"Places Called Out-of-Bounds": Abjection, Performativity and the Regulation of Boundaries in A...

EN304 – Dr. Nick Monk Student#: 0925762(20th Century North American Literature)

“Places Called Out-of-Bounds”: Abjection, Performativity

and the

Regulation of Boundaries in A Streetcar Named Desire

In the opening stage directions for A Streetcar Named

Desire, Tennessee Williams seems at pains to emphasise the

harmonious nature of the New Orleans French Quarter, the

setting for his drama and a place that is “unlike corresponding

sections in other American cities” (SND,1). Though it is a poor area,

it has a “raffish charm”, its “atmosphere of decay” invested with a

“kind of lyricism”, and though black and white are living in close

proximity with the potential for racial conflict, “there is a

relatively warm and easy intermingling of races” (SND,1). As actors enter

onto the stage, we are presented with the visible marks of

difference present within this community – the white Eunice

in conversation with the nameless Negro Woman; the “bellowing”,

“roughly dressed” Stanley with his wife, a “gentle woman...of a [class]

background obviously quite different from her husband's” (SND,1). Yet

these differences seem lost in the buzzing activity of the

street vendors, the “warm breath of the brown river” and the strains

of music from the 'blue piano' that wrap the whole scene

together into the apparently unified “spirit of the life which goes on

here” (SND,1). It is into this romantic and idealised picture

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of seamless community living that the figure of Blanche

DuBois enters, immediately “incongruous” in appearance and

introducing a sudden note of contrast, of clash, into the

aptly named 'Elysian Fields'.

Run out of her home town of Laurel and then the

Elysian Fields for her failure to embody the gender role

expected of her, she can be seen as the play's most obvious

example of that “jettisoned object”, the abject – that which

must be “radically excluded” (Kristeva,2), expelled from a

sociosymbolic order that relies upon discrete, clearly

bounded identities for its functioning. Indeed, according to

Julia Kristeva, the danger posed by the abject is that it

“disturbs identity, system, order...[and] does not respect

borders, positions, rules”; it is the “in-between, the

ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva,4). While it cannot be

assimilated, it threatens the integrity of both the subject

and society, pointing to the fragility of those assumed

borders upon which order is constructed. For this reason, it

draws those facing it “toward the place where meaning

collapses” (Kristeva,2). In this essay, drawing on Kristeva's

The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and the work of other

theorists such as Judith Butler and Kelly Oliver who have

appropriated or elaborated upon her ideas, I argue that

Blanche's entry into the Kowalski household introduces the

possibility of just such a collapse in meaning, causing

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tensions to erupt along the seemingly dormant fault lines of

gender, class and race present within the community. Inherent

and integral to this argument is the notion of identity,

whether racial, gender or class identity, as culturally

constructed and unstable, as opposed to essential. It is

worth noting that “Williams's colleagues and sometimes

friends Truman Capote and Carson McCullers both abundantly

showed in their fiction that they were constructionists in

matters of gender” (Guilbert,92), for we see much evidence of

this conception of reality in Streetcar. Equally important is

Rachel Van Duyvenbode's suggestion that Williams entertained,

and even the feared, the idea “that race cannot be clearly

distinguished” (Duyvenbode,212). In the light of these ideas,

the central struggle between Blanche and Stanley can be seen

as a struggle to control and regulate the boundaries that

determine what constitutes a socially acceptable identity. To

do this, they manipulate their environment and those around

them in an attempt to have each other seen as occupying a

space beyond that which is delineated as 'normal', the Same –

a space that is instead marginal, abject, a threat to the

Same. The play's narrative is marked by a series of founding

repudiations, serving to highlight abjection as the central

process by which individuals and social groups maintain a

sense of internal coherence. The centrality of this dynamic

has remained relatively unexamined by critics, and can be

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brought into sharp focus with the use of Kristeva's ideas.

