Tragedy

Parallelism Between Families Tragedy is defined by a series of unfortunate events that occurs to someone who does not deserve them. When a protagonist makes mistakes, sometimes other characters take the repercussions. Set in a time of royalty and ranks, King Lear describes parallel events of the pursuit of power, recognition, and certain tragic choices. With parallelism, similar occurrences highlight the importance of certain themes. In the play, William Shakespeare juxtaposes Lear’s choices and aftermath those of Gloucester to illustrate how physical and figurative blindness can lead to tragic endings.

By showing similarity between Lear and Gloucester’s impulsive actions, Shakespeare shows how making decisions without consideration can lead to the ultimate demise for the innocent. Lear makes rash decisions and is metaphorically blind because he does not listen to the truth and can not see past mere words. His first daughter swoons him by saying, “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty…beyond all manner of so much I love you. ” (Shakespeare I. i. 60-65). Lear believes those pleasant praises, however empty they may be.

He makes the mistake of basing his ideals on superficiality and rewarding those who could cajole him, which further shows his blindness as a father and king. Like Lear, Gloucester makes similar decisions. His choice of putting his trust where he would be oblivious to bad intentions causes his physical blindness. Neither Gloucester nor Lear can see past simple words and both refuses to see, therefore they are figuratively blind. Their similarity and parallel actions is significant because it intensifies the idea of how blindness can be tragic. Their blindness and fatal errors ultimately lead to the unreasonable death of the guiltless.

Tennessee Williams exploits the expressionistic uses of space in the drama, attempting to represent desire from the outside, that is, in its formal challenge to realistic stability and closure, and in its exposure to risk. Loosening both stage and verbal languages from their implicit desire for closure and containment, Streetcar exposes the danger and the violence of this desire, which is always the desire for the end of desire. Writing in a period when U. S. rama was becoming disillusioned with realism, Williams achieves a critical distance from realistic technique through his use of allegory. In Blanche’s line about the streetcar, the fact that she is describing real places, cars, and transfers has the surprising effect of enhancing rather than diminishing the metaphorical parallels in her language. Indeed, Streetcar’s “duplicities of expression”(3) are even more striking in the light of criticism’s recent renewal of interest in allegory. 4) For allegory establishes the distance “between the representative and the semantic function of language” (I89), the desire that is in language to unify (with) experience. Streetcar demonstrates the ways in which distance in the drama can be expanded and contracted, and what spatial relativism reveals about the economy of dramatic representation. Tennessee Williams’ plays, filled with allegorical language, seem also to have a tentative, unfinished character. The metalanguage of desire seems to preclude development, to deny progress.

And yet it seems “natural” to read A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegorical journey toward Blanche’s apocalyptic destruction at the hands of her “executioner,” Stanley. The play’s violence, its baroque images of decadence and lawlessness, promise its audience the thrilling destruction of the aristocratic Southern Poe-esque moth-like neuraesthenic female “Blanche” by the ape-like brutish male from the American melting-pot. The play is full in fact of realism’s developmental language of evolution, “degeneration,” eugenics.

Before deciding that Stanley is merely an “ape,” Blanche sees him as an asset: “Oh, I guess he’s just not the type that goes for jasmine perfume, but maybe he’s what we need to mix with our blood now that we’ve lost Belle Reve” (285). The surprising thing about this play is that the allegorical reading also seems to be the most “realistic” one, the reading that imposes a unity of language and experience to make structural sense of the play, that is, to make its events organic, natural, inevitable.

And yet this feels false, because allegorical language resists being pinned down by realistic analysis — it is always only half a story. But it is possible to close the gap between the language and the stage image, between the stage image and its “double” reality, by a double forgetting: first we have to forget that realism is literature, and thus already a metaphor, and then we have to forget the distance between allegory and reality. To say that realism’s empiricism is indistinguishable from metaphor is to make it one with a moral, natural ordering of events.

Stanley is wrong and Blanche is right, the moralists agree. But the hypocrisy of the “priggish” reading is soon revealed in its ambivalence toward Blanche/Stanley: to order events sequentially requires a reading that finds Blanche’s rape inevitable, a condition of the formal structure: she is the erring woman who gets what she “asks” for (her realistic antecedents are clear). For the prigs this outcome might not be unthinkable, though it might be — what is worse — distasteful. But Williams seems deliberately to be making interpretation a problem: he doesn’t exclude the prigs’ reading, he invites it.

What makes Streetcar different from Williams’ earlier play The Glass Menagerie (I944)(5) is its constant self-betrayal into and out of analytical norms. The realistic set-ups in this play really feel like set-ups, a magician’s tricks, inviting readings that leave you hanging from your own schematic noose. Analytically, this play is a trap; it is brilliantly confused; yet without following its leads there is no way to get anywhere at all. Streetcar has a map, but it has changed the street signs, relying on the impulse of desire to take the play past its plots.

In a way it is wrong to say Williams does not write endings. He writes elaborate strings of them. Williams has given Streetcar strong ties to the reassuring rhetoric of realism. Several references to Stanley’s career as “A Master Sergeant in the Engineers’ Corps” (258) set the action in the “present,” immediately after the war. The geographical location, as with The Glass Menagerie, is specific, the neighborhood life represented with a greater naturalistic fidelity: “Above he music of the ‘Blue Piano’ the voices of people on the street can be heard overlapping” (243).

Lighting and sound effects may give the scene “a kind of lyricism” (243), but this seems itself a realistic touch for “The Quarter” (4I2). Even the interior set, when it appears (after a similar wipe-out of the fourth wall), resembles The Glass Menagerie in lay-out and configuration: a ground-floor apartment, with two rooms separated by portieres, occupied by three characters, one of them male. Yet there are also troubling “realistic” details, to which the play seems to point. The mise en scene seems to be providing too much enclosure to provide for closure: there is no place for anyone to go.

