even when she’s denied it.