摘要
女性地位、女性权利、两性关系是当今社会正在研究的重要热点问题之一，小说、剧作等文学作品作为反映社会、时代的一面“镜子”，成为了重要的研究对象。《欲望号街车》这部作品里充斥着男性女性之间的矛盾与冲突，适合从女性主义视角进行分析研究。此外，这部著作荣获普利策奖，具有很高的研究价值。而西方在女性主义批判这一方向上所做的研究实践，与国内相比更加系统、成熟、完善，国内学者在50多年前才开始逐渐对此主题有一定研究。因此，本课题从女性主义视角出发，运用西方的女性主义理论，对该作品中出现的两性冲突、女性话语权缺失、女性绝望、女性压迫等现象进行分析，探究剧中主要女性角色白兰琪、斯黛拉在父权制宰治的社会环境下的真实处境，旨在丰富完善国内对《欲望号街车》这部作品的女性主义视角研究，同时为研究相同课题的其他研究者提供参考。
关键词：欲望号街车；女性主义；性别不平等；文学批评；父权宰制
Abstract
Women’s social status, female rights and the relationship between genders have become one of the most important hot issues being studied in contemporary society. And novels, plays, as well as other sorts of literary works, which serve as a mirror reflecting society of different specific times, have been reckoned as excellent research objects. A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Thomas Lanier Williams III, also known as Tennessee Williams, is an outstanding playscript full of contradictions and conflict between male and female, making it a feasible and suitable work to be analyzed from the perspective of feminism literary critics. What’s more, this play has awarded Pulitzer Price which makes it more valuable to be researched. Western theories on feminism are more systematic and mature than domestic counterpart, as the western scholars have conducted massive studies on feminism literary critics while Chinese scholars haven’t developed on this topic until past five decades. Thus, this thesis will generally analyze A Streetcar Named Desire, employing relevant theories of western feminism literary critics (studies by American scholars mostly) ,focusing on the gender inequality against females, female desperation and the lost right of female speech, to unveil the real living situation of female protagonists—Blanche and Stella in the patriarchal dominance society (specifically, Stanley’s dominance in this play). This thesis will generally magnify how Tennessee Williams has represented his female figures, especially Stella and Blanche, in this play, and, how patriarchal influences the characters.
Key Words: Desire number street car; feminism; gender inequality; literary criticism; patriarchal system
1 Introduction
In contemporary society, gender issues have increasingly been a hotspot of public awareness and, the contradictions and conflicts between male and female urgently need to be solved. Tennessee Williams is one of the most eminent American playwrights. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire, together with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is enlisted into the three finest American tragedies. Once being published, this drama has obtained great achievements and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Donaldson Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play. A Streetcar Named Desire, written in 1947, is a critique of post-war American society, epitomizing the period when large amounts of restrictions and oppressions were put on women’s lives. It examines the living circumstances of female at that time when chauvinism was rampant and demonstrates the struggle of women had to confront and the reality that they were treated as men’s inferiors. In other words, males always patronized and suppressed females, making them subservient to males and shared no rights in domestic matters. Thus, females were unable to decide what their lives should be.
Being a successful work, A Streetcar Named Desire has then become a focus of numerous critics. According to critics, the literary works of Tennessee Williams mostly are the reflections of his strong sentimental fluctuation on his own miserable life. A Streetcar Named Desire is known for its sincere portrayal of moral degradation, the explosive power of production and the refined characterization. “The idea of a woman coming to terms with life and shattering the image which no longer possible in the disintegration of society and the death of the old aristocracy, is the theme of A Streetcar Named Desire” (Khan 191). Feminism is a significant socio-political movement for the liberation of women in a society which is predominantly patriarchal. And many feminist critics have reckoned that literary works authored by males is biased due to its marginalized, subservient depiction of females to meet men’s pleasure and quench own fears of their shaken dominating position. This thesis will be divided into three main parts: the first chapter gives a basic literary review of former studies both abroad and at home and a general introduction of feminism literary theory; the following chapter elaborates on the female oppression, spiritual awakening and rebellion; the last chapter reveals the fate of female protagonists and the main idea of this play. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a general academic reference for researchers who study on the same topic, and a positive guidance to tackle gender contradictions and advance the progress of gender equality.