There is no fire escape, even though in this play someone does yell “Fire] Fire] Fire]” (390). In fact, heat and fire and escape are prominent verbal and visual themes. And the flat does not, as it seems to in The Glass Menagerie, extend to other rooms beyond the wings, but ends in a cul-de-sac — a doorway to the bathroom which becomes Blanche’s significant place for escape and “privacy. ” Most disturbing, however, is not the increased sense of confinement but this absence of privacy, of analytical, territorial space.

No gentleman caller invited for supper invades this time, but an anarchic wilderness of French Quarter hoi polloi who spill onto the set and into the flat as negligently as the piano music from the bar around the corner. There does not seem to be anywhere to go to evade the intrusiveness and the violence: when the flat erupts, as it does on the poker night, Stanley’s tirade sends Stella and Blanche upstairs to Steve and Eunice, the landlords with, of course, an unlimited run of the house (“We own this place so I can let you in” 48 ), whose goings-on are equally violent and uncontained. Stella jokes, “You know that one upstairs? more laughter One time laughing the plaster — laughing cracked — ” (294). The violence is not an isolated climax, but a repetitive pattern of the action, a state of being – it does not resolve anything: BLANCHE I’m not used to such MITCH Naw, it’s a shame this had to happen when you just got here. But don’t take it serious. BLANCHE Violence] Is so MITCH Set down on the steps and have a cigarette with e. (308) Anxiety and conflict have become permanent and unresolvable, inconclusive. It is not clear what, if anything, they mean. Unlike realistic drama, which produces clashes in order to push the action forward, Streetcar disallows its events a clarity of function, an orderliness. The ordering of events, which constitutes the temporality of realism, is thus no less arbitrary in Streetcar than the ordering of spade: the outside keeps becoming the inside, and vice versa.

Williams has done more to relativize space in Streetcar than he did in The Glass Menagerie, where he visualized the fourth wall: here the outer wall appears and disappears more than a half-dozen times, often in the middle of a “scene,” drawing attention to the spatial illusion rather than making its boundaries absolute. The effect on spatial metaphor is that we are not allowed to forget that it is metaphor and consequently capable of infinite extensions and retractions.

As we might expect, then, struggle over territory between Stanley and Blanche (“Hey, canary bird] Toots] Get OUT of the BATHROOM]” 367 ) — which indeed results in Stanley’s reasserting the male as “King” (37I6 and pushing Blanche offstage, punished and defeated — is utterly unanalytical and unsubtle: “She’ll go] Period. P. S. She’ll go Tuesday]” (367). While the expressionistic sequence beginning in Scene Six with Blanche’s recollection of “The Grey oy” (355) relativizes space and time, evoking Blanche’s memories, it also seems to drain her expressive power. By the time Stanley is about to rape her she mouths the kinds of things Williams put on screens in The Glass Menagerie: “In desperate, desperate circumstances] Help me] Caught in a trap” (400). She is establishing her emotions like sign-posts: “Stay back] … I warn you, don’t, I’m in danger]” (40I). What had seemed a way into Blanche’s character has had the effect of externalizing her feelings so much that they become impersonal.

In Streetcar, space does not provide, as it does in realistic drama, an objective mooring for a character’s psychology: it keeps turning inside out, obliterating the spatial distinctions that had helped to define the realistic character as someone whose inner life drove the action. Now the driving force of emotion replaces the subtlety of expectation, leaving character out in space, dangling: “There isn’t time to be — ” Blanche explains into the phone (399); faced with a threatening proximity, she phones long-distance, and forgets to hang up. The expressionistic techniques of the latter half of he play abstract the individual from the milieu, and emotion begins to dominate the representation of events. In Scene Ten, where Blanche and Stanley have their most violent and erotic confrontation, the play loses all sense of boundary. The front of the house is already transparent; but now Williams also dissolves the rear wall, so that beyond the scene with Blanche and Stanley we can see what is happening on the next street: A prostitute has rolled a drunkard. He pursues her along the walk, overtakes her and then is a struggle. A policeman’s whistle breaks it up.

The figures disappear. Some moments later the Negro Woman appears around the corner with a sequined bag which the prostitute had dropped on the walk. She is rooting excitedly through it. (399) The mise en scene exposes more of the realistic world than before, since now we see the outside as well as the inside of the house at once, and yet the effect is one of intense general paranoia: the threat of violence is “real,” not “remembered” and it is everywhere. The walls have become “spaces” along which frightening, “sinuous” shadows weave — “lurid,” “grotesque and menacing” (398-99).

The parameters of Blanche’s presence are unstable images of threatening “flames” of desire, and this sense of sexual danger seems to draw the action toward itself. So it is as though Blanche somehow “suggests” rape to Stanley — it is already in the air, we can see it being given to him as if it were a thought: “You think I’ll interfere with you? Ha-ha] … Come to think of it — maybe you wouldn’t be bad to — interfere with… ” (40I). The “inner-outer” distinctions of both realistic and expressionistic representation are shown coming together here.

Williams makes no effort to suggest that the “lurid” expressionistic images in Scene Ten are all in Blanche’s mind, as cinematic point-of-view would: the world outside the house is the realistic world of urban poverty and violence. But it is also the domain of the brutes, whose “inhuman jungle voices rise up” (40I) as Stanley, snakelike, tongue between his teeth, closes in. The play seems to swivel on this moment, when the logic of appearance and essence, the individual and the abstract, turns inside-out, like the set, seeming to occupy for once the same space.

It is either the demolition of realistic objectivity or the transition-point at which realism takes over some new territory. At this juncture “objective” vision becomes an “outside” seen from inside; for the abstraction that allows realism to represent truth objectively cannot itself be explained as objectivity. The surface in Scene Ten seems to be disclosing, without our having to look too deeply, a static primal moment beneath the immediacy of the action — the sexual taboo underneath realistic discourse: BLANCHE Stay back] Don’t you come toward me another tep or I’ll STANLEY What? BLANCHE Some awful thing will happen] It will] STANLEY What are you putting on now? They are now both inside the bedroom BLANCHE I warn you, don’t, I’m in danger] (40I) What “will happen” in the bedroom does not have a name, or even an agency. The incestuous relation lies beyond the moral and social order of marriage and the family, adaptation and eugenics, not to mention (as Williams minds us here) the fact that it is unmentionable. Whatever words Blanche uses to describe it scarcely matter.

