LITERATURE AND GENDER - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak

Tennessee Williams: A Street Car Named DesireUnder cover of the train’s noise STANLEY enters from outside. He standsunseen by the women, holding some packages in his arms, and overhears theirfollowing conversation. He wears an undershirt and grease-stained seersucker pants.]BLANCHE: Well – if you’ll forgive me – he’s common!STELLA: Why, yes, I suppose he is.BLANCHE: suppose! You can’t have forgotten that much of our bringing up, Stella, that youjust suppose that any part of a gentleman’s in his nature! Not one particle, no! Oh, if he wasjust – ordinary! Just plain – but good and wholesome, but – no. There’s something downright– bestial – about him! You’re hating me saying this, aren’t you?STELLA[coldly]: go on and say it all, Blanche.BLANCHE: He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talkslike one! 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 – anthropologicalstudies! Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is – StanleyKowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! Andyou – you here – waiting for him! Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, ifkisses have been discovered yet! Night falls and the other apes gather! There in the front of thecave, all grunting like him, and swilling and gnawing and hulking! His poker night! – you call it – thisparty of apes! Somebody growls – some creature snatches at something – the fight is on! God!May be we 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 new light havecome into the world since then! In some kinds of people tenderer feelings have had some littlebeginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark marchtoward whatever it is we’re approaching…. Don’t – don’t hang back with the brutes.[Another train passes outside. STANLEY hesitates, licking his lips. Thensuddenly he turns stealthily about and withdraws through the front door. Thewomen are still unaware of his presence. When the train has passed he callsthrough the closed front door.]As the beginning and ending of this conversation is capped by the passing of the train, Stanley is quite clearly associatedwith the locomotive as a force of that sort, or a representative of the mechanical or machine civilization. Blanche’sspeech dwells upon the kind of distinction Leavis made (in his debate with C.P. Snow on the subject of two cultures)between minority culture and mass civilization. At one level, the conflict between Blanche and Stanley is, for sure, theone between these two notions of culture. Also, as the language of Blanche’s discourse reveals, her opinion of ‘other’(here Stanley) has hardened into a strong prejudice carrying with it an element of contempt as well. Her surrealisticvision of the ‘other’ shows the extent to which she is removed from that world, and hence equally strongly prejudiced.(10) Woman as OtherThe discriminatory and prejudiced feeling about ‘other’ is not merely a phenomenon of culture, it is also a genderphenomenon. From the viewpoint of culture, Stanley and his friends constitute the ‘other’ for Blanche and her like.But from he viewpoint of gender, it is Blanche and her like, as well as women of the working class, form a singlecategory of the ‘other.’ In the all-male or masculine world of the Poker-party, or the mass civilization dominated bymuscle, women are pushed to the periphery, or are marginalized in terms of their ‘gender’ or political status. The waythese women, irrespective of their social status, are treated by the men-folk in Elysian Fields, their less-than-equalstatus in gender terms is made quite clear. Note, for instance, the following (at the Poker Night, an all-male card gameparty with drinks and meat and jokes about women, the ‘other’):STEVE [dealing a hand]: Seven card stud. [Telling his joke as he deals] This ole nigger isout in back of his house sittin’ down th’owing corn to the chickens when all at once he hears aloud cackle and this young hen comes likety split around the side of the house with the rooster31