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| A Streetcar Named Desire |
Reality is just not pleasant. In
the play, A Streetcar Named Desire,
by Tennessee Williams, the character Blanche displays a personality and a way
of acting that is odd from the rest of the characters. Her behavior could be
the response to several events in her life, which affected her emotional
stability, creating anxiety. Explained in psychology, anxiety is the result of
a conflict produced by the disagreement between our biological a social needs. To
deal with anxiety, Sigmund Freud talked about the defense mechanisms: denial,
regression, reaction formation, projection, displacement and rationalization
(Stratton). They were ways to distort reality to better cope with it. Fairy
tales and magic worlds are always the place we want them to be and the places
in which we would want to live. The mind is powerful and mighty, it can take us
places we can only dream of and give us pleasures that we never heard before.
In the play, A Streetcar Named Desire,
Blanche alters her reality through denial and rationalization to try to move on
with her life when everything in her world was not pleasant anymore.
Sometimes our lives just do
not go the way we would like them to go. Sometimes we are just not strong
enough to live our lives. Sometimes we just live our lives in a different way
and it is not bad but for Blanche, it was necessary to alter her life, it was
necessary to alter her reality. For Blanche, it was critical to create that illusion
that everything was better and that there was not pain, that her pain was
actually happiness and enthusiasm. She says, “I don’t want realism. I want
magic! Yes, yes magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to
them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that is
sinful, then let me be dammed for it!” (Williams 1225). This is reaction
formation, this is her changing her feelings to the opposite of what they are
and therefore she is able to deal with them. You can see how desperately she
needs it. The fact that she is willing to be “dammed” makes, it evident that
she rather go through extreme consequences, than facing the truth that her
young husband was homosexual and that her discovery of it triggered his suicide.
Blanche’s mind is conflicted but having the opportunity of denial, why not
denied herself what creates the trouble?
According to Kendra Cherry, a
psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, denial is a very common defense
mechanism. She says, “Denial is
probably one of the best known defense mechanisms, used often to describe
situations in which people seem unable to face reality or admit an obvious
truth” (Cherry 3). People deny things all the time, it is easy. It is easy to
pretend, it is easy to lie and it is easy to deny. Blanche does this in an
attempt to ease her complex situation. This is evident when she lies about the
reasons why she is in New Orleans. She tells Mitch, “Stella hasn’t been well
lately, and I came down to help her for a while. She’s very run down” (Williams
1189). There is nothing wrong with Stella; she is only having a baby. The truth
behind these lies is that there are many things going on with Blanche. She lost
their family’s property; she lost her job and her reputation. She is going
crazy but she does not see this happening to her. She lies to her sister, to
her friends and to herself. She is trying to protect herself from the hurtful
reality that is torturing her past. She sees in the lies a way of preserving
her emotional stability when inside everything is chaos. We all tell lies and we all try to justify
them, we find them to be the way out.
Rationalization is another Freud’s
defense mechanism. In about.com, Cherry says, “Rationalization is a defense
mechanism that involves explaining an unacceptable behavior or feeling in a
rational or logical manner, avoiding the true reasons for the behavior”
(Cherry). This is exactly what Blanche does when Mitch finds out the truth
about her and what she did in Belle Reve. Blanche tries to justify her actions
with the shock and grief of her husband’s death. She says, “Yes, I had many
intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan – intimacies with strangers
was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with…I think it was panic, just
panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection”
(Williams 1224). Blanche actions are unjustifiable, her mind is not right and
her surroundings are not helping realize of that. Everything about Blanche’s
life feels to her like she is going to be defeated and in her sense of
preservation there is no other path for her to follow but to lie.
There is no doubt that
Blanche’s character in the play, A
Streetcar Named Desire, is seriously damaged and needs a way out of the
real world. Psychological studies such as the defense mechanisms explain why Blanche
needs a world of “magic,” as she says it, to deal with her life. She is in
desperate need of help, which is impossible for her to find in her sister’s
household. There is no doubt that Blanche has made mistakes and that her way of
dealing with the grief and betrayal of her husband is not proper but everything
Blanche needs and looks for is condolence and sympathy. She needs a new start,
a new beginning and that is what she tries to find with Mitch. Unfortunately
for her, as the Spanish proverb says, “el pasado no perdona”, the past is not
compassionate. Throughout the play, Blanches desire is nothing more than the
drive to live again without having to hide behind a mask that cover the face of
a wounded woman.
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