As Stella says, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley” (405). The rape in Streetcar thus seems familiar and inevitable, even to its “characters,” who lose the shape of characters and become violent antagonists as if on cue: “Oh] So you want some roughhouse] All right, let’s have some roughhouse]” (402). When Blanche sinks to her knees, it is as if the action is an acknowledgment. Stanley holds Blanche, who has become “inert”; he carries her to the bed. She is not only silent but crumpled, immobile, while he takes over control and agency.

He literally places her on the set. But Williams does not suggest that Stanley is conscious and autonomous; on the contrary the scene is constructed so as to make him as unindividuated as Blanche: they seem, at this crucial point, more than ever part of an allegorical landscape. In a way, it is the impersonality of the rape that is most telling: the loss of individuality and the spatial distinctions that allow for “character” are effected in a scene that expressionistically dissolves character into an overwhelming mise en scene that, itself, seems to make things happen.

The “meaning” of the rape is assigned by the play, denying “Stanley” and “Blanche” any emotion. Thus, the rape scene ends without words and without conflict: the scene has become the conflict, and its image the emotion. Perhaps Streetcar — and Williams — present problems for those interested in Pirandellian metatheatre. Metatheatre assumes a self-consciousness of the form; but Williams makes the “form” everything. It is not arbitrary, or stifling. Stanley and Blanche cannot be reimagined; or, put another way, they cannot be imagined to reimagine themselves as other people, in other circumstances entirely.

Character is the expression of the form; it is not accidental, or originary. Like Brecht, Williams does not see character as a humanist impulse raging against fatal abstractions. (In a play like The Good Person of Setzuan, for example, Brecht makes a kind of comedy of this “tragic” notion — which is of course the notion of “tragedy. “) Plays are about things other than people: they are about what people think, and feel, and yet they remove these things to a distance, towards the representation of thoughts and feelings, which is something else again.

If this seems to suggest that the rape in Streetcar is something other than a rape, and so not a rape, it also suggests that it is as much a rape as it is possible for it to be; it includes the understanding that comes from exposing the essence of appearances, as Williams says, seeing from outside what we cannot see from within. At the same time, and with the same motion, the scene exposes its own scenic limitations for dramatizing that which must inevitably remain outside the scene — namely, the act it represents.

Both the surface “street scene” and the jungle antecedents of social order are visible in the rape scene, thoroughly violating the norms of realism’s analytical space. When Stanley “springs” at Blanche, overturning he table, it is clear that a last barrier has been broken down, and now there is no space outside the jungle. “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning]” We have regressed to some awful zero-point (or hour) of our beginning. (A “fetid swamp,” Time critic Louis Kronenberger said of Williams’ plays, by way of description. (7) We are also back at the heart of civilization, at its root, the incest taboo, and the center of sexuality, which is oddly enough also the center of realism — the family, where “sexuality is ‘incestuous’ from the start. “(8) At the border of civilization and the swamp is the sexual transgression whose suppression is the source of all coercive order. Through allegory, Williams makes explicit what realistic discourse obscures, forcing the sexuality that propels discourse into the content of the scene. The destruction of spatial oundaries visualizes the restless discourse of desire, that uncontainable movement between inside and outside. “Desire,” Williams writes in his short story “Desire and the Black Masseur” (I942-46), “is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being. “(9) The individual being is only the measure of a measurelessness that goes far out into space. “Desire” derives from the Latin sidus, “star” (“Stella for Star]” 250, 25I ); an archaic sense is “to feel the loss of”: the ndividual is a sign of incompleteness, not self-sufficiency, whose defining gesture is an indication of the void beyond the visible, not its closure. The consciousness of desire as a void without satisfaction is the rejection of realism’s “virtual space,” which tried to suggest that its fractured space implied an unseen totality. Realism’s objectivity covered up its literariness, as if the play were not created from nothing, but evolved out of a ready-made logic, a reality one had but to look to see.

But literature answers the desire for a fullness that remains unfulfilled — it never intersects reality, never completes a trajectory, it remains in orbit. The nothing from which literature springs, whole, cannot be penetrated by a vision, even a hypothetical one, and no time can be found for its beginning. As Paul de Man reasons in his discussion of Levi-Strauss’ metaphor of “virtual focus,” logical sight-lines may be imaginary, but they are not “fiction,” any more than “fiction” can be explained as logic: The virtual focus is a quasi-objective structure osited to give rational integrity to a process that exists independently of the self. The subject merely fills in, with the dotted line of geometrical construction, what natural reason had not bothered to make explicit; it has a passive and unproblematic role. The “virtual focus” is, strictly speaking, a nothing, but its nothingness concerns us very little, since a mere act of reason suffices to give it a mode of being that leaves the rational order unchallenged. The same is not true of the imaginary source of fiction.

Here the human self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from tilling the void, asserts itself as pure nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability. (I9) Nothingness, then, the impulse of “fiction,” is not the result of a supposed originary act of transgression, a mere historical lapse at the origin of history that can be traced or filled in by a language of logic and analysis; on the contrary fiction is the liberation of a pure consciousness of desire as unsatisfied yearning, a space without boundaries.

Yet we come back to Blanche’s rape by her brother-in-law, which seems visibly to re-seal the laws of constraint, to justify that Freudian logic of lost beginnings. Reenacting the traumatic incestuous moment enables history to begin over again, while the suppression of inordinate desire resumes the order of sanity: Stella is silenced; Blanche is incarcerated. And if there is some ambivalence about her madness and her exclusion it is subsumed in an argument for order and a healthy re-direction of desire. In the last stage direction, Stanley’s groping fingers discover the opening of Stella’s blouse.