From the moment she enters the social space of the

Kowalski apartment, Blanche's position is extremely

precarious. Not only is she supremely out of place, a

destitute relic of the rural Old South aristocracy alone in a

rough, working-class district, she is a woman with a history

of gender nonconformity involving promiscuity, alcoholism,

and “debased or perverted sexuality” (Berkowitz,90). Though

the full extent of her fall into disrepute is only revealed

later, in the very first scene we discover that she has,

despite her assurances, “turned into a drunkard” (SND,6) and

been “on the verge of – lunacy” for some time, her behaviour

both “hysterical” (SND,3) and “feverish” (SND,6). This mental

instability has come about as a result of an experience that

her sister Stella describes as having “killed her illusions”

(SND,73), and it is impossible to understand the character of

Blanche DuBois without examining the event that triggered

this breakdown. In her youth, she was married to a man named

Allan, whom she discovers to be a homosexual. Yet as Blanche

later emphasises, while he had a “tenderness which wasn't

like a man's”, he was not “the least bit effeminate”

(SND,66). The killing of her illusions, then, was this

contact with a man in whom there existed a disjuncture

between gendered behaviour and sexuality that posed a threat

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to her own heteronormative belief in gender as a stable,

natural marker of identity. If he had been effeminate,

immediately categorisable as 'queer', there would have been

no challenge to the structure within which her own gender was

formed – he would simply have been an abnormality, a

“degenerate” (SND,73). Yet the fact that he was

unrecognisable as a homosexual reveals that notions of innate

masculinity or femininity are nothing more than what Judith

Butler describes as a “regulatory fiction” (Butler,GT,185).

His very existence belies the assumptions upon which her own

sense of herself as a heterosexual woman are based. As a

result, he becomes “quicksand”, and she is “slipping in with

him” (SND, 66), being drawn towards the place where meaning

collapses. Thus he must be abjected, repudiated in order to

restore the illusion of her self as clearly bounded, “clean

and proper” (Kristeva,5). This she does when, "unable to stop

herself”, she tells him “You disgust me!” (SND,67), a

rejection that drives him to suicide. Yet the illusion of

gendered identity as stable is never fully restored. Georges-

Claude Guilbert has argued that her guilt regarding his death

leads her to “strive to bring him back to life by embodying

him...she behaves as she fantasizes Allan would have behaved”

(Guilbert,108) and become sexually promiscuous with a string

of men. However, it is also possible that, as with all

repudiating acts of abjection, there is a “dreaded

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identification” (Butler,Bodies,3), in this case with his

nonconformist sexuality, and one which she is unable to

banish entirely. While on the outside she continues to

present herself as the cohesively 'feminine' Southern belle,

she has become aware of and begun to explore her own formerly

repressed internal discontinuities, her 'unladylike' desires

for young men and boys.

This story, occurring years before Blanche's arrival

in the French Quarter, sets up a number of themes that are

key to this essay's interpretation of the play. Firstly, it

establishes the fact that the illusion of stable identity

requires an act of founding repudiation, of abjection,

whether it be by the individual or by a society. Secondly, it

alerts us to the idea of behaviour as something that is

constitutive rather than expressive of gender – Allan is not

inherently masculine as a result of being a heterosexual male

(which he is not) but because his mannerisms signify

masculinity. This is an idea that is consistently explored in

the work of Judith Butler, who in arguing that gender is

'performative' (some fifty years after the writing of

Streetcar) maintains that:

“gender is in no way a stable identity or

locus of agency from which various acts

proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously

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constituted in time and instituted through a stylized

repetition of acts. Further, gender must be

understood as the mundane way in which bodily

gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds

constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered

self” [my italics] (Butler,Essay,1)

To put this another way, “all gender is like drag, or is

drag” (Butler,Bodies,125). While it is interesting that

Blanche's character has been interpreted by some critics as a

masqueraded “man in drag” (Guilbert,110), I argue instead

that her theatrical and exaggerated adherence to a particular

brand of femininity is a culturally enforced “strategy of

survival” in a society in which “those who fail to do their

gender right” (Butler,Essay,3) are regularly punished. In

Butler's view, we are all performing our gender for this

reason. Yet because of her experiences with Allan, Blanche's

performance is self-aware, so that her existence in the play

is “doubling of what she already is – an actress on a stage”

(Bedient,51); she is something like a female impersonator.

