“I don’t want realism. I want magic!” — In Defense of Blanche Dubois

Ainsley Davis
29 March 2016
ENGL 299
What remains with you when you finish Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire? You are unsettled at best—disquieted, possibly wounded—and there is a decided lack of resolution; we are deliberately left grasping, wishing for the possibility of more. This play ends with no promise of good to come—its characters are not transformed, settled, or on their way to greater things, in fact, they are broken in the worst of ways—and Williams does not delude us with any false promises of happiness.
At the center of Williams’ 1947 quintessential Southern masterpiece is Blanche Dubois, the destitute, down on her luck Southern Belle from Laurel, Mississippi who is visiting her sister Stella and her new husband Stanley Kowalski at their home in a run-down quarter of New Orleans. Almost immediately upon her arrival, Blanche, out of place in her “white suit with a fluffy bodice” and “white gloves and a hat” (5), enters into an ultimately destructive power struggle with Stanley—a forceful, brutish man who is intolerant of Blanche’s fanciful nature—her opposite in every way. What we see, then, is the deconstruction of every one of Blanche’s illusions—what she clings to, how she presents herself, her paper lanterns to hide the revealing glare of the light, the costume jewelry, the fine clothes from her youth that she keeps meticulously clean. We see the Southern gentlewoman she was raised to be come in direct conflict with the modern world she is forced to survive in. She clings to elegance, the ideals of beauty and youth, and the system which demands and encourages Southern women to depend on men for financial and social security. Yet, Blanche simultaneously embodies and defies the Southern Belle stereotype; she drinks heavily, has sexual encounters with strangers, and, most importantly, is entirely unrepentant of the fact that she cloaks reality with “magic.” Some come to understand her as someone who merely puts on a show of gentility—a guise of goodness and morality—in order to disguise desire. But Blanche is much more complex than this.
“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” (136), Stella tells her husband when he condescendingly calls Blanche a “delicate piece.” Of the brief insights we are given into the life of Blanche Dubois, this is one of the most telling. Spoken by her sister, Stella, it informs us of Blanche’s inherent trusting nature, which we see almost none of now. We can imagine Blanche, naive and young, without the defenses she feels she must place around her—the things she now relies on to survive. At first, it is difficult to reconcile this image of Blanche as a a tender, trusting girl with the woman we see in Williams’ creation—faltering, unsure, relying on her femininity and sexuality as a mask for her weaknesses, yet unable to admit her desires, in case it might condemn her. Yet, we catch glimpses of this woman who, like her younger self, values kindness above all else, cares deeply for her family, and wants to give people—and herself—the most beautiful version possible of a life she finds harsh and unforgiving. She is quite unable to survive in a world where this is not possible—where the fantasy is not kept alive, at least somewhat, by reality. This world she has been thrust into is too harsh, too unlike what she has always known and relied on in order to keep her person intact. The tragedy of her character, then, lies in her inability to reconcile her past—and the constrictive, disciplined values of that past—with a modern world, in which she feels she has no place.
I would argue that Blanche is largely a product of the world she was raised in. She is not cruel or manipulative—she uses flirtation and the distraction of appearance because it is all she knows how to manipulate. She is a woman living inside her head, quickly descending into madness—unable to forget the violent suicide of her husband Allan, her family, now gone, the plantation lost forever—and furthermore, all of this is exacerbated by her alcoholism. Her illusions and refinement are coping mechanisms; the disaster of her “thwarted love” (Heims 57) and her subsequent guilt, combined with the loss of her family and their property, haunt her to the point of madness, and what we see in A Streetcar Named Desire are nothing more than what she uses to distract herself. This “weakness,” this inherent goodness that she attempts to hide, ultimately leaves her susceptible to violence.