Context Flashcards
Blanche’s madness - censors
Censors of the film labelled Blanche as a ‘nymphomaniac’ – shows how early 20th century American society equated female expression of sexual desire with madness
Blanche’s madness - Freud
Studies of hysteria (1895): Freud explained how the cause of hysteria was not physiological, but originated from deep within in mind (often influenced by past events)
More sympathetic understanding of Blanche’s ‘madness’. Its a product of unfortunate, distressing circumstance and the impossibility of her position as a woman marooned between a decaying aristocratic Old South and a post-war contempory New Orleans.
Williams on destruction of Blanche
Letter to Elia Kazan: ‘It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys Blanche in the end’
Williams on morality
‘I don’t believe in heroes and villains’
Elia Kazan on how to play Blanche
She experiences a ‘fatal inner contradiction’ between old values of modesty and desire for human contact’
William Painter
William Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’ was William’s primary source for the play.
if a woman ‘leaveth the smell of her duty and modesty’ it will ‘causeth the ruine of such which should be honoured and praised’
threat of the widow in society
Widows were regarded as particularly threatening because they possessed wealth and status from their late husbands, and yet weren’t in a position of legal subservience to their male relatives. Therefore, widows possessed an alarming degree of independence and were free to choose a husband out of sexual desire and who didn’t necessarily align with her family’s wishes.
Widow stats - normality of remarriage
between 1600 and 1659, half the widows in their 20s and 30s remarried
Why does Ferdinand’s transition into werewolf? -humoral theory
- Transitioning into wolf usually occurred because people exhibited the characteristics of an animal to an extreme degree, and so they almost manifested their inevitable metamorphosis.
- According to humoral theory, the body consisted of the four humours blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy, and pathological conditions were the result of humoral abnormalities. Brett Hirsch argues that Ferdinand is choleric in temperament; he is “passionate, intemperate and prone to rashness and anger”.
- He declares he must kill the Duchess to ‘quench my wild-fire’ and is described by the Cardinal early on as ‘stark mad’.
Why does Webster choose lycanthrope specifically for Ferdinand to transition into?
Brett Hirsch argues that Webster chose Ferdinand’s disease to be lycanthrope, because the lycanthrope ‘blurs the lines between man and beast – a distinction that was under increased scrutiny during the early modern period’. The play is thus questioning how far humans are really removed from that beast?
- The wolf is ‘hairy on the outside’ whereas the werewolf is ‘hairy on the outside’ as Ferdinand points out. The werewolf is a hidden threat.
