Disturbing behavior is clearly shown throughout both The Wasp Factory and A Streetcar Named Desire with representations of how the outside world effects and distorts the human mind through characters Blanche, Stella and Stanley in A Streetcar… and Frank, Eric and their father in The Wasp Factory. I aim to explore and compare the two depictions of the disturbed mind by finding similar themes within the play and the book, such as obsession, alcoholism and the ultimate disconnection with reality.
Blanches disconnection with reality in A Streetcar Named Desire is foreshadowed multiple times throughout the play with her statement “I ought to go up there on a rocket ship and never come down” and the general disjointment of her speech which is a metaphor for her instability. This foreshadowing results in Blanche eventually losing her sanity resulting in forced admittance to a mental asylum similar to Williams’ sister Rose who was also mentally unstable. Compared to in The Wasp Factory Frank’s disconnection with reality is clear within first few pages of the book when he claims to have predicted the future by means of an unknown factory “I already knew something was going to happen; the factory told me”. We later find out that this factory Frank speaks of is a contraption he has made resulting in a wasp’s gruesome death and a vague ‘futuristic prediction’ that Frank twists into becoming reality. An example of this would be when the factory predicts fire, Frank is attacked by a rogue male rabbit and breaks one of his many beloved inanimate objects – his slingshot The Black Destroyer – which results in him blowing the entire Rabbit grounds into heaps of smoke and mud. This shows Frank’s ability to mold his own reality an ability of which Blanche from a A Streetcar… also possesses when she I s seen talking to herself at the beginning of chapter ten “how about taking a