Streetcar

Cercles 10 (2004) CRITICISM ON A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003 JOHN S. BAK Université de Nancy II-C.T.U. When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on 3 December 1947, it stirred up controversy overnight. The play met with rave reviews in the following morning's papers, like that from Brooks Atkinson w ho c alled i t " a q uietly w oven s tudy o f i ntangibles" a nd Tennessee Williams "a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough" [First Night, 42]. In the days ahead, Joseph Wood Krutch in Nation, Kappo Phelan in Commonweal, John Chapman in the New York Daily News, John Mason Brown in The Saturday Review, and Irwin Shaw in The New Republic all sounded similar praise for Williams and for Streetcar . The play was not impervious to negative reviews, however, as Thomas Adler points out in his monograph The Moth and the Lantern, What criticisms the early reviewers did register centered on three issues: the potentially shocking nature of Williams's material, the seemingly loose way in which he structured it, and the apparently pessimistic stance he took toward human existence. [Adler, 11] George Jean Nathan, for instance, complained of the play's "unpleasant" nature, calling it "The Glands Menagerie" [Nathan, 14], and Mary McCarthy, satirizing Williams's use of symbolism and flowery rhetoric, said Williams would have been better off writing "a wonderful little comic epic, The Struggle for the Bathroom" [McCarthy, 358]. For the most part, though, author and play were critically acclaimed and commercially successful. Streetcar remains the most intriguing and the most frequently analyzed of Williams' plays. The following is a bibliographic essay digesting much of that theatric and academic criticism devoted to Streetcar since its debut. Working in tandem with, and not opposition to, other bibliographic essays of its kind on Streetcar,1 this essay attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the main issues that have bothered, troubled, or stumped critics over the years, issues whose own evolutions should be understood specifically as a byproduct of the changing needs of the academic community itself over the years. To make the abundant and varied criticism on the play more accessible, I have tried to classify these different studies into groups which, I 1 See especially S. Alan CHESLER, "A Streetcar Named Desire: Twenty-Five Years of Criticism," Notes on Mississippi Writers, 7 (1973), 44-53; Thomas P. ADLER, A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the Lantern, Boston: Twayne, 1990, 10-15; and Philip C. KOLIN, Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998, 51-79. For contemporary condensations of the various critical renderings, see also Felicia Hardison LONDRÉ, "A Streetcar Running Fifty Years," 45-66, in Matthew C. ROUDANÉ (ed.), T he Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bak, J. S. « Criticism on A Streetcar Named D esire   : A Bibliographic Survey, 1947-2003 «, Cercles 10 (2004) : 3-32. Cercles 10  /  4 feel, draw the essential lines of demarcation between how the play has been variously interpreted in the last half century. Beginning first with a comparison of the formalist social/psychological readings that interrogate the problematic of "meaning" in the play, the essay next explores the competing interpretations of that resultant ambiguity, concluding with a brief survey of the recent trend to import feminist, queer, and Cultural Studies paradigms to the play's analysis. Though most of the books and articles cited within this essay cannot be entirely reduced to just one particular idea, I have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the authors' defining theses, even if those theses tend to place them in more than one particular camp or school of critical thought. Williams's journeyman plays, those he wrote for the Mummers in St. Louis or for Professor E.C. Mabie at the University of Iowa in the 1930s, readily fluctuated between social agitprops, like those he had hoped would win h im f avor w ith C hicago's W PA F ederal W riters' P roject, a nd expressionistic dreamplays, which fed his poetic needs for a plastic theater. Because the early Williams could easily be categorized as both a social dramatist and a Freudian one--the playwright of both Not about Nightingales and Battle of Angels--critics who were at first confused by S treetcar ' s hermeneutics s ought t o c lassify t he p lay e ither a s W illiams's s ocial commentary on a post-FDR America (or a post-Reconstructionist one, for that matter) or as a psychological study of a fragile mind's struggle to negotiate nostalgia with