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The following is my typed-up manuscript from the Streetcar Named Desire assessment that was written at the end of last year. It was noted as a comprehensive analysis of desire as the ‘destructive/comprehensive force at the heat of human existence.’ There are a number of ideas within this that I wish I had returned to and made some further comments.

I could have further explored the backdrop of the play’s setting in the ‘sensual heat of New Orleans’ in the opening scene and the ‘intimacies with strangers’ in scene nine which is developed in a fourth sub-argument  in green pen.

Explore the Presentation of Desire in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

‘What you are talking about is brutal desire.’

Desire is presented as a brutal, unbridled, sexual passion to which all are held by its grip and that critically undercuts all notions of Blanche’s respectability as a Southern Belle. Within the aristocratic caste of Southern society, Blanche has been offered no mode of sexual release with the repressive sexual ideology of the old South, yet ironically the ‘epic fornications’ of her ancestors will reveal her undoing. Initially, she makes efforts to appear chaste, virginal, and pure; these standards in which she defines herself and rigidly attempts to uphold. However, her sordid past, in her promiscuity incurred by a deep loneliness at the loss of her husband, threatens to intervene in the reality that she manifests, Stanley, throughout, maintains an antagonism for his own hyper-masculine potency is necessarily at odds with the feminised deceit of her Southern manners. To a Marxist perspective, desire is but the method in which the emerging working-class, relishing in their post-war success, can destroy the inhibited Southern Aristocracy of the Antebellum America — indeed, the rape scene by Stanley pulls her into the modern, Capitalist progress of America that is not to let go.

It is a necessary imperative, to Blanche’s mind, that she appears within bound of the gender moral standards of the South: for that purpose, she follows a self-imposed instruction of fragility and virginal chasteness. Upon the audience’s introduction to Blanche, she adorns herself, through William’s use of plastic theatre, in a ‘white fluffy bodice.’ Her image of luxury and ‘delicate beauty’ is the method for her to maintain her façade of sexual purity. Her ‘pearls’ and ‘white clothes’ all denote the cleanliness of an aristocratic, wealthy, Antebellum existence. Still, her spectral appearance in white may relate to her decaying, anachronistic being, clinging onto her family’s history; her ethereality is perhaps suggestive of a liminal state between life and death itself. Ultimately, her appearance foreshadows her figurative death in the final rape, undoing her noble glory in an implosion of sexual violence. This is seen in the recurring motif that Blanche’s manners ‘suggest a moth,’ of a delicate beauty that is tragically impelled towards light but must elude it, lest it destroy her. The audience must observe the fate of her tragedy in the operatic romance that she shares with Mitch. Carefully, she employs the historical cultural hegemony of the South in order to note their similarities — her flirtation is reminiscent of the European, aristocratic courtship that is in contrast with the ’low, animal moans’ of Stella and Stanley. Her recognition of Elizabeth Barrett’s sonnet, ‘And if God choose, I shall but love thee better but after death,’ allows her a cultural currency to forge a gentle similarity between her and Mitch, both with dreams of the high drama of lost love; thus, she crucially evades a relationship driven by desire. Her courtship with Mitch — its ‘shimmer and glow’ — suggest her deep with for mutual compassion and sincerity, rather than the ‘brutal desire,’ for which she reprimands Stella. We note her mode of language for, ‘sick people have such deep, sincere attachments,’ indicates that she has yet to rise to such emotional connections. She can only make false performances of the true devotion of love.

