686 The American Century: Literature since 1945world that has no use for ladies. Her need is to find protection, to secure her image
of herself in the gaze of the – mostly male – other. So, her need for flattery (“How do
I look?”), her pursuit of romance and illusion; so, also, the power and pathos of her
famous closing line, addressed to the man who takes her to the asylum, “Whoever
you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Endowed with an
evocative idiom, a theatricality of gesture and behavior, Blanche stands for illusion,
idealism, culture, purity, love, the romance of the past. As her name intimates, she is
associated with whiteness, the virgin of the zodiac, with soft colors and soft lights:
“I can’t stand a naked light bulb,” she declares as she puts up an “adorable little
colored paper lantern,” “any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.”
But, equally, she stands for “lies,” falsehood, fantasy, and weakness: it is this, after all,
that makes her vulnerable. “I’ve been on to you from the start!” Stanley triumphantly
declares just before the brutal climax of the play. “Not once did you pull any wool
over this boy’s eyes!”
That is a typical remark. Stanley is as tough and terse in words as he is in action.
He believes that, as he puts it, you have “to hold front position in this rat-race” and,
to do that, you have to have pluck and luck. His faith is in the facts, in prosaic reality
rather than poetic idealism and illusion. His allegiance is to the rawly physical, the
sexual rather than the spiritual. “Animal Joy in his being is implicit in all his movements
and attitudes,” we are told. “Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been
pleasure with women.... Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all
the auxiliary channels of his life.” Associated with vivid colors, violent action, the goat
of the zodiac and the strutting cockerel of folktale, he has next to no interest in the
past. His commitment is to the present and future, and what he can make out of
them. “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” Stanley says to
Blanche immediately before he rapes her. It is a remark typical of the play in its mix
of brutality and mystery, suggesting as it does that these two antagonists are strangely
fascinated with each other and with their antagonism. The “date” with each other,
the conflict that is at the heart of A Streetcar Named Desire, operates on so many
levels and carries with it so many intimations. It is a fairy tale, of beauty and the
beast. It is a social history, of a declining old world and an emergent new one,
translated into sexual terms. It is a mythic contest between the material and the
moral, the “female” principle and the “male.” It is also a perversely, painfully human
tale of tension between two richly individualized characters. With its multiple levels
of meaning and inflection, all of them founded on a raw base of feeling and longing,
A Streetcar Named Desire is a play that is constantly available to the discovery of
fresh nuances. It is also a play that leaves its audiences torn between regret and
recognition of necessity, the ineluctable nature of both reality and illusion, facts and
lies, the material and ideal – above all, perhaps, between pity and fear as we
contemplate the fate of Blanche Dubois.
Williams was only to approach the achievement of A Streetcar Named Desire in
one or two of his later plays. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) is a powerful drama with
a dual narrative. Big Daddy Pollitt, a Mississippi landowner, has to decide who
should inherit his estate. Practical considerations clearly favor his sensible, reliableGGray_c05.indd 686ray_c 05 .indd 686 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM