Streetcar Named Desire

The competition between Blanche and Stanley is maintained to the penultimate scene of the play, in which Blanche’s past and how she views it comes is combated directly by Stanley’s view of her past. Depending on the path that the reader has taken throughout the play, Blanche can be seen as a woman who has reached out in many means to fill her empty heart and satisfy the loneliness that she feels in the arms of likewise lonely men. She is a sympathetic character in her own eyes, emotionally broken by the suicide of her homosexual husband and haunted by the numerous family deaths. Stanley, however, sees no sympathy to be had for her late husband or the tragedy that struck Belle Reve and has only taken away the context of her promiscuity to expose

Blanche is left physically sick at his inquiry into her marriage with the young man in scene 1, and the violation of his examination of her love letters left her “faint with exhaustion” in scene 2 (source). Stanley’s ability to make Blanche ill only continues in the next scenes as she has to clutch at her throat, coughing and gagging, in scene 8 when he gifts her a bus ticket back to Laurel, Mississippi and in scene 9, the exposure of her past to Mitch leaves her crying “Fire!” out of the window. Stanley physically disables her with his mere presences and leaves her in a state of inability to defend herself against the rape. The readers involvement in this reading up until this point becomes the foundation of how the characters become viewed. It brings up the morality question of if this was a true, unforeseen rape or if the story had been hinting at it all along with lines throughout the play such as Stanley’s “If I didn’t know that you was my wife’s sister I’d get ideas about you!” and Blanche’s “Yes, I was flirting with your husband” (source). As George Jean Nathan states in his review of A Streetcar Named Desire, the penultimate scene of the play commands the readers interest as everything rushes at once and then comes to an abrupt stop to give the reader time to understand the destination that the streetcar has been hurdling towards this whole time. After understanding the implications of this scene, the reader is able to piece together the moments leading up to it and see Williams’ almost dance-like writing around the response-invitation that happens between Stanley and Blanche. While this scene is needed to reach Jauss’ description of an “aesthetic whole”, it is not wholly aesthetic. Williams’ creates a space that puts pressure on the reader to consent to a