Regardless of the reasons for her now deviant sexuality, the

gender that she endeavours to display to the outside world

has become a self-conscious performance, as evidenced by her

pronouncement that “a woman's charm is fifty percent

illusion” (SND,21). Thus she “treats herself as a mannequin”

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(Bedient,51) onto which she piles cultural signifiers. She

has her “white suit with a fluffy bodice, necklace and ear-rings of pearl, white

gloves and hat” (SND,3) that denote not only wealth but the

virtuousness and sexual purity expected of a Southern woman

of her class, and tends ceaselessly to her make-up, literally

'masking' the “total...ruin” (SND,8) that she feels beneath.

Adding to this vision of delicate femininity is her constant

“bathing in the hot tub” (SND,16), which can also be seen as

a ritual cleansing – an immediate resort when she senses

herself coming undone.

Yet the strategic element of this performance is two-

pronged. Not only does it act as a defence, maintaining the

illusion of a respectable and cohesively 'feminine' identity,

it also serves as a weapon with which to render Stanley as

Other, a threat to (white American) identity. Within the

Elysian Fields it is Stanley who represents the greatest

danger to her position, for he is the upholder and main

representative of a rough, masculinist, working-class status

quo into which she does not fit. The perils attendant on not

'fitting in' are one focus of William Kleb's analysis of

Streetcar. Employing Foucault, Kleb discusses the way in which

societies operate by dividing individuals into categories:

sick/healthy, criminal/law-abiding, mad/sane. As the latter

of each these binaries comes to stand for 'normality', the

individual who behaves in a manner deemed socially

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unacceptable or 'abnormal' is immediately cast as dangerous.

Thus, anyone “regarded as a threat to society at any point or

level might be confined” (Kleb,31) or rendered a social

outcast. By asserting and embodying the values, appearance

and conventions of Southern American aristocratic gentility,

then, Blanche can and must attempt a redefinition of the

social space of the apartment as one in which her constructed

class identity is considered respectable and acceptable,

thereby “reconstituting her otherness as sameness” (Kleb,31).

Her first point of attack is the flat itself,

insisting that it is “horrible place” and undermining

Stella's chosen lifestyle by questioning why she allows

herself to live in “these conditions” (SND,7). By expressing

the outrage of one who is used to luxury, she is attempting

to reconnect Stella to her past, to their shared youth in

Belle Reve, and thus distance her from the cultural norms of

her present environment. Then, in stating that “Only Poe!

Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe – could do it justice. Out there I

suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!” (SND,7) she

deploys her knowledge of poetry as a reminder to Stella of

their shared “literary heritage” (SND,24), a heritage that

separates them from the uncultured 'ghouls' that make up the

inhabitants of the French Quarter – including Stanley, whose

apartment this is. When this fails, she adopts an opposite

approach, embarking on a process of redecoration in which she

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fills the apartment with her “dainty” things and,

significantly, places an “adorable little coloured paper

lantern” (SND,43) over the light bulb of the lamp. By doing

this, she is both transforming the apartment's difference

from her into sameness – turning it into an extension of her

own appearance and temperament – and, by dimming the light,

creating a masking illusion that reduces her own incongruity.

Thus, represented visually on the stage, there is a blurring

of the line that marks her as Other. Furthermore, in contrast

to her 'refinement', Stanley comes to represent ignorant

'brutishness'. As a result, Stanley's authority over Stella

begins to show signs of slipping, as she calls him an “idiot”

(SND,19) for his “obvious...ignorance of anything outside the

immediate sphere of his experiences” (Vlasopolis,329) – an

ignorance that marks his difference from the two sisters.

