Blog #3 topic 3

“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at--Elysian Fields!(2)” In the play “Streetcar named Desire”, Blanche confidently gets on a streetcar named Desire and comes to the Elysian Fields where she fantasies would help her live a new life. However, what’s waiting for her is not the heaven she imagined but the hell full of desire and brutal reality. In the end, sadly, she is seen as an insane woman and sent to the mental institution. To argue whether Blanche is insane, we should have a basic standard of what is insanity.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of insanity mainly refers to “something utterly foolish or unreasonable” and “a derangement of the mind”. It’s a rather broad definition since we don't actually know what’s the standard of being smart and reasonable. It seems there is something that’s ambiguous and left out in the dictionary. There are rules that are written unconsciously in our minds. There is no absolutely right definition of the standard of being reasonable. It’s very difficult to have everyone agree with one moral standard because people from different culture and background would have completely different view toward whether one person is reasonable or not.

The characters in the “Streetcar named desire” all have their different cultural backgrounds and therefore have various views toward the definition of being irrational and rational. Blanche who was born in a rich family in South received high education and accustomed to the fine clothes and houses since she was young. After all kinds of unfortunate events happened in her family’s plantation “Bella Reve”, she escapes to find her sister Stella and Stanley who is Stella's husband. According to the play, “Since earliest manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, dependency, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens”, we can see that Stanley is the typical representation of dominant male role from North who is charming but lacks education and wisdom. He naturally wants everyone to be ruled by him but Blanche who is well-educated challenges his dominant power by pointing out he is a “drunk animal thing”. In terms of Stanley’s view, Blanche who had already went bankrupt but still pretended to be the elegant Southern lady is hypocritical and deceptive. The conflict between Stanley and Blanche gets more intense after he knows she escapes to his house because she was fired by the school for mixing up with a seventeen-year-old boy. Stanley's finding of Blanche getting around with lots of men in Moon Lake Casino also breaks the elegant figure of Southern lady that she managed to pretend. She is definitely insane so that she tells stupid lies to everyone that there is a rich guy who can take her away from poverty. However, if we were a Southern lady like her at that time, the constricted impression that people imposed on females force them to rely on male because an independent and brave woman who wants to start a new life would be seen as crazy and immoral to do so.