A Streetcar Named Desire Criticism by Kathleen Margaret Lant

A Streetcar Named Desire Criticism by Kathleen Margaret Lant

1. Foster Hirsch

   • Foster Hirsch calls Williams's 'own ambivalence' toward the antagonists of the drama--Stanley and Blanche. According to Hirsch, the two find themselves locked in a "deadly sex war," in which "Stanley and Blanche are a solid match." Williams's commitment to both characters--his attraction to "Stanley's animal vigor" and his sympathy for Blanche's "sensibility"--enable him to write "with a fine balance."
     • As Hirsch puts it, "Though he is almost always divided in his feelings about his characters, Williams here makes capital dramatic use of his contrary impulses, and Streetcar thrives on its imbalances."
       • But the imbalances and tensions Hirsch points to are more extensive, more fundamental, than Williams's merely personal ambivalences. When Hirsch observes that "Romantic Blanche and naturalistic Stanley are locked in a symbolic conflict: culture fights vulgarity, and is trampled," he restricts his reading of the play to only one of its dramatic conflicts.
         • It is, in fact, as if in Streetcar Williams dramatizes two mutually exclusive narratives, reveals two archetypal dramatic situations which dictate completely antithetical roles for Blanche. On the one hand, the play does present Blanche as a tragic figure and Stanley as the cruel agent of her destruction. Stanley brings about Blanche's downfall by unmasking her pretensions and her lies, by physically unclothing and raping her.
           • In this dramatic situation, Blanche is--indeed--flawed, culpable, tragically imperfect, but she is fully and flagrantly human. As a tragic figure she functions as subject, to be judged by her action or inaction, her will to save herself, her sister, her home. She is a being wholly female, driven beyond her ability to cope with the wholly male world. At this level of the play, we may grieve as the environment (Stanley) destroys Blanche, or we may rage as Blanche backs herself into a corner with her lies and evasions. But no matter how we view Blanche--with pity or anger--we see and judge Blanche as Blanche, as a fully developed human character.

2. Blanche's attack

   • As a figure in this story, as its victim, its object, Blanche ceases to be human. She becomes--instead--a repository for all the mistaken notions our culture harbors about rape. She is acted upon, objectified, and ironically made guilty for her own victimization. No longer fully human, she is simply a metaphor for all that is vile about women. Blanche cannot, then, claim tragic stature or even our sympathy precisely because she is a victim of rape. And as she becomes responsible for her own victimization, Stanley is left to glory in his ascendancy. This aspect of Streetcar arises from the misogyny which colors the play and our responses to it and which undermines the very moving presentation of Blanche that Williams offers.
     • Even overtly feminist readers of Williams's work do not fully explore the implications of Blanche's rape by Stanley. Focusing on the imbalances of the work and arguing that Williams's attitude toward the rape are "ambivalent," Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, assert that in Streetcar Williams "records, rationalizes, and critiques the use of the penis as weapon that he perceives as essential to Stanley Kowalski's relations with women."
       • Gilbert and Gubar find Blanche a "sympathetic heroine whose imaginative energy surpasses the creativity of any of the other characters in the play; for Williams, Blanche is, nonetheless, guilty of abusing and using 'sensitive men' so that her 'punishment'--her rape--fits her crime." Gilbert and Gubar conclude, however, that while Stanley does seem to triumph over Blanche, does seem to punish her, what we really observe is Williams's "scathing critique of the heterosexual imperative which is driving Blanche mad." Gilbert and Gubar assert that in the final scene of the play, Stanley's guilt "may be" revealed as "greater than Blanche's" because Stanley is accused by one of his poker buddies of being responsible for driving Blanche to her breakdown.
         • But Gilbert and Gubar--like Hirsch--read or view Streetcar somewhat myopically. They too seem unaware of resonances in the play to which most audiences and readers would respond. While they focus their attention on a feature of the play that has not been fully considered yet--Stanley's violent assault against Blanche--Gilbert and Gubar ignore the implications of Blanche's rape. In effect, Gilbert and Gubar place the play so forcefully in a feminist context that they fail to hear the reverberations the work would inevitably create in a context less than sympathetic to women, the very context in which the play was created and first produced.