The final set-up feels inevitable; after all, the game is still “Seven-card stud,” and aren’t we going to have to “go on” by playing it? The play’s turn to realistic logic seems assured, and Williams is still renouncing worlds. He points to the closure of the analytical reading with deft disingenuousness. Closure was always just next door to entrapment: Williams seems to be erasing their boundary-lines. Madness, the brand of exclusion, objectifies Blanche and enables her to be analyzed and confined as the embodiment of non-being, an expression of something beyond us and so structured in language.

As Stanley puts it, “There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination] … And lies and conceit and tricks]” (398). Foucault has argued, in Madness and Civilization, that the containment of desire’s excess through the exclusion of madness creates a conscience on the perimeters of society, setting up a boundary between inside and outside: “The madman is put into the interior of the exterior, and inversely” (II). (I0) Blanche is allegorically a reminder that liberty if taken too far can also be captivity, just as her libertinage coincides with her desire for death (her satin robe is a passionate red, she calls Stanley her “executioner,” etc. . And Blanche senses early on the threat of confinement; she keeps trying perversely) to end the play: “I have to plan for us both, to get us both — out]” she tells Stella, after the fight with Stanley that seems, to Blanche, so final (320). But in the end the play itself seems to have some trouble letting go of Blanche. Having created its moving boundary line, it no longer knows where to put her: what “space” does her “madness” occupy? As the dialogue suggests, she has to go – somewhere; she has become excessive. Yet she keeps coming back: “I’m not quite ready. “Yes] Yes, I forgot something]” (4I2 4I4). Again, as in the rape scene, she is chased around the bedroom, this time by the Matron, while “The ‘Varsouviana’ is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle,” the “lurid,” “sinuous” reflections on the walls (4I4). The Matron’s lines are echoed by “other mysterious voices” (4I5) somewhere beyond the scene; she sounds like a “firebell” (4I5). “Matron” and “Doctor” enter the play expressionistically, as functional agents, and Blanche’s paranoia is now hers alone: the street is not visible.

The walls do not disintegrate, they come alive. Blanche is inside her own madness, self-imprisoned: her madness is precisely her enclosure within the image. (II) In her paranoid state, Blanche really cannot “get out,” because there no longer is an outside: madness transgresses and transforms boundaries, as Foucault notes, “forming an act of undetermined content” (94). It thus negates the image while imprisoned within it; the boundaries of the scene are not helping to define Blanche but reflecting her back to herself. Blanche’s power is not easy to suppress; she is a eminder that beneath the appearance of order something nameless has been lost: “What’s happened here? I want an explanation of what’s happened here. ” she says, “with sudden hysteria” (407-8). It is a reasonable request that cannot be reasonably answered. This was also Williams’ problem at the end of The Glass Menagerie: how to escape from the image when it seems to have been given too much control, when its reason is absolute? Expressionism threatens the reason of realistic mise en scene by taking it perhaps too far, stretching the imagination beyond limits toward an absoluteness of the image, a desire of desire.

The “mimetic” mirror now becomes the symbol of madness: the image no longer simply reflects desire (desire of, desire for), but subsumes the mirror itself into the language of desire. When Blanche shatters her mirror (39I) she (like Richard II) shows that her identity has already been fractured; what she sees in the mirror is not an image, it is indistinguishable from herself. And she cries out when the lantern is torn off the lightbulb, because there is no longer a space between the violence she experiences and the image of that violence.

The inner and the outer worlds fuse, the reflecting power of the image is destroyed as it becomes fully self-reflective. The passion of madness exists somewhere in between determinism and expression, which at this point “actually form only one and the same movement which cannot be dissociated except after the fact. “(I2) But realism, that omnivorous discourse, can subsume even the loss of the subjective-objective distinction — when determinism equals expression — and return to some quasi-objective perspective.

Thus at the very moment when all space seems to have been conquered, filled in and opened up, there is a need to parcel it out again into clearly distinguishable territories. Analysis imprisons desire. At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, there is a little drama. Blanche’s wild expressionistic images are patronized and pacified by theatricality: “I — just told her that — we’d made arrangements for her to rest in the country. She’s got it mixed in her mind with Shep Huntleigh” (404-5). Her family plays along with Blanche’s delusions, even to costuming her in her turquoise seahorse pin and her artificial violets.

The Matron tries to subdue her with physical violence, but Blanche is only really overcome by the Doctor’s politeness. Formerly an expressionistic “type,” having “the unmistakable aura of the state institution with its cynical detachment” (4II), the Doctor … takes off his hat and now he becomes personalized. The unhuman quality goes. His voice is gentle and reassuring s he crosses to Blanche and crouches in front of her. As he speaks her name, her terror subsides a little. The lurid reflections fade from the walls, the inhuman cries and noises die our and her own hoarse crying is calmed. 4I7) Blanche’s expressionistic fit is contained by the Doctor’s realistic transformation: he is particularized, he can play the role of gentleman caller. “Jacket, Doctor? ” the Matron asks him. ” He smiles … It won’t be necessary” (4I7-I8). As they exit, Blanche’s visionary excesses have clearly been surrendered to him: “She allows him to lead her as if she were blind. ” Stylistically, he, realism replaces expressionism at the exact moment when expressionism’s “pure subjectivity” seems ready to annihilate the subject, to result in her violent subjugation.

At this point the intersubjective dialogue returns, clearly masking indeed blinding — the subjective disorder with a assuring form. If madness is perceived as a kind of “social failure,”(I3) social success is to be its antidote. Of course theater is a cure for madness: by dramatizing or literalizing the image one destroys it. Such theatricality might risk its own confinement in the image, and for an instant there may be a real struggle in the drama between the image and the effort to contain it. But the power of realism over expressionism makes this a rare occasion.

