LITERATURE AND GENDER - Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak

Tennessee Williams: A Street Car Named DesireSTANLEY: Turn it off!STEVE: Aw, let the girls have their music.PABLO: Sure, that’s good, leave it on!STEVE: Sounds like Xavier Cugat![STANLEY jumps up and, crossing to the radio, turns it off. He stops short at sight of BLANCHEin the chair. She returns her look without flicking. Then he sits again at the poker table.Two of the men have started arguing hotly.]Stanley’s conduct here is in keeping with the exclusive male order, in which females exist only for the pleasure ofmen, as and when men get into the mood to have pleasure with women. Women are also needed for housekeeping,taking care of the male needs of catering to their eating and drinking habits, sleeping and waking hours. As for moneyand property, it remains the male preserve, keeping the woman as a dependent slave. This all-male order reveals howthe peripheral woman is not a part of this world, and how she remains an ‘other,’ to be treated as someone outside themale order, and to be treated as someone inferior and available for jokes and ridicules, whatever way the malecompany pleases to talk about her.(11) Plot of a Streetcar Named DesireAlthough Tennessee Williams is not a classical dramatist, the plot of A Streetcar Named Desire is as classicallyconstructed as any of the Greek tragedies. Reading from opening to ending of the play one is reminded of Sophocles’sOedipus the King. Like the Greek tragedy’s plot, the plot of the Williams’s play perfectly observes the principle ofthree unities (of time, place, and action). The play opens in Elysian Fields, a part of New Orleans town, more preciselyin the ground-floor flat of a two-story corner building, in which Stanley and his wife Stella live and where Blanche hascome to stay with her sister Stella. The play ends at the same place, in the same building, and the same ground-floorflat. The entire action, just as in Oedipus the King, takes place just at a house. As for the unity of time, the play’saction gets completed in a span of a few weeks, although Aristotle allows a longer span of one year. The course ofaction is as compact as that of place and time. The entire action is focused on the life of Blanche, as to what happensto her in the company of her sister. Her fatal encounter with Stanley, her short-lived affair with Mitch, her ingloriouspast unfolded in a logical unfolding of her life, all combine in a cause and effect sequence to give the play’s action aninevitability of a tragic plot. The rising intensity toward the tragic end comes logically to the play’s middle andbeginning, the three being causally connected with each other.Like any successful tragedy, A Streetcar Named Desire has at its core a conflict which arises, intensifies, andclimaxes as naturally as leaves to a tree. Also, like any successful tragedy, the conflict, as we go along, not onlycomplicates but also enlarges, gaining more and wider meanings associated with it. Despite her weaknesses, more inthe nature of a tragic flaw, than in the nature of a vice, Blanche emerges, with her virtues of decency and politenessand with her vision of a cultured society, a true tragic character, resisting and opposing the destructive forces aroundher, ready to sacrifice all that she has, but not prepared to make any compromise on her principles. Her commitmentto her cherished dream of having a life of her own, of making life like that of an art, ennoble her character. No othercharacter comes close to her rising stature in the play’s widening circle of life.Even the ending, which some have termed pathetic, is not at all tame. We see Blanche struggling against all those outto trap her like an animal and transport her to the asylum. She fights against Stanley who ruins her. She fights againstthe doctor and the matron who are called to manage her to the asylum. Like any tragic protagonist, she goes down atthe end, but she goes down fighting, refusing to compromise her dignity and integrity. Even when she desperatelyneeds someone’s love to sustain through life that has broken her, she remains true to herself. She reveals to Mitch, theman who seems to like her and also ready to marry her, all about her past shady sexual life, along with the explanationas to why she was driven into these ignoble ways. But discovering that Mitch’s mind was brainwashed by Stanley andwas not prepared even to believe her honest revelations or confessions, she asks him to get out of her room. She mayhave been made desperate for love, for life, but no amount of desperation can take away her dignity and integrity fromher. That is what lends her tragic dignity. See how it goes:33