Since Tennessee Williams has had a persistent interest in the idea of tragedy, there is good reason for looking at his serious plays in the light of a theory of tragedy. In this essay the term tragedy is used for a drama that is centrally concerned with a split personality, not a pathological split, such as Williams sometimes dramatizes, but a representative division between the different imperatives and impulses that human beings feel. A tragic character is strong enough so that an impulse that drives him can be destructive rather than simply annoying, and so that some kind of reordering is imaginable for him. Since reordering implies consciousness of what one is and has done, a tragic character needs the kind of intelligence that will make him more than a blind automaton in action and feeling. (p. 770)
In his earlier plays Williams tends to focus his attention on characters who don't come through, who because of some weakness or disability stay out of the world or opt out of it. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (1944) cannot face the ordinary problems of life; Blanche Dubois in Streetcar Named Desire (1947) lacks stamina to bear up under the stresses that experience brings. Laura stays at home for good; Blanche ends up in a sanatorium. Williams' early predilection for the structure of melodrama appears in another way in his male protagonists, who face the world vigorously and in their own ways seem headed for triumph; Tom Wingfield escapes from financial constraint and family burdens to travel and write, and Stanley Kowalski, endowed with sexual virility and a keen sense of how the world goes, is ready to charge over all obstacles. So we have the familiar dualism of victors and victims. But Streetcar has other convolutions that come out of a richer imagination. There is the paradoxical attraction, for a moment at least, of opposites: Stanley, carrying the no-longer-resistant Blanche into the bedroom, tells her, "We've had this date with each other from the beginning!"… The sexual common ground points up a world of imperfect choices: in Blanche, sexuality is allied with indiscriminateness, sentimentality, a decayed but yet not wholly unattractive gentility, in a word, the end of a line, the collapse of a tradition; in Stanley, with a coarse new order, vigorous but rude and boorish. Stella, Stanley's wife and Blanche's sister, has to make a choice: she cries in bitter grief for the sister, but chooses Stanley, whose "maleness," as Williams' master Lawrence might call it, is evidently meant to compensate for conspicuous narrowness, gaucherie, and arrogance (though the arrogance is modified in turn by his dependence on Stella). What is notable here is Williams' improvement on the basic Lawrence melodrama, which, as in Lady Chatterley and St. Mawr, puts sexuality and all the other virtues on one side, and nonsexuality and the vices on the other.
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