For the “ruse,” Foucault writes, “… ceaselessly confirming the delirium , does not bind it to its own truth without at the same time linking it to the necessity for its own suppression” (I89). Using illusion to destroy illusion requires a forgetting of the leap of reason and of the trick it plays on optics. To establish order, the theatrical device repeats the ordering principle it learns from theater, the representational gap between nature and language, a gap it has to deny: “The artificial reconstitution of delirium constitutes the real distance in which the sufferer recovers his liberty” (I90).

In fact there is no return to “intersubjectivity,” just a kind of formal recognition of it: “Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. ” Streetcar makes the return to normality gentle and theatrical, while “revealing” much more explicitly than The Glass Menagerie the violence that is thereby suppressed. This violence is not “reality,” but yet another theater underneath the theater of ruse; the cure of illusion is ironically “effected by the suppression of theater” (I9I). The realistic containment at the end of Streetcar hus does not quite make it back all the way to realism’s seamlessly objective “historical” truth. History, structured as it is by “relations of power, not relations of meaning,”(I4) sometimes assumes the power of reality itself, the platonic Form behind realism, so to speak, When it becomes the language of authority, history also assumes the authority of language, rather naively trusting language to be the reality it represents. The bloody wars and strategic battles are soon forgotten into language, the past tense, the fait accompli.

Useless to struggle against the truth that is past: history is the waste of time and the corresponding conquest of space, and realism is the already conquered territory, the belated time with the unmistakable stamp of authenticity. It gets applause simply by being plausible; it forgets that it is literature. To read literature, de Man says, we ought to remember what we have learned from it — that the expression and the expressed can never entirely coincide, that no single observation point is trustworthy (I0-II).

Streetcar’s powerful explosion of allegorical language and expressionistic images keeps its vantage point on the move, at a remove. Every plot is untied. Realism rewards analysis, and Williams invites it, perversely, but any analysis results in dissection. To provide Streetcar with an exegesis seems like gratuitous destruction, “deliberate cruelty. ” Perhaps no other American writer since Dickinson has seemed so easy to crush. And this consideration ought to give the writer who has defined Blanche’s “madness” some pause. Even the critical awareness of her tidy incarceration makes for too tidy a criticism.

In Derrida’s analysis of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he questions the possibility of “historicizing” something that does not exist outside of the imprisonment of history, of speech — madness “simply says the other of each determined form of the logos. “(I5) Madness, Derrida proposes, is a “hyperbole” out of which “finite-thought, that is to say, history” establishes its “reign” by the “disguised internment, humiliation, fettering and mockery of the madman within us, of the madman who can only be a fool of a logos which is father, master and king” (60-6I).

Philosophy arises from the “confessed terror of going mad” (62); it is the “economic” embrace of madness (6I-62) To me then Williams’ play seems to end quite reasonably with a struggle, at the point in the play at which structure and coherence must assert themselves (by seeming to) — that is, the end of the play. The end must look back, regress, so as to sum up and define. It has no other choice. The theatrical ending always becomes, in fact, the real ending. It cannot remain metaphorically an “end” And what is visible at the end is Blanche in trouble, trapped, mad.

She is acting as though she believed in a set of events — Shep Huntleigh’s rescue of her — that the other characters, by their very encouragement, show to be unreal. There is a fine but perhaps important line here: Blanche’s acting is no more convincing than theirs; but — and this is a point Derrida makes about madness — she is thinking things before they can be historicized, that is, before they have happened or even have been shown to be likely or possible (reasonable). Is not what is called finitude possibility as crisis? ” Derrida asks (62). The other characters, who behave as if what Blanche is saying were real, underline her absurdity precisely by invoking reality. Blanche’s relations to history and to structural authority are laid bare by this “forced” ending, in which she repeatedly questions the meaning of meaning: “What has happened here? ” This question implies the relativity of space and moment, and so of “events” and their meanings, which are at-this point impossible to separate.

That is why it is important that the rape suggest an overthrow of meaning, not only through a stylized emphasis on its own representation, but also through its strongly relativized temporality. (Blanche warns against what “will happen,” while Stanley says the event is the future, the fulfillment of a “date” or culmination in time promised “from the beginning. “) Indeed, the problem of madness lies precisely in this gap between past and future, in the structural slippage between the temporal and the ontological.

For if madness, as Derrida suggests, can exist at all outside of opposition (to reason), it must exist in “hyperbole,” in the excess prior to its incarceration in structure, meaning, time, and coherence. A truly “mad” person would not objectify madness — would not, that is, define and locate it. That is why all discussions of “madness” tend to essentialize it, by insisting, like Blanche’s fellow characters at the end of Streetcar, that it is real, that it exists.

And the final stroke of logic, the final absurdity, is that in order to insist that madness exists, to objectify and define and relate to it, it is necessary to deny it any history. Of course “madness” is not at all amenable to history, to structure, causality, rationality, recognizable “though” But this denial of the history of madness has to come from within history itself, from within the language of structure and “meaning. ” Blanche’s demand to know “what has happened here” — her insistence that something “has happened,” however one takes it — has to be unanswerable.

It cannot go any further. In theatrical terms, the “belief” that would make that adventure of meaning possible has to be denied, shut down. But this theatrical release is not purifying; on the contrary, it has got up close to the plague, to the point at which reason and belief contaminate each other: the: possibility of thinking madly. Reason and madness can cohabitate with nothing but a thin curtain between. And curtains are not walls, they do not provide solid protection. (I6) Submitting Williams’ allegorical language to ealistic analysis, then, brings you to conclusions: the imprisonment of madness, the loss of desire. The moral meaning smooths things over. Planning to “open up” Streetcar for the film version with outside scenes and flashbacks, Elia Kazan found it would not work — he ended up making the walls movable so they could actually close in more with every scene. (I7) The sense of entrapment was fundamental: Williams’ dramatic language is itself too free, too wanton, it is a trap, it is asking to be analyzed, it lies down on the couch.

