The Mental Destruction of Blanche Dubois
Tennessee William’s play A Street Car Named Desire offers a glimpse into the harsh reality faced by single southern woman in the 1940s. The 1940s was a time when females were viewed as delicate and fragile; therefore, it was understood that a male companion was a necessity to keep them safe and secure (Cook 84). The character of Blanche Dubois embodies the 1940s distressed female as she struggles with her environment. She is battling guilt, loneliness and financial insecurity when she arrives in Elysian Fields. Critics and audiences alike have mixed reactions to Blanche and her role as the tragic protagonist. In “The Space of Madness and Desire” Anne Fleche suggests Blanche is mad from the outset of the play. Others such as Leonard Berkman in “The Tragic Downfall of Blanche Dubois” argue that she symbolizes a fallen angel who descends into madness because she is victimized by surroundings that have condemned her to become a deranged concubine. I agree with Berkman’s position on her descent into insanity and will argue that Blanche descends into madness throughout her stay at Elysian Fields; post traumatic stress disorder resulting from the loss of her husband, lies and a past that prevents Mitch’s acceptance and rescue of her, and finally, the pitiless mental torment she faces at the hands of her “executioner” Stanley, culminate in her final descent into insanity. The death of a loved one is always a stressful event, but the unnatural death of someone close is beyond the usual stress of death; this compacted stress is evident in Blanche’s reaction to her husband’s death. Blanche’s husband’s unnatural death left her with a guilty conscience. Indeed, Blanche’s response to the ordeal could quite possibly be classified as symptomatic of post traumatic stress disorder: “A psychological disorder in which a person continues to respond with distress to a traumatic event long after that event has occurred. The affected person may re-experience the event in their
Cited: Berkman, Leonard. “The Tragic downfall of Blanche Dubois.” Modern Drama 10.2 (1967): 249- 257. Print. Cook, Sharon Anne, eds. Framing Our Past: Women’s History in the Twentieth Century. Montreal: McGill/Queen’s University press, 2001. Print Fleche, Anne. “The Space of Madness and Desire: Tennessee Williams and Streetcar.” Modern Drama 38.4 (1955): 324-335. Print. “Post traumatic stress disorder." The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. Web. 30 Mar. 2011. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/post traumatic stress disorder>.