A Streetcar Named Desire
Tragedy, as the negation of an individual's sense of reality, is automatically a story of failed mythologies. Such mythologies may be aptly described as private or personal, but they are always likely to have a significant historical dimension. Lillian Feder, as already noted, describes the mad men and women of Greek tragedy as displaying archaic patterns of thought and feeling. The double binds of tragedy typically arise from this sort of historical incongruity. This is how myths expend themselves and submit to the dialectic of history.
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire reminds us that there once existed an American South--a land possessed of a highly integrated culture of gallantry, civility and a high-blown aristocracy. He gives us as an emblem of that mythic South a faded southern belle who is felled by disrepute, by alcohol, and finally by psychosis. The play, then, is not only about a woman but about the ruination of a mythology. One can well surmise as to why such a message should arise from and for 1940's America.
In his assessment of A Streetcar Named Desire , in his book, Tennessee Williams , Benjamin Nelson contends that William's inevitable sympathy with "the broken and the weak" is an "insufficiency" which "prevents his plays from attaining the stature of tragedy." 22 Nelson concludes:
The sense of wholeness in the universe and in man and in human relationships escapes Williams. It is as if he cannot perceive the possibility of completion either on earth or in the heavens. Rather he is a poet of the inadequate. A Streetcar Named Desire is the most luminous and intense example of his ability to create beauty out of the plight of the gentle and the fragmented. And yet it is precisely this adherence to brokenness as the root condition of the universe which remains his great failing as a tragedian. 23
This conclusion strikes me as a mis-assessment of Williams, but more importantly it is a mis-assessment of A Streetcar Named Desire and it misses the fact that striving for "wholeness" is the ratiocination of the entire play. Nelson's conclusions are also questionable on the grounds that they bring to bear a particular understanding of tragedy, an understanding by which all the tragedies we have so far considered would become suspect of "insufficiency." Nelson argues that
Blanche's inability to be tragically mature is the direct result of her incompletion, her fragmentation, if you will. It is a fragmentation which manifests a greater and encompassing incompleteness in the universe itself. Blanche is doomed from the outset, not because she cannot find something in the universe to which to cling, but precisely because there is nothing in the universe to which she can appeal. 24
As we have seen, tragedy requires the establishment of an outline of reality, a set of rules, roles and/or aspirations so that attractions, aversions and injunctions may be established, and so that the sense of the centre falling apart may be transmitted. A world which is completely out of joint in the first place, already in utter ruins, or patently absurd cannot become tragic. Typically we enter the world of the tragic hero at a late point, disasters have already befallen her/him and/or her/ his world, and we arrive in time to witness the falling of the final straws which will break her/him. However, essential to tragedy is a recognition of the actual or potential oneness of the world, the unity of reality, the past, present or potential cohesion of the individual and a sense of reality--which, in the course of the play, is brought asunder.
In A Streetcar Named Desire Stella tells Stanley: "You didn't know Blanche as a girl. Nobody, nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change" (scene 8, p. 83). 25 In a sense we do know Blanche as a girl, we know her as the debutante of Belle Reve and the coquettish southern belle--the roles she still struggles to play. As a coherent extension of these roots we know her to be a teacher of literature and a passionate advocate of the refinements of civilization. She pleads with Stella to leave Stanley, whom Blanche describes as an "ape-like" brute from the "stone age."
Maybe we are a long way from being made in God's image, but Stella--my sister--there has been some progress since then! Such things as art--as poetry and music--such new kinds of light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow ! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we are approaching . . . Don't--don't hang back with the brutes ! (Scene 4, p. 70)
The unified reality which Blanche attempts to represent is under attack. When Stella calls Stanley a "Polack" he reacts savagely, responding ". . . what I am is one hundred per cent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it . . . " (Scene 8, p. 83). And, as Nelson points out, "he means it. He is the new American, rough, tough, but alive with the sense of his own being and power." 26
However, while we must acknowledge the conflict between Blanche and Stanley, and between the worlds they represent, we should at the same time recognize that their enmity is an externalization of Blanche's internal conflicts. In his book, Tennessee Williams , Signi L. Falk approaches this fact yet has difficulty reconciling himself to it.
