Reigh - Old South Vs New America

• throGabi Reigh reveals the conflict running through Williams’ play between a set of values and cultural attitudes deriving from a past era in America’s history and the new, more mulitcultural and urban world that has suspended it. She shows how the transfer of power is acted, above all, through the dramatic conflict between Blanche and Stanley.

• Through the power struggle between Blanche and Stanley, Williams retells a conflict between two cultures which has its roots in the american Civil War, more than 80 years earlier.

• Williams work is a late echo of the Southern Gothic tradition.

• Like Williams, fellow Southern writers, depicted the Old South as defeated as much by its own corruption as by the threat of a newly emerging society.

Contrasts of Costumes

• The contrast between Stanley and Blanche’s social backgrounds is established by Williams from the beginning of the play through the use of costume.

• Blanche’s arrival at Elysian fields ‘daintly dressed in a white suit’ as if she were ‘arriving (…) at a cocktail party’ identifies her as belonging to an elite of inherited wealth and privillege, whose life is centred around pleasure rather than work.

• Commenting on Blanche’s ‘incongrous’ presence at elysian feilds, Thomas Porter describes Streetcar’s plot as ‘an inverted version of the Civil war romance'.

• Stanley’s costume forms a stark contrast to Blanche’s elegant attire, as his ‘blue denim work clothes’ and ‘bowling jacket’ portray him as belonging to a modern America where hard work is needed in order to succeed and sport and popular culture have replaced intellectual pursuits.

• During the rape scene which forms the dramatic climax of the play, the defeat of the values and culture that Blanche stands for is again symbolically portrayed through costume as Blanche’s glamorous clothes that have been replaced by a ‘soiled and crumpled white satin evening gown’, foreshadowing her final humiliation by Stanley, triumphant in his ‘brilliant pyjama coat’.

The Old South

• Like other writers of the Southern Gothic, Williams had an ambivalent relationship with the Old South, exposing corruption which led to its downfall at the same time as lamenting the disappearance of the civillisation and romantic chivalry.

• When Stanley throws out the window the white radio playing the waltz which Blanche and Mitch dance to, nostalgically trying to recapture a lost chivalric world that they both yearn for, his actions embodies the new world’s violent rejection of what it considers irrelevant, ‘hoity-tioity’ snobbery.

• The decline of Blanche during the course of the play mirrors the crisis of the Old South after its deefeat in the Civil war.

• Blanche, like other characters of the Southern Gothic, is mentally unstable and increasingly marganilised in a rapidly changing world.

• Images of death, an important trope of the Southern Gothic, abound in the play, suggesting that Blanche is the last survivor of a world destroyed by its own excesses.

• Williams conveys how the world of the Old South has become merely a distant dream in modern America, symbolised by the name of the DuBois plantation ‘Belle Reve’ (beautiful dream.)

• The downfall of the aristocratic DuBois family is reminiscent of an earlier example of Southern Gothic Literature, Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ (1839)

• Blanche is haunted by these deaths and the ghosts of her past take on a physical presence in the Mexican woman seeing ‘flores para los muertos’. Her refrain punctuates Blanche's descriptions of her attempts to regain youth and vitality by vampirically preying on young men, as she tells Mitch that the opposite to ‘death…is desire’

• Blanche’s ‘intimacies with strangers’ are also the catalyst of her disgrace and eventual downfall.

• The new society of elyisan fields sees Blanche as ‘unclean’’ as a result of her affairs.

New America, New Vitality

• Blanche is haunted by the memory of her lost husband which continually revisits her through the polka tune.

• The motif suggests Blanche is paralysed by the past, and her inability to free herself from the influence of her dead husband has parallels to Williams Faulkner’s Gothic short story ‘A rose for Emily’, where a woman keeps the corpse of her lover in her bedroom until her death.

• In contrast, Stanley is predominantly associated with images of life and vitality, suggesting that the future belongs to the new world that he represents.

• Stanley’s power and vivacity is highlighted as he is described as the ‘gaudy seed-bearer’, whose ‘animal joy’ and ‘drive’ even make Blanche concede to Stella that

‘he’s what we’ve got to mix our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve and have to go on without Belle Reve to protect us’

• Stanley and Stella’s baby is the ultimate proof of the vital spirit of new America inheriting the future, as Thomas P.Adler argues that:

‘just as the plantation served as a symbol of the past, Stanley and Stella’s baby stands for the way the ‘working class’ ethos will be carried into the future’

• To some extent, this new society moves away from the iniquities of the Old South. It sees itself as an egalitarian world where ‘every man is a king’ and where, as the multicultural gathering of the poker match illustrates, there is a ‘relatively easy intermingling of races.’

• It is also a world, which thrills Stella, who embraces it wholeheartedly through her devotion to Stanley, magentically drawn back to him even after his violent outbursts.

• In contrast, Blanche sees Stanley’s behaviour not as exciting but as emblematic of a brutal, amoral world.

• Stanley’s desire to use his power to debase those he resntfully sees as belonging to the privilleged old world can be seen when he reminds Stella that marrying her he has ‘pulled her down off (the) columns’ of Belle Reve, foricibly bringing her down to his level.

• Blanche calls Stanley ‘survivor of the stone age’, and the primitive motif can be traced from the opening scene of the play, where Stanley, the hunter gatherer, ‘heaves’ the ‘red-stained’ package at Stella, to its finale, where the expressionist devices such as ‘the inhuman jungle voices’ amplify Stanley’s savage attack on Blanche.

• New America, though to some extent a more tolerant land of opportunity, is largely portrayed as intellectually and ethically regressive.

The Triumph of the New America

• The transfer of power from the old culture to the new begins from the second scene of the play where Blanche relinquishes the legal documents relating to the loss of Stanley’s ‘big capable hands’.

• Blanche becomes increasingly marganilised in Stanley’s ‘terrority’ and her frequent retreats to the bathroom testify to her isolation and alienation in a household where she is not welcome.

• She takes refuge in an inner world of fantasy, but even this is invaded and torn apart by Stanley who exposes it as mere ‘lies and conceit and tricks’, bringing about her mental breakdown.

• Leanord Quirino, says that ‘The Cards indicate a Voyage on A Streetcar Named Desire’