Desire and Death in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

• Main Authors: Pei-Wen Wang, 王佩雯
• Other Authors: 黃逸民
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/44889972383540849109

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 98 === Drawing on Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminie and Sigmund Freud’s instinctual dualism of Eros and death, this thesis attempts to explore how gender differences and the alloy of human instincts─desire and death─provoke the opposition between Blanche DoBois and Stanley Kowalski and especially Blanche’s inner conflict with herself in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Chapter One will focus on the external factors which cause Blanche to be opposed to Stanley and vice versa. Their differences in social backgrounds─Blanche is the representative of southern aristocrat while Stanley is that of working class─clearly prefigure their incompatibility. From the perspective of Michel Foucault’s concept of social regulation and normalization, their differences in social norms in terms of their social backgrounds─Blanche adheres to the southern aristocratic norm while Stanley advocates the primitive norm─lead to their ensuing opposition in Elysian Fields. Chapter Two will turn to Cixous’s concept of phallocentrism to explore another cause of their inexorable antagonism, that is to say gender differences. Throughout many poker nights in this play, Stanley could be conceived of as the king who seizes the throne of Elysian Fields by means of male potency, subjugation of female characters, and violence against those who try to pose a challenge to his authority. Blanche attempts to stage a revolt against Stanley’s phallocentric realm by abetting Stella to emancipate from her husband’s ferocity. Based on Cixous’s concept of écriture féminie, Blanche’s abundant desires could be regarded as a way of inscribing her feminine desires onto her body (or expressing Williams’s sexuality in this drama), since the playwright claims that he identifies with Blanche. The revelation of her desires transgresses the phallocentric inhibition that women should be passive nonentities and even disorients Stanley’s male potency. Chapter Three will deal with Blanche’s inner opposition between desire and death from two perspectives. The first half of this chapter will attempt to decipher the enigma of her inner conflict in terms of Freud’s psychic opposition between the instinct of Eros and that of death. Blanche’s self-torment, in the form of having intimacies with strangers and capitulating to Stanley’s rape, is driven by her sense of guilt for her husband Allan’s suicide, that is to say the derivative of the instinct of death. The second half of this chapter will turn to Cixous’s concept of writing through death to shed light on her inner association of desire with death. Based on Cixous’s affirmation that the only passage for a writer to penetrate into truths is through death, we could deduce that Blanche’s initiation of intimacies/William’s commencement of writing are both on the verge of death: she undergoes Allan’s death, while he withstands his sister Rose’s total derangement. To sum up, Blanche’s ultimate nervous breakdown should not be completely interpreted as her final downfall. To a certain degree, Tennessee Williams, in the disguise of Blanche, may suggest that the birth of Stella’s baby appears to be Blanche’s rebirth. Through the journey of desire release, she recuperates her identity as a woman/human in lieu of a silent nonentity.