Fantasy, Romance, and Deception in A Streetcar Named Desire

Alvin B. Kernan believes there are metaphors throughout the early stages of the book which symbolize Blanche’s issues. He states realism in Streetcar is identified with the bright light of the naked bulb that exposes Blanche’s aging face. This symbolizes Blanche’s aging ideals. Kernan explains that she turns away from the misery of reality at Belle Reve to her fairy tale romantic endeavors. Blanche, when accused of deliberate deception says only, “I didn’t lie in my heart.” As an educated audience, we know her hear

Stanley and Stella not only differ with Blanche in their social class, but also with their views of sex and intimacy. To Stanley and Stella, it is about a raw yearning for romance, sensuality, and foreplay, eventually followed by sex. Although Blanche also has a raw desire for sex, it is not of her tradition to succumb to the desires and romance now associated with sex. Corrigan states, “Since the ‘tradition’ allows no place for the physical and sensual, she rejects this aspect [of sex]”(56). Sievers shares this view, saying, “In A Streetcar Named Desire…[Williams] has shown Blanche struggling to master her conflicting drives of sex and super ego, to live up to an inner image of a belle of the Old South”(460-61). It is the conflicting drives that she cannot control which lead to her downfall. “[Blanche’s] two destroyers, desire and Stanley Kowalski, are thus made to hover like fateful accomplices over Blanche”(Quirino 472). Blanche’s efforts to “educate” Stanley and Stella in the ancient, old South traditions are violently repelled and denied.

Tennessee Williams has a flair for writing about reality clashing with fantasy in some of his plays. In The Glass Menagerie, Laura’s unrealistic grasp on life clashes with Tom’s ability to function in the “real” world. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there is a combination of raw reality and deliberate fantasy between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois (Riddel 24). Williams throughout Streetcar creates constant conflict between Blanche and either Stanley, Mitch, or Stella. The audience of the play, however, is presented with polar views of the drama (Kernan 17) from the “realistic” view of Stanley and the “non-realistic” view of his sister-in-law, Blanche. Blanche’s world is filled with illusions including herself, “I fib a good deal. After all, a woman’s charm is fifty percent illusion”(41). Blanche has full awareness of her own lies and openly admits it. Fantasy colliding with reality creates a series of conflicts throughout Streetcar.

In his essay “The Tragic Downfall of Blanche DuBois,” Leonard Berkman determines the catalyst of Blanche DuBois’s eventual psychological downfall to the asylum as her constant desire for sex while trying to preserve her dignity, self-regard, and upper class image. Berkman attributes her lust for sex, intimacy, and romance as a result of her failed marriage with Allan. The essay then blames Blanche’s troubles on her fear that eventually having sex will prevent future intimacy. Blanche believes that once she and a man have sex, he will no longer want to share the same level of intimacy with her again. He focuses on Blanche DuBois’s epic tragedies as centers for her mental wreck. Although she frowns upon “fornications” of any sort, she tempts Mitch, in Berkman’s words, “with the intermingling of sex with compassion that Blanche longs for; sex without compassion, that she cannot accept.” More specifically Berkman says, “the point of Blanche’s downfall [is] the finding herself turned by impulses towards truth in intimacy into the whore-image from which, through truth, she struggles to escape.” In summation, Berkman finds Blanche to be in a continual search for the confidence and romance of a relationship, once provided by the late Allan Grey.

[Blanche] is on the side of civilization and refinement. But the age has placed her in a tragic dilemma. She looks about for a tradition according to which she may life and a civilization to which she can be loyal. She finds none. [Our new society] has lost its shape. (462)

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