Is 'a Streetcar Named Desire' a Tragedy?

Is 'A Streetcar Named Desire' a Tragedy?

The question of whether or not 'A Streetcar Named Desire' is a tragedy is easy to answer if you accept Aristotle's traditional analysis of tragedy. To begin there is no death. Secondly, Blanche lacks the requisite stature to be a tragic hero. Thirdly to talk of a tragic "flaw" in her character is difficult because, outside of the flaw, there is no other character to speak of: the Blanche we encounter in the play is a flaw from beginning to end, arriving as an anachronism and departing as a hollow shell. And finally, and crucially, there is no sense of catharsis at the end of the play. How can the audience feel uplifted in any way as a broken Blanche is led away to an asylum, Stella "sobs with inhuman abandon", Stanley makes pathetic attempts to console his wife and Steve prompts the start of a new card game?

Tragedies involve journeys and learning experiences, but one of the most disturbing aspects of the play is that nobody learns, nobody completes a worthwhile journey and nobody at the end of the play is a better person because of what happens. Life will go on as before, as if Blanche had never arrived in Elysian Fields, for Stella loves Stanley regardless of his brutishness and will forgive him anything because "there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that sort of make everything else seem unimportant." (Indeed she appears to have forgiven or denied his seduction or rape of her sister.) Mitch, meanwhile, is destined for unhappiness, destined to always "need somebody", all the more so after his mother dies who he loves "very much". Alan, of course, cannot be brought back, a victim of society's disgust for homosexuality. And Blanche has passed the point of no return.

The tragic dimension of the play exists, so to speak, off stage, with all the classically tragic elements enacted before the play has even started. There is, arguably, a tragic dimension to the story of Alan and Blanche, but the key element of catharsis remains absent. As an audience we witness the break down and humiliation of Blanche and there is nothing uplifting about that experience. As she is led passively away by the doctor we may perhaps think of Lear after the death of Cordelia but her final line of "Ask her to let go of me" is too pathetic. Tragedy requires a sense of the noble and there is nothing noble in the play, no great gesture of redress, no epic struggle, no grand words on the point of death, no sense of wrongs being righted. It is just all desperately sad.

The other tragedy perhaps concerns the tragedy of Belle Reve. Here we have a sense of nobility in the form of the majestic plantation home. We do not know exactly how the estate was lost for Blanche is very vague but Stanley puts it all down to her extravagance, so supplying the "tragic flaw" required by Aristotle's classical recipe. Blanche offers a sense of an epic struggle when she exclaims "I stayed and fought for it, bled for it, almost died for it!" Hearing this, you might believe that she defended the plantation against an attacking army, perhaps making a stand for the Confederacy against the blue coats of the invading Union. But Blanche is simply using hyperbole of course. The only bleeding involved was the bleeding dry of the estate, the extravagant wasting of wealth as Blanche tried to maintain a fantasy world, a world of luxurious comfort, failing to adjust to the financial realities impinging upon her dream lifestyle. But Blanche may not have been entirely to blame. The Southern States and the plantations had their own tragic flaw, slavery, and Belle Reve would have been grounded in the exploitation of black workers. Time has moved on however. At the outset of the play Williams offers us the symbolic image of negro and white sitting together on the same step - on the same level literally and symbolically - sharing a joke, equal in every sense except perhaps for the language employed in the stage directions, with the 'coloured woman' jarring on the sensitivities of a C21st audience and the failure to assign a name to the 'Negro woman' perhaps betraying deep seated prejudice inside the author. When Blanche demands,