2 Analysis on the Protagonists
It is reasonable that a general analysis on the main male and female characters is needed if this thesis attempts to interpret the drama from the perspective of feminism. Thus, this chapter will elaborate on the image of Stanley Kowalski, Stella Dubois and Blanche Dubois and their behaviors in the patriarchal society.
2.1 Hegemonic Male Dominance—Stanley Kowalski
“Toughen up and be a man!” It is the battle cry of a typical patriarchal society, which is a seemingly innocent instructions on men throughout several ages, especially the twentieth century when the “dreamland of freedom” titled America entered into its transitional period from post-WWII reconstruction to the industrialized society. In this previously traumatized nation, the whole society indulged in the hedonistic atmosphere to fill the void of losing civilization and morality after a series of war’s onset. Just as Oscar Wilde remarked that America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. Thus, men also have experienced an unprecedented but prevalent twist in the society’s high expectations during the 1950s that resulted an ideal man whom only very few men were competent enough to become. Stanley Kowalski, a Polish immigrant and a former veteran returning from WWII frontline, exemplified the prevalent expectation of ideal male in American society. Though being a vulgar worker, Stanley ranks the top in the domestic hierarchy. Stanley was depicted as an uncultivated beast enjoying his small piece of domain when he made his first entrance in the play—he, in a bowling jacket, carries with him a package of meat, of which the packing paper stained with blood. He yells for Stella, to come out on the stairs and throws the meat up to her. These behaviors immediately trigger vigilant critics’ sense as Stanley conducting some sort of primitive rite of bringing meat home to show his identity as a family supporter as well as indicating Stella’s subjugation to his virility. “Stanley has trained his wife to catch his meat, in every sense.” (Stanton 49) He is the breadwinner, the sole provider to support his family and his mediocre lifestyle while he has never engaged in and cared about any domestic chores even Stella’s pregnancy. What this barbaric male immerses himself in are only cheap thrills such as dirty jokes, bowling, poker games, gluttony, and alcohol, which is the bestowal of the patriarchy. Simone de Beauvoir points out in her book The Second Sex, “males don’t interpret females according to females themselves, whereas they regard females as independent ones… males can be taken as the reference to define and distinguish females, while the reference to define and distinguish males cannot be females. ‘She’ is the Essential in opposition of the Inessential. ‘He’ is the subject and the Absolute, whereas ‘she’ is the Other.” (Beauvoir, 1998:11) As Beauvoir suggests that in a patriarchal society, males are entitled to positively take the initiative while females play a passive and dismissed role. Thus, Stanley devalues Stella who used to be a Southern lady born in a declined family of nobility, for Stella must depend on him to live. Stanley takes pride in himself being a genuine man throughout the play so that any castrating threats posed to his manpower result in his brute retaliation. “All men are kings! And do never forget I am the king around here!” is the manifesto in this morbid society. Thus, Blanche’s appearance unquestionably thwarts his reign over his territory.
