Hello everyone, this is Jen and I make useful English Lit study videos on Shakespeare, poetry, fiction, literary concepts and more to help you become a literary expert. So if this sounds like what you need, make sure you hit the subscribe button below so that you never miss out on my weekly videos. So in today's video we are looking at Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire through the lens of three critical theories, namely feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, which are...
the more dominant ones in the litcrit theoretical landscape today. As I mentioned in my video What is Literary Theory, which you can check out right here if you haven't, the main focus of literary analysis should always, always be on the text itself, and whatever theoretical framework we apply to our reading should only serve to supplement and enhance our interpretation of the literary text. Our task as good literary critics is to engage with the written material, not to advance a specific set of external ideas, whether feminism, psychoanalysis, or Marxism, by politicizing our reading of the text as a means to this end. Theory is only a framework for understanding literature from a specific angle, which can be an instructive way to engage with literary works through an interdisciplinary approach. So before we start, let's do a quick level set of what feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism mean in this context.
So Streetcar is actually a fantastic text to read through all three critical frameworks, largely because Blanche and Stella represent old and new modes of womanhood in a transitional period in American history. Blanche's behavior is steeped in a traumatic past and characterized by a whole host of neuroses, while Blanche and Stanley, or more broadly, the Dubois and the Kowalskis, symbolize the historic struggle between the white southern plantation masterclass and the multicultural immigrant worker class. in post-war 20th century America.
But as we read with these theories in mind, let's also consider that the play itself complicates ideas such as feminism, trauma, and class divides, as well as challenging the notion of them as being sufficient explanations of motivation for human behavior. So with all of those definitions and caveats out of the way, let's dive straight into the analysis. So to start, I think it's worth asking just how meaningful it is to hold Streetcar up to feminist expectations, and if doing so isn't a bit anachronistic or missing the point. Indeed, one of the reasons why Blanche is such a fascinating, disturbing character is that she seems to at once repudiate and embody feminist attributes as this damsel in distress who believes that using sexual charms to ensnare male attention is the only way to survive or get ahead in life. But equally, She is a fiercely defiant woman who won't let a tragedy-induced widowhood suppress her will to live, however desperately she goes about this.
If you've watched my Context in Streetcar video, you'll remember that Streetcar is set in a time period when patriarchy was the norm across the American South. So Blanche's ideas about needing a man to rely on for survival, Stanley's outright physical abuse of Stella despite her pregnancy, and the cruel social gossiping of Blanche's seedy past in Laurel as a prostitute wouldn't have stoked as much outrage from Williams' own audiences as it's likely to do so with us today. So we know that Stanley's behavior is chauvinistic, Blanche's attitude is self-victimizing, and Stella's passivity is disempowering.
But rather than filtering our perception of these characters through the patriarchal power dialectic of dominant men versus subjugated women, perhaps the better question is to ask whether Blanche and Stella aren't also actually feminists in their own way. in that both women at least make an effort to fight for a vision of existence that they desire, as delusional, detrimental, and self-destructive as their ideas may be. By the way guys, if you find this video helpful so far, I'd massively appreciate it if you could hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss out on any of my top-grade lit study content going forward. I'd also encourage you to check out my membership program by clicking the join button below if you want exclusive access to members-only study content and make special video requests.
I'll see you there. Despite the tragic trauma of her ex-husband's suicide, the despair of losing Belrev, and the series of missteps that Blanche took afterwards, i.e. being an escort at Hotel Flamingo, getting involved with a 17-year-old minor, Blanche continues to seek out ways to reinvent her identity and to revitalize her existence. first by leaving her old stomping ground of Laurel, Mississippi from the new world of New Orleans, Louisiana, despite being forced to do so, then by attempting to reveal her authentic, vulnerable side to Mitch, which is a process through which she tries to revive her sense of womanhood.
Even for Stella, who puts up with all the beating, disrespect and humiliation from Stanley, she is willing to accept the state of affairs because it is born in exchange for something she seems to want even more, i.e. Marrying Stanley enables her self-refashioning and breaking free from the archetypal mould of a southern belle. To Stella, then, a bit of physical and emotional abuse is a reasonable price to pay for a much more worthy goal, which is the existential baptism that will initiate her into the chaotic but vibrant world of new post-Bellum, post-war America, and to leave the deadening weight of a bygone Confederacy era behind.
Now, in a way, we could read Streetcar as a tragedy of what happens when someone just can't overcome their PTSD. It's suggested that Blanche descends into a spiral of self-destructive actions after her husband's suicide and her family's deaths, which become this massive traumatic tumour that metastasizes into a relentless self-sabotaging compulsion. There's too many psychoanalytic theories to cover in one video. There's the Freudian, Lacanian, Christovin ones, whatever. And even within Freudian, there's a boatload.