The clash between Blanche and Stan is inevitable, for they represent two opposite views of life. The play, however, is not a simple, clear-cut conflict between two equally strong forces but a subtle and sometimes rather confused study of character; rich in overtones, the play is sometimes weighted with significance implied rather than expressed. A play that has moments of greatness, it misses being great because the playwright had no clear idea what he was trying to say. The complicated and rather contradictory characterization of Blanche, the failure to follow through and dramatize the conflict, and Williams inability to resist writing "something wild" instead of extracting the fullest significance from his materials--all of these factors exhibit a weakness in the playwright's handling of the material. 27
As our analyses so far have indicated, one of the key features of the tragedian is his negative capability--what Falk sees in William's work as the playwright having "no clear idea what he wants to say." Lyrical tragedy inevitably shows the playwright dealing with a dilemma within the frame of a particular worldview, a worldview which cannot resolve that internal conflict and therefore the conclusion of that conflict is the opposite of a "clear idea", it is inevitably paradox, equivocation or aporia. While Falk bemoans the complicated, confusing and contradictory nature of Blanche's character, we should be reminded that all the tragic heroes we have considered suffer the confusions, complications and contradictions of their own natures. Falk's complaint that the conflict is not fully dramatized should remind us of our repeated discovery that in tragedy it is the internal conflict of the hero which dominates the action and to which the play as a whole coheres. Finally, Falk's characterization of Williams as having an "inability to resist writing ‘something wild’" flies in the face of the central contention of this book. It is the nature of tragedy that the unresolvable conflicts which develop within an individual's internalized reality inevitably lead to actions or behaviour which we should characterize as mad (which is what, I believe, Falk means by "wild") because they are not connected to any sense of reality--reality being the unity of elements by which one gains a sense of self.
Both Falk and Nelson's views of tragedy exclude A Streetcar Named Desire from the canon. In Nelson's definition, "tragedy depends to some extent upon individual responsibility, the realization of this responsibility and the inner growth evolving from this realization." 28 Yet, as we have recognized, tragedy, as seen in terms of individuals dealing with their reality, can equally be interpreted as individuals failing to evolve or, as in the cases of Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, failing to come to terms with who they are and therefore with what their responsibilities are.
Both critics fail to take into account the lyrical nature of tragedy in their analyses and, therefore, look to some external, universal, absolute principle or action or message as the quintessence of tragedy. Nelson writes:
I believe that any analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire must at some point come to grips with one essential query, and that is the question of where the author's sympathies lie. It is a deceptively complex query, because in a play as brilliantly objective as this, there is no clearly defined approach. 29
My response to such a contention is that, on the contrary, the play is highly subjective and that the approach to which the play directs us is clearly defined. There are contradictions within the character of Blanche Dubois, which is the central issue of the play, but there is no division of sympathies.
During a Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, Look Magazine asked Jessica Tandy who was playing the role of Blanche to pose for a photograph which was to imitate a Thomas Hart Benton painting of the poker-night scene. Tandy declined, and in a letter to Tennessee Williams explained that her objection to the proposed photograph and the painting was that the painting portrayed the play from the Stanley side of the picture. Williams responded:
What you say to me about Blanche suddenly recalls to me all of my original conception of the character and what it was to me, from which you, in your delineation, have never once drifted away in spite of what I now realize must have been a continual pressure: that unwillingness of audiences to share a more intricate and special and sensitive response to things; their desire to participate more safely , familiarly, in the responses of an animal nature. I have almost forgotten (perhaps under this same pressure) that it was Blanche whom I loved and respected and whom I wished to portray, though I have never, please believe me, forgotten the exact and tender and marvellously understanding way that you brought her to life. --I have such a divided nature! Irreconcilably divided. I look at Benton's picture and I see the strong things in it, its immediate appeal to the sense, raw, sensual, dynamic, and I forgot the play was really about those things which are opposed to that, the delicate half-approaches to something much finer. Yes, the painting is only one side of the play, and the Stanley side of it. Perhaps from the painter's point of view that was inevitable. A canvas cannot depict two worlds very easily: or the tragic division of the human spirit: at least not a painter of Benton's realistic type. 30
