Mohammed the First University Faculty of

Letters and Human Sciences  

English Department  

Abjection  and  Desire  in    

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
  
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

                                                                                                                         
1
 Her  attempt  to  ignore    
  
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.  
  
 

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,
  
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

                                                                                                                         
2
 Baudrillard,  Seduction;  see  especially  “The  Ecliptic  of  Sex”  and  “The  Effigy  of  the  Seductress.”  
  
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.  

 
  
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.