sketchy southern living

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi and reared in St. Louis. He turned to writing as a child when a two-year paralysis left little else for him to turn his attention to. Williams began his career as a dramatist in 1939, at which point he moved to New Orleans and changed his name to Tennessee in honour of his abusive father’s home state. He was devoted to his sister, Rose, whose struggles with schizophrenia and failed lobotomy contributes to his troubles with alcoholism. He was also plagued by abuse and discrimination due to his somewhat overt life as a homosexual; his most important relationship was with Frank Merlo, from 1947 until Merlo’s death in 1963. Merlo tempered Williams’ depressions and helped him to live with the uncertainty of his own mental health in the wake of his sister. At the age of 71, Williams choked to death on a eye dropper lid, likely made possible by impaired gag function due to the amount of drugs and alcohol found in his hotel room. His brother maintained that he had been murdered.

His first success came with The Glass Menagerie in 1944. Williams’ plays are about the darkness of life and are truly Gothic in setting and situation, but the characters gain their strength from an ability to feel a full range of emotion in the face of such situations, rather than simply shrinking away from or denying such horrors. All of this, despite the violence that is a part of everyday life for all of Williams’ characters. This is true of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a play set in a New Orleans slum. In Streetcar, Blanche Dubois comes to New Orleans to visit her sister, Stella Kowalski, and her brother-in-law, Stanley. Blanche has recently lost the family estate to bankruptcy and is troubled by the contrast between the life she and her sister shared in the past and the squalor she now sees. Over the play, we learn that Blanche’s prim ways are mere affectation; she had lost her school teacher’s job for having a sexual liaison with a seventeen-year-old boy, and had been bust around town before that. All of this is reactionary behaviour spurred on by Blanche’s heartbreak at the discovery of her husband’s homosexuality and his subsequent suicide. At the end of the play, Blanche is violently raped by Stanley while Stella is in the hospital giving birth; Stella’s choice not the believe her leads to Blanche’s commitment to a mental institution.

For me, what makes this play so disturbing is that none of the characters are capable of living in reality. Stella is beaten by Stanley and lives with his infidelities; like Eunice upstairs, it is better to be with a violent man than to be alone. Stella and Eunice both determine that Stella “can’t” believe Blanche — not that she doesn’t believe that Stanley raped Blanche, but that she must put such thoughts out of her mind and aside for the sake of her own survival. In so doing, Stella puts her own happiness — indeed, her own conception of reality — ahead of her sister’s. She must, then, believe that Blanche is unstable. Blanche is the most overt in her fantasy life, because she has built an elaborate web of lies to conceal her own tragic experiences. Like Stella, then, Blanche fantasizes out of self-preservation. The problem, though, is that because she has built so much upon lies, there is no chance of her being believed when she really needs it. The combination of her own delusions and those of her sister are what condemn her to her fate at the mental hospital.

But while all the criticism seems to focus on Stanley’s “realism,” he is as much consumed by the lying as everyone else. He has convinced himself that he lives in a happy home, that he provides for his wife and his child — in reality, he is abusive, and he is the wedge that has separated her from her sister. The ability to perpetrate a horrifically violent rape — and to pretend it never occurred — is indicative of his own ability to revise history as he sees fit. The sickness within this community is that revisionism, whether it’s Blanche rewriting the past, her husband trying to hide his homosexuality, or Stella believing she will live a happy life with Stanley. That, in the end, is the true tragedy of this play.