Guilbert PDF
Guilbert PDF
GEORGES-CLAUDE GUILBERT
Universit de Rouen
Guilbert, G.-C. Queering and Dequeering the Text: Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named
Desire , Cercles 10 (2004): 85-116.
Cercles 10/86
imitate and repeat, even parody. [] Williams and Albee can say as
much, and often speak more frankly than others about the horrors of
family life, the tedium of marriage. [Millet, 341-342]
The critic Howard Taubman famously complained in 1961 about the
infiltration of homosexual attitudes in American drama, judging that the
portrayal of women and heterosexual life should be undertaken by clearly
heterosexual playwrights, whereas the gays could write gay plays
[Loughery, 292]. Stanley Kaufmanns attacks of the same kind in the 1950s
and 1960s are equally (in)famous [Tinkcom, 348].
It is silly to suppose, as some critics still do, that homosexuals
(exclusive or not) do not know enough about heterosexual life to write about
it convincingly or interestingly. Homosexuals live, like everyone else, in a
heterosexual world.1 It is equally silly to suppose that homosexual writers
particularly want to write about the homosexual experience to the exclusion
of other spheres; and even if they do want to write about the homosexual
experience too, they usually know better than to limit themselves to it
(particularly before Stonewall), especially if they want to make a living out
of their work.
So without claiming that Williamss only aim was to discuss things
queer, he certainly had an interest in finding ways for this silenced majority
to be allowed to speak [Miller, 99]. As we shall see, in order to focus on
gender and sexual orientation, Williamss plays often queer the pre-text
more than the text: the queer in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last
Summer (1958) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) has already died before
the play starts. The queen is dead, long live the queen: it is this death that
gives life to the plays.
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams tells us in his notes for the
designer, takes place in the bed-sitting-room of a plantation home in the
Mississippi Delta. He goes on to specify that the style of this room is
somewhat unexpected. Why? Because it hasnt changed much since it was
occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a
pair of old bachelors who shared this room all their lives together [Cat, 13].
Just in case Straws and Ochellos sexual orientation were not clear enough
as indicated by the classical euphemism a pair of old bachelors and the
fact that they shared the room, Williams then accumulates references to the
tremendous love Straw and Ochello felt for one another.
So the queering of the text starts before and beside the text, as it were.
Things are never simple with Williams. More than perhaps any other
American playwright, he delivers a great deal of information in his stage
directions, thus creating both a mine and a minefield for the scholar. It is so
tempting to read his often copious directions, or as in this case notes for the
designer as simply part of the text, and assume that they signify as much
as the dialogue. In the same way, it is tempting to forget for research or
teachings sake that we are dealing with a play, a work of art to be seen on
1
If such notions were true, a sizeable portion of the art of the past twenty-six centuries
or so would be irrelevant to heterosexuals, from Plato to Warhol, via Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Wilde and Chaikovsky. If such notions were true, any novelist wishing to write,
say, about serial killers, would have to murder several people before hitting his keyboard.
Georges-Claude Guilbert/87
2
Why some critics still bother with thisor worse, seriously wonder if Catherine hasnt
made it all upis beyond me.
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3
I do not believe he was actually, as some say, outed in the 1950s, but I suppose it
depends on ones understanding of the phrase [Gage, Richards & Wilmot, 189].
Georges-Claude Guilbert/91
very young, and for a very short period of time. But could it not be because
she never had sex with her husband? It is a possibility, that Williams never
refutes nor confirms. At the end of Scene One, when Stanley asks Blanche to
confirm she was once married and asks what happened, she replies: The
boythe boy died. [She sinks back down.] Im afraid Imgoing to be sick!
[Streetcar, 130]. In 1947, a widow simply did not call her dead husband a
boy. This word is obviously opposed to the word man. So it can mean
either or both of two things: first, he was very young indeed when he died,
he was not yet fully grown, as it were; secondly, he was less butch than a
man, and the memory makes Blanche sick. This helps Williams develop the
running opposition between Allan the Dead Queer and the very-much-alive
Stanley.
Blanche drinks. Blanche and Bricks alcohol intakes echo each other.
They both drink until they reach that moment when they are temporarily
relieved of their pain, until the click. In Blanches case, the torment subsides
when she hears in her head (after the polka) the sound of the gun shot that
took Allans life. In both instances, the Dead Queer was killed by societys
homophobia. And Blanche, of course, feels guilty, like Brick.
So the boy died, and talking about it makes Blanche feel sick. Indeed
lots of things make Blanche sick, in every sense of the phrase. Blanche is ill,
Blanche is extremely frail and mentally fragile. Words like nerves,
nervous, nervousness, neurasthenic, hysteria, hysterical, recur in
the stage directions. She had always been a fragile, tender and delicate
creature, of course, but the horrors she survived made her a nervous wreck.
As Stella tells Stanley in Scene Eight: People like you abused her, and
forced her to change [Streetcar, 198]. Allan, too, was a fragile creature. His
boyish fragility, clearly, is opposed to Stanleys brutish strength.
In Scene Two, Stanley takes hold of a sheaf of paper belonging to
Blanche. Blanche says: These are love-letters, yellowing with antiquity, all
from one boy. Later, she calls those same papers poems a dead boy
wrote. As Suzanne Fraysse astutely remarks, there is a great deal of
ambiguity in those terms. Are these papers letters or poems or both? What is
more, nothing tells us with certainty thatwhatever they werethey were
addressed to Blanche [Fraysse, 52]. For all we know, they could have been
addressed to a man and appropriated by Blanchein every sense.
This is familiar Williams territory. He has used, and maybe even
overused, throughout his work (plays, novels, short stories, poems,
screenplays, memoirs) the following equation: lonely poet/artist/creator
(pote maudit)= monster/freak/mad(wo)man= queer. Stanley stands for
normality and unrefinement as opposed to the refinement of Allan (and
Blanche). When he grabs the poems Blanche tells him: The touch of your
hands insults them [Streetcar 139]. She will have to burn them, she adds.
Her husband was young and vulnerable, she says. Further, in Scene
Seven, Stella tells Stanley about her sisters marriage to Allan, which killed
her illusions. Here are the arresting words Williams puts into her mouth:
She married a boy who wrote poetry He was extremely good-looking. I
think Blanche didnt just love him but worshipped the ground he walked
on! Adored him and thought him almost too fine to be human! But then she
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found out [] this beautiful and talented young man was a degenerate
[Streetcar, 189-190].
So Allan was angelic, Allan wasof course, one is tempted to
writevery beautiful and very talented, and (rather than but) Allan had the
evil sexuality of a degenerate. Blanche, as an aesthete, worshipped his
beauty, talent and refinement. Stella, for her part, likes her men real, or
butch at any rate, and her choice of adjective shows her homophobic
tendencies. Practicing homophobia is one of the best ways to uphold the
patriarchy, and this somehow prepares her for her later rejection of Blanche.
Williams was extremely keen on Hart Crane, whose promiscuous sex
life fascinated/repulsed him almost as much as his poetry. Crane was an
outcast, a pariah, and fit into Williamss equation articulated above.
Williams frequently handled this type of notion in his nonfiction too,
speaking notably of the Sense of the Awful.4 That Sense of the Awful
ranges from Southern Gothic to closet poetics. In Scene Six of A Streetcar
Named Desire comes the queerest passage, spoken by Blanche. Here is the
first half,
He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl. When I was
sixteen, I made the discoverylove. All at once and much, much too
completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on
something that had always been half in shadow, thats how it struck
the world for me. But I was unlucky. Deluded. There was something
different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness
which wasnt like a mans, although he wasnt the least bit effeminate-
lookingstillthat thing was there [Streetcar, 182-183]
Craftily, Williams manages to cater for the initiated and the uninitiated at
the same time. Blanche was unlucky enough to fall for a homosexual. She
was deluded because she mistook him for a heterosexual. How much of
what she then tells Mitch is in fact hindsight? Surely that thing that was
there contributed to Allans attraction. A sensitive woman like Blanche, fond
of poetry and refined pastimes was bound to enjoy a particular softness
and tenderness in a manor rather, a boy. The subtext here is that she
might even have indulged in half-unconscious fag-hag tendencies (in
1972s Small Craft Warnings Williams favors faggots moll, rather than fag
hag or fruit fly).
Before I proceed, a few precisions linked to gender are in order.
Williamss colleagues and sometime friends Truman Capote and Carson
McCullers both abundantly showed in their fiction that they were
constructionists in matters of gender, half a century before people like Judith
Butler theorized constructionismas opposed to essentialism. First, there
4
See for instance the introduction he wrote for Carson McCullerss Reflections in a
Golden Eye, which can be found in the Bantam edition: It appears to me, sometimes, that they
are only two kinds of people who live outside what E.E.Cummings has defined as this so-
called world of oursthe artists and the insane. Of course there are those who have not been
committed to asylums, but who have enough of one or both magical elements, lunacy and
vision, to permit them also to slip sufficiently apart from this so-called world of ours to
undertake or accept an exterior view of it [McCullers, xi]. Later, he writes: Reflections in a
Golden Eye is one of the purest and most powerful of those works which are conceived in that
Sense of The Awful which is the desperate black root of nearly all significant modern art, from
the Guernica of Picasso to the cartoons of Charles Addams [xiv].
Georges-Claude Guilbert/93
are genetic data: one is born XX or XY (and even that is not so systematic as
people think). Then there are social constructions. The categories man and
woman are pure constructs, enforced by what I like calling the
dictatorship of gender. Total constructionists tend to believe that sexual
orientation is just as artificially constructed as gender. Williams, for his part,
often hovered between essentialism and constructionism. Blanche is
persecuted because she does not respect the dictatorship of gender.
So what does an effeminate-looking (man) mean? In a
constructionist perspective, not much. If you believe that gender is
performance (and performativity), that every sign of femininity observable
in women is learnt, imitated (walk, gestures, softness, tenderness), then
an effeminate man is someone who performs the wrong gender. Many
Freudian trajectories can lead a gay man to effeminacy, often installing itself
at the time of puberty, but this is no place to discuss such phenomena. We
are all semioticians, most of us are perfectly unaware of it, and the only
differencebesides reproductive organsbetween your neighbor Mrs.
Smith and a successful drag queen is that the latter knows what she is doing:
piling up signs of femininity.
So Allan was not effeminate-looking, Blanche tells Mitch. This
serves various purposes. Spoiling a clich that is reassuring for the dominant
culture, Williams is telling his 1947 audience that not all homosexuals are
effeminate. Many people still think they are, but this was an even more
popular misconception in the 1940slong before gay liberation and Castro
Street butch leather clones began to explode old stereotypes and create new
ones. In other words, your neighbor, brother, or even, as with Blanche, your
husband, may be homosexualwithout you ever suspecting it. So the world
is not such a safe place after all. Just like communists, homosexuals were in
hiding in 1940s and 1950s America and could be lurking anywhere. In the
same way transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and other cross-dressers
may have been mistaken for XX people though there were XY, or vice versa.
They were passing. Without ever directly addressing the politics of passing,
Williams certainly was interested (for an interesting comparison, see the
blacks who pass for white in the novels of William Faulkner or even those of
Boris Vian writing as Vernon Sullivan). The world is dangerous for
heterosexual WASPs if they can walk by a black man or a homosexual
without perceiving the threat, isnt it?
Besides, even though Williams was not averse to a bit of camping
around, he did not like queens (effeminate homosexuals in non PC
parlance, or worse, queeny men, or campy men), nor did he approve of
flamboyant conspicuousness in public places. Lyle Leverich writes,
Although in gay circles Tennessee Williams enjoyed the often hilarious
ritual of antic campingwhile seldom joining in himselfhe was
never able to reconcile himself to fragrant public displays, which he
saw as a mockery not simply of women but of his own sense of
manhood. [Leverich, 288]
In Small Craft Warnings, a much more openly queer play, the character
named Quentin (and not Bobby, pace James Fisher) is presented as such in
Williamss stage directions: The young man, Quentin, is dressed effetely in
a yachting jacket, maroon linen slacks, and a silk neck-scarf. Despite this
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5
Like Stella, Williams liked his men butch. He was always attracted to butch types, as is
well documented in his Memoirs, his letters, and elsewhere [Windham, 114; Leverich, 351]. So
he did not like them campwhich in no way kept Camp out of his work, in which, moreover,
larger-than-life camp women abound (see, for instance, Alexandra Del Lago AKA Princess
Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth [1959]).
Georges-Claude Guilbert/95
room that I thought was emptywhich wasnt empty, but had two people
in it [Streetcar 183].
David Savran has entitled one of the chapters of his book Communists,
Cowboys, and Queers Tennessee Williams: By coming suddenly into a room
that I thought was empty [Savran, 76-110]. An inspired and revealing
choice, as this sentence is of course central to A Streetcar Named Desire but
also to Williamss entire body of work. The quote above comes from the
Penguin edition. Now let us examine the longer, queerer version from the
Signet edition,
Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming
suddenly into a room that I thought was emptywhich wasnt empty,
but had two people in it the boy I had married and an older man
who had been his friend for years [Streetcar Signet, 95]
Of course, only the really obtuse spectator/reader needs to be actually told
that the two people in the room are both male. But in that more complete
Signet version, the sentence which in the Penguin edition is to be read in the
dots, gives us boy and older man in the same breath (pun intended). It
thus adds meaning to Allans boyhood, boyishness and boyness, as it
were, placing it in the realm of clich Greek style relationships: Allan is the
eromenos and the older man his erastes. The fact that Blanche specifies the
older man had been Allans friend for years allows us to imagine that their
sexual relationship had been going on for a long time and very possibly had
the chronological advantage over Blanches and Allans relationship. So the
room of sexual alternatives was not empty at all, and would in turn lead
Blanche to other rooms like it, to other voices, other rooms, as Truman
Capote put it.
So Allan was found out, he was caught in the act. Blanche speaks of
it as if it were a crime (Stella uses the same phrase). In the Penguin version
she proceeds to narrate his suicide, indicating a transitory period when she
pretended nothing had been discovered, and then explains: It was
becauseon the dance floorunable to stop myselfId suddenly saidI
know! I know! You disgust me [Streetcar, 184]. The Signet edition gives
us, much more graphically: I saw! I know! [italics mine, Streetcar Signet,
96]. This gives the words you disgust me much more strength, as the
spectator/reader may imagine in the Penguin version that Blanche merely
realized Allan was in bed with a man, whereas in the Signet version s/he
may infer that Blanche not only recognized Allans lover but also actually
witnessed just exactly what it was they were doing, the precise act they were
involved in. Both versions have the first part of Blanches narration
interrupted by the sound of a terribly Freudian locomotive, which fills
various roles in the play but could in this case, of course, evoke sodomy,
among other things. A western heteronormative society expresses its
homophobia in various ways, but one of the most common learned notions
is that of disgust; it usually rests on two millennia of Judeo-Christian
dubious essentialist conceptions of what is natural and what constitutes a
crime against nature. The homosexual as cultural Other is he who does
things with his body homophobic society refuses to envisage and is shocked
when compelled to visualize or worse, see. Hence, I saw! I know! You
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dont cry. Much less men. Still, such dequeering is enough to make Kazans
film literally another story, with its own closet discourse. In 1979 I had
bought the official Warner Bros video of A Streetcar Named Desire, that lasts
122 minutes. Then in 1992 I bought the official Warner Bros video, original
directors version: totally restored footage never seen before, that lasts 125
minutes. Disappointingly, none of those extra 3 minutes concerns the above-
mentioned scene, with Allans and the films closets remaining as airtight.
So, like Suddenly Last Summer, A Streetcar Named Desire is to a large
degree a play about the closet; many critics agree with that proposition. Yet
there is no consensus when it comes to the dance floor flashback.
Independently from what Williams himself may have said about it, a serious
point remains open to two contradictory interpretations. Did Blanche out
her husband or not? Let us look at the text again, It was becauseon the
dance floorunable to stop myselfId suddenly saidI know! I know!
You disgust me [Streetcar, 184]. Or in the Signet edition, It was
becauseon the dance floorunable to stop myselfId suddenly saidI
saw! I know! You disgust me [Streetcar Signet, 96]. Nowhere does
Blanche tell Mitch that she screamed or shouted; she uses the verb to say,
and the fact that it is preceded by the adverb suddenly in no way
guarantees that anybody but Allan heard her. This is a capital ambiguity if
ever there was any.
Some spectators/readers may imagine that Blanche spoke loudly
enough for her rejection of Allan to constitute an instance of outing, others
do not. The former had better stop and ponder this: even supposing Blanche
was heard, who among the people within earshot was actually astute
enough to translate I know! I know! You disgust me or even I saw! I
know! You disgust me as I saw you having sex with that man, I know
you are a homosexual, you disgust me. This is important because the two
contradictory interpretations give different meanings to Allans suicide.
Considering that for a while Blanche pretended nothing had been
discovered, if she merely rejected Allan on the dance floor with some
measure of discretion, the whole matter could very possibly have remained
their own private business and some arrangements could have been found,
including a divorce. If, on the other hand, she did out him, then scandal was
inevitable. Obviously if Blanche outed Allan, the outing itself may be seen as
the principal reason for his suicide. A great deal of endurance was no doubt
needed to survive outing in a small Southern town in the 1940s.
To settle this, the exchange between Stella and Stanley in Scene Seven
is not particularly useful:
Stella: This beautiful and talented young man was a degenerate. Didnt
your supply-man give you that information?
Stanley: All we discussed was recent history. That must have been a
pretty long time ago.
One could argue that smalltown gossips are rarely restrained, and
considering all the things that Stanley learnt about Blanche, it is likely that if
Allans sexual orientation had been public knowledge in Laurel he would
have heard about it too. On the other hand, one could use Stanleys answer
to contend that Allans outing was ancient history and thus not so readily
discussed any longer. Other ambiguities remain, evidently, due to
Georges-Claude Guilbert/99
reason does not find Stanley sexy must make an intellectual effort and
imagine that Stella finds him sexy, and that Williams finds him sexy, that
audiences of hundreds, male and female, have found him sexy, otherwise
s/he will fail to completely grasp the play. Hence the all-importance of the
casting of Marlon Brando on stage and on film. As Camille Paglia writes,
Marlon Brandos raw, brute, comic performance as Stanley Kowalski, in the
play and the 1951 film, was one of the most spectacular and explosive
moments in modern art [Paglia, Sex, 93]. Who could better embody the
following stage directions on stage? I have seen many a Stanley in the
theater since, expressing himself in various languages, but none can
comparenot even Alec Baldwin in Glen Jordans 1995 TV version,
He is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly,
compactly built. Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his
movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the center of his life
has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with
weak indulgence, dependently, but with the power and pride of a
richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this
complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels of his life,
such as his heartiness with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his
love of good drink and food and games, his car, his radio, everything
that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He sizes
women up at a glance, with sexual classifications, crude images
flashing into his mind and determining the way he smiles at them.
