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1. Mohammed the First University Faculty of
Letters and Human Sciences
English Department
Abjection and Desire in
A Streetcar Named Desire
Term Paper 1
09/05/2016
Drama and Poetry
Abderrahmane Alamrani
Prof. Mohammed Dellal

2. Abderrahmane Alamrani
Professor Dellal, M
Drama and Poetry, S6
Monday, 9 May 2016
Abjection and Desire in A Streetcar Named Desire
In the appropriately titled A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois’s lust infested
lifestyle, and her promiscuous behavior led to a tragic fall. A once pure hearted girl from the Old
South aristocracy of Louisiana takes refuge in her sister’s home in New Orleans, where she
meets her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Tennessee Williams introduces themes such
abjection, desire and gender roles and the challenge of survival in a changing world. In what
follows, is an exploration of key events that led to her nervous breakdown, drawing back on
psychoanalysis to elaborate on how Blanche’s traumatic life experiences negates the shell that
encompasses her morbid livelihood.
The play opens with an imagery of the slums of New Orleans, the working class housing
projects with an inadequate name, the Elysian Fields, the name in the Greek mythology refers to
paradise, a place of happiness. The description of the locale is anything but paradise looking,
houses with a “raffish charm” and “rickety” stairs, an atmosphere of “decay” with the stench of
the “brown river”. After Stella and her husband leave the scene, Blanche enters confused, the
scenery is shocking and not what she expected, their sisterhood did not withstand the test of time
and distance.
Blanche’s sudden entry to the Kowalski’s reveals much of the hidden dynamics in their
household, by which Stanley and Stella’s marital relationship are based on. Not only through a

3. strong attraction to one another, but also through Stanley’s power, his attractive forceful
physique, raw self-confidence draws him the attention of all present characters. His violent
attribute shown when he proceeds to beat Stella after a drunken poker game with his fellows and
when he breaks the light bulbs of the small apartment on his wedding night, and ultimately when
he rapes Blanche the night his son is born. Stanley’s impulsive behavior, inability to inhibit his
excitement, unleashing it with strong acts of violence.
Blanche’s confusion, a played out act of a naive Southern belle, when she realizes the reality of
Stella’s livelihood, proceeds to stigmatize her sister, an inhibited impulse that draws back on
their early years of Stella “being quiet around” her. Then proceeds to explain the events that
took place after Stella left their home in Laurel, the loss of their estate, named Belle Reve
(french for Sweet Dreams) due to a foreclosure for unpaid loans. Stanley having suspected that
Blanche is cheating them on their inheritance proceeds to rip through her stuff in search for
evidence, his attempt at exposing Blanche’s false act to Stella, while she’s taking a bath,
frequent baths whenever tension arise around her.
Blanche’s frequent baths, as mentioned before, Calvin Bedient notes “to relax from the tensions
and to escape the disgusts of abjection” (Bedient 41). Long frequent recurring baths, a symbolic
cleansing from the past that drove her to New Orleans, and also from the present with fine
clothing and jewelry. She’s continuously escaping from the real world where she’s helpless, to
an imaginary one where she reigns supreme over men she seduces. An assumption that is drawn
from her previous acts, that are linked to a previous experience.
Blanche’s guilt inherited from the tragic suicide of her husband, who turned out to be
homosexual, “You disgust me!” she says to him before1
he ran away and shot himself. Her
failure to understand Alan’s innate conflict, and his failure to embody the gender roles expected

4. of him, Blanche says that he had a “softness and tenderness that wasn’t like a man’s”, her
description of him, presents us with a man, whose sexual identity challenged constructed
concept of manhood expected of him, this experience Stella describes having “killed her
illusions”, the desolation of a constructed notion of an innate fixed masculinity and femininity,
and in this sense Judith Butler writes:
Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed;
rather, it is an identity tenuously 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. (Butler 43)
Blanche sudden discovery of her husband’s homosexuality, the incident that also challenges her
understanding of herself as a heterosexual woman. The understanding of gender’s sexual
identity, as a fixed and transmitted through repetition of a set of inherited acts. Alan presented
the abnormal for Blanche, a man that she describes as “least effeminate”, his sexuality hidden
from her at the beginning of their relationship, but later fully present before Blanche to reject,
“You disgust me” she says to him after she finds him in bed with another man. She later recalls
his attributes that led to her rejection of his desires “there was something different about the
boy,” she says having “softness and tenderness that wasn’t like a man’s”, a way for her to
restore a “clean and proper” (Kristeva 8) sense of sexual identity.
His desires, antagonistic in their nature towards her own, disintegrates the sense of belonging for
the both of them in an environment that proceeds to function by a highly concealed and clearly
defined sexuality to function. Sexual desires are the core of the play, it joins together Blanche
DuBois with her younger sister Stella, and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in a space where
moral conventions are challenged with Blanche’s open display of venereal desires. The same
challenge that Alan's sexuality presented for Blanche, is also present for the rest of the
characters.

