Lecture on Streetcar: Difference and Convention

1. Lecture on Streetcar: Difference and Convention The Individual (Difference) and Society (Convention)

2. Walter PaterMarius the Epicurean (1885) We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’ Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass…

3. Concept of Aestheticism • Aestheticism is an art movement, an ideology that celebrates and venerates artistic values (the love and appreciation of artistic beauty and expression) above and beyond the conventional values associated with the ethical and political within society; • As made manifest through great literature, fine art, and music etc

4. Concept of Bohemian / Bohemianism Etymology of Bohemian: • A gypsy of society from the French, ‘Bohemien’ (1550s) from the country name Bohemia; (gypsies were then believed to originate from the 16th century kingdom of Bohemia); now part of the Czech Republic; • Means now an artist type person who does not follow or abide by social rules; or an artist, litterateur, who secedes from conventionality; • Bohemianism: The practice of living a free, unorthodox, anti-establishment way of life;

5. Concept of a Libertine • A man who continually looks for sexual pleasure, and tends to show little respect for women; Libertinism (Not to be confused with Liberalism) • Disregard for convention or authority in sexual matters; Critical Question • What about Women as Libertines? • What of Blanche in this regard?

6. Concept of the Anti-Hero • A twentieth-century variation on the traditional concept of the Hero figure who is usually noble and virtuous, even if flawed in some ways; • The anti-hero / heroine behaves in an unheroic manner and has few virtuous qualities or instincts; • What of Blanche?

7. Concept of Theatrical Language • Theatrical techniques or methods open to those involved in directing a performance of a stage play • e.g. Sets (set design), lighting, sound, costume, make-up, mime, dance, movement, gesture, music, and special effects; • It usually refers to those techniques peculiar to the theatre, and excludes the actual words spoken;

8. Williams as a Poet of Theatre;(‘Streetcar’ a Cinematic Play?) • Creative use of a theatrical ‘vocabulary’ beyond words- • The three-dimensional images of the stage itself; communicating the feeling of the play through its set design in its entirety; • The Set of one production designed to convey the feeling of the play by using sloping telegraph poles, and lurid neon lights surrounding the ornate but crumbling façade of the pale, old apartment house in Elysian Fields; • Stresses the relationship between the image of the set and the nature of the characters framed within it;

9. Shakespearean Theatre ‘Words, words, words’ - Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ ‘Words are all we have.’ - Samuel Beckett • Dramatic effects are conveyed through words • Scene painting / set design done through words; • Atmosphere through words; • Lighting effects through words; • Sound effects through words; • E.g. Language in ‘Othello’ is used to evoke the sound of a raging tempest

10. Technique of Juxtaposition • Dramatic interest in a character created through delicately established juxtapositions; • In the conflicts and tensions between extremes • Blanche presented as both repellent and pathetic • And the externalization of these conflicts;

11. Sub-text in Drama • The unspoken element in dialogue; • The meaning behind the words; • The space between words • The implied text

12. Identity and Individuality Blanche - Not a conventional person?

13. Williams’ Art (Drama) A Critical Perspective: ‘Williams’ art is decadent. And his characters remain basically indifferent to human suffering in a quest for salvation in sex rather than religion.’

14. Society • Associated with the normalization of individuals; • According to set standards, codes of conduct / conventions governing lives of individual women and men; including codes governing sexual conduct; • What’s socially permissible; what’s tolerable - • For men? For women? • And what of those transgressing boundaries? • ‘Every Man is a King.’ p65 (Patriarchy) • Sex and Violence; Female sexuality; Male violence

15. Identity: the Shaping of the Self;Creating Sameness • Through (biological) transmission of identity— from one generation to the next, most children share at least some traits identical with their parents; • Ethnicity, features; and skin pigmentation etc • Attributes and values are passed down from parents to children; • Also Religion / religious belief; (Credal beliefs from the Cradle) • Language and Sociolect; • Community; Culture, and Society;

16. Identity Formation;Creating Difference • Internal Formation / shaping of the self; inherently acquires traits, values, preferences that a child does not share with his / her progenitors; foreign to his / her parents; • External Formation / shaping of self Acquires traits from observation of / participation in a peer group, or sub-culture, or hidden culture in society; (direct or indirect influence);

