For Robert Jones, Williams’s heroine exists mainly in illusion, denying today and living an imaginary yesterday, as Blanche DuBois from the play “A Street Car Named Desire”. “She lives in a world of paper lanterns and moonlit lakes, a world of gentility where courtly men crown her the eternal belle of the ball, where everyone desires her and she save her favor for a phantom”. (in Hurrell p.112) She is pathetic as she is incapable of meeting or triumphing over the demands of the time. Blanche DuBois has lost the contact with reality being the victim of the double.
In the play Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Appealing to lies, it allows her to make life appear as she wishes rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and unravels them. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality.
Formally this kind of women living the double of their destiny, would have been married by their families to wealthy planters and thus would have been assured of respectability within the social structure. However the young planters changed, as the society evolved. Not only fettered by the conventions, these women married planters who were effete and impotent, often they were homosexual like Blanche’s husband, Allan. All these heroines created by Williams are emotionally immature, and they have a strong sexual desire, usually tending towards nymphomania. Unconsciously, they as the case of Blanche DuBois desire to belong to these men physically, but because of the code under which they live, they turn their desire into coquettishness, affectation and evasion. (Jones in Hurrell, pp.111)
Stella has escaped from neuroticism to which her sister has fallen prey by completely accepting physical love with her husband, an animal like Pole, Stanley Kowalski. No matter how sordid her existence or how degrading her compromise with life, Stella has security and a sense of fulfillment. Blanche who uses sex to cling to when all else is gone, cannot understand her sister’s submission to what she believes is an animal-like existence. Thus, the physical act becomes a liberating force in the play. Blanche’s addiction to it is in fact a symbol of the degeneracy of the family and of its flight from reality.
When changing social conditions, Blanche is supposed to adjust, as she is not protected. She thus is forced to become a teacher in order to preserve a shabby gentility. Because of her license, she is relieved of teaching duties and so she goes to her sister’s place for safety. But this heroine never finds anything in the contemporary world to replace her former security. Her past cannot be recaptured. And yet, she seeks to recapture it by various means. Blanche tries to revive it through memory. She will not accept that she must come to grips with reality and live accordingly to its exigencies in order to retain some amount of sanity. She rejects the reality.
“I don’t want realism! Now, I tell you what I want. Magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth” (Williams Apud Jones in Hurrell, p. 115)
Being prisoner of a view in which the dominant reality is monstrously destructive and implacable, Williams has opposed to it with a poor, hazy-minded, being already broken in the toils and armed only with obstinate illusions rather than with reasonable will through Blanche.
Great drama cannot emerge out of fight and hysteria, but arises from genuine conflicts. (Taylor in Hurrell, pp.98-99)
Symbolic characters and properties assert themselves, some garishly, like the blind Mexican woman, chanting “Flowers for the dead” or like the poker players dressed in their primary colours who watch Blanche taken away, or like the fancy lampshade which Mitch strips from the naked bulb. The ramifications of meaning that Williams devises by such means seem inexhaustible. Nor does he hesitate to call up a surfeit of theatrical pathetic fallancy, the weather of nineteenth-century melodrama: heat, wind, thunder, all the rage of heaven.
These effects add up to an impressive theatre to accommodate people in it: most neurotic and lonely women, immoderately romantic, leaning hard on a Southern gentility which can no longer support them, caught in the toils of a society which will not easily admits weaklings. There is a great compassion behind the concept of such individuals as Blanche DuBois. They are not held for ridicule, nor to satisfy our salacious curiosity about those who live on the fringes of life. They are exposed because they “are symptoms of the stresses and strains of modern living”. Williams is evoking that: life is never what it seems, but that it must be faced. (Styan, p.210)
Blanche, nevertheless Blanche herself probably remains Williams’s most notable creation. She is an amalgam of contradictions, giving a pathetic-comic note to the play. She is a woman of refinement of attitude as well as of manners, while she is also a sensualist tippling in private and teasing the other sex. She appeals sometimes to lies or evades in her effort to bring a touch of magic into her life.(Styan, p.212)
When preparing for party to which Mitch is expected to join, Blanche starts singing in the bath wells to the point where “in the bathroom the water goes on loud; little breathless cries and peals of laughter are heard as if a child were frolicking in the tub”. Suddenly, Stanley cancels the event not before Blanche to burst from the bathroom with a gay laugh: “A hot bath and a long cold drink always gives me a brand new outlook on life ! (Williams Apud Styan, p.215)
The counterpoint in the song, the bathing and the happy comments, with the presence of the cake on the table, heighten the horror of Stanley’s revelations. The double world in which Blanche is living is epitomized, fact which readers may share with Blanche – the instinct to live in some sort of consonance. While the destiny of Blanche is to be wept for, she earned her deserts. “A quality of inevitably lifts our response from a merely sordid pleasure in the cruelty of the act”. (Styan, pp.215-216) Williams’s drama gravitates to sensationalism and melodrama because he does not trust his audience to accept his ironies without their being overstated, he paints in primary colours the scenes and avoids the shades between wherein we mostly lurk ourselves. He stresses the pain of the reality and the hopelessness of the aspiration to overcome it until it grows destructively, sensing insincerity in the drama. (Styan, p.216)
To Blanche reality is an electric bulb which is too blinding to be endured; everything must be seen by candlelight which never shows the shabbiness and the dramas of the present. She says “ I can’t stand a naked light bulb any more than I can a rude remark or vulgar action” . (Williams Apud Jones in Hurrell, p. 115) If a light bulb is a symbol of reality in the play, there should be many symbols of escaping from present, the most obvious being the candle.
