Abstract
Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, has always been read as either “mad” from the start of the play or as a character who descends into “madness.” We argue that Streetcar adumbrates elements of trauma theory, specifically symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder such as involuntary reliving of traumatic events, dissociation, guilt, shame, denial, the shattering of the self, the compulsion to repeat the story of trauma, as well as the early stages of recovery from trauma. We are the first to employ trauma theory as a critical framework through which to view Blanche and the dramaturgical devices used to concretize her post-traumatic state of mind. Williams’ heroine speaks from traumatic experience and not from psychic fabrications. Indeed, we contend that the play traces Blanche’s deliberate and self-conscious working through and mourning of the traumatic losses of the past, including her idealized, narcissistic conceptions of herself within a traumatic present. Thus she is more attuned to the most disturbing parts of reality and exhibits tragic insight born of traumatic experience. Critics who see Blanche as “mad” do not fully recognize her struggle to come to terms with trauma and loss within a culture of denial. We conclude that Streetcar stages the inextricable relation between the individual and social dialectics of trauma.
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Notes
According to J. Herman in Trauma and Recovery, “[t]raumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe” (1997, 33).
In discussing the rape scene in scene ten of the play, Holditch refers to “insanity [as] Blanche’s final sanctuary” (1993, 163).
Holditch also recognizes the cogency of Blanche’ remark on the “cathedral bells”: “The tower of the cathedral seems here to echo Hart Crane’s ‘Broken Tower’ from which the persona fell into the broken world. . . .” For Holditch, Blanche’s fall into the broken world constitutes a “new knowledge,” specifically “of approaching death.” In fact, he likens Blanche’s desire to die at sea with Edna Pontellier’s suicide at the end of Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening. But clearly this analogy overlooks the self-mockery in Blanche’s comments. Indeed, Williams’s heroine, through her use of humour, appears to be separating herself from the conventional, melodramatic narrative trajectory of the nineteenth-century destitute woman who commits suicide.
In “Williams and European Drama: Infernalists and Forgers of Modern Myths,” B.H. Bennett discusses the absurdist elements in Williams’ plays, although she focuses primarily on his later works. Nonetheless, her reading of Camus’s Sisyphus as a figure “who experiences the freedom of the man condemned to death, devoid of hope and thus devoid of expectation” (1977, 431) is applicable to the character of Blanche in the final moments of Streetcar. Indeed, Blanche’s acceptance of her own powerlessness frees her from the grip of the traumatic present, if only momentarily. Other critics have drawn a connection between Williams’s work and absurdism. See C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama: 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 39; E. Albee, “Which Theatre is the Absurd One,” American Playwrights on Drama, ed. H. Frenz (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 171.
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Ribkoff, F., Tyndall, P. On the Dialectics of Trauma in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire . J Med Humanit 32, 325–337 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-011-9154-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-011-9154-4