As well as manipulating Stella and the apartment to

instate the class-based social boundary of refinement versus

unrefinement, she also targets Mitch, Stanley's best friend.

When Mitch first appears, his similarity to Stanley is

emphasised – both wear coloured shirts and jeans, both are at

the “peak of their physical manhood” and both are “coarse and direct”

(SND,27). Yet there is something different about him, a

certain “sensitive look” (SND,30) and an attachment to his

mother that makes him a target of emasculating jokes at

Stanley's hands but that is quickly recognised by Blanche as

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a difference that can be converted into sameness. Once again,

it is poetry, high culture, that she deploys in attempting to

build this bridge, commenting on Mitch's “pretty” (SND,33)

cigarette case and finding common ground in the inscription

that is from her “favourite sonnet by Mrs. Browning”

(SND,33). It is a connection that, with Mitch's mentioning of

his dead lover, leads to a deeper understanding based around

their shared experience of grief and loss. Later, in Scene 6,

when Blanche describes the death of her husband Allan, we see

Mitch at his finest, as “he seems to gain in stature and

substance; he matures and becomes, for a moment at least, a

man of strength and compassion” (Kleb,46) He becomes, in

fact, what Blanche terms a “natural gentleman” (SND,62) and

seems to be finding a new model of manhood, a new gendered

identity in which he is in his element.

Yet if Blanche's chance of survival in this

environment relies upon her ability to reconstitute the

boundaries within which one is considered socially

acceptable, then the only way for Stanley to maintain his

authority is to defend his control of the Same and assert

Blanche's difference. He must continue to represent “the the

organizing principle around which life is centered and

revolves...an icon of male heterosexual power” (Kleb,37). As

part of this, he represents the law, with his “impressive

judicial air” (SND,22) and his enlistment of the Napoleonic

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Code, and the violence with which the law is upheld. This

violence is emphasised in the stage directions, for Stanley

rarely talks, he 'shouts', 'bellows' or 'booms'. His actions

are equally brutal, as he 'throws', 'heaves', 'kicks',

'slams' or 'shoves'. Yet his dominant position as law maker,

as man of the house is, guaranteed only within “the father's

sociosymbolic order” (Bedient,52), a system of relationships

which cannot function without clearly demarcated gender

identities.

On the evening of the poker night, we see clear

evidence of his determination to maintain these gender

boundaries in the face of Blanche's increasingly threatening

class influence. During this scene, there has occurred a

subtle blurring of the clear gendered divisions upon which

his authority and power depend. Not only has Stella begun to

move away from a position of complete deferral to his will –

“This is my house and I'll talk as much as I want to”

(SND,31) – but he also witnesses Mitch, his best friend,

“magnetized by the feminine sphere” (Vlasopolis,330). Mitch

is in conversation with Blanche and, as suggested earlier,

seems to be finding in her an acceptance of his otherwise

'emasculating' sensitivity, a sense of himself that lies

beyond the machismo-defined realm of the poker table. Indeed,

the space of the stage is clearly divided by gender, the

bedroom becoming a female space as the kitchen is dominated

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by poker – a typically masculine game requiring strict rules

that “supplement social law without falling into the feminine

domain of obscure enchantment” (Bedient,54). Thus the

violation and enforcement of distinct gender boundaries is

enacted in a series of visually symbolic moments and

movements: Stanley's barring Blanche from the poker game

(“Why don't you women go up and sit with Eunice?” [SND,29]),

Stella and Blanche's retreat to the bedroom, Mitch's leaving

the table and stepping in to join them. Having repeatedly

bellowed for Mitch to return to his seat and cross back into

his side of the stage, Stanley “stalks fiercely through the portières

into the bedroom” (SND,35), aggressively penetrating this

feminine 'inner chamber' and shattering its aura with the

destruction of the Waltz-emitting radio that has Mitch

“delighted” and moving “in awkward imitation [of Blanche] like a

dancing bear” (SND,35), seemingly aspiring to her refinement.

