Dr Elaenor Spencer Regan - Is A Streetcar Named Desire a Poetic Tragedie?

Poses the question: Can Blanche be seen as a tragic protagonist?

Aristotle: (In his work ‘poetics written over 300 years BC) Tragedy should function as an illumination of the pitiable and the fearful in human existence. The aim of a tragedy is to provoke pity and fear for the protagonist.

• For Aristotle though, what a character does is more important than their motivations.

• In these tragedies, the protagonist will always be of high birth.

• The higher their position at first, the greater the fall, the greater catharsis.

• 1949 Arthur Miller wrote ‘The Tragedy of the Common Man’ - useful for considering streetcar.

• Miller: ‘I believe that the common man is as apt a figure for tragedy as the highborn man.’

How is this relevant to Blanche?

• Blanche is a moth- first impressions of Blanche are as fragile and pure. The moth is a familiar literary trope- trnascience, death. The moth has a glamorous and self destructive quality.

• Blanche: ‘I don’t want realism, I want magic. I try to give that to people… I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be the truth.’

• Blanche’s desperate attempts to hold onto something of beauty, is arguably about more than just vanity. She needs to maintain the illusions of herself and she can’t or won’t accept what the world is.

• Blanche is an emblem of a dying culture. It isn’t really Blanche who dies, it is the old world values that she represents.

• Stanley represents animalistic, new world cynicism.

• She cannot make the values that she stands for triumph over the harder, colder world of realism that Stanley forces her to recognise.

• The play functions as a poetic, rather than a realistic tragedy.

• The use of ‘plastic’ theatre techniques are more and more regularly used to emphasise her perceptions of the world e.g. the ‘inhuman voices’ the ‘sinuous’ and threatening shadows on the walls which combine to show us the very genuine fear she is experiencing.

• This suggests that Williams wants Blanche to be seen as a tragic, sympathetic heorine.

• We are allowed to become psychologically intimate with Blanche.

• She is the one for whom we are actively encouraged to feel both pity and fear.