Kazan saw this perverse desire in the play — he thought Streetcar was about Williams’ cruising for tough customers: The reference to the kind of life Tennessee was leading rear the time was clear. Williams was aware of the dangers he was inviting when he cruised; he knew that sooner or later he’d be beaten up. And he was. (35I) But Kazan undervalues the risk Williams is willing to take. It is not just violence that cruising invites, but death. And that is a desire that cannot be realized.

Since there is really no way to get what you want, you have to put yourself in a position where you do not always want what you get. Pursuing desire requires a heroic vulnerability. At the end of “Desire and the Black Masseur” the little masochistic artist/saint, Anthony Burns, is cannibalized by the masseur, who has already beaten him to a pulp. Burns, who is thus consumed by his desire, makes up for what Williams calls his “incompletion. ” Violence, or submission to violence, is analogous to art, for Williams: both mask the inadequacies of form. Yes, it is perfect,” thinks the masseur, whose manipulations have tortured Bums to death. “It is now completed]”(I8) NOTBS I Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. I (New York, I97I), 246. Subsequent references are to this edition and rear nod by page number in the text. 2 See Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson, Miss. , I986). 3 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. , revised (Minneapolis, I983), I2. See de Man, Blindness and Insight, I87ff, where he outlines the critical movements in Western Europe and the U. S. that have thus “openly raise d the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures” (I88). Among the critics he cites are Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault (to whose work I will turn later in this essay). Subsequent references to Blindness and Insight are noted by page number in the text. 5 Tennessee Williams, The Gloss Menagerie (New York, I97I). 6 Stanley is quoting Huey Long. 7 See Gore Vidal’s “Introduction” to Tennessee

Williams’ Collected Short Stories (New York, I985) xxv. 8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, I978), I08-9. 9. Tennessee Williams, “Desire and the Black Masseur,” in Collected Stories (New York, I985), 2I7. I0 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, I965). II. Ibid. , 94. I2 Ibid. , 88. I3 Ibid. , 259-60. Subsequent references are noted by page number in the text. I4 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected

Mean states “Antigen deserves the title role because her courage and conviction, her absolute and self-sacrificing defiance of Green’s edict is the catalyst that creates the whole tragedy; but as the drama unfolds in performance, Green’s incapacity to Andre the political and familial situation that he has created becomes more and more central”. The point of this statement is to tell how Antigen’s disobedience, and loyalty to her brother created this play, but Is overshadowed by the impotence of King Akron.

Antigen Is seen as a female hero while Akron Is not accepted as the tragic hero. Being faced with the death of his wife, and son, Green’s nobility does not compare to that of Oldness. Antigen Is then described by Michael Means as being, “right to transgress against the role expected of a woman In fifth century Athens, and bury her brother herself”. Frank, Bernhard. Sophocles’ Antigen. ” Explicator 55(1997):187-1 89. Literary Reference Center. Web. 22 Gag. 2014.

In this literary critique Frank insists that the incest motif still remains very clear in this story as it did in Sophocles’ . He also states that the murder motive reappears. Antigen is described by Bernhard Frank as, “Rather than the “ill-fated bride” of Hammond, it is as the bride of her slain brother that Antigen may see herself’. This quote Is stating that she is mourning her brother so much that you would think she was his widow. Antigen Is then described as the, violent daughter of a violent father of a violent father”.

Oedipus other daughter, Kinsmen Is described as hope at the end of literary work of art. She will probably marry out of her family. Kinsmen is called the future of her families never ending tragedy. Merchant, David Michael. “Antigen. “Masterpiece, Fourth Edition (2010):1-2. Literary Reference Center. Web. 26 Gag. 2014 There are many themes discussed in this literary critique written by David Michael Merchant. The subjects of obedience to the laws provided by the gods before anything else, is family worth more than the state, ND the theme of consequences and choices.

It is debated that Antigen was right for fulfilling her role In Grecian society, and burying Policies. In contrast, Croon Is looked as scum for trying to kill his niece, and son’s fiance. Merchant then states, “Both Antigen and Croon stick stubbornly to what they feel are logical choices -but they are Limited In their knowledge and cannot foresee all the consequences of their choices”. Both of them do not listen to a council, which tries to guide them. If they audience to debate whether Antigen, or Croon wins this tragic war.

King Arthur as a Hero

            The life of King Arthur consists various features in myths the world over, from his secret parentage to his final encounter in a paradise across the waters.  Even though mythical elements, such as giants, wizards, and magic play significant roles in the story, at its core is the simple tale of a man trying to live in accordance to the highest standards in a world where human weaknesses exist.

He was a celebrated epic hero of medieval Britain.  King Arthur assumed the lead character in some of the most famous literary works renowned the world over.  For nearly 1,000 years, poets have put into writing the noble deeds of this mighty king as well as the brave exploits of his knights (Castleden 107; Higham 10).

            King Arthur was born in a place in time where imagination and history come together.  Although it is possible that the original legends have been based on the life of a real person, scholars have not yet identified who that person actually is.  Be it a product of the imagination or a real account, his story has been fashioned by the literary creations and earliest myths which evolved around him, and the chivalrous medieval king who appears in the well-known versions has been conceptualized in a more recent time (Higham 150).

Perhaps there was a real King Arthur.  However, historic accounts that will serve as verification of his actual existence are insufficient.  His tale was passed on by words of mouth from one generation to the other.  The stories told about him could have had their basis on a real British leader who successfully won minor battles against German conquerors from the early 500 A.D. (Castleden 107).

            According to legend, Arthur’s parents were King Uther Pendragon and Duchess Igraine of Cornwall (Castleden 13).  Sir Ector, one of Uther’s barons, raised Arthur but did not tell him of his royal ancestry (Castleden 107).  Then guided by Merlin, an old Celtic magician, Arthur defeated a force of rebellious princes and married the beautiful Princess Guenevere (Castleden 107).  He had a number of residences.  However, the castle in Southern England, named Camelot was his favorite (Castleden 148).