When Stella protests, “physical violence becomes the response

by which to subdue the female adversary” (Vlasopolis,330) as

he chases her and beats her into submission. This explosion

immediately restores his authority over the men, who have

been protesting his dictatorship (“Aw, let the girls have

their music” [SND,31]) but who now speak “quietly and lovingly to

him” (SND,36). And as we learn at the beginning of the next

Scene, a combination of violence and sex has also utterly

mastered Stella, who the next morning is “serene”, with eyes

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that have an almost “narcotized tranquillity” (SND,40). The

powerful class-based allure of Blanche's poetry and Waltzes,

with its evocation of gentility that gives Stella a sense of

entitlement and Mitch a partial sense of belonging, has been

destroyed in one fell swoop. With Mitch's pronouncement that

“Poker shouldn't be played in a house with women” (SND,36), a

pronouncement that realigns him in sameness with Stanley, the

clear demarcation and division of gender roles has been re-

established and Stanley is back in control.

In response to this disastrous turn of events,

Blanche's last ditch attempt to render Stanley as socially

Other and win over her sister evokes ideas that are highly

suggestive of the dynamic of racial abjection endemic to

colonial and post-colonial relationships – a crucial dynamic

in the history of the South (and one that has been almost

entirely overlooked in discussions of Streetcar). To

understand this, it must be noted that while the role of

Southern belle is most obviously one of upper-class

womanhood, it is also a “construction of white femininity

(particularly in the slaveholding South) that became

crucially related to and intertwined with the notion of the

uncontrollable sexuality of black males” (Duyvenbode,206).

Allusions to Stanley's status as racial Other have been

present in undertones throughout the play: in Stella's

offhand remark that Stanley is of a “different species” to

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the “men we went out with at home” (SND,10), for example, or

in Blanche's suggestion that Mitch, the “only Anglo-Saxon”

(Duyvenbode,214) male present , “seems – superior to the

others” (SND,30). On top of this, Rachel Van Duyvenbode

alerts us to Williams's implicitly 'black' construction of

Stanley's character, outlining five main stereotypes of the

black male: “great physical size or strength, inability to

communicate, lack of intelligence, uncontrollable desire, and

potent sexuality” (Duyvenbode,211). One might add to this

list an association with animalism, and the idea of an

innate, instinctive 'joi de vivre'. All of these can indeed

be found in the figure of Stanley – his muscularity is

frequently dwelt on, he takes an “animal joy in his being”, has

“never been very good at English”, and “Since his earliest manhood

the centre of his life has been pleasure with women” (SND,31). From this,

Van Duyvenbode concludes that Stanley represents an

embodiment of Williams's own anxieties and assumptions

regarding the black masculine otherness, masqueraded on stage

as the immigrant Other1. Whether or not one subscribes to

this interpretation of Williams's conscious or unconscious

portrayal of Stanley, more important for the purposes of this1 To do this, she draws on ideas taken from Toni Morrison's essay “Playing in the

Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination”, in which Morrison argues that “the insecure, increasingly diverse American nation had to develop a consensus as to what the American was, through constructing a sense of what the self was not” (p.206), and that as a result white writers of the 19th and 20th Century often consciously or unconsciously created characters who, though presented as white, functioned as masqueraded versions of dark, deviant racial others.

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essay is the fact that such tendencies towards collapsing

racial and ethnic groups into one another are clearly present

within Blanche DuBois. This can be seen when she suggests

that “Polacks” are “something like Irish”, before

categorising Stanley and his friends (one of whom is

Hispanic) under the homogeneous bracket of “types” (SND,9).

In other words, she does not draw distinctions in her

stereotyping of those she perceives as racial Others.

