Free How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn Page A

“Beautiful Riverbank,” which is, in fact, pronounced “bell reeve,” and which is a perfectly sensible name for a house in the Mississippi Delta.
    The elision of the sensible if rather ordinary “riverbank” in favor of the far more poetic if grammatically illogical “dream” is—whether Williams intended it or not—a deeply symbolic one. On the one hand, it may be said to represent the heroine’s approach to life. From the moment she shows up on the seedy doorstep of Stella and her crude husband, Stanley Kowalski, it becomes increasingly clear that Blanche’s aim is to replace the mundane, even the sordid—poverty, disgrace, loneliness, encroaching middle age, all the unflattering realities that she associates, in a telling little outburst early in the play, with the naked lightbulb that hangs over Stella’s matrimonial bed—with romantic illusions, using whatever means she has at hand: liquor, deceit, costumes, colored paper lanterns. “I don’t want realism,” she cries during her climactic encounter with her shy, sweet suitor, Mitch, after he’s learned that Blanche’s affected refinements conceal a dirty past. “I’ll tell you what I want. Magic!” The action of the play consists of the process by which Blanche’s magic is eroded and ultimately pulverized by contact with hard reality, embodied by her brother-in-law, Stanley. It is no accident that Stanley is a sexual brute who smirkingly boasts of having pulled his plantation-born wife “down off them columns” into, presumably, the mire of sexual pleasure—of having, in a way, retransformed “Belle Reve” into the muddy “Belle Rive.”
    But the original metamorphosis, the enhancement of common delta clay into the stuff of illusory dreams, of “Belle Rive” into the impossible “Belle Reve,” may be said to reflect another sleight of hand that takes place in the text of Streetcar . Here I refer to the character of Blanche herself. In a notoriously vitriolic denunciation of the play composed immediately after its March 1948 New York première, Mary McCarthy derided the “thin, sleazy stuff of this character,” the kind of stock figure—the annoying in-law who comes for overlong visits—who, to McCarthy, belongs more properly to the genre of comedy:
    â€¦thin, vapid, neurasthenic, romancing, genteel, pathetic, a collector of cheap finery and of the words of old popular songs,fearful and fluttery and awkward, fond of admiration and overeager to obtain it, a refined pushover and perennial and frigid spinster…the woman who inevitably comes to stay and who evokes pity because of her very emptiness, because nothing can ever happen to her since her life is a shoddy magazine story she tells herself in a daydream.
    It is, to say the least, difficult to reconcile this rude vision of Blanche DuBois with the iconic status she has achieved in the half century since the play’s première: the vanquished but somehow ennobled female victim of male violence, gallantly exiting on the arm of her executioner, the heroically wounded prophetess of art and beauty in the face of crassly reductive visions of what life must be—an emblem, in short, of culture itself. “When, finally, she is removed to the mental home,” Kenneth Tynan wrote, “we should feel that a part of civilisation is going with her.”
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    For a production of Streetcar to work, McCarthy’s and Tynan’s wildly opposed characterizations of Blanche must both feel true. Precisely what makes the part so insinuating is the way in which it manages to hold Blanche’s awfulness and her nobility in a kind of logic-defying suspension. There can be little doubt that the decision to endow her with both monstrousness and pathetic allure was a deliberate one on Williams’s part. As he recalled in his memoirs, Williams began writing