Blanche’s sordid history, upon the loss of Belle Rêve, all threaten to destroy her carefully-crafted image of sexual purity — even Blanche herself cannot maintain a control of herself, in uninhibited sensuality. Her attraction to the young boy from the ‘evening star,’ represents the sexual taunts that she represses in the recurring symbols of stars and light; objects that she must resist, else they should destroy her, She has been entrapped by desire, from her ‘discovery [of] love’ at ‘sixteen’ with Allen Gray that places her within a perpetual state of sexual juvenility. The loneliness of her torn heart, against the ‘spotlight’ of the harsh world (a dichotomy developed in her harbouring of a historical sexual repression with the sexual liberties of post-war America) creates a dangerous attraction to youth. Perhaps, this relates to Blanche’s yearning to return to a purer point in her life, having not been exposed to the wider landscape of America. She willingly begins to adopt the role of temptress, of melodramatic quality, to express a theatrical form of seduction that contrasts with the moderated courtship with Mitch. Her expressions of ‘eternity’ in her poetic romance contrasts with the brutal, sexual passion of New Orleans. Even in scene 6, the audience can witness the tender romance with which she infuses her desire. This gentle quality is that which Williams encourages the audience to develop for Blanche to become a figure of pathos in the tragedy of her destruction at Stanley’s hands. Still, her theatrics that she demonstrates with Mitch reveal an ironic recognition of her fakery of sexual innocence, as she ‘rolls her eyes’ at the suggestion of ‘old-fashioned ideals.’ Blanche knows that the mask of propriety has long since been stripped by desire. Once again, she employs a mimicry of European romance, adapted by the Southern aristocracy, to express the disparity between her and Mitch’s worlds. She solicits him in French, ‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi […]?’ so that he cannot understand her — here, the audience recognises that they are entirely emotionally and sexually incompatible. The fact that she willingly pokes at the holes in her façade is perhaps evidence for her self-awareness in simultaneous performances of the purity of the Southern Belle and being enticed into a portrayal of sexual openness in the dramatic role of the temptress, freely adopting the role of the Dame Aux Camellias. In all ways, the two are critically incompatible for in Mitch, she cannot find the mutual understanding that she seeks, only security as she expresses to Stella — ‘I want to rest!’ Blanche acknowledges the need for security that she can only gain by a male figure: the outlet of the passions of Stella and Stanley coexists within the protected domestic setting of their marriage. The modernity of their sexual promise, an outlet within the confines of their marriage, contrasts with Blanche’s own anachronistic sexuality.

Stanley, in the potency of his sexual relationship with Stella, perilously unveils Blanche’s gentility as a Southern Belle. The reveal of her ‘secret history’  is impelled by her impeding on the free expression of his own sexual desire in the claustrophobic setting of Vieux Carré. Williams’s emphasises this by way of an Aristotelian unity of place that has the function of the compression of desire until the climax. His attempt to categorise Blanche’s past as a prostitute in her ‘pack of lies’ and calling upon insanity as ‘downright loco-nuts,’ may all be contextualised in the notion of the hysterical woman. Williams may be suggesting that this is instead a form of patriarchal categorisation of female characters, like Blanche. The threat that she poses against the freedoms of his desire mean the total destruction of her as ‘her future is all mapped out for her.’ His actions control her future, wielding his own desire as a weapon. This is best signified in the rape scene that totally destroys Blanche’s ideas of gentle intimacy — sex of understanding and compassion. Williams may have been calling upon the inevitability of their conflict as Stanley notes, ‘we’ve had this date from the beginning.’ Throughout ASND, this essential dichotomy between the Old South and Modern America is developed through the lens of the expression of desire. The ‘epic fornications’ of Blanche’s ancestors having degraded the economic and cultural power of the South, post-civil war that reduces Blanche to poverty and isolation. By a Marxist paradigm, the raping of Blanche by Stanley is emblematic of the necessary destruction of the Southern aristocrats by the emerging working-class. Stanley’s economic power and sexual potency as a labourer, proudly displayed in the ‘blue denim work-clothes,’ and to protect these gained powers, he must destroy Blanche to maintain his position atop the capitalist hierarchy. As she is ‘fading,’ the last destruction of her dignity, any notion of chasteness and class superiority is annihilated, pulled into the capitalist progress of modern America in the hands of desire.

Ultimately, Williams forms the notions of desire as a force of both brutality and destruction contrasted with its soothing against the harshness of the exterior world in the safe confines of a relationship that Blanche seeks. The desire of the new, industrial America, however, is of the former that must destroy the totality of Blanche’s hopes and all that she represents.

The sensuous heat of New Orleans is inhabited in the physicality and sexuality that infuses the play. In the opening scene, the polyphonic dialogue emphasises the brash familiarity of sexual vice, particularly of prostitution ‘tapping on the shutters.’ This pervading chaos of desire seems to infiltrate every aspect of those in New Orleans. It is this sense of passionate claustrophobia that ultimately entraps Blanche, The motif of her bathing becomes indicative of the sweat in the subtropical climate that seems to invite an outlet of desire, and as a space which Stanley freely maintains. The sexual tension between these characters comes to a head in ‘my clothes’re stickin’ to me,’ demonstrates the exertion of sexual power. He finds himself king in the animalism of the New Orleans climate that all seems to come to fruition in the inevitable rape of Blanche that depicts her being subsumed in the modern American capacity for sexual desire.