What remains with you when you finish Tennessee Williams’s 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’s 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 from the first scene in her “white suit with a fluffy bodice” and “white gloves and a hat” (Williams 5), enters into an ultimately destructive power struggle with Stanley—a forceful, “ape-like” (28) brutish man who is intolerant of Blanche’s fanciful nature—her opposite in every way. He undermines her every move, calls attention to each mistake—he even goes so far as to uncover the truth about Blanche’s departure from Laurel, which leads Stanley’s friend Mitch, who Blanche hoped to marry, to desert her.
What we see, then, is the deconstruction of every one of Blanche’s illusions: what she clings to, how she presents herself—the paper lanterns on the bulbs that hide the light’s revealing glare, 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 in which she is forced to survive. 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.” Put eloquently in Biljana Oklopčić’s essay on Southern Bellehood—“Blanche’s past, as well as her present, is a mixture of sin and romanticism, reality and illusion, personal excessiveness and social discipline.” She works to perpetuate the performance, but also admits to its falseness—and certainly recognizes in private the superficiality of what is indeed a performance, an exaggeration. It is when she can no longer maintain the performance—and when the madness becomes too overbearing—that we see her break. Some have come to understand her character as someone who merely puts on a show of gentility—a guise of goodness and morality—in order to disguise desire and mental illness. But I believe that Blanche is much more complex than this. Tennessee Williams has created a character that few people know how to classify—as Southern women studies scholar Anca Vlasopolos states in her essay “Authorizing History: Victimization in “A Streetcar Named Desire’”—“Perceptions of Blanche as the sole representative of sensibility destroyed by a callous society stand side by side with descriptions of her as sexually immoral…as a nymphomaniac” (323-324); like the character herself, perceptions of Blanche are divided. She cannot be simply classified as either a destitute, victimized woman or as an unrepentant narcissist—her complexity, and Williams’s insistence in the text that we see this complexity—makes a hasty classification of Blanche impossible. An actress who recently played Blanche in an updated version of the play, Gillian Anderson, said in an interview that Blanche “is one of the most complex characters I have ever read… She just has so many layers that work simultaneously, obviously [playing her] is going to be a challenge.” Similarly, it is a challenge to understand the layers of Blanche as an audience member or a reader. I would argue that her complexity, the peculiarities of her character which perplex us, anger us, cause us to judge her harshly, are but a few of the layers that make her up, and should be examined only within a larger view of her character—remembering always her past and upbringing, her fragile mental state, her intelligence and kindness, the inadequacies she feels, and the caustic effects of the “broken world” she has come into.
x
(….)
Williams has also stated that the play is about “the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society.” If this is the message we are supposed to receive—how, then, are there still so many viewers who refuse to see Blanche as anything more than a collection of her faults? Has Stanley’s “win” caused people to assume that the ending of the play was somehow the right course of action, rather than a collective unwillingness to accept something which would so violently alter the social fabric? Williams has not merely given us a character. He has written someone we should, and must, see as entirely human. In order to understand the layered complexity of Blanche, we must remember that she, like any of us, is far from perfect.
Furthermore, the way Blanche is perceived depends largely on the actress who plays her, as well as the director of the production—this can go so far as to influence whether she is interpreted as an unrepentant harlot, or as a sacrificial figure. In recent productions, such as Gillian Anderson’s 2014 performance, we can contrast Anderson’s flirtatious, sensual Blanche with Vivien Leigh’s more timid, unsure depiction from the 1951 film. Still, though, the directorial decision to highlight Blanche’s desires rather than suppress them does not detract from the increasing fragility we also see in her; instead it makes it more apparent, especially by the second half of the play. How a director chooses to stage the rape can also play an important role in audience interpretations. In Benedict Andrews’ production with Anderson as Blanche, Stanley carries a passed-out, defenseless Blanche to the bed. We see him violently peel back the chiffon of her dress, which he covers her face with, before the lights go down. Here, the scene is depicted as explicitly and violently as possible; it is also followed by Blanche crying in a bathtub. This is a startling difference from the film, in which we can only infer what has happened, and are shown next to nothing.
Marlon Brando’s iconic depiction of Stanley in both the play’s original run and in the film perhaps caused viewers to consider the play to be Stanley’s, when it is decidedly not. Perhaps misreadings of Stanley have a large role in an overall misreading of the play, and a denunciation of Blanche. Vlasopolos poignantly writes that “the savage rejection of Blanche combines with the discomfort of identifying with her destroyer and accepting the circumstances that make him triumph” (324); I think it is true that if a viewer has reduced Blanche to nothing more than a mentally ill, lying woman who has fallen from her position in society, it is not so difficult to accept what happens to her—it is not so horrible to imagine her destruction, because she has already been destroyed. I believe that what we are to take from this play—and what Williams hoped we would take from this play—relies entirely on a reading of Blanche that celebrates, acknowledges, and attempts to understand her entire character, including the forces of the modern world which she contends with. Reducing her to anything less than a complex character is detrimental, and harmful. She is a displaced and isolated person who favors the ideal over the truth, who carries the past with her in order to lessen some of the harshness of the present—covering lights, wearing old finery, over-valuing appearance. The enlightened way of life she seeks, and tried, to live is simply not possible in the real world. The thing about Blanche is that her self-deception isn’t hurting anyone. She uses these little tricks for herself—for her own happiness—they are not meant to harm, not meant to deceive, not a form of artifice. They are simply her coping mechanisms—the only way she knows how to engage with the world, and still maintain her sense of self, and her dignity. She has not done, and cannot possibly be said to have done, anything to bring on what happens to her. Her existence as a Southern aristocratic woman who has turned away—“fallen”—from the social norms which made her, while simultaneously using them to protect the reputation and the home which she has lost, make her entirely vulnerable to Stanley. Her attempts to reclaim authority are always thwarted because she fails to conform, and this is unforgiven. The boundaries she crosses in gender and class cement her as destitute, and ready to be taken advantage of; the tender aspects of her person are forgotten, set aside in favor of the mistakes she has made, the lies she has told, the social norms she has upset with her presence. While we might identify with Blanche—we hear the music she hears, see the visions she sees, experience her madness and pain—we understand that society is on the side of Stanley, on the side that wouldn’t dream to upset the way things are for the purpose of saving one woman who can’t save herself.
x
I reference Gillian Anderson’s recent performance briefly in my essay, and the Young Vic (the theatre where it was originally produced) actually released a short film to accompany the play’s run, which is called “The Departure.” It is obviously based on the play, and is meant as a kind of prequel to Streetcar, and speculation about Blanche’s past. It shows Blanche in Mississippi, at what we presume is the Flamingo motel, before she was run out of town (thus the title, The Departure). It’s about 16 minutes long, but a very interesting insight into the character of Blanche–it’s also quite heart wrenching, but that might be a personal opinion. Gillian directed and starred in the short film, and it was written by Andrew O’Hagan.
Also, here is an interesting article about the short film.
No comments yet.