            Excalibur was his sword.  There are two versions of how he obtained this sword.  In one version, Excalibur was embedded in a stone slab so that only the worthy successor of the British throne could pull it out (Higham 10).  Many men tried, but only Arthur succeeded.  He thus proved right to be king of England.

            According to the other version of the legend, Arthur received the sword from the mysterious Lady of the Lake (Castleden 178).  She lived in a castle in the middle of a magic lake.  Just before Arthur died, he commanded Sir Bedevere, one of his knights, to throw Excalibur into the lake.  When Bedever did so, a hand rose from the water, caught the sword, and pulled it beneath the surface (Castleden 178).  No one ever saw the sword again.

            At the start of the fifth century CE, a once-powerful empire of Rome was starting to collapse (Matthews 13).  It would last for another few hundred years, but it can never regain its former glory, when it had extended from Africa in the south to Scotland in the north, from Spain in the west to America in the east (Matthews 13).  Rome’s boundaries were now shrinking back upon themselves, and the inhabited regions had started to leave from distant provinces, summoned home to defend the Eternal City itself.

            As the year 410 CE drew to a close in one of these provinces, the island of Britain, the mists drew back behind the last departing Roman galley, and the ancient land was once again sent back to its former masters, the Celts (Matthews 13).  Certainly, this strong and independent people had never been greatly conquered, and many areas of Britain had remained independent of Roman influence, producing a crisscross of conflicting factions across the whole island.

Accounts concerning the events which led to the death of the king come in different versions.  It was believed that King Arthur waged war against Emperor Lucius of Rome and took over the most part of Western Europe (Castleden 178).  Early writers maintain that King Arthur was summoned home even before he was able to complete his conquest.  The king heard that Modred, a knight who was either his son or nephew, captured his wife and seized control of his territory (Higham 10).  He killed Modred but he succumbed to death because of the wounds obtained from the battle.

Later poets wrote that the king had completed his conquest against the Romans.  Following his return to Britain, he had his court to start the search for the dish or cup that was used by Christ during the last supper, the Holy Grail (Castleden 107).  According to some legends, the Grail was a dish or a stone.  The Holy Grail inspired writers during the Middle Ages to put into writing the allure of this cup or dish.  These poets may have adapted the legend from a tale told much earlier by pagan Celtic people.  The Celtic story described a magic cup or dish that provided food and drink for anyone who used it.  Different versions of the Grail story written during the Middle Ages differ from one another on important points as well as in small details.  However, each version of the story describes a search of the Holy Grail by King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.

Following the end of the battle, a love affair grew between the king’s wife, Guenevere and one of his knights, Sir Lancelot (Castleden 107).  While waging a war of vengeance against his unfaithful knight, the king learned about the betrayal of Mordred.  Afterwards, a battle followed which resulted in the deaths of both Mordred and the king.  Most people believed that the wound of the king would be cured and that one day he would come back to his country when they desperately need him.

Le Morte Darthur, a famous romantic prose is a compilation made by Sir Thomas Mallory at around 1469 from much earlier English and French romances telling the story of the legendary Arthur (Higham 150).  Several poets made Mallory’s work a basis of their literary accounts of the king.

People of the Western world have been caught up in the intriguing romances of King Arthur for well over a thousand years.  Throughout Great Britain, continental Europe, and North America, the adventures of Arthur and his noble knights know no cultural or nationalistic boundaries.  A multitude of translations have nearly removed language barriers, rendering Arthur as a universal epic hero in every sense of the world.

Associated with his name are qualities that are good, worthy, and honest.  His spirit embodies principles disciplined by ethics, truth, victorious through justice, power submitting to right, compassion blending with sensitivity, chivalry governed by courtesy, and love tempered by forgiveness.

            At the mere mention of this king among kings, people of different ages, races, and cultures can call to mind at least one story of the well-known adventures surrounding him.  They can identify the names his wizard, his sword, his queen, and at least several of his knights.  The name King Arthur produces a charming appeal, a mixture of awe of fantasy and the spice of reality.  The one who are tantalized by him are stuck in the knightly exploits of the romantic Middle Ages – the thrill of the court, the intrigue of courtly love, knights who seek for daring missions, banter and the display of manhood.  Still, even with these enthusiasts, there is an inciting interest in Arthur’s reality.  The magic of Arthur spills over into history and the Dark Ages where captivating mysteries area locked in the mists of time (Reno 5).

            Even though this area of history, archaeology, and speculation is not as famous to the enthusiasts of the romanticized Arthur, the concern on his historicity is as strong as the interest in his knightly achievements recorded in literary tradition.  Legendary heroes serve as examples to promote cultural values as they pass from one generation to the other.

King Arthur was one of the greatest cultural heroes of all times, an embodiment of all desirable values.  He was filled with powers that bordered on wizardry, brought back to life not once but twice, and rescued his country from total destruction for over a half century.  Records of his exploits developed into medieval romances, entering modern times laden with exaggeration, fabrications, clever inventions, and sometimes intentional deception.

Every time the name King Arthur is mentioned, the majority of enthusiasts think only of the romances.  It is the appeal of these stories which arouses the imagination: King Arthur’s noble knights, the code of chivalry, the formidable Merlin, banter, courtly love, damsels in distress, battle, honor, and the search for adventures.  There has been never such an outpouring of stories about such an impressive figure upon such insufficient historical basis.

            King Arthur is the greatest of British literary heroes, celebrated by poets and writers for over a thousand years.  From the twelfth century to the twentieth, his heroic acts have been celebrated in prose and verse, and have inspired painters and poets alike.

            Heroes come into being for different reasons.  At times, it is to set what is right and wrong, or at times, it is to establish a profound change in society, or at other times still, it is to recover lost treasure, both of this world and the other.  The hero known as Arthur came into being in response to a cry for help from a people in need.

            The life of the celebrated leader of Britain became the basis for a compilation of narratives otherwise known as the Arthurian legends (Higham 10).  Being a central feature of British mythology, King Arthur was a symbol of the epic tradition of the Britain.  The Arthurian legends, together with its elements of fate, chivalry, betrayal, adventure, war, love, magic, and mystery, has tapped into the common imagination and formed part of the humanity’s collective mythology.

