Essays

"Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable"

(Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar named Desire)

 

Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is perhaps the most frequently staged drama of the twentieth century.

According to Elia Kazan, who directed Williams' most successful plays, everything that happened in the playwright's life can be found in his plays, and everything that is in his plays can be found in his life. Therefore, in order to understand A Streetcar Named Desire and its moral message, we need to know the writer's life.

Williams' life was fraught with many problems. As a child he had a laryngitis and it took him two years to learn to walk again. During this time, he began to write. His sister Rose, the person he felt closest to, suffered from schizophrenia and as her condition deteriorated, her family, but most importantly their mother, agreed to a lobotomy, which tragically left Rose incapacitated for life. The writer feared that, like her sister, he would one day go mad. His fear of going mad was compounded by his homosexuality, which probably contributed to his hypersensitivity and later to his alcoholism, drug addiction and depression. The desire in him to explore and work around themes in his plays which no one else wanted to talk about - addiction, madness, homosexuality, I think may have been due to his conscious or unconscious acceptance of the agonies of human existence and of otherness as a quality associated with human existence, and most likely because these were Williams' life experiences that shaped his personality. As a true artist and a hypersensitive human being, he could only present the contradictory web of social, human character and human relationships as he saw them through his vision.

According to Rollo May, the artist is necessarily neurotic and thus able to perceive and experience things from reality as well as to understand and see the layers of human existence that other people may be unable to.

Writing this essay has given me overwhelming feelings. I was not only Blanche, but also the writer himself, with his anguish, his obsession and his deep, insoluble loneliness and unhappiness, and most likely to experience the irrationality of premeditated cruelty. The subjective world of the writer was revealed to me, and I was horrified by the depth of his suffering, but it was also uplifting to experience his sincerity and the profound humanism he felt for the 'losers' and suffering people, which may underpin and explain the impact and success of his works, most especially A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Award.

The characters in the drama reflect on the life of his family and the personalities of his family members. The heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, is modelled after Williams` sister Rose, but some writers believe that Blanche also has many of Williams' traits. He reputedly said when he wrote the play that he felt he would soon die, and this work would be his swan song.

The story is set in New Orleans, in the so-called French Quarter. The tragedy is foreboded by the widowed Blanche DuBois, who turns up at her sister Stella's apartment with a suitcase as a last chance to find refuge and solace, but thanks to her working-class brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, Blanche's fragile nervous system gives out and her visit to New Orleans ends in a psychiatric hospital.

From the very beginning of the story, you sense that something tragic is about to happen. Blanche's arrival in New Orleans is accompanied by ominous omens. She takes a tram called Desire to get to them, then takes another one called the Cemetery, and after six stops gets off at the Elysian Fields, the street where her sister lives. Blanche's appearance, which is refined and subtle, is quite different from the surroundings in which she has arrived. Her "uncertain attitude, her white dress somehow reminds one of a moth". She meets Eunice, another resident of the block, who lets her into the apartment because her sister and her husband have gone bowling. Blanche's sense of uncertainty hovers like a dark cloud from the beginning of the drama, spreading fear and anxiety around the place at which she has arrived. She has no confidence in herself or in the future, that she can still be happy; we only feel her dread of the future. To control her fear, she needs a drink. She is isolated and lonely, with no one in the world but Stella. "You are all I have in this world and you are not happy for me," she tells her sister when they meet. She is exhausted, vulnerable, full of fear, with no money and no livelihood; she is totally dependent on the goodwill of her sister and her husband.

We feel she is a victim as she is unable to defend herself. Her sister lives in a two-room apartment with her husband, who is an agent in the French Quarter, where sailors and prostitutes roam the streets and there is not even a door between the two rooms. Of the two sisters, Stella is able to accept the negative changes in her social situation, while Blanche is unable to face the loss of her middle-class status and adapt to life without her lost privileged  family residence, Belle Réve. However, she looks to someone else to help her change her fate for the better, which is why she has come to her sister. Blanche, as a middle-class woman, is prejudiced against Stanley, Stella's husband, who is a rough, sensual man whom she derisively calls  Pole or Polack because of his Polish origins. Blanche looks to her sister for understanding over the loss of their inheritance, as she was the only one left to care for her ailing parents and relatives and has been unable to save the debt-laden house. Stella, on the other hand, left home for New Orleans to fend for herself, while Blanche had stayed in Belle Reve.

"Me, I took the blows with my face, with my body! All that death. Those endless funeral processions! Daddy, Mummy, Margaret... You've just come home for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are beautiful compared to death... And here you sit, accusing me of letting our home go to waste! Where the hell do you think all that money came from? …. for sickness and death? Death is expensive, Miss Stella!... That's how it all got out of hand."

