In A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams uses stage directions as much as dialogue to complement and enhance how the setting of the play affects the characterizations, transformations, and actions of the major characters, especially and Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. Specifically, I just want to zoom in on this one scene in particular, that Williams places right before the final, scarring occurrence of what Stanley declares to Blanche is “this date [we’ve had] with each other from the beginning!” (p 130, end of Sc. 10), and that I’m still pondering the meaning of:
“ [She [Blanche] sets the phone down and crosses warily into the kitchen. The night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in a jungle.
[The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces.
[Through the back wall of the rooms, which have become transparent, can be seen the sidewalk. A prostitute has rolled a drunkard. He pursues her along the walk, overtakes her and there 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. “
(Scene 10, p. 128 (in my version >.<”))
When I first skimmed this passage, unsure of what “rolled” exactly meant in this context, I and many others that read this play, may have simply seen the “prostitute” and “drunkard” as symbols of Blanche and Stanley (especially noting the scene’s timing in context with the rest of the events); because it took place right before Stanley’s implied rape of Blanche, many of us readers at first thought Williams had placed it there as a sign, or omen if you will, of Stanley delivering the final blow to Blanche’s last shred of sanity.
However upon looking up the definition of “rolled” and going back and reading the text more closely, I realized that I had largely misinterpreted what happens in that scene and thus why Williams uses it in the play.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, definition #7 of “roll” is: “to rob (a drunk, sleeping, or unconscious person) usually by going through the pockets” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rolled) – which fits perfectly into the context of the scene and greatly dispels our original misconception of the scene as an omen for the rape.
What happened:
The prostitute, seeing the drunk man’s vulnerable, unstable state, robbed him (perhaps for revenge or simply as a means to survive in the harsh urban environment), which is why he chases after her (perhaps yelling and stirring up a ruckus, causing the “inhuman voices like cries in a jungle” that Blanche hears). When he catches up with her, they fight fervently until the police (perhaps called to the scene by annoyed neighbors) arrive to break it up. In the end, though we don’t know for sure whether or not the drunk man was able to fully recover his possessions, we do realize that the prostitute ironically lost her own (perhaps quite important?) “sequined bag” in her melee with the drunkard, as we see that the “Negro Woman” looting eagerly through it at the end.
So now that we know what actually happened, versus what we had imagined happened, what is its overall significance in the play?
Personally I feel that Williams uses this scene to enhance and highlight many different aspects of the play that include the following:
1. Idealistic Illusion v.s. Blunt Reality:
This scene contributes to this ongoing contrast by bringing alive the harsh reality of what really happens in this world—that if you let down your guard for even a second, anyone can come by (even a complete stranger!) and take advantage of your momentary weakness in an instant (as shown by the prostitute “rolling” the drunkard, the drunkard fighting the prostitute, and the “Negro Woman” searching through the prostitute’s forgotten purse). By only displaying not-so-good aspects of humans (greed, cunning, violence), Williams highlights the mercilessness of reality (which Stanley represents throughout this play, and which may slightly foreshadow his actions at the end of Scene 10), driven by the animalistic concept of “survival of the fittest” and the fact that everyone is vulnerable—even if you take advantage of someone, someone else may also be taking advantage of you.
2. Blanche’s stance as a victim:
In this scene, because both the prostitute and drunkard are the victims in some way (the drunkard was robbed; the prostitute’s purse was looted by the “Negro Woman”), Williams may be using both the represent Blanche in a way and emphasize her vulnerable state in that environment: the prostitute relates to Blanche because of her own controversial past as a near-prostitute when she lived in the Flamingo hotel (or “the Tarantula Arms” as she wryly calls it) and the drunkard relates to her current state as the beginning of Scene 10 says, “It is a few hours later that night. Blanche has been drinking fairly steadily since Mitch left…” (p 122).
3. To characterize the environment and further emphasize how Blanche cannot fit into it:
This scene further characterizes the crowded poor urban environment that the Kowalski’s small flat is set in by displaying an event that shows how people, driven by the need to survive, are not above taking advantage of their fellow human beings, especially in the urban cities where the close environment and rampant poverty are major factors. In turn, this characterization of Stanley’s home environment also serves to highlight the differences between the civil old Southern culture of gentle women and courteous men that Blanche came from and the animalistic, survival-of-the-fittest, harshly honest environment she arrives in, and how she can’t fit into it, as she panics right after this scene when she returns to the phone and says,
“Operator! Operator! Never mind long-distance. Get Western Union. There isn’t time to be—Western—Western Union!... Yes! I—want to—Take down this message! ‘In desperate, desperate circumstances! Help me! Caught in a trap…’” (p 128).
In the end, this scene also directly contradicts Blanche’s last line—“Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” (end of Sc. 11, p 142)— because it shows that perhaps there is no such thing as “the kindness of strangers” as even strangers are known to take advantage of each other.
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