Tragedy might well be characterized as a lyrical treatment of the "tragic division of the human spirit." The spirit in question in A Streetcar Named Desire is Blanche's and, as a result, the play in effect belongs to her. She is the persona which holds the play together and, therefore, there can be no question of other sympathies. A streetcar named Desire or one called Cemetery only hold symbolic significance in the mindscape of Blanche Dubois. The blues piano is Blanche's theme, the distant polka music and the Varsouviana are the echoes of Blanche's past. The repeated intrusion of a passing train, the flowers of death which haunt the Quarter, and the extended symbology of light and darkness--all of the symbolism upon which the unity of the play is constructed derives from a sympathy with Blanche's inner life. This lyricism is enhanced in production, as Falk shows in his description of the climactic rape scene: “The state of Blanche's mind is pictorially suggested by the lurid reflections, grotesque and menacing shadows, that appear on the walls; the mood is intensified by off-stage noises symbolizing inhuman jungle cries.” 31
The play portrays the unresolvable confusions and contradictions which fracture Blanche's spirit. The untenable choice which must be made between, on one side, animal desire and the Dionysian energies of sexuality and intoxication and ecstacy which at certain moments in life seem to add up to life itself, and, on the other side, the refinements of human civilization which seem to offer a kind of hope, a chance for a tenderer world where a gentle woman might find self-realization--this dilemma, the basis of the play, afflicts Blanche and only Blanche in the world of the play. Williams' consciousness of wholeness and unity are apparent in the lyricism of A Streetcar Named Desire , but the play, like all the tragedies we have analysed here, is about the loss or impossibility of this wholeness within the life of an individual. Nelson captures the process of this fragmentation and seems to recognize the reasons for Blanche's inability to recapture a sense of wholeness.
Belle Reve has crumbled. For Blanche it was the remaining symbol of a life and tradition that she knows in her heart have vanished, yet to which she clings with desperate tenacity. She is dated. Her speech, manners and habit are foolishly passé, and still she cannot abandon this sense of herself as someone special, as a ‘lady’ in the grand tradition. She knows she is an anachronism in an alien world, and yet she will not compromise. She cannot and will not surrender the dream she has of herself, and even though she wants desperately not to be lonely, it is precisely the clinging to this dream, the airs, mannerisms and sense of herself which alienate her further. She is trapped in a terrifying contradiction. 32
The exposition of the play maps out Blanche's decline from her days in Belle Reve, and thereby sets up the contradiction which Blanche finds within herself, and at the same time demonstrates that reality as she knows it offers no solutions to her dilemma. Falk persists in failing to recognize that the play is the portrayal of Blanche's inner life and the confusions, evasions, and the contradictory yet overwhelming affect which this entails. He complains that
Williams has been overzealous in his explanation of her pitiable condition. Too many factors have contributed to her insanity. Her frequent references to death-bed responsibilities, her girlhood marriage to a poet-homosexual, the fear of poverty and loneliness, her frustrated need for love and companionship could explain her condition.
But on the other side, the nymphomatic tendencies which she seems to have inherited, her almost pathological care of her body, her pretenses to virtue and her exhibitionism at the slightest excuse, and her eagerness to tell the whole lurid story--all these add up to something theatrical and deliberately sensational. As if that were not enough, she is the last aristocrat of an old order, an intellectual of sorts, something of a poet by nature, and the easy mark for the insensitive. . . . there is no wonder confusion arises about the playwright's intentions. 33
This complexity of causes is a feature of the double bind. A problem which has no solution is by definition a complex one. The overdetermination of madness, as we have seen, is also a frequent feature of tragedy. The difference between the traditional tragic hero and modern tragic antihero, between king and common man is, as Creon suggests in Antigone , that "you cannot learn of any man the soul,/ the mind, the intent until he shows / his practise of the government and law." (176-8) Kings and princes must take action, must demonstrate their principles and show their minds. Their dilemmas are easily made public. The modern tragic individual shows the same desire for self-realization, but the basis for self-realization is not easily promulgated. The contradictory injunctions which they face will also be tied to private and more exclusively psychological or socio-psychological motives, whereas the motives of kings and princes, though equally psychological, always have a public, political level which makes them easier to expose. On a superficial level the contradictory injunctions which the traditional tragic hero faces are apparent to us, what remains to supply is the elaboration and imagery of this situation to demonstrate that it is inescapable and unresolvable. In modern tragedy the double bind situation requires extensive exposition, suggestion and explanation because the basic contradiction is always, in the first place, a personal rather than a public matter. It is clear to us that Orestes is trapped between avenging his father and murdering his mother, that Creon is caught between the authority of the state and the sympathetic rebelliousness of Antigone, that Macbeth is suspended between the repugnance of regicide and ambitions to kingship. However, that Hedda Gabler is trapped between fear of scandal and aspirations beyond her role as a woman requires explanation, and that Blanche Dubois faces a contradiction of death and desire requires a deep background of justification. That such forces are inescapable and negate the individual's sense of reality requires still further detail and elaboration.