[Streetcar, 128]
Paradoxically, this is queer. Why? Because Williams is clearly perceiving this
male character as sexy, and presenting him as such, if only paratextually, to
begin with. Who else did in 1947 America? Which plays thus offered man as
sexual spectacle? (See Laura Mulveys theory of the male gaze etc.).
Some critics and biographers are keen to establish biographical
connections here, insisting that a Stanley Kowalski existed, that he was a
colleague of Williamss at the shoe factory or something; or that the
character was inspired by Williamss father, the man who fell in love with
long distances[Menagerie, 235]. I dont believe that is important. What
matters is that here is a splendid rooster, a richly feathered male bird, a
peacock, a cock. Obviously Williams is thinking of the word cock at this
point and elsewhere in the play, fully aware of its polysemy. Stanley is a
walking penis. In Kazans film Brandos entire body sometimes evokes an
erection. Again, old-style feminist criticism is not so helpful to deal with
this. Things are never black or white in a Williams play. What the
spectator/reader needs to remember is that the term macho used to be a
compliment, and remains one in certain circumstances. Of course, Stanley is
a phallocratic and chauvinistic upholder of the patriarchy. Of course, he
wants women to serve him and he sees them as potential sexual preys. But
he gives pleasure to women. He does not only take it. It might be presented
as somehow condescending, but at a time when female orgasm was only
whispered about in limited spheres, when 25,000 years of male oppression
had not yet been challenged by 1960s feminism, a man who worries about
female pleasure and is sufficiently knowledgeable in female physiology to
actually be an efficient lover is a rarity:
Stella: it isnt on his forehead and it isnt genius.
Georges-Claude Guilbert/101
Blanche: Oh. Well, what is it, and where? I would like to know.
Stella: Its a drive that he has. [Streetcar, 147]
Stella likes watching her husband bowl. Well, thats where shes at,
watchin her husband bowl, says Eunice [118]. And thats where shes at
indeed, enjoying the spectacle of her virile man playing with phallic bowling
pins and testicle-like bowling balls in his brightly colored cock-like bowling
shirts and bowling jackets, her masculine husband who belongs to a
different species [124], who was a Master Sergeant in the Engineers Corps.
She wasnt just blinded by all the brass, she tells Blanche [125]. No, not
just. But those decorations did impress her. Like Mae West, no doubt she
loves a man in a uniform. At the beginning of Scene Six, Blanche and
Mitch have probably been out to the amusement park on Lake
Pontchartrain, for Mitch is bearing, upside down, a plaster statuette of Mae
West, the sort of prize won at shooting-galleries and carnival games of
chance [Streetcar, 175]. Unlike Mae West, Stella married a man in a
uniform and stayed with him, rather than go off and explore the bodies of
several, the way Blanche did in Laurel.
The reference to Mae West is significant, of course. She had a
promiscuous femme fatale image and was a self-professed fag hag, who
knew exactly what she was doing (at least until the 1950s), unlike Blanche.
Mitch is carrying the statuette upside down, which points to Blanches lack
of control, topsy-turvy life and approaching downfall. At the end of Scene
Ten, Stanley picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed, her head
limply hanging down [Streetcar, 215]. That drives her further away from
reality, and her mind is upside down. Could this statuette be a reluctant
homage from Williams, awareas he clearly wasof the queer subversion
Mae West practiced in her heyday in her camp theatrics and drag politics?
So Stella is in love with Stanley, as she tells Blanche in Scene One
[Streetcar 124]. She explains,
Stella: When hes away for a week I nearly go wild!
Blanche: Gracious!
Stella: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby [She
smiles to herself] [Streetcar, 125]
That love is totally sexual, obviously. The orgasms Stanley gives her are
like a drug; and this explains the ending of the play to a degree that too few
critics acknowledge. In Scene Three Stanley actually hits Stella [Streetcar,
152]. In Scene Four, she tells a bemused Blanche: I am not in anything that I
have a desire to get out of [Streetcar, 158]. And then, famously: There are
things that happen between a man and a woman in the darkthat sort of
make everything else seemunimportant [Streetcar, 162]. All this,
naturally, was very much downplayed in the film. The elaborate expressions
of Stellas desire for Stanley are reduced to Blanche saying What youre
talking about is desire, just brutal desire, and Stella answering I told you, I
love him. Practically gone too is the notion that Stanley would be all right
for a one-night-stand, but not to live with on a long-term basis. Not
appropriate for Hollywood fare.