Works Cited

Barber, Richard. King Arthur: Hero and Legend. New York: Boydell Press, 1990.

Castleden, Rodney. King Arthur: The Truth Behind the Legend. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Higham, N.J. King Arthur: Myth-making and History. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Matthew, John. King Arthur: Dark Age Warrior and Mythic Hero. New York: The Rosen

Publishing Group, 2008.

Reno, Frank. The Historic King Arthur: Authenticating the Celtic Hero of Post-Roman

Britain. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1996.

William Shakespeare’s classic, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, is about two lovers that are forbidden to be together and their solution. The writing style of this Shakespearean play reveals the era of the play by highlighting the social classes. Skillfully using his writing, Shakespeare develops his characters by implying the social classes of each character.

Shakespeare uses language usage and style to suggest the individual social standings. In the Renaissance Era, the separation of the social classes is prominent. The four main social groups are the nobles, merchants, the middle class, and laborers (Dowling, “Renaissance Social Hierarchy”). At the top, the nobles have extensive property, live in large lavish homes outside of the city, and are owners of large businesses (Dowling, “Renaissance Social Hierarchy”).

Since the nobles own most of the land, they have a lot of power and tend to be military officers, advisors to royalty, and politicians (Dowling). Nobles are trained to be warriors, to have social skills, to dance properly, and to carry themselves with a certain air about them (Dowling). Laborers, on the other hand, do not live in such luxury. Their employers did not guarantee them employment and their employment status and paycheck depended on their performance in their duties (Dowling).

Despite the hardships in a laborer’s life, the life of a peasant was far worse. All of society frowned apon the peasants. The separation of social standing during the Renaissance Era was obvious. Language usage between the different classes was quite different. Those who are higher up in the social ladder have more education opportunities and as a result are more educated.

In Shakespeare’s writing, the language usage by each character helps to identify the social classification of the character and develop the character. Romeo and Juliet often use an oxymoron or an antithesis when talking to and about each other (“Bitesize”). ” … ” (1.1.44–69). Characters like Romeo and Juliet tend to speak in an iambic pentameter blank verse. Common folk or people that are considered laborers tend to speak prose. ” … ” (1.1.44–69)

He felt like maybe he shouldn’t have done what he did. Lastly, Machete’s psychological state is that he is feeling suspicious about how Duncan and Banquet are acting. Analyze- In this scene , something that is revealed is that Macbeth immediately realizes that the fulfillment of the prediction may require conspiracy and murder on his part. One thing that Machete’s words in this scene mean to me is that things can be good but also be terribly bad at the same time.

Also, life can be hard at times, but you have to push through it the best you can. You can’t let the bad things overtake the good in life. Think the most important words in this aside are when Macbeth says he is Thane of Castor. These are the most important words because even though some people may not want him to be king there isn’t anything they can do about it for it to change. Personalize- My reaction to these lines are that there is a lot of defense coming from Macbeth, like he is lining guilty or ashamed about being king.

I feel like Macbeth is trying to get a point across to Banquet, that he knows Banquet wants to be king but he will never feel the joy that Macbeth feels. Banquet will never have the power of being king. The way would deal with the situation would most likely be the same way Macbeth did. He seemed very calm about it. He didn’t really get violent, he just stated that he was King, and there’s no way to change it.

Imagine you are up late one night watching television, and you come across the MTV channel and you start to watch a show where a man is slamming himself to a wall, and then you see another clip where a man is dancing around naked in the street, then you must be watching Jackass. Jackass is a show where people perform dangerous, hilarious, disgusting stunts and pranks, but simply the show is made to make people laugh. The show is really simply comedic, but since the show includes many dangerous stunts and activities, the show receives negative criticism for being the blame for certain accidents where teenagers tried to imitate the show.

Even though the show has received a lot negative criticism, the show was still able to maintain its popularity because we have a dark sense of humor, we seek some sort of thrill, and it makes us feel superior to people on the show. Most of us have shown to have a dark sense of humor and we enjoy watching television shows like Jackass. The stunts and pranks performed on the show are cruel and most of the time people performing the stunts end up getting hurt, but we still laugh.

Even looking at history, we can see that people have always has a dark sense of humor, like in Roman Empire era when people would fight to the death for other people’s entertainment. Then, we moved from trying to kill each other for entertainment to have animals fight for our entertainment, and now we have television and movies to help feed our craving for dark humor. In Stephen King’s essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies”, Stephen explains that a horror movie “…deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidly unchained, our most base instincts set free, our nastiest fantasies realized…” (Page 2).

Just like a horror movie, shows like Jackass appeals to the worst in us and helps us to take control our dark sense of humor. Jackass is probably still one of the most disgusting and daring show on air and we find it thrilling to watch because for that reason. The shows intensity and excess makes us either want to look away or watch even more. On the show, they go as far as artificially inseminating a cow, swallowing a live fish and throwing it up later, flipping over a port-a-potty while someone is inside, diving into a pool full of elephant feces, and even more ridiculous stunts.

The stunts on the show aren’t something that people do on a daily basis and people find it thrilling to watch others try something that hasn’t been done. Some of us would probably want to know what it is like to do some of the stunts seen on the show, but we are too afraid to try. The show help us to see what would have happened if we were to try a stunt seen on the show. The pranks done in the show are truly cruel and unnecessary and in some way makes us happy it isn’t us and makes us feel superior to the people on the show.

On the show, someone walks around with an electric razor and randomly cuts out patches on people’s hair, also people on the show go off-roading in golf carts. Even though the show has a warning not to try anything seen on the show at home, most of us know better than to go ice skating naked and makes people laugh to know that there is someone out there stupid enough to try it. Just the watching the people on show, it makes us feel that we are better than them; somewhat feeds to our ego to know that there are others who less incompetent than us.