Furthermore, in the context of the South, her discomforted

suggestion that maybe Stanley is “what we need to mix our

blood with now that we've lost Belle Reve” (SND,25) cannot

but be associated with fears regarding miscegenation between

blacks and whites. There is thus strong evidence to suggest

that in Blanche's mind, Stanley's threatening otherness

operates along the boundary of both class and race.

This idea can be further developed in light of Kelly

Oliver's discussion of racial abjection. Drawing both from

Kristeva and from ideas outlined in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin,

White Masks, Oliver argues that the white man's confrontation

with a racial Other that is both similar and different brings

about a radical questioning of his own definitions of what

constitutes humanness, and is thus threatened with psychic

fragmentation. As a response to this, the logic of

colonialism “enables the coloniser to project onto a

racialised and inferior Other all the unwanted qualities in

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himself” (Oliver,29), so that the white man's construction of

his own identity as 'good and civilised' is defined against

the black body, which he abjects as evil and animal. This

works to shore up the borders of the self and the group as a

defence against ambiguity. Deborah R. Geis perhaps comes

closest to recognising the threat of abjection that Stanley

poses to Blanche's construction of herself as superior when

she writes that her calling him a 'brute' is an attempt to

“ward off the acknowledgement of her own sexuality, her own

desiring body” (Geis,5). Her white dresses and her constantly

powdering her face can therefore be seen as a double

signifier – whiteness symbolising both virginity (sexual

purity) and whiteness itself (racial purity) in a kind of

inverse blackface that points to the fluidly performative

nature of both gender and race.

In Scene 4, Blanche's desperate appeal to Stella makes

explicit that, as in the colonial psyche, the fear she wishes

to convey to her sister is“of the breakdown of borders

between civilized and barbaric, human and animal, white and

black [or racially Other]” (Oliver,54). Having failed to

instigate class-based notions of gentility to align Stella

and Mitch against Stanley's unrefinement, she now uses her

performance of the Southern belle to reinforce a position

from which to 'expose' Stanley as a racially abject brute.

Employing familiar racist tropes of biology and evolution,

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she describes him as “ape-like”, insisting that there is

“something – sub-human – something not quite to the stage of

humanity” (SND,47) about him. Reinterpreting moments in the

play from this perspective, she paints him as Neanderthal,

“bearing the raw meat home from some kill in the jungle”,

while the poker game becomes a “party of the apes” (SND,47).

Against this caricature of pre-historic animality, she paints

herself as championing “such things as art – as poetry and

music – such kinds of new light that have come into the world

since then” (SND,47), those “tenderer feelings” that must be

held as “our flag” – the flag of white America and its claims

to civilisation. Men like Stanley must be left behind,

abjected, cast out from society to restore the illusion of

the “clean and proper” (Kristeva,5) boundaries of white

American identity. Yet it is at this moment that Stella's

allegiances become clear. While both sisters recognise the

'brutal desire' epitomised by Stanley as existing within

them, Stella has forged herself a new, 'modern' identity that

does not rely on its rejection to appear cohesively feminine

and white, that does not need to recoil from “rude remarks or

vulgar actions” (SND,34) or, indeed, from interracial mixing.

Furthermore, it is an identity that is far more in line with

her environment than Blanche's, whose “superior attitude” is

ultimately “out of place” (SND,46). As a result, Blanche's

appeal backfires. Rather than reigniting in her sister the

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racial and class prejudices of the aristocratic, plantation

South, Blanche instead comes to “represent the deadly drag of

the archaic past” (Bedient,57), the real threat to Stella's

new sense of self. She thus drives her sister literally into

Stanley's arms.

