Among the new plays of the 1947–48 season A Streetcar Named Desire was not only the best but the most indicative of the flexibility of realism. Strongly rooted in the reality of character and environment, and replete with stinging naturalistic detail, this tragedy of a fallen member of the Southern landed aristocracy, nevertheless, abounds in poetic overtones. These are justified, in part, by Blanche's refinement of language. She is well bred and she has had sufficient education to have taught school for a while. Her consuming need, moreover, is to make herself and others constantly aware of her refinement. She is concealing her tawdry past of alcoholism, incontinence, and common prostitution. She is compensating for her fallen estate. Her memories being as unbearable as her present circumstances, she must transform both by building a dream-world for herself. Obviously, this world contains a large measure of self-delusion, as well as a good deal of pretentious public behavior. She makes "poetry," which her cultural background enables her to "activize" in the form of "manners" and to articulate in dialogue. Her drama becomes "poetic drama." Not realistic drama with poetic varnish, but realistic drama naturally and necessitously poetic. How necessitously, we can realize from the fact that her very refinement betrays her by becoming excessive—hysterically fastidious rather than natural. Her manners become mannerisms, and her speech verges on preciosity. As if in atonement, she crucifies herself on a cross of culture. In Streetcar, poetic drama becomes psychological reality. (p. 355)
[There] is an ambiguity in Blanche's situation—or, rather, we have here a series of ambiguities. Placed in opposition to Stanley Kowalski at the beginning of the play, she is the aristocrat who condescends to the plebeian when she is not actually scorning him. This is compulsive conduct on her part, because she must feel superior to her sister's husband if she is not to feel inferior in view of her helplessness. But her behavior does not commend her to us. She is also an element of disease threatening the healthiness of her sister's relations with Stan. We can be grateful at first when Stan, disconcerted by Blanche, tries to take Blanche down a peg. Yet there is a certain splendor in Blanche's personality—a tragic splendor until the clinical aspects of her character dim it. Her sister avoided shipwreck by compromise—by marrying Stan and by satiating herself at the trough of commonplace gratifications in marriage. Stella is fortunate in this respect, as ordinary people, who have an aptitude for "the blisses of the commonplace," are fortunate. Blanche, on the contrary, cannot renounce her view of herself as a rare individual. Like other tragic characters, she longs for "the blisses of the commonplace" but is as incapable of accepting them as she is incapable of courting them efficiently. Tragic characters are "efficient" only in courting, suffering and encompassing their own destruction. Antigone, Oedipus, Hamlet, and Lear are tremendously efficient in this respect. Therein lies their arête, their specialness and stature, even when it is wrapped in folly, as in the case of Lear's dotage. Therein lies also their ultimate hamartia, or tragic flaw, which is, above all, their inability to recognize, in the words of Keats, that life has its impossibilities.
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