Why is Blanche Dubois the Big Loser in A Street Car Named Desire - Research Paper Example

Why is Blanche Dubois the Big Loser in A Street Car d Desire? The debate continues to rage over the nature of Tennessee William’s greatest creation. Descriptions of her character have ranged from that of a heroic victim of circumstance and a sensitive spokesperson of Lost Cause gentility, to a mentally deluded and morally tainted, if well-educated, tramp who is a threat to the dignity of the common man (Seigle 1).This debate derives from the apparent moral ambiguity of the play and the uncertainty over Williams’ intentions. A reader may highlight the sympathetic aspects of Miss Dubois such as her tragic widowhood and her refined sensibilities. Other analysts, however, might tend to downgrade these elements by countering that Blanches’ behavior was at least partly to blame for her defeat. It is the purpose of this paper to support the thesis that Blanche Dubois’ is the big loser because she fails to meet the basic human needs that all humans strive for. In this paper, these basic needs are defined as; the need for physical survival and security, the need for love and meaningful human relationships, the need for sympathy, respect and understanding, and the need for self-actualization or to attain the human capacity for growth in order to become a better person. Everyone in this plays loses something, but Blanche Dubois loses the most. She is truly a tragic figure, who when faced with both personal failings and external dangers, manages to achieve no kind of victory at all. None of the losses of the other characters come close to the string of shattering defeats suffered by Blanche. There has been a voluminous literature arguing in favor of naturalism, with Blanche and Stanley reduced to the role of soldiers struggling for cultural supremacy, helplessly carrying out the dictates of determinism (Bak 2). Blanche and Stanley are indeed symbols for opposing classes, historical periods and ways of life (Galloway 1). However they are also human beings with some say in their destiny, otherwise, Blanche Dubois’ loss is meaningless. This paper will examine the issue of Blanche’s downfall from that perspective. There exists a contra arguments defending Blanche that must be discussed prior to an examination of her loss. Blanche is seen by many to a representative of the sensitive artist and thus deserves our favor. As evidence they point to the fact that she opposes Stanley’s cruelty and tries to protect her sister from it, she is an English teacher, she recognizes and appreciates “culture”. And most importantly, she is misunderstood. Readers who hold to this perspective are inclined to see themselves in Blanche. They believe themselves to be misunderstood, delicate artists with ‘torn soul.’ identify with Blanche, even to the point of feeling self-pity (Berkman 1). This argument can be defeated with a few simple questions; ask how well does she champions these values? How much good does it do her or the other characters? In addition, her aesthetic sensibilities, she still fails to live up to her dreams or even to meet her basic human needs. First, Blanche fails in her quest for survival and security. When running away from Laurel, Mississippi, Blanche states this need for security to her sister as the two discuss Blanche’s hopeful interest in Mitch, one of Stanley’s more gentlemanly and promising friends; Stella: “Do you want him?” Blanche:” I want to rest. I want to breathe quietly again.” But instead of the sheltered harbor she is looking for, Blanche finds her self in a very unstable place involving a series of threatening confrontations with her sister’s hostile husband Stanley. In order to survive or cope with her new environment, Blanche is faced with three choices; adapt, change the environment, or escape. Blanche fails to succeed in any of these options. “I’m very adaptable—to circumstances” Blanche says to Mitch, but then proceeds to display an utter lack of ability to adapt, by loudly condemning what she finds distasteful in her sister’s home, which is pretty much everything. Since it is not in her ability to go along with Stanley’s way of living, Blanche must then find a way of escape. Blanche first realizes that the instability she has found herself in is not limited to emotional or verbal threats when Stanly drunkenly assaults Stella. Blanche is genuinely concerned and tries to get everyone, especially Stella, to see that the situation is intolerable and dangerous. She first attempts to gain an ally in the promising Mitch, who comes by later to check on things. He, however, clearly tolerates the situation as normal since Stella and Stanley are ‘crazy about each other,’ and can only offer bland assurances. The following morning, Blanche next turns to her sister in an effort to open her eyes to Stanley’s abusiveness and unworthiness. She is thwarted by Stella’s opiate-like state of contentment after a night of love-making and reassures her panic-stricken sister that Stanley has “smoothed things over,” and is ‘gentle as a lamb.” Stella excuses Stanley’s behavior and even indicates that his stormy personality gives her a thrill. She tolerates Stanley’s behavior because his powerful, even violent masculine strength attracts her. Despite an impassioned and eloquent speech, Stella remains stalwart; Blanche: “Pull yourself together and face facts.” Stella: “I’m not in anything I want to get out of.” Unable to persuade Stella to her way of thinking, Blanche becomes desperate, seeking any way out possible. But she succeeds only in distancing her sister and further antagonizing Stanley, who overhears her scathing evaluation of him and her scheme to break up his family. Blanche now feels alone and threatened in a primeval world in which only brute forces rules and in which there are no guarantees. She sees Stanley as a ‘stone age savage bringing in the meat from the kill.’ The first time we meet Stanley, in fact, he tosses a package of meat to his wife before heading out to bowl with his friends. A basic rule of survival is to figure out who has the power and then to gain their sympathy or support. Like it or not. Stanley is the most important person in the household and someone whom Blanche must somehow learn to live with. Blanche fails to recognize this signal fact and begins to misjudge and alienate Stanley from their very first meeting when she attempts to flirt with Stanley by spraying him with perfume. Blanche’s coping mechanism: self-delusion, only works if everyone cooperates. Stella is the only one who will cooperate, and she has no power. Blanche persistently underestimates Stanley and to recognize that falsehood will not work with him. “I’ve been on to you from the start! Not once did you pull the wool over this boy’s eyes!” declares Stanley (scene 10). What makes her an even bigger loser is that she is partly to blame for making herself even more vulnerable. While rape is never excusable, Blanche unwittingly sets the stage for it by failing first to get on Stanley’s good side by simply being honest or displaying genuine repentance. Then she turns Stanley into an active enemy by carelessly allowing him to overhear her scathing denunciation of him and schemes to breakup his marriage. This understandingly prompts Stanley to search for a way to remove this threat and so he investigates her past. By discovering her fallen life in Laurel Stanley not only has the ammunition he needs to be rid of her and ruin her chances for security with Mitch, he also, in satisfying his powerful sex drive, most likely found it much easier to rape a known prostitute than if had thought she was a respectable woman. She is already a fragile creature when she arrives at her sister’s, with an emotional and physical brittleness that some have likened to a moth. As a fragile moth she faces the witch hunting tactics of Stanley who grinds her up like one of the machine in the steel mill machines he works in. She is tough and able to hold her own verbally and mentally against her antagonist but cannot stand up to Stanley’s brute strength. Her rape causes her to lose what little mental stability she had which leads to her confinement to a mental institution, and the complete loss of independence. Ironically, in going to the institution, Blanche will finally have the security she wants but only at the cost of mental health and independence. Secondly, Blanche fails miserably in her quest for love and meaningful human relationships. In addition to basic security, Blanche is looking for someone who can fulfill this need in a way that also fulfills her desire for sensitivity. She seeks a cavalier that will protect and provide while at the same time be a man who is worthy of her love and devotion. In this quest, her attention is instantly drawn to Mitch. Twice Mitch makes the statement;”Poker shouldn’t be played in a home with women,” to express his gentlemanly concern over the violent and drunken behavior of Stanley. Mitch is the only man who offers any possibility of giving Blanche what she wants, and she instantly seizes the chance as Mitch is on a bathroom break from the poker game. But Blanche is not any more honest with Mitch than she is in any of her relationships. Her ultimate failure in her relationship with Mitch is foreshadowed in their first meeting when she hands him a partial truth; ”I’m an old maid school teacher,” when the fact is she has been discharged for being anything but an old maid. Her hope in Mitch is cruelly shattered when Mitch, thanks to Stanley, is ‘wised up’ about her unsavory past and refuses to marry her. Her last opportunity comes when Mitch arrives disheveled at the Kowalski’s to find Blanche alone. Blanche tries to win Mitch over at first with a denial of everything he has heard about her. She then changes tactics and offers a full confession. She insists that Mitch accept and approve of her lying and ignore her background but he cannot. Blanche fails because she cannot understand the essential role of honesty and trust in any human relationship. How can Mitch trust her knowing that she has deliberately misrepresented herself to him. Third, Blanche falls short of gaining any lasting sympathy, respect or understanding from the other characters. This is apparent when we first meet her in scene 1. A lost-looking Blanche is helped by Eunice, the Kowalski’s upstairs neighbor, who confirms that Blanche has indeed found the street she is looking for; Elysian Fields. Blanche’s reaction is shocked and bemused. She can’t believe that such a run-down, sorry-looking quarter should be named after the mythological paradise of ancient Greek heroes. A fact completely lost on Eunice-and everyone else. Eunice:”That’s where you are now.” Blanche:”At Elysian Fields?” Eunice:”This here is Elysian Fields.” Blanche:”They mustn’t have - understood…” Blanche as