2.2 Female Desperation —Stella Kowalski
“Stella, Stella for star!”, as Blanche cried in Scene 1 when the Dubois sisters reunited, without knowing that the “star” no longer retains her celestial elegance and inherent nobility of the upper class. Having left the spiritually declined Belle Reve for the physically vibrant French Quarter, Stella since then has no longer being nostalgic as Blanche but adapts to the mundane lifestyle. She is content with the physical pleasure that Stanley could and only offer her, trying to quench the lust through which her void of fading glory can be filled. Stella chooses to escape from her ancestral homestead where no male protector remains. Evidently, in such a male-dominating society, a female, raised in a wealthy Southern family, conforms to the social norms and relies on and pleases male. Stella seeks out to trade her nobility with liberation and survival while never being conscious about her docility and enslavement to Stanley’s male supremacy. Starting from scene 1, Stella shows no reluctance towards Stanley—she appears at once on the upstairs like a cadet hearing the instruction of commander and willingly catches the dirty package of meat that Stanley throws to her with laugh on her face. Virginia Woolf thinks that “women’s independent economic status is the material foundation to obtain personal freedom. If women are dependent on men economically, they are deprived of all the equal rights.” (Wu 2005:69) Stella has given up her genteel manners for the excitement of watching Stanley brutally smash all the light bulbs in their wedding night. When Blanche resorts to her, Stella has degraded herself as a captive but devout worshipper of her husband and shackles herself in the mental prison where Stanley’s world and friends define the parameters of her own, exactly the same as her neighbor, Eunice. A week’s physical separation from Stanley will make her go “wild”. Even the physical abuse and oral humiliation cannot wake up this pretentiously be-muted ‘little woman’—at the end of scene 3 in the play, Stella dismisses Blanche’s persuasion, runs downstairs and surrenders herself to the brutal man who had just beaten her few minutes before. It is comprehendible that in scene 7, Stella collaborates with her “beloved” husband to conspire against Blanche. Throughout the play, confronting with Blanche’s heartly indication of her reality, Stella is always reluctant to assent that her situation in the marriage is desperate and is the one that she intends to get rid of. No matter when it comes to the choice between Stanley and Blanche, it ends up in her yield to Stanley’s embrace. It is clearly that Stella’s life as her husband’s “baby doll” is desperate.
2.3 Awakened Female—Blanche Dubois
Unlike her sister, Blanche, just as the implication of her name—purity and chastity, has not discarded her manner and lifestyle that she inherited from Southern little bourgeoise. She is stunned by the ragged apartment of Stella. Scholar reckons that “Father Dubois” is the first male who exerts powerful influence on Blanche and Stella. Once it dawns on the two sisters that the family is decaying, they immediately turn to other males for sanctuary. (Liu 2007, 101) Blanche blames Stella for her betrayal of abandoning the glory-faded Belle Reve and resort to tasteless Stanley for protection of manliness and quenching of her sexual desire. However, Blanche dose not senses that her runaway with Allan Gray, her late homosexual husband, is just another kind of dodge away from the cruel reality. She fails to possess a normal marriage with Allan whose suicide becomes the haunting nightmare that she could never disperse while Stella, though belittled as the byproduct of Stanley, successfully find her asylum of male protection. It is Blanche’ s coming that interrupts their unprivileged but happy life. From the very moment when Blanche intrudes upon Kowalski household, she poses a great threat towards Stanley’s ruling over his small kingdom. As critic Alice Griffin writes, Williams witfully sets Blanche’s former profession as a school English teacher, which provides himself a great chance to conduct the wordplay and simultaneously enhance a stark comparison between Blanche and her male antagonist, Stanley. (Tharpe 79) Blanche persists to describe the blue-collar worker Stanley as common, a Polack and an animal, all of which gradually infuriate him. In addition, after her appearance, Stella’s ideology as a female seems to be infiltrated by Blanche’s defiance against male that she starts to waver upon the hegemony of Stanley and calls him an animal for the first time in their quarrel. Blanche’s apparent attacks on his virility provoke Stanley and make him determine to take actions to defend his masculinity. Just as an author writes in an analysis on gender roles and television in the 1950s “Trying to over-fulfill one’s manliness because of the fear of not being manly enough often leads to violence” (The Artifice). In the following scenes, Blanche continues to despise and scorns Stanley in front of Stella, insinuating that she and her sister are superior to him, and he is incompatible with his wife. And, except persuading Stella to leave him, Blanche even tries all the way to ask Stanley’s best friend, Mitch to marry her. These behaviors are no longer seems to be a female shrinking into the corner, passively waiting to be chosen by men but actively pursuing love instead. According to Kate Millet, the essential relationship between male and female is the issue of dominating and dominated. The present liberation of women, especially the new right of female to seek for love, makes women the dominating role. Blanche dares to challenge Stanley’s dominance and encourage Stella’s confrontation against Stanley, demonstrates her figure as an awakening female in the male-centric society.