Things get more complicated when we find that Stanley is equally
dependent on Stellas companionship and body. When she disappears
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6
I strongly suspect this is among other things meant to function as a camp joke; as it is
rather easy to imagine legions of male and female fans of Brandos (at least mentally)
screaming, yeah, take them off!. No actor had ever appeared wearing so little on the
American stage before.
Georges-Claude Guilbert/103
7
It is of little consequence that a kind and gentle (heterosexual) Harold Mitchell existed
in Williamss lifea very good-looking man, judging from his picture [Leverich, 118-119].
Cercles 10/104
other sense is big. Blanche fantasizes him as the deus-ex-machina who will
save her from her predicament, but he will turn out to be simply a big oaf.
So both Stanley and Mitch are opposed to Allan, with Mitch
occupying a sort of middle position, establishing a perfect literary balance.
Allan has been crushed by the compulsory heterosexuality [Rich, passim]
enforced by the dominant culture, Blanche has been crushed tooalthough
not completely yet when the play startsand Mitch appears in Scene Six as
if he could be Blanches salvation. Picture a spectator/reader completely
ignorant of Williamss work: s/he could very well remain hopeful, expecting
a happy ending. But when you are familiar with Williamss world, you
know that he is going to forsake her.
Mitch is tolerant at first of Blanches idiosyncrasies, he agrees to see
her only in poor lighting, he respects her, contenting himself with small
displays of affection and placidly hoping for more. But when Stanley tells
him about her past, he rejects her. In Scene Nine he tears the paper lantern
off the light bulb, then he turns the light on and stares at her [Streetcar,
203-204]. Having thus exposed Blanche, he accuses her: Oh, I knew you
werent sixteen any more. But I was a fool enough to believe you was
straight [Streetcar, 204]. At the end of the scene he places his hands on her
waist and tries to turn her about [Streetcar, 206]:
Blanche: What do you want?
Mitch [fumbling to embrace her]: What I been missing all summer.
Blanche: Then marry me, Mitch!
Mitch: I dont think I want to marry you any more.
Blanche: No?
Mitch [dropping his hands from her waist]: Youre not clean enough to
bring in the house with my mother. [Streetcar 207]
The last shred of hope Blanche might have clung to thus disappears, as
Mitch is Stanleyized, loses his grammar, and turns out to be a macho pig
too, as well as a potential rapist (like every heterosexual man, some radical
feminists would say). The spectator/reader may easily imagine at this point
that Blanches screaming is what saves her from rape. Mitch was prepared to
miss sex as long as he presumed her clean, but now that he has found
out she has a rich sexual past, he cannot see why she should not comply.
Just like Stanley, Mitch judges people according to Victorian double
standards: men may have multiple sexual experiences, but women should
be virgins until marriage and chaste after widowhood. If they do not obey
those rules, they are whores. Men may want to have sex with whores, but
they dont want to marry them; respect and desire do not necessarily go
together, far from it.
In Scene Eleven, Mitch worsens his case. The nave spectator/reader
may still hope, against all odds, that the appalling preparations for the
removal of Blanche to a psychiatric institution will shock him into some
rescuing reaction. Instead he inarticulately says to Stanley, seemingly
apropos the poker game: You you you Brag brag bull bull
[Streetcar, 216]. And after the arrival of the doctor and the matron he
contents himself with this,
Mitch [wildly]: You! You done this, all o your God damn interfering with
things you
Georges-Claude Guilbert/105
are often portrayed as threatening, deviant, and bad. [Maglin & Perry,
205]
It is much worse if the woman who acts as a sexual agent does not limit
herself to adult males but debauches an underage boy, like Blanche.8
Blanche is also uncommon in that she can never be made to fit a fixed
category, in spite of the efforts of the people around her, the
spectator/reader and the critics. Just when you think she has definitively
been labeled a jaded slut, she indulges in childish fantasies about Shep
Huntleigh. Is she a damsel in distress waiting for her white knight in shining
armor to come rescue heror is she an unrealistic but materialistic Southern
Belle who thinks she can still command enough seduction to ensnare a
millionaire sugar daddy? As Judith J. Thompson writes,
Her romantic attempt to achieve an idyllic union with Allan Grey is
reenacted in a diminished version with Harold Mitchell, or Mitch; in
a fairy-tale version with another young man; in a demonic version
with the animalistic Stanley Kowalski; in an imaginatively
transcendent version with the fantasized Shep Huntleigh, and,
finally, in a tragically ironic version with the Doctor who escorts her to
the mental institution. [33]
Blanche simply cannot, in 1947, survive being a sexual outcast. In this
respect, Williams is making a feminist statement; he is also making a very
feminist statement: he sums up in Scene Five the plight of women as victims
of the Victorian double standards I mentioned above (often coupled with
ageism), applied by Mitch,
He hasnt gotten a thing but a good-night kiss, thats all Ive given him,
Stella. I want his respect. And men dont want anything they get too
easy. But on the other hand men lose interest quickly. Especially when
the girl is overthirty. They think a girl over thirty ought tothe
vulgar term isput out And IIm not putting out. [Streetcar,
171]
8
Blanches behavior, of course, is linked to the Dubois family curse and her guilt
complex.