reality (one not too distant from his experiences with the dementia of his sister Rose). Streetcar as Social Drama Though a substantial number of critics believe Streetcar to be essentially a social drama, few have found themselves in concert in defining what kind of social drama Williams's play most resembles. The first school argues that Blanche and Stanley represent archetypes of cultures or species. From this perspective, Eric Bentley and Roger Boxill call Streetcar a "social-historical drama" [Bentley, 402; Boxill, 79]. Thus Stanley and Blanche's clash is not human against human but rather species against species. Three branches of this critical school of social dramatization find Streetcar to be a textbook representation of Strindbergian and Chekhovian Naturalism, of Nietzschean Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, or of Darwinian natural selection. A second s chool, h owever, f ocuses o n B lanche a nd S tanley a s u nique individuals and not as types, with the audience acting as voyeurs of their personal war. This school can similarly be divided into three branches: those who see Streetcar as a study of Lawrentian blood knowledge, of hero versus antihero, and of villain versus victim. Joseph Wood Krutch has made the claim in both The American Drama Since 1918 and "Modernism" in Modern Drama that he had heard third-hand what Williams said about the meaning of Streetcar: "You had better look out or the apes will take over" [American Drama, 331; Modernism, 129]. Krutch finds in this naturalistic determinism the thesis of most modern (pre-1950) American drama. He sums up half a century's dramatic fiction thus, John S. Bak  /  5 The thesis which from the very beginning I have been attempting to expound might be summed up in such a way as to include a phrase from Williams's alleged comment. That is, a break with the past as radical as that which much modern thought and much modern drama seems to advocate unintentionally prepares the way for the apes to take over. ["Modernism," 129-130] From this understanding, Krutch argues that S treetcar is "a sort of semisurrealist version of the Strindbergian submission to destructive obsessions" ["Modernism," 124]. Several critics have also alluded to this naturalistic struggle for cultural hegemony, though dropping the Strindberg label at times. Weeks after the first performance, for instance, Irwin Shaw said Streetcar was written with "a triumphantly heightened naturalism" [Miller, 45]. Equally, John Gassner, in his landmark College English essay of 1948 "Tennessee Williams: Dramatist of Frustration," calls Streetcar a "naturalistic drama" [Gassner, 6]. Joan Templeton, like Thomas E. Porter, Pnina Rafailovich, Joseph K. Davis, and Durant da Ponte, also writes about the cultural clashes between Stanley and Blanche. Building upon W.J. Cash's "Cavalier thesis," Templeton argues that Blanche, through her own "epic fornications," is just as responsible for her fall as the Old South is for its own demise. Although the Strindberg label is missing in Templeton, as it is in all of these arguments here, its essence is still present. Kenneth Bernard in Philip Kolin's "A Streetcar Named Desire: A Playwrights' Forum" describes an identical naturalism in Streetcar, not in Strindbergian but in Chekhovian terms. Bernard finds S treetcar , as John Gassner did earlier in his "A Study in Ambiguity" [Bogard & Oliver, 377], similar to The Cherry Orchard. Both plays portray the decline of one culture and the subsequent rise of another. Here, the serf Lopahin's rise to economic power presages Stanley Kowalski's ascension in the New South; and in Blanche, the aristocratic but bourgeois Old South has fallen victim to the natural evolution (some say revolution) of the rise of the proletariat. Jacob H. Adler defends this Chekhovian view in his "Tennessee Williams's South: The Culture and the Power" (revised from his earlier essay, "The Rose and the Fox"), where he argues that all of Williams's plays set in the South deal with the confrontation between culture and power, though in Streetcar that is not all that is at work, What is primary is story and people as they are, as they inevitably are; what is secondary is Blanche and the others as representative of the culture-power dichotomy and the southern dilemma; what is tertiary [...] is Blanche as representative of the sensitive individual lost in the complex, impersonal modern world. [Tharpe, 40] Constance Drake, in "Blanche Dubois: A Re-Evaluation," agrees with Jacob Adler's a ssessment ( the C hekhovian c onnection) a nd f inds W illiams "presenting the pessimistic view of modern man destroying the tender aspects of