3. In this light, we can understand why Streetcar expresses a great compassion and affection for Blanche (a humane response to the suffering woman, a respectful acknowledgment of her humanity) and at the same time an intense hostility and prejudice toward her (a misogynist response to her very femaleness and to her vulnerability to rape, a reduction of Blanche to the status of metaphor, bearer of meaning rather than creator of meaning).

   • To understand that this double attitude toward Blanche exists in Streetcar is to take a step toward discovering why the play fails to hold together in important ways, why it is difficult to feel pity and terror for Blanche's plight (when we know we should), and why it is difficult not to feel vindicated at Stanley's brutal ascendancy (when we know we should not). Both attitudes, toward women in general and Blanche in particular, exert strong influence on readers and viewers, encouraging at one moment an intense ompassion for Blanche and inciting in the next a distaste for and hostility toward her.
     • Thus, Streetcar reveals Williams's desire to render Blanche fully human, though flawed and put upon. Williams displays great compassion for Blanche and insight into the position of women in the twentieth century. He is aware of both their dependence on men and their vulnerability to the passionate excesses of men. In a sociological approach to the play, Robert Emmet Jones shows that the degeneration of Southern aristocratic society left women like Blanche in a peculiarly imperiled position; he characterizes these women as "the passive pawns of social forces and their own emotions." Blanche, raised to be decorative, fragile, and delicate, finds herself out of place, alienated from the real world, as Williams's description of her demonstrates:
       • Her appearance is incongruous to this setting [Elysian Fields]. She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and earrings of pearls, white gloves and hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or cocktail party in the garden district … Her delicate beauty must avoid strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth. (scene 1)
         • Blanche's genteel, feminine world has fallen apart, destroyed by the "epic fornications" of all her male relative--"improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers" (scene 2). Blanche "stayed and struggled," she tells Stella, trying to justify to her sister the loss of Belle Reve: "I … tried to hold it together … but all the burden descended on my shoulders."
           • Jones characterizes Blanche's situation this way: "The tragedy of these women is the tragedy of the civilization which bore them, nourished them, and cast them out." What Robert Brustein calls "the dark masculine forces of society" are pitted against Blanche's typically feminine qualities. And in the struggle, Blanche is pathetically lost and brutally exploited.
             • Williams is not unsympathetic to the fact that Blanche must exist in a male world on male terms. He shows us that she is trapped economically and socially. When she says to Mitch of Stanley, "The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is
               • my executioner!" (scene 6), she demonstrates her awareness that it is the brutal male ethic, the "Napoleonic Code," which has reduced her to virtual prostitution. Nor is Blanche unaware of the rules of the games she must play in this men's world or of the power every male has over her. From the beginning of Streetcar she is frightened ("Her voice drops and her look is frightened," scene 1), and her reaction to Stanley is consistently edged with terror ("looking apprehensively toward the front door"; "She darts and hides"; "drawing back involuntarily from his stare," scene 1).

4. Moreover, Williams is aware (as he shows Blanche is) that the games she plays with men--the coyness, the flirting, the submissiveness--are necessary for survival in a masculinist environment. As Andrea Dworkin points out in Women Hating, self-denigrating female social behavior is "learned behavior" that allows woman "survival in a sexist world." Blanche must please and placate those in whose hands her destiny rests.

   • When she apologizes to Mitch for not being an interesting companion on their date, he asks why she tries so hard to please: "I was just obeying the law of nature … The one that says the lady must entertain the gentleman--or no dice" (scene 6). She leads Mitch on in a shameful way, it is true, but she is not unaware of her deception ("She rolls her eyes, knowing he cannot see her face," scene 6). Williams has made perfectly clear why the deception is necessary: Blanche is alone, vulnerable, penniless, and--most pathetic of all--desperately lonely.

5. Williams expresses his sympathy for women in a male-dominated world in one other way: his development of the violent and frequently physically abusive relationships between Stanley and Stella and between Steve and Eunice. Williams's sympathy is qualified, however, for--in the final analysis--in spite of the fact that he perceives the horror for women in these relationships, Williams comes out in favor of them; they are, he tells us at the end of Streetcar, life giving, fueled by desire, whereas Blanche's way represents a surrender to death.

