'Women have no real power in this play' Flashcards
‘Real power’
might be defined as the ability to exert one’s independent will; to have bodily autonomy. “A Streetcar Named Desire” is a post-bellum play within which the female characters were financially dependent on their male counterparts, thus preventing autonomy of the female body. Both Blanche and Stella attempt to gain some semblance of bodily autonomy through their sexuality, though this is not a ‘real power’.
Both Blanche and Stella’s ‘real power’
of female bodily autonomy is prevented by their patriarchal social world, and enforced economic dependence on the male characters partly caused by the social stigma of remaining in the workforce post-war.
Significantly, Blanche and Stella lose
their economic stability before even being introduced. Blanche exclaims: ‘I tried to hold [Belle Reve] together’ - the futile tone of the perfect verb ‘tried’ illustrating how her ‘improvident grandfathers and fathers and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications’. The combination of solely male familial imagery with the hyperbolic sexual connotations of the adjectival phrase ‘epic fornications’ suggests that Blanche’s loss of this real power is due to the irresponsibility of her socially superior patriarchs, eliciting pathos for this ageing Southern Belle, now displaced from both time and home, powerless.
Stella is similarly economically dependent,
depriving her of ‘real power’. She uses the declarative statement: ‘The best I could do was make my own living.’ A modern feminist critic would usually interpret ‘living’ as a career – however, Stella has no such aspirations – with the men having returned from war, 5% of women left work to resume their domestic duties. Crucially, Stella’s definition of ‘living’ is entirely dependent on a man – Stanley ‘doesn’t give her a regular allowance’, and she has to ask if he will ‘give [her] some money’ (the inequality highlighted by the infantile connotations of ‘allowance’ and the benevolent tone of the verb ‘give’), except in some horrifying compensation scheme for his abuse: ‘this morning he gave me ten dollars to smooth things over’.
The idea of money to compensate
for violence, with the nonchalant tone of the idiomatic ‘smooth things over’ is a clear indicator of Stella’s powerlessness in this abuse, as she perceives her own safety as available for transaction. The intermingling of lexical sets of money and relationships is reiterated later, with her imploring question: ‘don’t I rate one kiss?’ The pecuniary connotations of ‘rate’ reinstate how Stella’s sexual gratification comes at an unspoken price – an unsettling indicator of her lack of ‘real power’.
A repercussion of their economic dependence
is a social dependence on men, explored through both of their sexualities, which further serves to deprive the female characters of any real bodily autonomy; any ‘real power’.
Blanche’s powerless dependence
upon men is most significantly explored in her relationship with Mitch, and her attempts to disguise her past promiscuity. She disguises herself as ‘prim and proper’ (the caricature exemplified by the plosive alliteration) in order to ‘deceive him enough to make him – want [her]’. Initially, the connotations of ‘deceive’, exemplified by the actor through italics, might serve to villainise Blanche. However, when considered in the patriarchal context, projecting an image of Christian chastity in exchange for ‘protection’ cannot be judged as wholly wrong, as Billington realises: ‘her lies are a protection against solitude’, but more importantly, an attempted protection against destitution.
Mitch’s realisation:
‘you need somebody. And I need somebody, too’, with the repetition of the verb ‘need’ depicts a strange sort of desperate equality between the two. However, the actors often choose to depict the imbalance more subtly through their different physicality’s before the expressionistic lighting dims to close the scene: Mitch remains stoic, while Blanche releases ‘long grateful sobs’. It is the adjective ‘grateful’ that is imperative, as it proves that Blanche’s desire to be with Mitch is not borne of autonomy, but a desire to ‘hide’ from her powerlessness in the metaphorical ‘cleft of the rock of the world’ that he symbolises for her; a ‘gentle’ delusion against the brutal social realities of her patriarchy.
This is solidified by her admission
that it was ‘panic, just panic’ that drove her to her ‘many intimacies with strangers’ - the juxtaposition between the images of safety in the figurative language (‘cleft’) and the danger of her repeated ‘panic’ implying the impossibility of independence, of ‘real power’. Shepherd-Barr asserts that Blanche is a ‘victim of Desire’, however this is not the case. Blanche’s victimhood, and her lack of real power, stem not from Desire itself, but from the necessity to disguise herself for ‘shelter’ in a patriarchal society.
Moreover, in the rape scene
her ‘inert figure’, with its vulnerable connotations, manifests her powerlessness against the wills of men. This is exacerbated by Stanley’s declarative statement: ‘we’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!’. The temporal clause ‘from the beginning’ is a subtle suggestion of Blanche’s status as a tragic protagonist. From before the play begins to after it ends, she is utterly powerless against the decisions of the men, and their direction over her narrative arc - she has ‘no real power’.
Stella, rather than
tailoring her sexuality to the patriarchal norm to try and attain bodily autonomy, prioritises her sexuality over her autonomy, thus sacrificing any ‘real power’ she might have had in marriage. Notably, a contemporary audience might judge her character less harshly, as she abides by the contemporary Christian rhetoric of sex within marriage being virtuous.
For Stella,
‘life with Stanley – sex with Stanley – is her highest value (McGlinn). The superlative ‘highest’ is not hyperbolic; Stella admits that ‘the things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark […] make everything else seem – unimportant.’ The ultimate implications of the phrase ‘everything else’ demoted to status of unimportance clearly proves McGlinn correct. Indeed, she admits ‘[half to herself]’ that she can ‘hardly stand it’ when Stanley is gone, leaving her crying ‘like a baby’. There is a certain intimacy in the stage directions, reiterated when she ‘[smiles to herself]’, that juxtaposes the intensity of her adverbial clause ‘hardly stand it’ and the simile of infantilisation she undergoes without his presence. These are indicators of the highest level of dependence, as she enjoys that which takes away her power.
Stella might initially be perceived
as having real power through her sexuality through the intensity of the implied aural imagery her absence provokes in Stanley, as he is left [shuddering with sobs]’. However, the simile ‘like a baying hound’ recalls earlier figurative language (peacock stuff) that remind us of Stanley’s primitive worldview. He uses the simple declarative statement: ‘I want my baby down here.’ Beginning the sentence with ‘I’ followed by the selfish tone of ‘want’ and the possessive pronoun ‘my’ essentially commodifies Stella – thus, it might be perceived that Stanley has been deprived of that which he believes belongs to him, due to the French consolate of 1804, and this is what exacts his drunken misery, rather than any real love for Stella.
When Stella fails
to recognise this, giving in to her perceived ‘love’ for her abusive husband (‘I’m not in anything I want to get out of’), and descending the ‘rickety stairs’ that set designers sometimes use to symbolise a descent into the Elysian Underworld (death), that she forfeits any bodily autonomy, or real power, she may have initially held. Kazan asserts that ‘Stella […] has found a kind of salvation […] but at a terrific price’. We discern from this that Stanley is not Stella’s salvation, but her ruination, reducing her to a ‘blind’ ‘animal’ to be ‘borne’ where he desires, language rife with degeneration and significantly with the same verb choice as the ‘meat’ prop thrown in scene 1. As such, from Scene 3 onwards, Stella has no real power in the play.
Ultimately,
the patriarchal society is established by both men that the female characters have become dependent upon. Stanley asserts: ‘Every Man is a King!’ and I am the king around here’, using images of monarchy to impose his superiority over the women, and diminish their power. Moreover, Mitch states that Blanche is not ‘clean enough’ for him, reinforcing the archaic sexist ideals of virginity that were so entrenched in society to devalue her. Both women finish the play ‘wild’ and ‘blind’, a reiteration of the degeneration into overt powerlessness.
