Additional reading (quite challanging but give it a go!)

Modern Critical Interpretations
Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire

The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois

Leonard Berkman

(P33)

Especially after the late 1940s it became commonplace for critics to talk of the ubiquitous “common man” of modern American drama, one who is already defeated at the outset of the play’s action, who struggles at best passionately but always futilely, and who is always too low in mankind’s moral (if not occupational) hierarchy to manage any semblance of downfall, let alone a downfall with tragic impact. Whereas Arthur Millar tried doggedly to develop a sense of tragedy within such dismal boundaries, insisting upon the commonness of his protagonists while insisting too that ‘victory’ remained nevertheless impossible for them, Tennessee Williams turned feverishly towards opposite aims. Enlisting the array of forces – temporal and eternal, comprehensible and beyond human ken- against which the heroic struggle must be waged, A Streetcar Named Desire is an inspired refutation of the linking of modern American drama with the common man.

(P34)

For a thorough account of what he calls Williams’s ‘unsparing’ analysis of Blanche, turn to John Mason Brown:

          Her abiding tragedy comes neither from her family’s dwindling fortunes nor from her widow’s grief. Is it sprung from her own nature. From her uncontrollable duplicity. From her pathetic pretensions to gentility even when she is known as a prostitute in the little town in which she was brought up. From her love of the refined when her life is devoted to coarseness. From the fastidiousness of her tastes and the wantonness of her desires. From her incapacity to live up to her dreams. Most particularly, from her selfishness and her vanity, which are insatiable.

Mr. Brown appears willing to apply “tragedy” to Blanche’s situation despite his not finding her character inspiring in the least, and despite his not remarking upon even one instance of Blanche’s self-awareness or effort at overcoming “her own nature.”

There are faulty defences of Blanche that must be dismissed before a more pertinent appraisal of her can be attempted. At the core of these defences is the deference to Blanche as representative of the artist. She is, after all, an English teacher, she values “culture”, she is sensitive, she opposed Stanley’s brutishness. Above all, she is misunderstood. The enveloping effect of Williams’s play, when it is interpreted from that perspective, is to generate intense self-pity among all those spectators who have thought of themselves as fragile, gifted and rejected.

Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom

Chelsea House Publishers
NEW YORK: PHILADELPHIA 1988