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A Streetcar Named Desire

by Tennessee Williams

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A Streetcar Named Desire's classification as a tragedy

Summary:

A Streetcar Named Desire is often classified as a tragedy because it depicts the downfall of its protagonist, Blanche DuBois. Her delusions and inability to adapt to changing circumstances lead to her mental and social disintegration, characteristic of tragic narratives. Additionally, the play explores themes of human suffering and flawed characters, aligning with traditional elements of tragedy.

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How is A Streetcar Named Desire a tragedy?

Tragedies are about a central character who is brought low by the end of the drama. In A Streetcar Named Desire, this certainly applies to Blanche Dubois, who tries to fight reality and loses. Even at the start of the story, Blanche is on a downward spiral. She was once a southern belle in a wealthy family which fell upon hard times. Now she is a lonely, alcoholic person who can only cope with reality with lies and delusions.

The protagonist in a tragedy also usually has a tragic flaw, a characteristic which leads to his or her destructive end. Blanche's is her inability to face her life as it is. She still wants to believe she is refined, pure, and young, instead of facing the truth: she is aging, lonely, and has been so desperate for sexual attentions that she pursued teenage boys for them.

Stanley is Blanche's nemesis, representing reality in its ugliest, most brutal form. He resents Blanche's falseness and seeks to defame her. After Stanley ruins her credibility with Stella and Mitch by sharing her sordid history, Blanche is unable to fool others. Stanley's raping her shreds her last hold on reality, driving her into permanent madness. At last, she is brought totally low, trapped in a world of dreams and committed to an asylum. And this proves tragic.

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How is A Streetcar Named Desire a tragedy?

I think that Williams' work is a tragedy for a couple of reasons.  In my mind, the most overwhelming reason that the story is a tragedy is because there is not a happy ending for anyone.  There is little in way of unity and comedy for any of the characters.  Blanche is institutionalized, Stella recognizes that she might have made a mistake only to be smoothed over by Stanley, exposed to be a brute in the most savage of ways.  This is a setting whereby disunity and fragmentation results for everyone.  I would say that another way the play is a tragedy is that it reveals a challenging situation between cultures, different ways of life, where validation is not really present.  Blanche is living in a different world, and it is one that has passed her by in a brutally honest manner.  Yet, if Stanley represents the force of modernity, one cannot take solace in that because any setting where someone as harsh and as brutish as Stanley cannot represent a force of salvation.  In this light, the drama reflects another tragic condition.

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Can A Streetcar Named Desire be considered a tragedy?

No, according to the classic definition, mainly because the main characters are not of high rank and therefore cannot “fall from a high place.”  The correct term might be “melodrama,” if you consider the characters tugging at the audience’s emotions with exaggerated expressions of grief.  The other problem with the term “Tragedy” is that what happens to the characters is not “tragic” that is, irreversibly destructive (usually this means death.)  Blanche is presumably going to a hospital, Stella and Stanley will continue with their damaged relationship; and none of them undergoes any sort of catharthis or cleansing.  The most obvious absence for a definition of tragedy is the lack of awareness by the characters – there is little or no realization of what just happened, and therefore no resolution.  The 20th century has usurped the word “tragedy” and softened it to mean “not happy.”  One valuable classic definition of comedy is “tragedy avoided.”  The term “tragicomedy” has also been used, to mean something “too bad, but ironic at a distance.”  So the warning here is: don’t assign genre names too strictly, because they are tools for post-creation critics, not blueprints for artists.

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How is A Streetcar Named Desire considered a tragedy?

Aside from the unity of place A Streetcar Named Desire doesn't show too much fidelity to the Aristotelian theory of drama. But in the character of Blanche Dubois there can be no doubt that we are presented with a tragic heroine, brought low by a fatal flaw, and invoking pity and fear in the audience along the way. All the traditional elements of the tragic heroine are present in Blanche. First of all, she comes from a respectable family, one that enjoyed wealth and status. Yet, look at her now; and see how far she's fallen in the world. In Greek drama a tragic hero or heroine comes to grief through something they've done; they are not simply the plaything of fate. And in Blanche's case it's her self-absorption, her yearning need to be wanted and loved that leads to her sad demise.

Blanche is also sorely deluded. She thinks that purity of heart and inner refinement will be enough to wash away the taint of sin she's acquired from her numerous illicit liaisons. Yet try as she might, Blanche cannot escape the stifling restrictions placed upon her by a society that regards an occasional lapse in moral judgement as expressive of a fundamentally bad character. Blanche hopes that by starting over in a new town she'll be able at long last to find some measure of acceptance. But she can't; Stanley sees to that. By dredging up the details of her sordid past he makes sure that Blanche can never begin to experience the peace and emotional security she so desperately needs. A frail creature like Blanche is simply not cut out for this world, and therein lies the greatest tragedy.

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How is A Streetcar Named Desire considered a tragedy?

I think that Williams' narrative can be seen as a tragedy for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it sets Blanche against conditions that are larger than herself.  Blanche acquires a tragic figure sensibility when she is set against the changing times from Belle Reve to the modern South.  Blanche is almost helpless in how life and social values have shifted, leaving her behind.  In this, she acquires a tragic sensibility.

If we operate with the belief that a tragedy in the modern sense is a story "where some of the characters’ lives or story arcs end badly," then Blanche is in a tragedy.  The arc of her life is a tragic one.  She enters New Orleans with the hopes of finding someone and leaves as dependent "on the kindness of strangers."  She is abandoned and raped, discarded and abused.  While Blanche bears responsibility for what happens to her, I think that Williams' depiction is one where it is difficult to say that she deserved what happened to her.  His construction of her is a sad one, reflecting in some of the worst ways what it means to be human:

... when I think about her, Blanche seems like the youth of our hearts which has to be put away for worldly considerations: poetry, music, the early soft feelings that we can't afford to live with under a naked light bulb which is now.

In seeking to make Blanche such a representation of what it means to be human, I think that Williams makes her character tragic.  It is here in which the drama can be seen as a tragedy in the modern sense.

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