Blanche: A Doppelganger of Homosexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire

一、选题背景与意义（说明所选课题的历史背景、国内外研究现状和发展趋势）

1. Research Background

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), is a master playwright of the twentieth century. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, he is a son of a shoe salesman and a Southern belle. For his childhood in Mississippi, Williams describes it as happy and carefree. However, this sense of belonging and comfort is lost when the family moves from Mississippi, a small provincial, to St. Louis, a big city when he is seven years old. His father becomes increasingly abusive as the Williams children grow older. Besides, Williams is also influenced by his older sister’s emotional and mental imbalance. It is there that he finds life unsatisfactory so that he begins to look inward and to write. Actually, his childhood experience has a great impact upon both his sexual orientation and writing style which is in the perseverance to tell his stories. After his graduation from the University of lowa, he moves to New Orleans where he begins going by the name Tennessee, a nickname given in college because of his southern drawl. With a new name and a new home, he finally enters a new life as a gay man in order to be true to himself after struggling with his sexuality through his youth. He begins a lifelong love of New Orleans which is set the locale for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams is a prolific writer who publishes short stories, poems, essays, two novels, an autobiography, and dozens of plays. It is for his plays that he is most widely known. The most successful of these are The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). All four receive New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards, and both A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof win Pulitzer prizes.

As for his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire is generally considered to be Williams’ greatest play. In the play, Williams shows the reality of people’s lives, an enduring concern throughout his writing career. He writes the play believing he is about to die, so he writes about what he feels needed to say. And actually Williams himself comments that the play says everything he has to say. Therefore, Randolph Goodman feels that the play can thus be read as “an allegorical representation of the author’s view of the world he lives in.” When the play is first presented, it quickly becomes an international sensation. Williams sets the play in the South, but the compelling manner in which he renders his theme makes it universal, winning him an international audience and worldwide acclaim. The play runs 855 impressive performances before theaters in cities as far fling as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and so on. When it is adapted to film four years after its premiere, its reputation as one of the most compelling American dramas of the twentieth century is cemented. A Streetcar Named Desire mainly creates four main characters: Blanche DuBois, her younger sister Stella, her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski and her lover Harold “Mitch” Mitchell. The play begins with Blanche, who is descended from an old French aristocratic family, visiting Stella who is pregnant and lives in a cramped apartment building in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Blanche tells a lie that she is there on vacation after the loss of their family mansion, Belle Reve on a mortgage. When she is faced with Stanley who is animalistic and brutish in her eyes, she takes an immediate dislike to him. And in return, Stanley dislikes her presence because of her false airs. The two do not get along and irritate each other from their first meeting. However, at her first sight of Mitch, she can tell that he is different from Stanley due to Mitch’s kindness and gentle manners. At the same time, Mitch is entranced by Blanche’s feminine charms and refined manners. Undoubtedly they fall in love. But Stanley is so suspicious of everything Blanche tells them that he investigates her past and digs up dirt on Blanche that actually she flees to New Orleans because she is expelled from Laurel for her affair with one of her high school students as well as her prostitute identity. Stanley reveals his discoveries to Mitch about Blanche’s sordid past. Consequently, Mitch feels duped and breaks up with Blanche after considering marrying her, which makes Blanche descends more quickly into a state of mental depression. On the night Stella goes into labor near the end of the play, the drunken Stanley comes home and rapes Blanche, driving her into final insanity with her delicate sensibility already strained to the breaking point when she first arrives. Ultimately, Blanche is sent to mental institution, others’ life going on.