The basis of the "terrifying contradiction" of Blanche's life, which in turn is the etiology of her manic, obsessive behaviour and hallucinations, and the key to the play’s symbolism, requires a good deal of exposition. After the suicide of her husband, as Blanche describes it, " . . . the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this--kitchen--candle . . . " (Scene 6, p. 78). As Blanche ages, fades and is evermore weighed upon by shame, the reasons for darkness, for aversion to the harsh light of reality, grow. She aches for truth and its beauty; she claims to have never "lied in her heart" but more and more she requires illusion and the ‘mendacious finery of culture.’ Her illusions she tries to make her reality, but they will not abide; they grow thin, mannered, transparent. The reality she has always known dissipates, just as the residents of Belle Reve grow dissipated. She literally faces death on a daily basis, and she fights against the death of her own spirit.
BLANCHE. Death--I used to sit here and she used to sit over there and death was as close as you are . . . We didn't dare even admit we had ever heard of it!
MEXICAN WOMAN. Flores para los muertos, flores--flores . . .
BLANCHE. The opposite is desire. So do you wonder? How could you possible wonder! Not far from Belle Reve, before we lost Belle Reve, was a camp where they trained young soldiers. On Saturday nights they would go in town to get drunk-- (Scene 9, p. 86)
Yet, Blanche also recognizes the failure of desire and becomes the spokeswoman of civilized behaviour as she pleads with Stella to leave Stanley.
STELLA. But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark--that sort of make everything else seem--unimportant.
BLANCHE. What you are talking about is brutal desire--just--Desire!--the name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down the other . . .
STELLA. Haven't you ever ridden on that streetcar?
BLANCHE. It brought me here.--Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be . . . (Scene 4, p. 70)
Should Blanche choose civilization, in absolute terms, such a choice would entail the repression of desire. Desire for Blanche having come to mean the opposite of death, the repression of her desires becomes a form of slow death. Yet, sexual desire, after the death of her husband, her ostracism in Laurel, and her meeting with Stanley (whom she has seemingly already met in the guise of other men) for Blanche has come to entail guilt, shame, disintegration and a denial of civilization and of her sense of selfhood--and, therefore, for her it is also a kind of death. The conflict in the play is between Blanche and that side of Blanche's nature of which Stanley is a personification, but Blanche--that is, her behaviour, her principles and relations to the world--stands in contradiction to and an exemplar of both sides of this conflict. Trapped in this contradiction Blanche lies and fantasizes, and in the process speeds up her own destruction--socially, in terms of her relationship with Mitch and even with Stanley, and psychologically, in terms of her own grasp of reality.
Throughout the play Blanche continues to equivocate between desire and a self image which even she recognizes as requiring darkness. We sense this equivocation even in the moments before she is attacked by Stanley. She has long flirted with Stanley and knows the dangers of the situation before her. She does not scream as she had done in the previous scene to ward off Mitch's advances. She chooses to threaten Stanley with a broken bottle. The gesture is itself sensual and Stanley's response to it--"let's have some roughhouse! Tiger--tiger!"--mocks it as such. In the film version of the play, Williams makes Blanche's dilemma and indecision more apparent. In the film Blanche has the opportunity to escape Stanley but she is stopped by the Flower Woman selling "flores para los muertos" and is driven back into the house and to Stanley. Blanche is conquered and destroyed not simply by Stanley, but first by the entire circumstance of her life and then by Desire itself, of which Stanley is a symbol and an agent.