Death, desertion and decline surround these women. The age of chivalry which has been romanticized to them in their youth, has disappeared. Their homes have been sold, their families have died, culminating with sickness and mental breakdown. Blanche says “All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be put in a coffin! But had to be burned like a rubbish” (Williams Apud Jones in Hurrell, p. 115)
Along with a consciousness of general decay in her society, Williams heroine has undergone a far more violent experience with reality, fact that terrified her in the sense that she refuses to see reality as it is. Blanche’s husband committed suicide, a tragedy she had caused through a careless remark.
Seeing the romanticized past die before their very eyes, these heroines cling all the more firmly to the romantic aspect of it. The past has been idealized. They consciously ignore the regretful aspects of the past and seek to embrace its careless, pleasant part in order to retain “the glory and the dream”, that world of imagination that is specific to childhood. Blanches says:
“His Auntie knows that candles aren’t safe, that candles burn out in little boys’ and girls’ eyes, or wind blows them out and after that happens, electric light bulbs go on and you see too plainly” (Williams Apud Jones in Hurrell, p. 115)
In the few moments when these heroines are not self-deluded they recognize the past as representing death. But while the past symbolizes death to these women, the present does not represent life, but rather desire. Desire is an escape from death, a means of forgetting it. Also, they believe that through physical desire and its consumption, they will belong, they will achieve Life and escape Death. They don’t figure out that desire fails unless it is accepted wholeheartedly, as by Stella Kowalski. Their responsiveness to and pleasure in sexual function is merely the result of a desperation into which their social position has forced them: “I was never hard or self-sufficient enough” – Blanche (Williams, A Street Car Named Desire, p.91) Moments of introspection are rare in Williams’s play. His women are more the passive pawns of social forces and their own emotions than active participants in the life’s tragedy. Blanche accounting for a cultured corrupted tradition, has not the strength of character to even triumph over the brutal Stanley Kowalski, for whom culture is a insignificant.
These heroines are sometimes intentionally comic and often pathetic and melodramatic but never tragic. Blanche isn’t a tragic figure because she has been defeated before her appearance on stage. We may observe her groveling before her fate, the illusions she created and her fellow man.
In addition to these, Williams dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through an analyze of the boundary between exterior and interior. The set of the play consists of the two-room Kowalski apartment and the surrounding street. Williams allows the street to be perceived at the same time as the interior of the home expressing the notion that the home is not a domestic sanctuary. Blanche refuses to leave her prejudices against the working class behind her at the door. The most evident instance of this effect occurs just before Stanley rapes Blanche, when the back wall of the apartment becomes transparent to show the struggles occurring on the street, foreshadowing her violation.
In order to escape, however, Blanche must come to perceive the exterior world as she imagines. Thus, objective reality is not an antidote to Blanche’s fantasies; rather, Blanche adapts the exterior world to fit her delusions.
All in all, the tragedy of Blanche is the tragedy of the civilization, which nourished her and then cast her out. (Jones in Hurrell, pp.115-116) Blanche may be so, seen as an anti hero as she is unable to adapt to the reality surrounding her, struggling to shape the present accordingly to her own will.
Bibliography
Harry Taylor, The Dilemma of Tennessee Williams in John D. Hurrell Two Modern American Tragedies, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1961, pp.97-99
Robert Emmet Jones, Tennessee Williams’Early Heroines in John D. Hurrell Two Modern American Tragedies, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1961, pp. 111-116
J L Styan The Dark Comedy – The development of Modern Comic Tragedy, 2nd edition, Cambridge At the University Press 1968 (1st edition 1962)
Tennessee Williams A Street Car Named Desire, Penguin Books, England, 1st edition 1959, 3rd edition 2000