Anne Fleche - the Space of Madness and Desire
Tennessee Williams exploits the expressionistic uses of space in the drama, attempting to represent desire from the outside, that is, in its formal challenge to realistic stability and closure, and in its exposure to risk. Loosening both stage and verbal languages from their implicit desire for closure and containment,
Streetcar exposes the danger and the violence of this desire, which is always the desire for the end of desire. Writing in a period when U.S. drama was becoming disillusioned with realism, Williams achieves a critical distance from realistic technique through his use of allegory. In Blanche's line about the streetcar, the fact that she is describing real places, cars, and transfers has the surprising effect of enhancing rather than diminishing the metaphorical parallels in her language. Indeed, Streetcar's "duplicities of expression"(3) are even more striking in the light of criticism's recent renewal of interest in allegory.(4) For allegory establishes the distance "between the representative and the semantic function of language" (I89), the desire that is in language to unify (with) experience. Streetcar demonstrates the ways in which distance in the drama can be expanded and contracted, and what spatial relativism reveals about the economy of dramatic representation.
Tennessee Williams' plays, filled with allegorical language, seem also to have a tentative, unfinished character. The metalanguage of desire seems to preclude development, to deny progress. And yet it seems
"natural" to read A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegorical journey toward
Blanche's apocalyptic destruction at the hands of her "executioner," Stanley.
The play's violence, its baroque images of decadence and lawlessness, promise its audience the thrilling destruction of the aristocratic Southern Poe-esque moth-like neuraesthenic female "Blanche" by the ape-like brutish male from the
American melting-pot. The play is full in fact
Streetcar exposes the danger and the violence of this desire, which is always the desire for the end of desire. Writing in a period when U.S. drama was becoming disillusioned with realism, Williams achieves a critical distance from realistic technique through his use of allegory. In Blanche's line about the streetcar, the fact that she is describing real places, cars, and transfers has the surprising effect of enhancing rather than diminishing the metaphorical parallels in her language. Indeed, Streetcar's "duplicities of expression"(3) are even more striking in the light of criticism's recent renewal of interest in allegory.(4) For allegory establishes the distance "between the representative and the semantic function of language" (I89), the desire that is in language to unify (with) experience. Streetcar demonstrates the ways in which distance in the drama can be expanded and contracted, and what spatial relativism reveals about the economy of dramatic representation.
Tennessee Williams' plays, filled with allegorical language, seem also to have a tentative, unfinished character. The metalanguage of desire seems to preclude development, to deny progress. And yet it seems
"natural" to read A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegorical journey toward
Blanche's apocalyptic destruction at the hands of her "executioner," Stanley.
The play's violence, its baroque images of decadence and lawlessness, promise its audience the thrilling destruction of the aristocratic Southern Poe-esque moth-like neuraesthenic female "Blanche" by the ape-like brutish male from the
American melting-pot. The play is full in fact