The meeting of Blanche and Stanley confronts us with the apparent contrast between their different personalities and emotional attitudes, and our sense of overwhelming sadness at the unfolding of Blanche's fate is only heightened: Blanche is the sophisticated, over-sensitive, emotionally insecure young widowed literature teacher, while Stanley 'radiates an animal joy of existence in every movement, in his whole bearing. Since the dawn of his manhood, his life's pleasure has been the pleasure of women - but he enjoys the give and take of pleasure not with the feeble devotion of a dependent, but with the power and pride of a decorative male bird feathering among his hens'. So, on the one side is the vulnerable, insecure Blanche and on the other the confident, strong Stanley. Stella in this conflict situation cannot be seen as a protagonist in the situation, since she is strongly emotionally attached to Stanley and is both financially and existentially subordinate in their marriage and in their human relationship.

After Stanley learns of the loss of his wife's fortune, he invokes the ‘Napoleonic Code’ to find out how the inheritance was lost. He does not trust his wife's sister. Blanche, who in order to ease the tension between them flirts with Stanley, wants him to button her dress and asks for her cigarette so she can sniff it. Stanley learns from Blanche "how they (the male members of the family) have wasted the land on their legendary debauchery".

Blanche’s chance for a better life, the hope and opportunity for happiness in the drama is Stanley's friend Mitch, whose sensitive, reserved and trusting nature could provide protection and security for Blanche, who is over-sensitive ('I can no more stand bare light bulbs than I can stand a rude remark or a vulgar act') and escaping from the insecurity of her existence.

At a poker party, Blanche watches in shock as Stanley drunkenly beats Stella, who is expecting a baby, but her dismay is only heightened when she realises that Stella is content with her life with Stanley. "That's what you're doing, loitering here, spouting your dung. "A radio tube broken... beer bottles in the kitchen!... As if that's the way things are!" In her sister's marriage, sensuality is the dominant element and this sensuality keeps Stella magnetized to the relationship. Blanche, recognizing the hopelessness of her sister's and her own situation, feverishly and irrationally tries to get money from one of her former university partners, a millionaire from Dallas. However, we realise that their lack of money is a permanent state of being, like their vulnerable situation, perhaps a consequence of the permanence of their learned sense of helplessness (suggested by Seligman, 1975).

Blanche's relationship with Mitch deepens in the story and she becomes more and more hopeful: they are already talking about marriage. We learn that Blanche's first husband was homosexual who committed suicide at a party where the music of Varsoviana was playing, a tune which now continually haunts Blanche.

The climax of the drama is Blanche's birthday dinner, where Mitch fails to show up, despite Blanche desperately expecting him.  Stanley, to protect his friend from marrying an "immoral woman", has told Mitch everything he knows about Blanche's past.  At the birthday dinner, Stanley is deliberately cruel to the hopeless, broken and hallucinating Blanche, and gives her a bus ticket back to Laurel as a birthday present. Blanche's weak nerves can no longer take the deliberate malice. "The music of the Varsoviana creeps softly in and continues to play. Stella suddenly stands up and turns away. Blanche smiles, tries to laugh, then stops, jumps up from the table and runs across the room. She grabs her neck and runs into the bathroom. There's the sound of coughing and fisting." "You shouldn't have been so cruel to him, he's alone," says Stella to Stanley.

That evening, Stella is admitted to hospital in labour pains. Then finally Mitch shows up and meets Blanche to confront her about her past, which only adds to Blanche even greater sense of hopelessness. She does not protest, she confesses everything to Mitch: she talks about the past, about the empty space in her heart that was only filled by affairs with strangers, and about her young student with whom she also had an affair. She talks about losing her job and the hope that she might find peace of mind with Mitch. But Mitch is unable to accept Blanche's past and forgive her for lying about her age and history.  Unable to change focus and identify with Blanche's position. "I am not telling the truth, but what should be the truth. And if it is a sin, I damn you for it...."- says Blanche. After Mitch has gone, Blanche reaches for the whisky glass again. Then Stanley arrives from the hospital. She senses that Stanley is more than ordinary, "there is something overtly... savage about him". After Blanche's past is revealed and as the story progresses, the human relationship between Blanche and Stanley is worsening, even that little understanding and empathy Stanley may have had at the beginning of their encounter completely disappears.

For Stanley, Blanche becomes devalued, losing her humanity. She becomes a useless object, no longer a human being, but a person endowed with only negative qualities, lacking any good traits. As a result, at the end of the drama, Blanche's rape and madness is no longer seen by Stanley and the other characters as a serious crime against another person, but as a deserved punishment for that person, who is bad. After all, Blanche tried to fool everyone and lied. But not Stanley!" I'm the boy you couldn't fool once. You come in here, sprinkle the flat with powder and cologne, hang a lamp on the light bulb, and then chirp, chirp, chirp, the flat is Egypt, and you are the Queen of the Nile.”

Thus, Stanley does not become a sinner in the eyes of the community, because it is Blanche who is an immoral woman in the eyes of the community, which can be the result of the process of scapegoating in society and in human relations. But can a person only be judged positively or negatively, as so many factors can influence our choices and actions, and what is good for one person can be bad for another? And are there even perfect people, or only people who strive for the good? What is immorality? And is it not immoral deliberately to be cruel to someone, like Stanley to Blanche? After all, Blanche has never committed unforgivable sin, her only unforgivable sin, perhaps, was that she was “so foolish as to throw her pearls to the swine...”  to people who could not appreciate her and did not understand her.