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Is A Streetcar Named Desire a tragedy?

Neil Bowen on (Edited )


Is A Streetcar Named Desire a tragedy?

According to Roxanna Stuart, an actor who played Blanche, ‘the first four scenes are comedy; then come two scenes of elegy, mood, romance, then five scenes of tragedy’. Perhaps Stuart is right. But the balance of comic, elegiac and tragic elements probably depends on the way the play is acted and directed. Overall, although there are only passing references to death in A Streetcar Named Desire [Allan’s suicide, the deaths of the DuBois relatives and the Spanish flower seller’s cries of ‘Flores para los muertos’], and nobody actually dies at the end, it would be difficult to argue that the play isn’t tragic. How it ends is, of course, crucial. For many of us, the displacement of Blanche to an asylum, accompanied by the ‘inhuman sobs’ of her sister, as well as Mitch, are probably enough to justify this description. If you take into account the indifference of the poker players at the end, and Eunice’s resignation to a life of self-delusion - ‘you’ve got to keep on going’ - and the fact that Stanley has completely ‘got away with’ raping his sister-in-law, then the play does indeed come across as bleak, at the very least. Critics like Philip Smithers have made some interesting comparisons between A Streetcar Named Desire and Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, suggesting that in both plays the tragedy lies in the ‘collision between two world views’. According to Gillian Anderson, who played Blanche in 2014, audiences have frequently left playhouses in floods of tears after watching it. Certainly, the ending of A Streetcar Named Desire is not comic.

What arguably is a little less clear, however, is whether we can actually label Streetcar... as a tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearean mould. As we’ve noted, in Greek tragedy, fate dictates the protagonist’s downfall; in Shakespearean tragedy it is brought about by the character’s ‘fatal flaw’ or hamartia. The latter would seem to describe Streetcar... more accurately: Blanche’s capacity to deceive herself, as well as her vanity and penchant for flirting with young men, would certainly seem to be worthy of that description. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to attribute the tragic ending of the play to fate, unless we interpret that term in a more modern and post WW2 way and define ‘fate’ as the socioeconomic circumstances in which Blanche finds herself in 1940s New Orleans, arguably a situation over which she has very little control.

This way of viewing the play is perhaps more productive, as it redirects the focus away from just one individual - Blanche - and encourages us to see her in the context of the 1940s setting. If we identify Blanche and Stanley as representatives of the Old and New way of life in the American South after the war, then Blanche is, at least in part, the victim of circumstances: she is a woman, she has no independent means and she belongs to that dying breed of wealthy Scarlett O’Hara-esque landowners whose demise characterised the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in America.

The other advantage to viewing the play through this more modern lens is that it allows us to assess the nature of the play in terms of the other characters who are, in most cases, also tragic in their own ways. Although Stella is not taken away to a lunatic asylum at the end of the play, and the birth of hers and Stanley’s baby might be seen as a symbol of hope, she does have to sacrifice her only remaining blood relative, tolerate physical abuse at the hands of her husband and accept that he may have raped her sister. Stella might be very different from her sister, but she is equally constrained by her gender at a time when it was still very much a man’s world. As Simon Bubb has suggested, ‘the real pathos at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire derives mostly form Stella’s torment about the implications of the choice she has made’. Similarly, Mitch, who is also left sobbing regretfully in the final scene, seems destined for a life of loneliness and grief. Perhaps the only main character to come out of the play intact, even stronger, is Stanley, the wife beating rapist. That’s quite a pessimistic ending in its own right.

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