love. [...] And, in Blanche's refusal to submit, she is being portrayed as the last representative of a sensitive, gentle love whose defeat is to be lamented" [Drake, 59]. Cercles 10  /  6 None, though, has had as much influence on this naturalistic theory as Elia Kazan, Streetcar's first, and arguably most influential, director. From his private director's notebook, published for the first time in 1976, Kazan informs us as to where his sympathies lay. Although he identifies with Blanche's plight, his support is with Stanley. In his Stanislavskian reading of Streetcar , looking for the "spine" of each character, he concludes that Stanley's "spine" is to keep things his way, that he must fight off the destructive intrusions of Blanche who "would wreck his home," Blanche is dangerous. She is destructive. She would soon have him and Stella fighting. He's got things the way he wants them around there and he does not want them upset by a phony, corrupt, sick, destructive woman. This makes Stanley right! Are we going into the era of Stanley? He may be practical and right. [...] but what the hell does it leave us? [Cole & Chinoy, 375] Kazan's direction heavily favored making Stanley the victim of Blanche's onslaughts against his name, his heritage, his masculinity, and ultimately his family. (Some audiences, it was reported, actually cheered during the rape scene of Kazan's production.) It was not until Harold Clurman took over as director of the road version of the play that a shift to Blanche as victim took place, a shift which would inaugurate the timeless debate over Streetcar's meaning. Under Clurman's direction, Blanche and Stanley became real persons, n ot r epresentations o f a m oribund c ulture a nd a t hriving socioeconomic middle class. Nevertheless, w hile m any c ritics h ave s uggested s trains o f Strindbergian Naturalism in Streetcar, making specific comparisons between it and Miss Julie, Richard Vowles offers the most in-depth study of these two playwrights in his "Tennessee Williams and Strindberg." Vowles concludes that while there are indeed traces of Strindberg's influence on Williams in both of their treatments of human misery, sexual and social conflicts, and theatrics, the number of differences between the two far outweighs any similarities. At best, only in his theatrics does Williams become a Strindberg student. Poncho Savery concurs with Vowles's anti-naturalistic reasoning, writing that Williams cannot be labeled a naturalistic writer because "a writer of naturalism believes in scientific determinism and tends to create one-dimensional characters who are the living embodiments of natural laws" [Savery, 4035A]. Such a writer believes in didactic morality and not, as Williams does, in psychological realism. Thomas P. Adler in The Moth and the Lantern suggests that the Strindberg/Chekhov labels are both valid, if Streetcar is viewed from altered perspectives. I f, f or i nstance, o ne w ere t o f ind S tella a nd S tanley's relationship as the play's locus, then Strindberg's Miss Julie would seem Streetcar 's literary progenitor with their similarities in a lower-class male pulling an upper-class female down from her aristocratic tower [Adler, 65]. If, however, one reads Streetcar as Blanche's struggle with Stanley, then the Chekhov label would seem justifiable; for The Cherry Orchard and Streetcar are both about the proletariat supplanting the effete bourgeoisie [Adler, 39]. Streetcar is, in the least, a blending of these two matrices. John S. Bak  /  7 With essays like Gassner's in College English and Harry Taylor's "The Dilemma of Tennessee Williams" in Masses and Mainstream (both in 1948), Williams's and Streetcar's place in the American literary pantheon seemed in jeopardy. Critics knew they had witnessed in Streetcar something dreadful but were not sure what was so tragic about it. Taylor intimates that the reason for this uncertainty lies in Streetcar's immature artistry: Williams creates opposition in Blanche and Stanley but not true tragic conflict [Taylor, 54-55]. Yet it is this same opposition that other critics see as successful in Streetcar . The opposition between Blanche and Stanley is not, they argue, between cultural types, but between human types. Thus, whereas one side argues that Williams is creating a Blakean chiaroscuro as embodied in Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian personality types, the other side finds in Streetcar the simple display of Darwinian natural selection which Tennessee Williams h imself e mphasizes. W hile t he s econd g roup f inds s ome justification for the conflict--the survival of the family unit is at stake--the former group