Yet while Blanche's racist, classist diatribe has not

succeeded redefining the social space of the stage as one in

which Stanley is dangerously Other, she still represents a

threat, for at this point he has still not succeeded in fully

asserting Blanche's difference, in rendering her abject. It

is for this reason that he conducts his researches into her

past, uncovering a history of promiscuity, sexual deviance

and paedophilia – her entanglement with a seventeen year old

boy. By passing this information on to Stella and Mitch,

Stanley radically undermines Blanche's claims to racial and

class-based superiority – to 'pureness' and refinement. He is

once again in a position to assert his Sameness, as he does

in Scene 8, declaring, “I am not a Polack...what I am is a

one hundred percent American” (SND,79). Yet he also uses the

revelation of Blanche's past to firmly redefine the boundary

that determines sameness and difference as operating

primarily along the lines of gender and sexuality. On these

terms his dominant position is assured, and far from being an

abject brute, his identity is both cohesive and in keeping

with dominant structures of gender relations. His use of

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violence to control women, for example, is implicitly excused

by the community because it is culturally intelligible,

understood as normal and even necessary within the context of

the French Quarter. This is made clear with a direct

mirroring of Stella and Stanley's argument in a scene

involving Steve and Eunice, when she accuses him of cheating,

he beats her, and they later return upstairs “in a tight embrace”

(SND,52). Mitch sums up the attitude of the neighbourhood

when he tells Blanche, “there's nothing to be scared

of...it's a shame...but don't take it serious” (SND,38). And

there is nothing to be scared of for Mitch because there has

been no violation of culturally acceptable modes of behaviour

between the sexes and thus no threat to the codes that

determine fixed gender roles.

However, with the revelation of her sexual history

Blanche represents the greatest threat possible to the social

order. To fully understand this, we must return to Judith

Butler's theory of gender performativity. In her discussion

of the dangerously subversive potential of drag, she

describes how it “mocks the notion of a true gendered

identity” (Butler,GT,186). For, as she writes in Gender

Trouble, the gulf between the drag queen's biological sex and

the way in which they perform their gender

“reveals the distinctness of those aspects of

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gendered experience which are falsely

naturalized as a unity through the regulatory

fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating

gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender

itself” (Butler,GT,187)

Once again, one does not have to interpret Blanche as

literally representative of a man in drag to see the danger

that she poses. While she performed the part of the Southern

belle successfully, she may have been different, culturally

unintelligible to the residents of the Elysian Fields, but

she did not undermine the notion of gender as a cohesive

marker of identity. In other words, she was still

identifiably categorisable as feminine. Yet when it is

revealed that she desires like a man, is sexually promiscuous

like a man, possesses a gaze which “eroticises the male body”

(Kleb,36), she exposes the fallacy that gendered behaviour is

expressive rather than constitutive of gendered identities, a

'natural' follow on from sex. The artifice of her affected

gestures, her white dresses and her fake jewellery points not

only to the fact that her exaggerated femininity is a

performance, but that all gendered identities are

performative, non-essential. Indeed, Stanley's outrage is

primarily caused by this performance (“the same old lines,

the same old act” [SND,71]) rather than simply her

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promiscuity. The danger she poses is the very danger that

Allan posed to her – a collapse in meaning, the breakdown of

an order that relies upon the perception of gender as a

stable border upon which order and social hierarchy can be

founded, undermining the basis of individual and collective

gender identities. The greatest threat is, of course, to

Stanley, for if the role of the 'Southern belle' is merely a

social construct it opens up the possibility that Stanley's

role as 'man of the house' is an equally performative gender

norm – that his “gaudy” (SND,13) signifiers of powerful

masculinity constitute his gendered position in the social

hierarchy rather than being expressive of an innate

superiority.

