Rich Hall's 'The Dirty South'

Key points from Rich Hall’s ‘The Dirty South.’

·        Heat in Southern American drama is a prominent feature. Quite often Southern American dramas are propelled by heated conflict; the physical heat suitably intensifies the severity of the physical conflict. (NB. In Streetcar the heat gives Blanche DuBois ‘the vapours.’) Look out for Blanche’s constant need to bathe and keep clean in the play and consider the symbolism inherent in this action.

·        Traditionally Southerners have been portrayed as a somewhat unsophisticated and unrefined race of people. However the ‘new’ South has developed a new motto: ‘The South will rise again.’

·        You can’t always understand the South: it is a place of complexity and contradictions. However, what is important is that you can feel it. Ultimately it is a very sensory place.

·        The South is famous for producing ‘memory plays.’ Aspects of the past always seem to impinge on the present. In short, the South cannot escape the stigma of losing the Civil War and a history plagued by racism. In many senses the South seems to be ‘waiting to get better.’

NB: In U.S. history, the Civil War (1861–65) was a conflict between the Northern states (the Union) and the Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy.

·        Southern humour and values: the South’s inherent stupidity has historically been a source of comic value and ridicule. (NB: The stock portrayal of Southerners as hillbillies and red necks). In the South, intuition is esteemed over intellect and practical skills championed instead of academia.

·        Historical contexts: Early 1900s massive industrialisation was drawing Southerners north as they sought out better work and more significant wages. In 1915 a tiny but deadly bug wiped out cotton in the South and resultantly the South languished economically.

·        Social Contexts: From 1915 onwards a new kind of class distinction was emerging: urban versus country. Some Southerners embraced this; others were homesick for the past. (NB: The effects on the South brought on by The Depression* and Prohibition**).

*The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future.

**Prohibition in the United States, also known as The Noble Experiment, was the period from 1920 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption was banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

·        Erskin Caldwell tried to portray the abuse of the Southern industrial worker and the disintegration of the family in the South through his writing.

·        America post World War II: A good place to be if you were white. Segregation was still very prominent on account of the mandatory Jim Crow Laws: black and white were ‘equal’ but ultimately separate. The South remained a complex and contradictory region. It was, at once, a place steeped in violence and racial segregation but simultaneously a place that celebrated gentility, politeness, manners and family. In his plays, Williams dramatises this complexity.

·        Tennessee Williams and the South: Williams reinvented the caricature of the South. He tried to make sense of it by making it sensory. Thus, he created a South putrid with physical and social displacement where self deception and sexual hedonism was rife.

·        A Streetcar Named Desire: Williams makes the screen throb with exciting life. Undoubtedly Williams writes with an evident love for the South but importantly he did not glorify the South. Rather he presents it as a place which is lost, an Eden gone bad.

·        Setting of Streetcar: a two-roomed apartment in New Orleans. It is loud, unsettling, raw and exposed. For the audience it can sometimes feel like you are starring into the open window of a sweaty, feral prison.

·        ‘Old’ South: realised in Blanche DuBois from Laurel, a faded Southern belle. She is a relic of the ‘old’ South and its values of gentility and politeness. Blanche is constantly trying to rise above her past. However, Williams makes his audience aware throughout Streetcar that the ‘old’ South was built on artificial values and deception.

·        ‘New’ South: realised in Stanley Kowalski, a Polack.

·        Williams gives us all sorts of insights into human beings through the conflict of these two worlds.

·        Stella DuBois (Blanche’s sister, Stanley’s wife) is somewhere in between. She has adjusted to her new world.

·        The desire and psychosis present in Streetcar made early audiences feel unnerved. Tennessee Williams (born in 1911) wrote in a way that was influenced heavily by much of his childhood. Father was extremely cruel, often beat Tennessee. His mother was the daughter of a Southern minister, a pillar of ‘old’ Southern ideals. Sister Rose was mentally disturbed. As a homosexual, Williams was extremely sympathetic to the plight of outsiders. (Consider this in his treatment of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar).

·        In Streetcar Williams presented a domestic situation that was closer to reality; dysfunctionality at the heart of Streetcar. In the play he gives the South a feeling; he makes it nasty, sexy, dirty and raw. Thus, Streetcar changed what American’s considered to be ‘culture.’

·        Music in Streetcar is crucial in the same way that the blues are a prominent feature of the American South.