LITERATURE AND GENDER - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak

18STELLA: I was – sort of – thrilled by it. [She waits for a moment]….Literature and GenderWilliams is, of course, using in the play the age-old comic device of incongruity, making the two sisters antithetical, andmore so the poker-playing men and the chattering hens. But the antithesis, especially the imagery, the dramatist usesconforms to the clichéd concepts of man and woman. He succeeds in providing laughter, but does he attempt anysensitization about the coarseness that goes with all this? It seems he does not. One of the problems with such standardways of creating comedy is that it reduces ever serious things of life to a laughing matter. Laughing becomes a way ofoverlooking the serious cultural flaws carried without any consciousness in everyday conversation and activity.Not that Williams has designed Blanche to be a feminist, a spokesperson for women’s cause in the world, but he hascertainly made her representative, not merely of a decadent dying culture but of ‘culture’ as such, which includes arightful, a decent place for a woman in society, even if it remains male dominated. Her long comment on Stanley asman, worth only for a fling or two, but not worth a life-long companion for a woman, implies an ideal, a set of values,for a woman’s position in society. Note, for illustration, the following:He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks likeone! There’s even something – sub-human – something not quite to the stage of humanityyet! Yes, something – ape-like about him, like one of those pictures I’ve seen in –anthropological studies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by,and there he is – Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meathome from the kill in the jungle! And you – you here – waiting for him! Maybe he’ll strikeyou or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Night fallsand the other apes gather! There in the front of the cave, all grunting like him, andswilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! – you call it – this party of apes!Somebody growls – some creature snatches at something – the fight is on! God! May bewe are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella – my sister – there has beensome progress since then! Such things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of newlight have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people tenderer feelings havehad some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as ourflag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching…. Don’t – don’t hangback with the brutes.We must notice here, first of all, that this discourse echoes the kind of difference Leavis made out between “minorityculture” and “mass civilization.” Here, while Blanche obviously represents the former, Stanley and his friends representthe latter. What she is talking about here is that antagonism of Arnoldian or humanist culture and the blind march ofmaterial, machine or mechanical civilization. It must also be noted, here, that Blanche seldom, in fact, never, invokesthe conventional pieties of social institutions such as marriage or family. While Stella represents, in this secondantagonism, the traditional woman, Blanche represents the unconventional, new, educated, woman. Blanche, evenwithout being gender specific, would like to have a decent place at home and in outside world, in her relationship withmen. Expressionistic exaggerations apart, which Williams uses as a stage technique, Blanche genuinely represents acertain modicum of decency that goes into making a women “cultured.”Blanche is given the role of a female crusader, too, however muted or subdued that role might seem in the more noisyantagonism of culture and civilization, aristocracy and democracy. The way she has to face the odds of life alone,when left to live with ailing and dying members of the family; the way she has to survive in a society of sharks (mostlythe male) gives the play the feminist dimension. Large part of her misery or suffering stems from her being a female.See what she has suffered:I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to thegraveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! So big with it, it couldn’t be putin a coffin! But had to be burnt like rubbish! You just came home in time for the funerals,Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths – notalways. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they