17. Convention encountering Difference • Encountering the unfamiliar; the strange; • The Other; Otherness; (Outsiderness) • Stigma / stigmatized; perceived as threatening; dangerous; offensive; disgusting; shameful • Contaminating / corrupting society and its beliefs, values, and thus social stability Hence • Othello and Blanche are both rejected by Society

18. Presentation of Character of Blanche;Visual and Aural Devices How is her inner life voiced? • Not just through words spoken; • Use of visual projection of her inner life; • Complemented by the pattern of sounds • Primarily through the use of musicto sound echo for the audience the music Blanche hears in her mind’s ear, that of the polka; • To convey a sense of her qualities and passions;

19. Blanche as an unconventional Woman What makes Blanche unconventional as an individual, as a woman? What makes her different? • Williams lets us in as an audience on the nature of her difference by degrees; • Indirection, part of Blanche’s speech pattern; • Her actions and gestures; • Key technique—Juxtaposition (X and Y)

20. Difference • No money; • No property • No social equity But her memories (as in that trunk case) • Especially memories of boys who have given her sustenance;

21. Blanche’s Unconventionality An Outsider; a defiant outsider? • Her marital status; unmarried but has loved; • Reflected in her outlook, and desires • Her thoughts and modes of behaviour; • Her nerves; her alcohol consumption; her long hot baths; ‘Hydro-therapy’ (Scene 8 p67) • Her extensive reading of Literature e.g. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter? ‘The world’s law was no law for her mind.’ • Her sexuality; sexual nature; a Libertine Aesthetics take precedence over Ethics;

22. What of Iago as an Outsider? • Affirmative; However • He is more an Insider-Outsider? • It is not made manifestly visible or obviously evident for society to see it;

23. Blanche’s Bohemianismand notorious Libertinism • Married very young to an equally young boy • ‘There was something different about the boy’ • Multiple sexual liaisons; • Also affairs with young boys; ‘They kicked her out of that high school before the spring term ended’; ‘ A seventeen-year-old boy—she’d gotten mixed up with!’ • Stanley: ‘Yep, it was practickly a town ordinance passed against her.’ (Individual vs Society)

24. Blanche to Mitch in Scene 9, p73Use of Language and Literary Devices • Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with. . . . I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection—here and here, in the most—unlikely of places—even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy but—somebody wrote the superintendent about it—“This woman is morally unfit for her position.”

25. Blanche’s Bohemianism • I want you to have a drink! You have been so anxious and solemn all evening… And now for these few remaining moments of our lives together—I want to create—joie de vivre! • That’s good. • We are going to be very Bohemian. We are going to pretend that we are sitting in a little artists’ café on the Left Bank in Paris. Understand French. • Naw. Naw. I—

26. Scene 9 p72Blanche the Aesthete • I don’t want realism… I’ll tell you what I want. magic! Yes, yes, magic! I don’t tell the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! • Blanche holds to Oscar Wilde’s belief that ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’ • For Blanche also, it is important that her life should resemble a work of art; As she says to Stella in Scene 4 p41, ‘Art, as poetry and music,’ should be the flag she carries ‘in this dark march.’

27. Stella to Stanley Scene 9 p68;and Blanche to Stanley p67 • Delicate piece she is. • She is. She was. You didn’t know Blanche as a girl. Nobody , nobody, was tender and trusting as she was. But people like you abused her, and forced her to change. • You healthy Polack, without a nerve in your body, of course you don’t know what anxiety feels like.

28. Differenceand Conventionality Converging • Her difference from the straight wives; • And also mothers who people her current world; NOTE: But (it can be argued) • Blanche does try conventionality; to be conventional; • However, conventionality does not fit Blanche; • Where and How do we see this in the play? • Her intelligence, and her status as a defiant outsider, are constant obstacles;

29. Difference: ‘Queer’ Languageand Crypto homo-erotic Speech • (It could be argued) Blanche speaks in a gay style form of language; • ‘Queer’ discourse from a libertinian aesthete; Blanche speaking to Stella - • I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft. And Stanley to both Blanche and Stella • Who do you think you are? A pair of queens?

30. Blanche: Living in the Church of the Self • Williams’ characters live in the church of the self; • Even as characters, like Blanche, reach past its doors toward a world that either accepts • Or more often, brutally rejects their difference. (As we see in Scene 11)