In Blanche DuBois, the leading character of A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams is accused of having created a sexual pervert, who is insane by the end of the play, and whose portrayal is so particular as to have little relevance to life, or meaning to the American theatre. Williams, however, makes the point that it is the isolation resulting from social and hereditary factors which makes Blanche abnormal. Doubtless the accusation that Williams is strongly influenced by D. H. Lawrence is also true, but the playwright has made purposeful use of the sexual instinct by dramatizing its contrasting effect in two sisters and cannot be charged with mere sensationalism. The theme of the play, like that of Paul Green's The House of Connelly, indicates that members of the Southern plantation-owning class cannot exist in isolation. Stella is able to adapt herself to a new mode of living through her intense physical love for the Polish Stanley Kowalski, whereas Blanche cannot relate herself to any mode of life open to her in the modern age, and so perishes. Since, as Erich Fromm points out, "Complete isolation is unbearable and incompatible with sanity," it is obvious that her end is the only possible logical conclusion to the drama. (pp. 140-41)
[As in] The Glass Menagerie, the fact of the unbearable physical closeness of human beings to each other and their psychic separateness is dramatized with clarity in A Streetcar Named Desire. The isolating effect of crowded conditions is perhaps made even more explicit than in the other [play],… and the irony of the fact that the bathroom, associated with Stanley's vulgarity, is also Blanche's only place of retreat and relaxation is symbolic of the theme of the two sisters—one of whom belongs through the most physical of means, the other of whom cuts herself off from the life of the household…. The blows which [Blanche] suffers … are enough to vanquish the spirit of a woman better equipped than Blanche to meet the loneliness of poverty and the alienation from all loved ones…. It is no wonder that she, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, speaks of her life in the apartment as "a trap." She has run like a mouse to a far corner and cannot escape. Reality is unbearable. Tom gets away by joining the Merchant Marine; but with every possible tie to life broken, Blanche can escape only into insanity. (pp. 141-42)
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