I fell in love with Tennessee Williams when I was meant to be studying Victorian literature. My tutor Steve Newman was poorly and I could not get overly excited about a mini course on social realism and was pining for Dickens. Liverpool University had a superb Extension Studies programme and so I signed up for American Literature in Southport with a brilliantly exacting tutor of the old school who introduced me to Gatsby and Blanche Dubois. Such introductions last a life time and I remember reading A Streetcar named Desire and feeling my whole mood and body take on a new speech, a Southern heat as the play insinuated and then stormed its way to one of the most unbearable scenes in literature. Even now I find the last scene makes me turn away as Blanche is carried away to a mental asylum and I wonder if this act of turning away makes us as culpable as Stella whose eyesight and hearing remain resolutely selective throughout the play? If ever there was a text that explores a ‘ruin’d chapel’ it’s A Streetcar named desire! And of course such ruination is exactly what Stell and Stanley crave in their own sexually voracious ways.
For Blanche’s refusal to ‘see’ the threat of her situation as interloper in the sexually coodependent world of Stanley and Stella seems more flailing victim than arrogant invader and rereading this yesterday I was riveted by William’s brilliance at recognising the destructive potential of shared housing! I kept wanting to shout ‘get on that bus Blanche..leave town now!’ as everything inside and outside Blanche starts to collapse upon her. When Blanche says: ‘I,I I’ in her famous ‘death speech’ near the opening of the play, Williams is capturing her faltering grasp of identity, her rage at being left by Stella to cope, and the devastation of all her losses where she has been reduced to the neurotic, needy ‘vampire’ we meet when she steps off the streetcar. The listing of her losses allows a Southern Vista of despair, of hopelessness and faithlessness to open up before us. Far from being finished or even finished with, Blanche’s past is ever present. Only Stella can ‘do’ the future in the play and that is her survival as well as her heartlessness. Stanley is ever present to his own presence. This render him magnetic and profoundly disturbing, visceral and monstrous by turns.