Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

my empty heart with.. . . I think it was panic, just panic, thatdrove me from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and there, in the most— unlikely places. . . 20[first ellipsisWilliams’s; second ellipsis mine]Blanche’s desire had always set her apart, because she alwayswanted a lover with a sensibility the opposite of Stanley’s, nottraditionally masculine, animalistic, aggressive; she alwayswanted someone in whom “ some tenderer feelings have hadsome little beginning! ” She was always Stanley’s enemy, theenemy of the ordinary, however unrepressed the ordinarywas. And it was this opposition to the ordinary— to ordinarymasculinity— that marked her: that was her sexual appetite,her capacity to love, the anguish at the heart of her desire. Atsixteen she fell in love— “ [a]ll at once and much, much toocompletely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding lighton something that had always been half in shadow, that’s howit struck the world for me. ” 21 The boy was gentle, nervous,beautiful, with “ a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like aman’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking. ” 22He wrote poetry, and she loved him “unendurably.” 23 Onenight she found him kissing an older man; that night he killedhimself, because she told him she had seen the kissing andthat he disgusted her. The opposite of death, says Blanche, isdesire; desire for the soldiers camped near the family land,Belle Reve, while her mother was dying; desire for other menin the wake of Allan; desire for a seventeen-year-old boy whenshe was a teacher, resulting in her being fired; and now, holedup with Stella and Stanley, where the streetcar named Desirehas taken her, trying to trap Mitch into marriage, desire evenfor the newspaper boy collecting for The Evening Star: