Arts

How Feminists Rescued Blanche and Robbed "Streetcar."

A stronger portrayal of Blanche DuBois ruins the original play.

Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has been universally praised, and rightfully so. Blanchett brings a presence and force to the role that makes her character’s moments of greatest confusion and agony devastatingly real. But Blanchett’s version of Blanche is also a reminder of what a tense relationship modern theater has with Streetcar, specifically with Blanche.

Since the play premiered on Broadway in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan, those who produce and perform it have become increasingly uncomfortable with its misogynistic elements. The women of Streetcar are financially, emotionally, and sexually dependent on men; because Blanche has no one to depend on—other than those kind strangers—she is made to seem grotesque. To make the play more palatable to contemporary audiences, a reimagined version of Blanche has emerged, one not so easily trampled by her brother-in-law, working-class alpha-male Stanley Kowalski. What directors and actors don’t realize or won’t admit is that when they transform Blanche into a pillar of strength, Streetcar runs off track.

Blanche, as Williams wrote her and Elia Kazan conceived her in the original Broadway production and the 1951 film, is two negative female archetypes smashed together—the meddler, trying to convince her sister, Stella, to leave Stanley, and the hysteric. Thus she is punished with the play’s climactic act: Stanley rapes her while Stella is at the hospital delivering his first child.

The supporting female characters don’t do women any favors, either. Stella is so “thrilled” by Stanley’s aggressiveness and sexual prowess that she returns to him even after he hits her in a drunken rage, knowing she is pregnant. Rather than believe Stanley raped Blanche, Stella commits her sister to a state asylum. Her upstairs neighbor Eunice reassures her, “You done the right thing, the only thing you could do.”

Early audiences didn’t take issue with the play’s negative portrayal of women. A review of the touring production’s 1949 premier in Jackson, Miss., noted that some in the audience had asked, “Why would anyone write a play like that?” The female critic’s response: “Life is sometimes like that.”

But by 1973, Streetcar’s 25th anniversary, feminist revision was under way. Two big productions went up that spring, one on each coast. Clive Barnes’ New York Times review of the New York production described Rosemary Harris’ portrayal of Blanche, along the lines of earlier reviews, as a vulnerable “fading rose.” But in his Times review of the Los Angeles production that went up a month earlier, Stephen Farber wrote, “it is wrong to see [Blanche] as a sheltered flower … too frail for the world. She has probably suffered and survived more than Stanley and she has not been defeated.”

Ever since, American theater has portrayed Blanche as the heroine of a feminist tragedy, one that emphasizes Blanche’s agency, how much she’s been through before she ever arrives in New Orleans and penetrates Stanley’s space (Freudian critics especially favor this reading). Most contemporary productions present Blanche as likable, even witty, making Stanley’s disdain for her less defensible and his victory wholly despicable.

This shift also resolves the less frequently discussed problem of audience guilt: As Williams wrote her, Blanche annoys us, and many viewers feel to some degree glad to be rid of her, even though she has been terribly violated. Thus the play implicates the audience in her destruction. In making Blanche more likable, feminist revisions save us from that guilt.

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