Ladies and Gentlemen Callers in Tennessee Williams' South

Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University
College of Languages and Translation
Department of English
Ladies and Gentlemen Callers in Tennessee Williams’ South
By:
Arwa Al-Mofawez
Submitted to the Department of English
of the College of Languages and Translation
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Prof. Monji Raddadi, Advisor
Muharam 1430 – January 2009
I

Abstract
Blanche Dubois and Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' plays A Streetcar
Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, are two female ambassadors from the vanished
plantation of the Old South. Their journey of finding gentlemen callers becomes a symbol of
a lost life mode, which is lamentable but unavoidable. It also reflects a shape of community
where women cannot define themselves except through the existence of men in their lives. In
Amanda and Blanche, Williams evocatively portrays the harsh and terrifying loneliness of
feminine individuals in the isolation of the New South. He shows their pitiable and deep
attempt to cling to values momentous to them in the face of an aggressive, male-dominated
society. Williams demonstrates their tragic struggle to establish contact with the world
through finding a gentleman caller who represents the attributes of the Old South. The
playwright shows that they failed because of their inability to fulfill an impossible dream.
III

Table of contents
Introduction 1
I. The Glass Menagerie: A Determined Quest of the Long
Awaited Gentleman Caller 3
II. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Disappointing, Imaginative
and Substitute Gentlemen Callers 20
Works Cited 46
VI

Introduction
Al-Mofawez 1
Historically, the ideal of the Southern Lady lies at the very core of the traditions and the
values of the American South. The image of the lady and her devotion to the stern convention of the
conduct, dignity, decency, and chastity have resulted in the Southern male placing her upon a plinth
from which she finds it hard to descend. The Southern lady is a female in waiting, with traits
specifically designed to enable her to capture a wealthy, thriving man.
Amanda Wingfield and Blanche Dubois, the two most famous Southern Gentlewomen
among Williams‘ characters share a loyal sentiment to their Old South, a sentiment that makes
adjustment to their displacement from their former Southern background hard to achieve. These
characters attempt to cope with the actuality of their new environment through reflections of the
Southern majesty and fantasies of the long-awaited gentleman caller. But, unable to cope with the
changed circumstances, these women struggle to survive a cruel and disgraceful existence, void of
Southern dignity, through fantasy and illusion.
Williams‘ sensitive females unconsciously feel that the loads of the modern society have
caused a moral and spiritual transformation. They feel that they are out of place, deeply distressed,
and totally disoriented. Williams captures his female characters in moments when their ―personal
dreams and myths are under pressure and when the reality of mortality and the fact of the physical
decline become undeniable‖(Bigsby, A Critical Introduction 17). As a result, they become anxious
and in desperate need to take refuge in former memories. Being unable to adjust or to reshape their
identity according to the new standards, they sense that the community rejects them for being too
old-fashioned or for simply being too old.
At first sight, Amanda Wingfield, and Blanche DuBois, both believe in the romantic ―myth
of the Old South of gracious living, family tradition, chivalry and coquetry‖(Bauer-Briski 23). Both

Al-Mofawez 2
are evenly shocked by the animalistic expression of the instincts and want the finer things in life
instead. They are wrong in assuming that the image of the Southern Gentlewoman as an icon of
Southern culture is their pathway to success. While Blanche, who has ―the manner of a genteel
aristocrat and the habits of a prostitute‖(Hirsch 28), fails to correlate with that pure incarnation,
Amanda is not enclosed by these physical contradictions but she fails also to represent the true
dignified embodiment of the Southern Gentlewoman.
Amanda and Blanche hold tightly to the Southern gender role which states that the
female‘s foremost definition lies in her ability to ―entertain the gentleman‖(Streetcar 101). This
demonstrates quite well that, as far as the female is concerned, ―the role offered by the Old South
was social and symbolic and not personal and physical. The woman was essentially a passive
creature, alternately a chaste symbol, a social icon who played her role in concealing a more
anarchic and brutal reality‖(Bigsby, A Critical Introduction 63). The image of the Southern
Gentlewoman as a conventional ideal not only is the symbol for Amanda and Blanche‘s descending
but also imply the rigid gender stereotypes in the Southern background.
For the two characters, it is the gentleman caller who could be the bridge to the return to
gentility and prosperity. Tennessee Williams defines his gentleman caller as "the long-delayed but
always expected something that we live for"(Menagerie 1). However, these women refuse to see the
gentleman caller as a link to the real world. They insist on attaching him with all the long forgotten
qualities and graces they associate with the word "gentility".
Amanda's failure with the gentleman caller occurs from the fact that she is ensnared in her
perception of what life should be as opposed to what it is. Blanche DuBois' perception of the
gentleman caller takes her one step further. Her gentleman caller viciously focuses the light of reality
on her face and pushes her toward creating an imaginative suitor and then reaches insanity. The
symbol of the gentleman caller is so important in the scheme of The Glass Menagerie that Williams
first entitled the screen version "The Gentleman Caller". Only after revising it to stage form did he

Al-Mofawez 3
change the title to The Glass Menagerie (Johns 325). This early title underscores Williams' essential
premise that reality and illusion are forever rooted in the mind of the displaced female. While much
attention has been paid to the females' clinging to their Southern past in Tennessee Williams' plays,
there is no real focus in A Streetcar Named Desire on the concept of the gentleman caller as a symbol
of the female's severe displacement.
In The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams seems to be presenting the
frustration of the females‘ dislocation in place and time. Blanche and Amanda‘s conflict in the
manner of their nostalgic yearning for a ―gentleman", is a struggle with a socio-economic structure.
Their craving to find this figure is self-defeating because they do not recognize that their own
disintegrated and basically socially constructed ideals are preventing them to form self-realization.
They can not manage to show that their desperate search for the gentleman caller to ensure protection
is not a way-out to find their ideals or to fulfill their feminine needs, but only a desperate seek to
recapture a way of a collapsed life. The women's constant reference to their solid Southern roots
amplifies the destructive masculine system, and consequently pushes them deeper into an inflated
illusion.
The quest for the real representative of the gentleman caller with all the Southern attributes
demonstrates a woman and a culture in a state of crisis. In seeking this figure, both Amanda in The
Glass Menagerie and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire do not only reflect an individual
feminine subject but also a symbol of ―an entire past life or [for] the expiring culture with which the
subject in question is associated‖ (Savran 22).
I. The Glass Menagerie: A Determined Quest of the Long Awaited Gentleman Caller:
In her upbringing in Blue Mountain as a Southern lady, Amanda Wingfield is prepared to
undertake the traditional responsibilities of the entertaining wife. This kind of lady is totally
dependent on her husband to fulfill the needs of the family. She is hanging on her Southern