Moments before he attacks her Stanley tells Blanche this blackly comic anecdote:
I used to have a cousin who could open a beer-bottle with his teeth. That was his only accomplishment, all he could do--he was just a human bottle-opener. And then one time, at a wedding party, he broke his front teeth off! After that he was so ashamed of himself he used t'sneak out of the house when company came . . . (Scene 10, pp. 87-8)
That Stanley should choose to tell this story to Blanch at the nadir of her decline demonstrates not only his "deliberate cruelty" but the depth of that cruelty. Stanley realizes that, as Stella has often reiterated, Blanche has nowhere to go. Belle Reve is gone, she has been caste out of Laurel, she has lost Mitch, and when Stanley presents her with a bus ticket, Blanche has by that action been exiled from New Orleans and her last living relative. Her fibs and fantasies about Shep Huntleigh turn into delusions. As Stanley's little story indicates, more than having nowhere to go, Blanche now faces the negation of everything she has ever thought herself to be. Mitch had earlier tried to strip Blanche of her illusions, but she fought him off with the rationale of the necessity of romance and magic. Stanley continues the attack on Blanche's airs and fabrications but with a directness which she cannot counter.
STANLEY. There isn't no millionaire! And Mitch didn't come back with roses 'cause I know where he is--
BLANCHE. Oh!
STANLEY. There isn't a goddam thing but imagination!
BLANCHE. Oh!
STANLEY. And lies and conceit and tricks!
BLANCHE. Oh!
STANLEY, And look at yourself! Take a look at yourself in that worn-out Mardi-Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker! And with the crazy crown on! What queen do you think you are?
BLANCHE. Oh--God . . .
STANLEY. I've been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boys eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling down my liquor! I say-- Ha--ha--ha! Do you hear me? Ha--ha--ha!
Blanche's reaction, which is perhaps both to this unmasking and to the physical threat from Stanley, is hysterical panic. Stanley's vengeance goes beyond animal savagery.
At the end of the play, when Blanche, completely broken, is lying on the floor about to be taken off to the asylum, Stanley taunts her with what might be interpreted as either diabolical cunning or profound ignorance.
STANLEY. You left nothing here but spilt talcum and old empty perfume bottles--unless it's the paper lantern you want to take with you. You want the lantern?
(He crosses to dressing table and seizes the paper lantern, tearing it off the light bulb, and extends it toward her. She cries out as if the lantern was herself. . . . . ) (Scene 11, pp. 92-3)
Stanley's motives are not a central issue in the play, but his gesture of tearing off the Chinese lantern is the ultimate symbol of the play. His story of the human bottle opener, his verbal unmasking of Blanche, and even the act of rape itself are additional images of the same motif in which Stanley deprives Blanche of her humanity, of her sense of being a whole person, self-identifiable and supported in that identification by the world around her.
In that an argument could be made for the idea that Stanley drove Blanche to insanity, the play boarders on the melodramatic. However, Stanley is the final but not the absolute or even dominant agent of her defeat. The tragedy of Blanche Dubois, the contradictory, double bind forces in her life which compelled her to search for selfhood in a hopeless past or in insouciant liaisons, predates her coming into the life of Stanley Kowalski. Her final line: "Whoever you are--I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" (Scene 11, p. 93)--signals the reduced and feeble basis of self-actualization which she has long been apportioned. The "kindness of strangers," "brutal desire" and the "dark journey" of civilization--these oxymorons in themselves tell us of the impossible contradictions upon which Blanche Dubois was compelled to build her sense of reality and suggest to us the inevitability of her madness.
Notes
22. B. Nelson, Tennessee Williams: His Life and Work (London: Peter Owen, 1961), p. 139.
23. Ibid, p. 140.
24. Ibid, p. 140.
25 .all quotations of the play are from T. Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire in Best American Plays , Third Series--1945-1951, ed. J. Gassner (New York: Crown Publisher, 1952).
26. Nelson, p. 126.
27. S.L. Falk, Tennessee Williams ( New York: Twayne, 1961), p. 82.
28. Nelson, p. 140.
29. Ibid, p. 123.
30. from a letter to Jessica Tandy from Tennessee Williams, November 2, 1948, in The World of Tennessee Williams , ed. R.E Leavitt (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978), p. 77. The Benton painting entitled "The Poker Night" is illustrated on p. 76.
31. Falk, p. 88.
32. Nelson, p. 130.
33. Falk, p. 89.
