English Literature

The streetcar named Desire bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.  It connects to another car called Cemetery, and from there one proceeds to a part of New Orleans called Elysian Fields.  This tells us something about life.  When people live, they do everything because they desire.  It keeps them moving.  Then it kills them, or maybe they just die, and then its on to the Elysian  Fields, the name the Greeks called their equivalent of Heaven.  In Tenessee Williams play, the Elysian Fields in which Blanche DuBois finds herself is anything but Paradise, and the souls she finds there are far from blessed.

Blache DuBois is a relic of the Old South, an ageing, genteel woman who likes alcohol and soft light because they take the edge off things.  She arrives at her sister Stellas home in New Orleans with a vague story about how she left her teaching job for the sake of her health, and it isnt long before she upsets the household and its lord and master, Stanley Kowalski.  Stanley is everything that Blanche is not, everything that she fears and distrusts.  He is the son of Polish parents, a factory worker, a straight talker who isnt above hammering on the door and yelling at a lady if she takes too long in the bath. If Blanche embodies the dead dreams of the feudal plantation era, Stanley represents the New South, fast-paced, industrialized, unsentimental.  It would be too easy to dwell on the differences between these two characters and the reasons why the ways of one would get on the other ones nerves, or to say that one is sure to be destroyed while the other will do well in the modern age.  Maybe it would be better instead to explore the idea that while Blanche and Stanley might appear to be worlds apart, they are actually only two faces of the same coin.  

Blanche comes to New Orleans burdened with a trunk and the news that Belle Reve, the plantation where she and Stella were raised, has been lost forever.  But where another woman would have come wailing or maybe fighting mad, Blanche waltzes in and proceeds to fill the Kowalski flat with illusions.  Indeed, she admits later on that a womans charm is 50 illusion (Scene 2, p. 167).   Her refusal to deal with the loss of the plantation in a more realistic manner might be because of the way she has been brought up to the ideals of the chivalric code.  There was chivalry in the Old South as it was organized a little like the world was in the time of knights and damsels-in-distress.  There were poor people who farmed the land, and they were protected by the land-owning lords.  The landowners in turn were answerable before God for the welfare of their women, children and servants.  Everything depended on people fitting into their proper places.  If they did their duty there would be harmony.  If slaves worked, they would be fed.  If ladies were discreet and pretty and obedient to their husbands and fathers, they would be protected from vulgarity and the harsh necessities of life.  If the plantation owners and their sons took care of their women, children and slaves, they would be rewarded with the love of these weaker ones, the respect of their peers, and the blessings of the Almighty.  The ordered, chivalrous ways were supposed to result in a world where there was truth, beauty and goodness, one that Blanche tries to keep alive by clinging to its outward trappings  fine clothes, refined talk, and being conscious of things that just arent done in polite society.

Stanley on the other hand is the son of immigrants but an American himself.  If the Old South was about respecting the proper order of things where some are born to be lowly and some are born to rule, his ethics are geared towards upward struggle.  Not that Stanley actually thinks that he is beneath people like Blanche.  The struggle spoken of here is one where the limits from olden times - like social status - are removed, so that there is the idea that if a man only works hard enough and looks out after his best interests, then he will succeed.  The measure of success is not the achievement of a pretty, genteel world, but a world where no man or woman or child has to go hungry and there are equal opportunities for all.  This new way of thinking of course takes into account the price that people in the Old South paid for their orderly world  the suffering of the majority so that the privileged few could enjoy beauty and good things.

These contrasting world views are apparent in Blanche and Stanleys attitudes toward material things like property, as well as to those that are intangible, like human relationships.

When Blanche talks about the fall of Belle Reve, she recites a litany of deaths, including a particularly harrowing story of how their hugely pregnant kinswoman could not be made to fit into a casket.  The loss of the plantation to her is represented by the lives that the war took away.  As relatives die one by one, so is Belle Reve sold bit by bit to pay for their funerals.  When asked exactly how the plantation was lost in business terms however, she finds it hard to explain.  This in turn, is what Stanley finds hard to believe.  Being a man of the world who looks out for number one, his first instinct is to accuse Blanche of lying.  The ugly side of an equal-opportunity world is the thought that no one is above suspicion.  To justify his intrusion into the financial affairs of the DuBois sisters, he even invokes Louisianas Napoleonic code (Scene 2, p. 163), which says that whatever a woman owns is also the property of her husband.  Ironically, the Napoleonic code itself is a holdover from more chivalrous times.  If Blanche holds the painful pinch of poverty beneath the pain of losing her loved ones, Stanley sees this sentiment as a kind of act put on to distract interested parties from what to him is the pressing issue   Where is the money

While at the Kowalskis Blanche gains a suitor  Stanleys friend, Mitch.  Mitch is a little nave, and Blanche plays the part of damsel-in-distress to gain his sympathies.  True, the man isnt very manly, isnt too handsome and still lives with his mother.  Still, in Blanches world, there must be a man.  It doesnt matter if there must be paper shades over the lights, if she must lie about her age or her past or anything else.  It fits into the dream to have a man worshipping her, putting her on a pedestal in the old-fashioned way.  It is nothing like Stella and Stanleys relationship, where Stella admits that there are things that happen, between a man and a woman, in the dark, that makes everything else seem unimportant.  For Stanley though, it is no romance when a relationship is built on lies, and so he promptly digs up the truth about Blanche  how she prostituted herself to survive before becoming involved with a minor and losing her job.  Mitch is enlightened but is devastated as Blanche hysterically tries to hold together the illusion that is falling apart (Scene 9, p. 221).

But when all is said and done, Blanche and Stanley, the Old South and the New South, are not so very different after all.  Blanche struggled tooth-and-nail, as bravely and bitterly as any man, to protect her family and her heritage, just as Stanley and his fellow laborers struggle, though less dramatically, for a chance of three square meals a day for themselves and their families.  If Blanche believes in beauty and goodness, so Stanley believes in equality and labors sure reward.  It might be argued that both are utopian ideas that are far from reality.

Blanche fought passionately to preserve what she cared about, even if it meant the degradation of her body and the loss of her reputation.  Stanley also, for all his toughness, must stand tearing his shirt on the street and shouting Stella...Stella on a drunken night when his wife has deserted him (Scene 3, p. 179).  If Blanche gently succumbs to the hopeful delusion that a millionaire named Shep Huntleigh is about to carry her off on a grand cruise, then Stanley comes home after the birth of his first child brimming with good spirits because that weak little morsel of flesh is for him joy and hope.

When Stanley rapes Blanche it is not because he is an animal.  It is only the modern world realizing that it doesnt have all the answers, just as the old world didnt.  The thought is unbearable, so the New South must commit violence upon the Old South.  For after all, it isnt just Blanche who takes the streetcar named Desire, then hops on the one called Cemetery, to get to Elysian Fields  so does Stanley, and so must we all do.