sees romantic sensitivity crushed by realistic brutality, and nothing more. In his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes an archetypal struggle between restraint (Apollonian) and passion (Dionysian). In his analysis of Streetcar , subtitled "Nietzsche Descending," Joseph Riddel asserts that Williams borrowed from Nietzsche "in great chunks, often undigested" [Riddel, 421]. Although Williams, like many American artists who borrowed from European ideologies, took liberties in his philosophy, the essence is still there. Riddel writes, But even in Streetcar one must begin with a contradiction between his intellectual design and the militant primitivism of the theme; or to use a philosophical gloss, one must begin with Nietzsche's ApollonianDionysian conflict, in an almost literal sense. [Riddel, 421] The Apollonian figure is characterized by restraint and order, the Dionysian by passion and metaphysics. Nietzsche accepts the dialectic, finding a tragic but necessary beauty to the bond. Riddel points out that Blanche is Apollonian and Stanley Dionysian, but the reason Streetcar fails is because Williams misinterpreted Nietzsche. By suggesting that Dionysian behavior often dominates the Apollonian, Nietzsche did not mean that passion defeats restraint, as Williams thought, but that order moves inevitably toward chaos. Joseph R iddel i s n ot t he o nly c ritic t o m ake t he N ietzschean connection. Judith J. Thompson describes Streetcar's mythos as a "dramatic agon " between Stanley (Dionysus) and Blanche (Pentheus), based on Euripides' The Bacchae [38 ff.]. Britton J. Harwood in his "Tragedy as Habit: A Streetcar Named Desire" also finds the Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic in the Blanche-Stanley conflict, but Harwood sees the struggle better described in Rudolf Otto's terminology: Self versus Other. Harwood sees the crux of Streetcar as a code of loyalty both upheld and betrayed. Whereas Stella remains loyal to Stanley by the end (as Stanley is to Mitch in protecting him from Blanche), Blanche betrays her loyalty to Allan by exposing his homosexuality, just as Stanley does her promiscuity. By recognizing the Wholly Other in each other, that which is "both dreadful and fascinating" Cercles 10  /  8 [Tharpe, 107], Stanley and Blanche battle in order to preserve the Self, whose dominion is in peril. Many o thers d escribe t his s ame p henomenon, t his s ocial confrontation with opposing human types, though not in Nietzschean terms. Harold C lurman, f or e xample, w rites i n N a t i o n that S treetcar is a "dramatization of sensibility crushed by [...] brutishness" [Clurman, 635]. And Henry Popkin traces the classical Adonis-Gargoyle myth in Williams, where the healthy young man (Stanley) is pitted against the older neurotic woman (Blanche) [Popkin, 48]. But Signi Falk in her 1958 Modern Drama essay, "The Profitable World of Tennessee Williams," provides one of the better insights into Williams's technique of juxtaposing character types onstage. Falk, in short, vilifies Williams as a careerist for creating plays not with real people but with stock characters such as the dreamer, the animal, and the Mamma's boy for his men, and the neurotic southern belle and the mother figure for his women. So, while some critics find Williams successful in his drama of human types at odds, others, like Falk, find this form of drama deplorable [Falk, 180]. The other group who argues for Streetcar as a dramatization of human nature types sees it as a play not of ideologies but of sexual aggression for protection and propagation. These critics find Williams writing a play based on Darwinian natural selection: Blanche and Stanley are two opposing animals of the same species striving for the survival of their kind, with Stella as the prize. Deborah Burks, for instance, calls the conflict "less [...] a struggle between Good and Evil" and more a "Social Darwinist struggle for survival between two 'species' of human beings" [Burks, 37]. Blanche, in trying to save Stella from the bestial Vieux Carré with her "Don't hang back with the brutes" speech, solicits open warfare from Stanley, who must in turn destroy Blanche before she damages his and Stella's life in the Elysian Fields. As do Anca Vlasopolos and Sarah Boyd Johns [Schlueter, Feminist Rereadings, 158-159 & 143], Leonard Casper sees this triangle of opposition with Stella at the apex as Williams's "cellular structure of a proper community [...] composed of diverse elements (apposition), but without divisiveness ( opposition)" [ Tharpe, 7 52]. I n t his c ommunity, C asper believes, "all men are intermediaries to one another's missions" ...