A Streetcar Named Desire: A Level York Notes

Williams initially idealises Stanley’s masculinity. He is a meat provider who finds ‘animal joy’ in his existence, and who has ‘the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens’: he is supremely self-confident, and full of raw energy. Moreover, he gives pleasure as well as taking it. When he meets Blanche he seems friendly and hospitable: ‘You going to shack up here? ... Good.’ True, he is aware of their social differences: ‘I’m afraid I’ll strike you as being the unrefined type.’ Yet at this point he is not resentful, and it would be misguided to define him simply as ‘despicable’.

Blanche, on the other hand, reveals her faults and weaknesses from the start. We see her snobbish insensitivity when she snubs the lower-class Eunice by curtly rejecting her offers of help and conversation – a snub echoed in Scene Eleven when she rejects Eunice’s gift of grapes.This is hardly noble. Left alone, Blanche helps herself to whisky, washing the glass to hide the fact. This reveals her drink problem, her exploitation of hospitality, and her dishonesty. She is insensitively disparaging about the apartment, and patronises Stella (‘plump as a little partridge’). Yet she is defensively vain: ‘I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!’ Admittedly, an alternative view would be to see this as vulnerability, as she is so sensitive about getting older, perhaps because of the obsessive fear of death brought on by her husband’s suicide.

Stella, by contrast, seems almost saintly at first. She welcomes Blanche, humours her, and puts up with having her home compared with an Edgar Allan Poe horror story. On several occasions she defends Blanche to Stanley, as when he rakes up her past in Laurel, and when he is cruel to her in Scene Eight. Later, though, we will see how Stella’s passion for Stanley compromises her morality.

The characters’ flaws become increasingly apparent. In Scene Two, Blanche verbally attacks Stella to forestall criticism: ‘I took the blows in my face and my body!’Her melodramatically metaphorical outburst combines manipulation with hysteria. Noticeably she manages to avoid revealing how Belle Reve was ‘lost’, and the naive Stella never asks. This is echoed later by the evasive way in which Blanche avoids telling Mitch her age (Scene Six).

Stanley is understandably frustrated by his wife’s vague acceptance of Belle Reve’s loss, and worried that he is being swindled, but we see him in a far worse light in Scene Three. He dictatorially tries to stop the sisters talking, smashes the radio, and then hits his pregnant wife. To most audience members, especially now, this is unforgiveable. Perhaps, if Stella chooses to stay with a violent man, she has only herself to blame. However, she is pregnant by him and, in the social climate of the 1940s, has little choice. Moreover, she enjoys their shared passion. To her, the ‘things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark ... make everything else seem – unimportant.’

Stanley is perhaps justified in becoming frustrated. Blanche’s stay costs him and Stella money and inhibits their lovemaking. Her overheard condemnation of him as an ‘ape man’ (Scene Four) also fuels his animosity, though his smug confidence in Stella’s loyalty, shown by his grinning at Blanche over her shoulder, is chilling. However, he plumbs new depths in Scene Eight when he takes cruel delight in giving Blanche the surprise ‘birthday remembrance’ of a ticket back to Laurel. However, it is his rape of Blanche while Stella is giving birth that puts him completely beyond the pale. His claim that it is fated (‘we’ve had this date ...’) does nothing to justify it. Later he is ‘prodigiously elated’ because he has finally beaten Blanche, and got away with rape. One or two critics have taken a similar view to Robin Grove, namely that ‘in scene 10, the real unspoken meaning of the play is that [Blanche] really has been asking for what she gets’ (‘Being Taken for a Ride: A Streetcar Named Desire’, 1987). However, this seems unduly harsh. A more convincing view is the ‘Darwinist’ one – that Stanley simply represents the survival of the fittest, either as an individual or as a representative of a newly assertive working class in the US of the time, tapping into ideas of the American dream. His actions may be despicable, even if his motives are less clear.

Stella may represent the perfect wife, but her passivity is not real virtue. She believes Stanley’s story because, as she tells Eunice, she could not live with Stanley and believe Blanche’s. She is therefore guilty by default, choosing security and sexual gratification over her sister’s sanity. Her rhetorically repeated ‘What have I done to my sister?’ shows only that she found the choice difficult, not that she regrets it. Her sobbing is just a ‘luxurious’ self-indulgence, and is therefore hardly noble.

Mitch is a marginally more acceptable model of masculinity. He is more sensitive than Stanley, as we see when he shows Blanche the inscribed cigarette case ‘from a dead girl’, and in his love for his mother. However, his clumsy attempt to force himself on Blanche in Scene Nine shows that he fails to understand her vulnerability. He subscribes to the chauvinistic moral double standards of the time when he condemns her as not ‘clean enough’ to share a house with his mother. His stuttering accusations as Blanche is led away are too little, too late.

Some critics say that Blanche achieves tragic status, but is this true? Tragic heroism requires the dignity of sanity: hence Shakespeare restores Lear’s wits before his death. Blanche, however, remains deluded. She exits calmly only because she is charmed by the courtesy of the only decent man in the play – the Doctor. All four major characters are despicable to some extent – Stanley the most because of his crowing triumph, Stella because of her collusion and betrayal, Mitch because of his double standards, and even Blanche because of her pathetic inability to face reality.