Cercles 10/108
So she is looking for Allan in herself, but she is also looking for Allan
in others, which is in no way contradictory, as homosexuality has by
definition strong narcissistic connotations. When she debauched her pupil
back home, she was no doubt pursuing Allans youth through him. The
beautiful young man collecting for the Evening Star reminds her of Allan. In
the play, Blanche tells him after she has pressed her lips to his: Run along
now! It would be nice to keep you, but Ive got to be good and keep my
hands off children. Adios! [Streetcar, 174]. In Kazans film this is reduced to:
Run away now, quickly. Adios. Adios. This omission contributes greatly
to the dequeering of Blanche, for the original lines are extremely camp.
Williams is always careful to remain just this side of pedophilia, but a
bit of pederasty does not worry him. Such notions, of course, are terribly
relative. What is condemned as pedophilia in the Western world is perfectly
normal practice is some other parts of the world, where girls are married off
at eleven or twelve years old. There is also the matter of the evolution of
mores in the West to consider. I believe if a playwright wanted to produce
the same effect on an audience today that the story of Blanches debauching
a seventeen-year-old schoolboy produced on a 1947 audience, s/he would
need to change the age of the boy to thirteen, or maybe fourteen. The words
Blanche says to the young collector are an instance of typical self-
deprecatory Camp. In some productions their tremendous humor is lost on
the audience. Not only does the film get rid of It would be nice to keep you,
but Ive got to be good and keep my hands off children, it also replaces the
run along now with run away now, quickly. So whatever vestiges of
Williamss queering might have been preserved in the camp, ultra tongue-
in-cheek run along now without the rest is shattered by the purely
melodramatic and reeking-of-supermarket-psychoanalysis run away now,
quickly. The dangers amusingly evoked by the exchange in the play, real
and imagined, for Blanche and for the young collectorclearly reminiscent
of the schoolboy scandal back homewould have become something almost
boring in the film if it hadnt been for that inspired piece of casting of Wright
King who does convey innocence as well as look gorgeous, helping the
viewer to imagine Allans no doubt similarly gorgeous face.
So Blanche is like Allan, in that she is rejected by Stanley in the same
way she rejected Allan, but she is also like Tennessee Williams. She too is a
sort of pote maudit. She too has a lot of casual sex. But maybe she is not such
a success as a gay man. As she puns herself: I dont think Ive ever tried so
hard to be gay and made such a dismal mess of it [Streetcar, 175].
One of the most persistent homophobic stereotypes that the
dominant culture spreads about gay men is that they are such sex
maniacs that they are ready to have sex with anything that moves and
has testicles. This blatantly contradicts another stereotype, that of the
aestheticism of gays. That vision of gays as indiscriminate potential
ravishers of any male (including underage ones) within their field of
Cercles 10/110
9
Added to the ludicrous notion of homosexuality as a catching disease, that vision of
gays also accounts for such campaigns as Anita Bryants Save Our Children, launched in 1977.
10
Well, that is what you may think if you are an essentialist feminist believing in some
fundamental innate feminine nature. However, if you are a constructionist feminist like myself,
you do not worry about such considerations. If there is no such thing as natural femininity, and
if gender is the product of performance and performativity, then the difference between a drag
queen and a genetic woman is nothing but a slight divergence in chromosomes.
Georges-Claude Guilbert/111
run for protection, Stella, from under one leaky roof to another leaky
roofbecause it was stormall storm, and I wascaught in the
center People dont see youmen dontdont even admit your
existence unless they are making love to you. And youve got to have
your existence admitted by someone, if youre going to have
someones protection. And so the soft people have got toshimmer
and glowput apaper lantern over the light But Im scared
nowawfly scared. I dont know how much longer I can turn the
trick. It isnt enough to be soft. Youve got to be soft and attractive. And
IIm fading now! [Streetcar, 169]
Soft people, that is, queens or gays (cf. Allans softness) turn tricks, they
do tricks, they trick. In gay lingo this sometimes means prostituting oneself,
sometimes it simply means picking up strangers for casual sex. Gays are
notoriously ageist and the cult of youth is practiced in gay circles on a large
scale.11
Blanche tells Mitch: But, honey, you know as well as I do that a
single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her
emotions or shell be lost! [Streetcar, 176]. This sentence speaks volumes
about the gender order, obviously, but it also becomes hilarious if read as
the camp banter of a queen with a lot of mileage. And of course, the
polysemy culminates into Mitch exclaiming: But I was a fool enough to
believe you was straight [Streetcar, 204, italics mine]. Blanche had been
passing but now she has been found out. Some people are taken in by acts
la Blanche, others are not, or are fooled only for a time. As Stanley puts it:
Some men are took in by this Hollywood glamour stuff and some men are
not [Streetcar, 137].