a representative of Civilization has an opportunity to inject some refinement or into the Kowalski’s state-of-nature realism but the people around her are no more receptive than her former students were to being enlightened, Blanche’s attempt to champion a higher aesthetic sensibility has a history, we find, when she explains to Mitch her job as a teacher:”I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drug-store Romeos with reverence for Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe!” Moreover, when Blanche arrives at her sister’s, she potentially could garner much sympathy; the loss of her young husband under tragic circumstances and the loss of her property and fortune. Stella is sympathetic and as family peacekeeper, Stella relates to her husband a much sanitized version of Blanches’ failings, but Stanley ignores his wife’s plea to “understand her and be nice to her…”(scene1). Instead of sympathy and compassion for a stricken widow she is forced to live with Stanley who represents all she despises and who unhesitatingly bears an instant dislike of her, which develops into an actual determination to expose and destroy her. Stanley’s nature and outlook does not allow him to sympathize with her plight. The two antagonists, Blanche and Stanley not only represent a clash of wills but a clash of culture and attitudes. Stanley is as hard as the steel mill he works in. His name, Kowalski, is harsh and un-poetic, as are his actions and words. For him the human voice is made for expressing base wants and harsh demands; to control and subdue. He is Natural Man, valuing money and the delight of the flesh above all else. His interest in Bell Reve is limited to its financial impact on him, not any attachment or respect for its history or heritage. Stanley:”Then it was lost on a mortgage?” Blanche:”That must’ve been what happened.” Stanley:”I don’t want no ifs, and, or buts!”What’s the rest of them papers?” Blanche loses to Stanley’s insistence on truth, and even more pathetically for Blanche, her defeat at the hands of Stanley is not even the redeeming one of pure truth over deception. Although he sees though Blanche’s lies, Stanley does not understand her and jumps to several false conclusions as exampled by his mistaken identification of her cheap costume jewelry for Tiffany diamonds. Stanley is a realist whose comprehension is limited by literal appearances, to his senses alone. Stanley is a naked light bulb that looks at life in a purely materialistic. He can only see her as ‘unprofitable’ and a bother. Like the light bulb, Stanley can only see her figure, and lack of property and silly pretensions, not her heart. Stanley only values that which is a ‘thing’, something that adds up, like the money from Bell Reve (Kernan 2). Also, however much sympathy an audience may hold towards her because of the lack of respect for womanhood displayed by Stanley, must be balanced with an unbiased evaluation of her own highly-prejudicial attitudes and lapses of judgment. Stanley is trying to protect his family from the threat that Blanche represents, even though he handles it in a despicable way. After all, she did try to get his own wife to leave him. Lastly there is Mitch. He seems to understand that Blanche is different:” I guess we strike you as a pretty rough bunch.”But he loses all respect for her when he discovers the truth about her. In the end, he views her only as an outlet for his physical desires which he has “been missing all summer.” Finally, Blanche does not grow or become a better person. The heroic character should emerge from their struggles as a better person. She should have learned something or overcome some personal obstacle by the end of the story and thus bring confirmation of the human being’s capacity to rise above circumstances. Blanche has two main problems to solve; her tendency to avoid reality, and her propensity for shallow, illicit physical relationships. In addition, she must use her gifts, a high appreciation for beauty into something that profits her as a person and, perhaps, even those around her. However, throughout the play, Blanche persistently fails to learn from her failings and past mistakes, or to deal with the weaknesses that have led her to low point in the first place. The main drive of the story is that Blanche persistently fails to come to a healthy relationship with truth. This ruins her chances to find some kind of personal satisfaction. Ironically, she is the only character who is fully aware of Stanley’s brutal nature and animal passions. Blanche can be discerning in her judgment of others, but this attribute is fatally undermined by her inability to be truthful with herself. Blanche cannot overcome this problem because she doesn’t see it as lying. This turns an idiosyncrasy into pathology. Sanity is a matter of degree. In this sense, Blanche is sick and unable to recognize her inability to live up to her unrealistic dreams. She explains her twisted philosophy as Mitch takes off the paper lantern that had been covering the light bulb. Blanche: “I don’t want realism.” Mitch: “Naw, I guess not.” Blanche: “I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it. Don’t turn the light on!” The harsh world Blanche finds herself in is symbolized by the naked light bulb. Blanche remarks, ”I can’t stand a naked light bulb, anymore than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action,” Thus admitting her distaste for truth. The Kowalski’s world is stripped bare of any of the softening effects of delusion preferred by Blanche. Her illusions were shattered once when she uncovered the disturbing truth about her late husband. She survived that jarring event in the sense of going on with life, but this survival could not be called triumphant because her response was to withdraw into a shadowy realm of self-deception and shallow relationships. Getting kicked out of Laurel and coming to live with her sister was an opportunity for Blanche to, in Stanley’s parlance, ‘wise up.’ Ultimately, though, Blanche’s fails to do so and her shaky kingdom of shadows is overthrown by Stanley’s strength of will and elemental drives. This distaste for reality is also seen in Blanche’s pathetic pretensions to gentility even when she is known as a prostitute, in the fastidiousness of her tastes while continuing to recklessly indulge her desires with anyone available, including a stranger who shows up selling newspapers. By refusing to be shaken out of her self-deception, Blanche is her own worst enemy. The biggest loss is not that of property or position but her failure to come to grips with reality. She refuses to adjust properly to her circumstances. Since the death of her late husband Blanche has refused to face reality. If Blanche had been up front with Stella, Stanley and Mitch, she might have gained their support. But in failing to overcome her vast capacity for a façade, she loses everything. Several times in the play, Blanche does attempt to break out of the web of lies clouding her mind, although only when driven to desperation. Blanche manages a feeble confession as part of her campaign to enlist the aid of her sister, but even then all she can manage is a vague comment about having been ‘bad’. Even this weak attempt at transparency is dampened by her rush to then justify this behavior with a variety of excuses. Again, towards the end of the play she finally believes that revealing everything about her past might save her, but she is rejected and once more escapes into a world of illusion (Colemen 3). When Stanley returns with his wife at the hospital, Blanche makes her final misstep. She weaves a string of lies to Stanley, who brutally tears it down and then rapes her. (scenes 8 & 10) Despite the glaringly obvious facts of her environment, symbolized by the harsh naked light bulb and the run-down apartments, in the end she still clings to her make-believe world. In the remaining moments of the play, Blanche shows she has learned nothing. As the people from the state institution arrive to take her away, Blanche resists, insisting that she has left something behind. Stanley invents the ‘something’ by taking off the ‘magic’ Chinese lantern and handing it to Blanche, who accepts it. This allows the naked light bulb to once more shine glaringly at Blanche. Blanche tries to escape form the harsh light but is trapped by the matron of the State Institution. Symbolically, Blanche still desires to escape reality, represented by the light, instead of facing it. This time, her escape from reality only comes at expense of her sanity. She has also fallen into the trap of surrendered her virtue in exchange for something to fill the emptiness in her heart. Until her rape, at least Blanche has never given to her numerous lovers what she did not want to give. Stanley’s rape of her breaks that tender thread of remaining self-respect. Into the harsh world inhabited by the Kowalski’s and their friends, Blanche Dubois floats like a frail butterfly and is squashed under the wheel’s of Stanley’s instinct for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. Did Blanche’s succeed in at least opening Stella’s eyes to her husband’s cruel nature in the end? Williams does not make this clear. We are not certain of even this benefit from Blanches’ ‘sacrifice’. And even if it did, Blanche would never have known about it. She has already lost her husband, property and reputation. Now she has lost her mind. Lastly, Blanches’ knowledge and appreciation of literature does her no good, in fact, it considerably worsens her situation. Her loss of job as the result of scandal prefigured her failure at the Kowalski’s to make any good use of it. Blanche brings along with her the memory of a refined life at Belle Reve and an appreciation of high culture. Her last name, Dubois, connotes heritage, culture and refinement. Her speech is characterized by education and an appreciative of fine literature. Blanche has much to offer her culture-deprived sister and her husband. However, despite the fleeting admiration of Mitch, Blanche’s artistic sensibilities do not get her very far in Stanley’s world (Berkman 2). In fact, it is just one more aspect of Blanche that Stanley resents. WORKS CITED 1. Seigle, Lauren. “Blanche Dubois: An Antihero.” WR: Journal of the CAS Writing Program 100, Paper 2 (2009-2010) 2. Bak, John S. “Criticism on A Street Car Named Desire: A Bibliographical Survey, 1947-2000.” Cercles Oct. 2004: 2. PDF. 3. Galloway, Shirley. “Last Stop: Blanche’s Breakdown. Ipl2 Literary Criticism www.ipl.org. 4. Kernan, Alvin B. “Truth and Dramatic Mode in A Street Car Named Desire” Modern Drama Vol.1 no.2 1958. 5. Berkman, Leonard. “The Tragic Downfall of Blanche Dubois.” Modern Drama Dec. 1967: 1. 6. Coleman, Robert. A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘The Visionary Company of Love”. Insights 1994. Read More