So I want to focus on one of the more controversial but intriguing concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis for streetcar, and that's the death drive, thanatos. The death drive is a counterintuitive idea that people are consciously driven to create circumstances that lead to their own death, for instance by repeating past traumatic or destructive experiences which would put them in peril despite their best irrational judgment. This death force counters the life force which Freud calls eros, which represents growth, reproduction, and sex.
vitality. And in Blanche's case, she once again occupies this curious liminal in-between space within this life versus death force framework, as she is someone who feels compelled to amplify her sexual instincts for survival, hence demonstrating a life force-driven desire, but at the same time behaves in a pattern that consistently puts her reputation at stake and her own life in compromising dangerous situations. Red in a Freudian light, there's room to see Blanche's trauma of witnessing both her family and her husband's death.
as a primary driver of her own will to death. Indeed, early on in scene one, when Blanche first arrives at Stella and Stanley's flat, her speech to Stella is at once histrionic and morbid, as she bemoans, all of those deaths, the long parade to the graveyard, father, mother, Margaret, that dreadful way. As the sole survival of the Dubois name still remaining in Laurel, Mississippi, Blanche is ironically made to feel lifeless and psychologically dead with the loss of the Bell Rove estate. And when Blanche claims that funerals are quiet but death's not always, sometimes they're breathing as horse and sometimes it rattles and sometimes they even cry out to you, don't let me go, Blanche portrays the idea of death not as a static endpoint or stable phenomenon which happens to each individual but as an osmotic force which by virtue of happening to one individual drives others to desire the experience of dying in perverse subconscious ways.
So as Blanche's self-destructive actions a reflection of her wish to repeat, as it were, the sequence of deaths to which she has been an observer in her life. Having seen first her husband commit suicide, then her parents and relatives pass away, as well as the symbolic death of their plantation home, Belrive, Blanche seems to want to live up to the successor persona. But of course she is unable to do so in the wholesome way by inheriting Belrive. She symbolically compensates by inheriting the pattern of death and destruction in those who have been close to her. Paradoxically, then, the fact that Blanche doesn't die by the end of the play but is instead made to live out the rest of her life in a mental institution actually compounds her tragic stature, because it implies that she has failed at the only remaining possibility of fulfilling a legacy role, being this daughter who must shoulder the baggage of having lost the family home and the wife who has both driven her husband to suicide and doesn't carry on his bloodline.
Now, one way to read Streetcar is to consider it as Marxist irony, where the working-class roughneck Stanley is actually the property owner, with power, over the erstwhile upper-class aristocrat Blanche, who is forced to seek shelter from someone she clearly considers very much beneath her. When Stanley ransacks Blanche's luggage and discovers her flamboyant clothes and jewellery, he compares her case to the treasure chest of a pirate, which is characteristically Marxist in its pejorative caricature of the capital of the Soviet Union. capitalist master as someone who steals and acquires wealth through exploitative or even illegitimate means. Yet the irony is that Stanley, the rogue proletariat, seems much savvier and more interested in matters of material ownership than Blanche, who is the actual bourgeoisie.
And we see this early on in scene two, with Stanley's interrogation of Stella about Belle Reve's loss and his claims to marital entitlement to Stella's inheritance under the Napoleonic Code. In fact, for all of Blanche's narcissism and myopia, she's not actually very materialistic, and the fancy clothes, jewelry, and haughty posturing are just misguided means for her to seek emotional connection and unconditional acceptance. In the Marxist capitalist-proletarian dialectic, Stanley and Blanche's nominal class positions don't really reflect the archetypal impulses and priorities that one would expect from a poster capitalist or a classic worker. Which leads to the more important question of how useful it is to engage with streetcar characters as agents or representatives of these fixed social class in the Marxist system.
Part of this can be explained by the transitional nature of the play's historical setting. 1940s New Orleans was a confluence point for New and Old America, which meant an explosion of new economic possibilities for rags to riches among the working class and with this a reshuffling of social power and dynamics between the rearguard old money families and the emergent multicultural communities looking to assert their values in a new world order. Perhaps the most we can say about Blanche from a class perspective, then, is how glaringly hollow and useless her class credentials are eventually exposed to be. It doesn't help her protect Belle Reve from being seized by accreditors. It doesn't help her access financial power or means in the long run.
It doesn't help her gain respect or attention from either rich or poor men. And most tragically of all, it doesn't do anything to help her develop a sense of security and strength that she needs to navigate the confusing disarray of changes in a world where her traditional southern charm and class no longer hold much purchase or prestige. Ultimately then, we see that class divides in streetcar are exposed to be nothing more than a cosmetic marker of one's birth, and that they don't carry meaningful weight in a nation as desperate to break free from the chains of its past, as Blanche is so desperate to hang on to them for the illusion of comforting familiarity. And there you have it guys, just a quick demo of me applying three of the most popular critical frameworks to an analysis of streetcar.
I hope this video has given you some new and inspiring ideas to further develop your own critical reading of the play. For your next video, I recommend that you watch my Context and Streetcar video, or you will find what's basically a historicist approach to applying historical information to our interpretation of the play. It's also pretty much necessary knowledge if you want to come up with in-depth analysis, so make sure that you watch it right here.
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And as always, I will see you in the next one. Bye!