A Streetcar Named Desire is very much a play about power. Stanley
feels threatened by Blanche. She is intellectually superior, she endangers
Stellas devotion to him, she questions his authority, and therefore his
virility. So he rapes herwhat better way to reassert his virility?and then
locks her away. Vulgarity and cheap machismo win. Whether you see
Blanche as madwoman in the tenement, female sexual outcast, gay man or
drag queen, she loses.
Conclusion
Blanches splendid final line, Whoever you areI have always depended
on the kindness of strangers, has become, at least among gay males a
clichd expression of homosexual alienation, writes David Van Leer [18].
Whatever A Streetcar Named Desire may be about, it is also about homosexual
alienation. But it is not a gay play, and Williams was no gay militant.
Donald Spoto quotes the 1976 Gay Sunshine interview Williams gave
George Whitmoren,
After admitting that the politics of gay liberation did not much interest
him, he continued: People so wish to latch onto something didactic; I
11
Heterosexual men are ageist too, but because women have been brainwashed for
thousands of years into thinking women are not ageist, men can always change wives when
they reach their mid-life crisis and find young women who are quite willing to tolerate
wrinkles, sagging flesh and love handles.
Georges-Claude Guilbert/113
do not deal with the didactic, ever [] You still want to know why I
dont write a gay play? I dont find it necessary. I could express what I
wanted to express through other means []. I wish to have a broad
audience []. Im not about to limit myself to writing about gay
people.
Spoto then explains,
[There] was a negative quality, and an underlying resentment, to
Williamss attitude to homosexuality in his work. [] Tennessee
Williams in fact hated homosexuality, hated being homosexual, and
could never accept those who would come to peaceful terms with
being one of a sexual minority. [Spoto, 319-320]
Still, A Streetcar Named Desire is, to a large degree, a queer text. Williams may
well have been a self-hating queer, but he survived and wrote about it. Is
Blanche a survivor? Is she totally destroyed at the end? Is her being
committed to a psychiatric asylum simply the end result of a truly tragic
process? Can the asylum be seen as a form of death or not? Some critics are
still arguing the point. Bronski writes,
But the truth is that the majority of his women characters are
survivors. Williams himself saw Blanche as a survivor. He claimed, I
am Blanche DuBois. It was Williamss life as a gay man that enabled
him to create a character who survives by rejecting the sordidness of
this world and creating a better one of her own. [Bronksi, 115]12
Allan, for his part, remains very dead, like Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof. At least in that play two of the three dead queers (Jack Straw and Peter
Ochello) lived a long and happy life before the play. From the point of view
of sexual politics, it is possible to dismiss plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
Suddenly Last Summer and A Streetcar Named Desire as homophobic, in that
they associate queerness and death and speak to the audience from the
closet, as it were. Williams himself remained partially closeted until the
1970s, when post-Stonewall gay critics took him to task for not coming out,
which he did in a series of public utterances [and several pieces of writing],
all of which document, often pathetically, [his] sense of himself as a gay
man [Clum, Tennessee Willliams, 751]. Indeed Williams has always
received an ambivalent reception from gay critics, who have sometimes
found his characterization of gay men depressing and negative [Hogan &
Hudson 578]. Gay critics may also deplore Williamss clichs. John Loughery
writes: When Blanche DuBois tells Mitch about the suicide of her
homosexual husband, a boy too sensitive for this world, Tennessee Williams
was reinforcing a clichloving and well-meant, but nonetheless a clich
[184].
Allan killed himself. Blanche rode the Streetcar named Desire,
transferred to the Streetcar called Cemeteries and got off at Elysian Fields.
Like Allan, she did not survive. Williams did, and what a good thing it is for
literature. But as the last line of the play has it: The game is seven-card
stud [Streetcar, 226]. In 1947, studs rule, real men control the game, and
queers or dissolute women lose. Things are better today, notably thanks to
12
I myself see her removal at the end of the play as a form of death. I do not believe
she will marry the good doctor or open a boutique in the Vieux Carr after a little bit of shock
therapy.
Cercles 10/114
decades of more or less queer novels, films, and plays, including the
variously queered and dequeered (by Williams, by Kazan, by critics) A
Streetcar Named Desire.
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