5. The play introduces Desire, and namely sexual desires at the core that links all characters,
Stella’s desire towards Stanley, her lover and protector, but she’s more to him a mother than a
wife, she’s always forgiving of his violence towards her. Blanche DuBois’ towards her dead
husband, replaced by the string of men she had relations with, including a minor resulting in her
dismissal from her work as a high school teacher. Also, her exile from her hometown due to her
notorious behavior, leaving her with no other choice but to seek refuge in her sister’s home.
Stanley desires of all women he lays eyes on, including Blanche.
The desire between Blanche and Mitch is one of mutual convenience, she requires financial
support, and for him to replace his ill mother after she passes away. This convenience is shortly
lived, his need to replace his mother, in Freudian terms makes him an infant, unable to really
rescue Blanche from the clutches of her poorly made decisions. The formality that Blanche
places to hide her need of a savior is dismissed when Mitch discovers the truth she had hidden
from him, he shifts his desire towards satisfying his sexual urge. This desire that carries all
characters past the moral conventions of the locale, Blanche’s fully present when she flirts with
the young delivery man.
She’s constantly seducing men around her, with a continuous display of frivolousness, a cover
for the void that is consuming her from the inside, the void left by “the blood-stained pillow-
slips” of her dying family members. Blanche’s provoking men’s desire for her, neutralizing her
own self as an object of desire for strange men to consume. An attempt to numb the feelings of
guilt, and mask the void inside of her left by her faded love for Alan.
Williams presents Desire as the moving force towards quarrels, and also the solution to the
emptiness. Blanche’s wrong assumptions of the surrounding people, miscalculating the threat
Stanley presents accelerated her demise. Stanley’s violent attributes and his impulsive behavior,

6. unable to cope with Blanche’s frivolousness he succumbs to his own primitive instincts and
proceeds to rape her.
The title of play, invoking a symbolic journey of Blanche DuBois’s sexual experiences that led
to her symbolic death, when she’s admitted to a mental asylum, unable to escape from it, in
contrast to her statement “Death....is the opposite of desire”. Tennessee Williams renders desire
and death as both opposite to each other and being the same. Yet the force that transported
Blanche from a Southern belle to a hollow shell is “once said that desire is rooted in a longing
for companionship, a release from the loneliness that haunts every individual” (Leverich 347) .
Terrible loneliness and a need to forget the death that haunts her drove Blanche into self-
destructive “intimacies with strangers”, a pursuit for compliments and attention from men, not
merely sexual intercourse, filling the void inside with appreciation, negating her poor self-
esteem.
It’s impossible to understand Blanche without her tragic past, and the chaotic relationships she
had, a placebo to all the misery she lived through. Despite the journey the title suggests,
Blanche’s life is not, as Kristeva puts it “sustained by desire”. She attempts to survive, past her
heartache, with the allure of seduction, “to seduce is neither to desire nor to love” (Bedient 44),
but rather, as Jean Baudrillant says “to challenge the autonomy of sex itself, to provoke desire
only to deceive it, to show it as deluded about its power”2
. Blanche’s seduction inhibits the lies
she tells throughout the play, she hides her age, the truth behind her “leave of absence”, keeping
herself in the shadows while presenting a brushed up facade of virtue and purity, a clear sign
that Blanche centers her presence on appearances.
In conclusion, the characters in A Streetcar Named Desire, are based on people whose
actions challenge social and moral conventions, preserving what’s already present, and seeking

7. what is absent, leading a life of constant struggle for the characters to endure until they either
obtain their object of desire or collapse under the heavy weight of morality.

8. Works Cited
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: New Directions, 1980. Print.
"Elysium." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference
Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015.
Bedient, Calvin. "There Are Lives that Desire Does Not Sustain: A Streetcar Named Desire"
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: A Streetcar Named Desire — New Edition. Ed. Harold
Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. 35-48. eBook.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory."Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives.
Ed. Carole Mccann, Seung-kyung Kim. Routledge, 2013. eBook
Kristeva, Julia. "Approaching Abjection." Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans.
Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. eBook
Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers,
1995.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.