It is this that creates the need for her to be

symbolically designated as occupying a space that is “'Out-

of-Bounds'” (SND,71) – those “abject zones of social life

which are nevertheless populated by those who do not enjoy

the status of the subject” (Butler,Bodies,6). Through her

story, we see the symbolic order fiercely maintained by

Stanley as “a series of normativizing injunctions that secure

the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis,

abjection, psychic unlivability” (Butler,Bodies,15). As a

result of having failed to perform her gender correctly she

is, in Kleb's Foucauldian terms, separated from the category

of the Same/Reason, deemed to be mad, and sent to a mental

22


institution. Crucially, while Blanche was alone in perceiving

Stanley as threateningly abject and thus was unable to have

him purged from the community, Stanley is not alone in

perceiving Blanche's threat. Stella too is revealed as a

guardian of these strict gender divisions, a position that is

evident throughout the play. She “likes her men butch”

(Guilbert,92) and in calling Allen a “degenerate” she shows

herself to be homophobic. As Guilbert suggests, “Homophobia

is one of the best ways to uphold the patriarchy, and this

somehow prepares Stella for her later rejection of Blanche”

(Guilbert,92). In fact, the entire community is on stage for

Blanche's eviction from the Elysian Fields. All are

complicit, for “Just as waste is expelled from the healthy

body, the abject is expelled from healthy society”

(Oliver,Unravelling,58), or as Eunice puts it, “She couldn't

stay here; there isn't no other place for her to go”

(SND,105).

In conclusion, A Streetcar Named Desire can be interpreted

as depicting the struggle between opposing cultural forces,

each vying to control and regulate the boundaries of class,

race and gender that determine what constitutes a socially

acceptable identity. In his exploration of this struggle,

Williams reveals and highlights the crucial role played by

abjection and the illusory performance of cohesive, stable

23


gender roles in maintaining and enforcing these borders. Yet

the outcome is rigged from the start by dint of the fact that

Blanche is clearly dislocated in both time and space. She is

not in plantation society, where her values are prized, but

in an urban, working class district, and she does not live at

a moment in American history in which the Southern rural

aristocracy are in the height of their power, but rather at

one in which a shift is occurring “from an agrarian to an

industrial society” (Bray,188), accompanied by an influx of

immigrants. In the light of this essay, however, simplistic

notions of the play's representation of this shift, such as

Andrei Goncharov's assertion that it depicts “the downfall

and ruin of a fragile beauty and its incompatibility with the

vulgar and cruel new world” (Bray,185) must be radically

questioned. For in Blanche we see not only the epitomization

of 'those tenderer feelings' but also of the exclusionary

practices attendant to any dominant group. Instead, the play

must be seen as portraying a historical continuum in which,

while the boundaries may shift, dividing lines are always

built up between society and a 'certain nature' on the simple

logic of excluding the abject, thus founding the 'stable' and

bounded identity of each social group.

24


Bibliography

Bedient, Calvin, “There Are Lives that Desire Does Not Sustain: A Streetcar Named Desire” in Philip C. Kolin (ed.) Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (London,1993)

Berkowitz, Gerald M., American Drama of the Twentieth Century (London, 1992)

Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993)

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (New York, 1990)

Butler, Judith, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory (1988)

Bray, Robert, “A Streetcar Named Desire: The Political and Historical Subtext” in Philip C. Kolin (ed.) Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (London, 1993)

Frior Scott, Anne, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970)

Geis, Deborah R., 'Deconstructing (A Streetcar Named) Desire: Gender Re-Citation in Belle Reprieve' American Drama (Summer, 2002)

Guilbert, Georges-Claude, 'Queering and Dequeering the Text: Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire' Cercles, Vol.10 (2004)

Kleb, William, “Marginalia: Streetcar, Williams and Foucault” in Philip C. Kolin (ed.) Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named

25


Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (London, 1993)

Kristeva, Julia, The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York, 1982)

Oliver, Kelly, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis, 2004)

Van Duyvenbode, Rachel, 'Darkness Made Visible: Miscegenation, Masquerade and the Signifier Racial Other in Tennessee Williams'Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire' Journal of American Studies, 35:2 (Winter, 2001)

Vlasopolis, Anca, 'Authorizing History: Victimization in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'' Theatre Journal, 38:3 (Winter, 1986)

Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (London, 2009)

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