   • The most revealing character in this respect is, of course, Stella. Critics are fond of accusing Blanche of refusing to face facts and of lying, but it is Stella (and Eunice, too) who constantly refuse to look at things, to listen to the truth, or even to tell the
     • truth. Stella lies to Blanche throughout and her final, most devastating lie represents her complete betrayal of her sister: she allows Blanche to think she is going on a trip when, in fact, she is being sent to a state mental hospital. Stella, good wife that she is, concerns herself only with maintaining the status quo. She knows, at a deeply unconscious level, that she must keep Stanley happy to preserve the economic and emotional security she has achieved as his woman.
       • Every time Blanche confronts Stella with the facts of Stella's situation (that Stella deserted Blanche and Belle Reve, leaving Blanche to endure death and degradation; that Stanley is crude and brutal; in short, that Stella is "married to a madman!" scene 4), Stella turns her eyes away from these facts. She willingly blinds and anesthetizes herself to what her life with Stanley has become: "Blanche! You be still! That's enough!" (scene 1); "I want to go away, I want to go away!" (scene 3); "She crosses in a dazed way from the kitchen" (scene 7); "Her eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquility that is in the faces of Eastern idols" (scene 4). In fact, Blanche finds Stella's complete abnegation of self in the face of Stanley's brutality so astonishing that she asks Stella, "Is this a Chinese philosophy you've--cultivated?" (scene 4).

6. Williams demonstrates, moreover, that Stella is abused physically and degraded sexually in her relationship with her husband: she participates in and enjoys sex with Stanley after he has beaten her.

   • There is, too, something unsavory in Stanley's equation of sex and violence (he feels that his brawling with Stella and Steve's with Eunice are perfectly natural expressions of sexual appetite) and in Stella's description of her sexual attachment to Stanley. She tells Blanche, "I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night … When he's away for a week, I nearly go wild!… And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby" (scene 1). Marion Magid remarks quite incisively of this scene: It is hard to know what is more unpleasant in this image: the overt sentimentality it expresses or the latent brutality it masks: a fascination with the image of the helpless creature under the physical domination of another, accepting his favors with tears of gratitude.
     • Magid is, however, mistaken when she implies that Williams glorifies this relationship without qualification, for Williams demonstrates throughout the play that Stella is blinded and drugged and that she has shut herself off from the truth in order to maintain her relationship with Stanley.
       • Williams is not, then, unaware of the self-sacrifice a woman makes to live with a man like Stanley, for, as Stella says finally when she forsakes her sister so that she can stay with her husband, "I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley" (scene 11). The irony of the situation is that Stella has believed Blanche's story all along; she--Stella--has called Stanley drunk, pig. She has reviled him but also has shut her eyes to her revulsion for him.
         • This is, Williams shows us, the predicament of the heterosexual woman in the modern world. For Williams, Blanche is clearly the only female--the only fully human female--who has the will to set herself against Stanley. Only she refuses to blind herself to Stanley's evils. This pride, her insistence on her right to see and to name, may well be her tragic flaw. She may be quite simply too noble to exist as a female in a world run by a phalanx of Stanley Kowalski's.

7. In many ways, however, A Streetcar Named Desire dehumanizes Blanche, undercuts her tragic situation, and renders her by the end of the play a maddened hysteric with no place in a well-ordered society. In this respect, Williams draws on the most heinous and trivializing myths about women and about rape that inform our culture, and he demonstrates that he bears as many prejudices toward the modern woman as does a brute like Stanley.

   • These prejudices, Williams's misogynous attitudes, irrevocably flaw this play, for a human being viewed as weak, neurotic, hysterical, dishonest, emotional, affected, and fragile (which, the prejudice tells us, women are and which Blanche certainly is) cannot at the same time aspire to the conditions of the tragic figure. Williams wants Blanche to be tragic (in the final scene he describes her so: "She has a tragic radiance in her red satin robe following the sculptural lines of her body," scene 11), but woman--as conceived in a system of patriarchal myth, especially the myth of rape--cannot be tragic. Blanche is, most clearly after Stanley's assault, too weak and too oppressed to convey tragic grandeur. Williams demonstrates this contradiction beautifully if unconsciously; for as soon as he characterizes Blanche as "tragic," his stage directions indicate that she must speak "with faintly hysterical vivacity" (scene 11). A neurotic woman may speak in this manner, but never an Oedipus o