3 Revelation of Females’ Fate
This chapter will elaborate on how the main female characters are influenced by the patriarchy, how their fates are predestined in the play and the reasons behind, as well as the subject matter through the lens of feminism.
3.1 Patriarchy influences
Williams notes that “The meaning that A Streetcar Named Desire want to express is that the brutality of modern society raped those who are tender, sensitive and elegant.” (Wang, 1992:79) In the play, both Blanche and Stella are the sacrifice of patriarchy. Ever since they were born, they established a dependence on their father, the heir of old money. They were brought up in Belle Reve plantation, self-contained and self-efficient, which is exactly an epitome of the pre-war Southern civilization in America. The South believe in “itself to be unique, because it projected itself as such through its writers and spokesmen, because it manufactured a folklore of plantation aristocracy, of the magnolia paradise of the antebellum days, of the Greek society and the peculiar institution of slavery, of the Lost Cause, of White Supremacy, and of the need to be born there to understand it all, and Southerners repeated this litany so many times that it became true—or almost so.” (Horton, 1987: 377) The outline of the south is on the basis of idealized aristocracy and chivalry, according to which female are raised as gracious lady affiliated to their husbands. Kate Millet holds in Sexual Politics that the gender relation between males and females is a kind of power one, that is “sexual politics” (Jin, 2004:595) In the south, male gain control over money, power and even women because the traditional Southern economic structure liberates women from labor. Women endeavor to keep their beauty, behave elegantly and please men. The Marxism feminist critics point that the oppression women suffer from and women’s reliance upon men results from their failed trial to be economically as well as mentally independent. (Luo, 2004:100) Thus, women are deprived of the right to decide their own fate and the strength to confront with men, leading to the descent of both domestic and societal status.
3.2 Female’s fate
From argument above, it can be easily understood that why Stella immediately leaves Belle Reve and Blanche behind and finds a man’s man, Stanley to provide her the haven her father can no longer provide to her. She inherits and abides by the Southern conventions and is willing to serve as her husband’s baby doll and be held in his sexual thralldom. Women’s dependance on men could also be manifested by Blanche. She whines to Stella in scene 1 during their reunion that “You left! I stayed and struggled! You came to New Orleans and looked out for yourself! I stayed at Belle Reve and tried to hold it together! I’m not meaning this in any reproachful way, but all the burden descended on my shoulders.” (Williams, 1947;24) It is obvious that Blanche is reluctant to take care of her ailing father and the business that he late left for her and reckon herself incompetent and irresponsible to deal with it.
After her father died, liberated from the first male that controls her, Blanche falls in love with and marries to a romantic young boy, Allan Gray. On the contrary of Stella’s sensual desire to Stanley, Blanche is passionately mesmerized by Allan’s poetics and talent. However, it turns out that Allan is gay and caught by Blanche in the bed with another man. This lamentable romance fails to attain its longevity and ends up with the young swain’s suicide and Blanche’s first disillusionment. Losing her adored husband and financial support, Belle Reve, Blanche is pushed to the verge of emotional collapse. On the one hand, she feels regretful and guilty to husband’s death for her refusal to help him. As the descendance of conservative puritans, homosexuality is non-tolerable by her and her contemporaries. On the other hand, the traditional norms of phallocentric surrounding triggers her anxiety that she is aging and has to find a man to lean on as soon as possible. Hence, she moves to Laurel and exhausts her tricks that she has learned to lure men and enjoy the temporary gratification of sex to refill her hollowed heart. Beauvoir said that it is the education that females receive since they were child degrades themselves as the affiliation of men and makes them willingly discard their rights of independence. (Liu, 2004;186) This kind of education restrains women and permeates into their ideology that it is their duty to behave like a demure lady to attract men to rely on. And, to cement their affiliating status, they must master all the means whatsoever to be beckoning in front men. The male-worshipping society ceaselessly squeezes female’s space, identity and freedom. Even if Blanche finds a decent vocation as an English teacher, she tells Mitch that a teacher’s salary is barely sufficient for her living expenses. “I didn’t save a penny last year and so I had to come here for the summer.” (Williams, 1947;106) Blanche could not totally abandon her former extravagant lifestyle and her meager income as a teacher could merely make her ends meet. Thus, she is desperate to flirt with males due to her unfathomable sense of insecurity and belonging, which are the persecution patriarchy render upon her. Consequently, she is banished out of Laurel with a notoriety of seducing her 17-year-old student. Losing Belle Reve and occupation and evicted from Laurel, Blanche’s elder sister, Stella thus becomes her last resort. After accommodating in Kowalski’s, Blanche somehow recognizes the truth of patriarchy through Stanley and deeply despises it, regardless of her unquenchable desire to males including Stanley from time to time, fearing that her gorgeousness will soon fade away. Maybe only through dependence on various men, flirtation with them and establish sexual relationship with them, can she fill up her empty heart, and find a shelter and sense of security. Mitch is just her last shelter, where she may “have a rest” and “breathe quietly again”. Based on the fact that Stanley knows Blanche’s dissolute past, when facing a lady only in “a white satin evening gown”, it is impossible for him to remain unmoved. In addition, Blanche’s continuous strikes upon him ignite the fuse of his atrocious retaliation. So eventually when his wife is sent to hospital to have the baby, he rapes her, which makes her mentality breakdown.
Stella is apparently the counterpart of Blanche. To some extents, she is willing to enslaves herself to her husband’s manliness and yields to his andro-magnetism Stella is doomed to be subservient to Stanley at the beginning. Just like her animalistic husband’s image as an idealized male, Stella is the prototype of tamed female in 1950s and is the inevitable status of most women. She compromises to the reality and becomes internally numb to atrocities that real life throws to her. Even though she flees from the suffocating South plantation and restrictive dogma, which strips her right to choose her husband, Stella falls prey to the savage sexual predator, Stanley. Their marriage is commercialized as a barter between sex and shelter. Stanley, the worshiped patriarch in his small kingdom, dehumanizes Stella and any other female, merely regarding them as the outlet of sex. Stella pathetically accepts it and ironically feels satisfied without any complains. Even after knowing Blanche has been raped by Stanley in the finale, she refuses to acknowledge the harsh reality and sends Blanche to the psychiatric hospital.
Conclusion
To conclude, in a phallocentric society, the idealized women is the permanent affiliation of men, the object to fulfill male desire and the non-emotional machine of reproduction. Once marring and becoming a wife, women naturally descend to the possession without identity of their husbands and the “second sex”. As Beauvoir said that before marriage, female is the accessory of father, and, after marriage, of their husband. There is no essential difference in between but just the transfer of ownership.” (Beauvoir, 1998) “What” male needs is a docile slave without revolt, a dumb “baby doll” without speech.
In this play, both Stella and Eunice comply to the morality, blindly worshiping their husband and remaining silent in domestic abuse without any complains because the ideology is engraved in their brain that they cannot survive with man’s protection. These “model wives” comprehend deep in mind that no skepticisms can be posed against male authority in a world centered and conquered by men. Once they figure out their real living conditions and rise up to defy males, they will be damned to death. Thus, dumbness and slumbering are the best choice.
As a semi-woken female, Blanche’s oscillation between detaching from the cruelty of mundane life and lustful dependence on men results in her torment. It is predestined that her defiance against patriarchy will only bring her persecution and the defects of her traits will lead to destruction.
Stella’s and Blanche’s tragedy manifests that under the despotic rein of patriarchy, it is impossible for women to obtain the access of emancipation and true independence. Tennessee Williams masterfully presents women’s oppression, lacks of speech and failed awakening in male patriarchal society in A Streetcar Named Desire. He relates to the male other through his own experience as a marginalized segment of Society as a homosexual. Nevertheless, the liberation of female is a work in progress, which is also the liberation of male from the outdated gender stereotype.
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