Destruction and Desire

Desire is extremely important in Tennessee William's play—so important that it made its way into the title. Every character in the play has desire, but these desires are of a different nature from each other and consequently lead to different outcomes. Blanche's desires in the play are self-destructive and lead to her downfall. Stella's character tries to please everyone. Most of her desires are not for herself, but instead split between Blanche and Stanley. In the end, this conflict forces her to make a choice between the two of them.

Blanche's main desire is to be accepted. To her, this means being a youthful, elegant southern belle, and nothing less. She wants this so badly that she is willing to lie endlessly and shamelessly in order to be perceived this way. Stella's desires are divided. She desires Stanley, physically and emotionally, but she desires for Blanche to be happy. These desires conflict not only at the end, but throughout the entire play. Stella is constantly trying to please Blanche and make her comfortable in her new surroundings, bringing her cokes and liqueur, and taking her out for entertainment. She tries to do this without offending Stanley, who childishly vies for Stella's attention.

Both desires, though very different, lead to the same end. When Mitch hears about all of the scandal Blanche was involved in, her confronts her. He angrily says to Blanche, “lies, lies, inside and out, all lies.” Rather than apologizing when he comes over, she continues to play her part, shrieking when he pulls the light cover off the bulb and refusing to believe in her heart that she lied. Because of this, Mitch leaves. Blanche's overwhelming desire to be perceived as a young debutante ultimately destroys her relationship with Mitch. Once he leaves (or once he refuses to marry her), Blanche seems to lose some of her sanity, yelling “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Though Stella's desires are benign, they work hand in hand with Blanche's destructive desires. Stella obviously has physical desire for Stanley, but their relationship is deeper than this. She wants to please him. After Stanley rapes Blanche, Stella is forced to choose between her husband and her sister. She tells Eunice “I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley.” Eunice in return tells her never to believe it. The rape was Stella's breaking point. Even though she loves Blanche, she is forced to believe that she is insane. Stella still desires happiness for her sister, which is why she is unsure of herself and questions whether she made the right choice. Blanche has always been slightly insane, making up ridiculous lies, so she set herself up to be discredited in the end. Blanche tried to deceive the world by creating a “magic” image of herself, but because people could see through her lies, she ended up creating the image of a crazy person instead. Blanche was like the little boy who cried wolf. Everything she said was a lie, so the one time she needed people to believe her, they didn't.

Blanche's persistent desires lead to her ruin. Stella's desires for Stanley ultimately lead to Blanche's ruin because she is inclined to believe Stanley over Stella. This final decision is exacerbated because Blanche sets herself up for ruin. If Blanche had admitted, anywhere in the play, that she was wrong and apologized, the outcome would have likely been better for her. But instead, she held tight to her fantasies. She replaced realism with “what ought to be the truth.” Even if she was not truly insane in the end, this was the ironic reality that she had created.

A Softer Side

A Streetcar Named Desire has strong, memorable characters, which is why the play and its movie remake have gone down in history. The play develops the multiple dimensions of its characters, specifically Stanley, by subtly showing his inward motives. In both the movie and the play, Stanley Kowalski is foremost depicted as a callous brute. However, a close look at the text reveals a softer interior that possibly motivates his need to be powerful and controlling. The multiple dimensions of Stanley's character are seen mainly in his relationship with Stella.

Stanley is characteristically dominant and orders Stella around as if she is his property. At his worst, slobbering drunk, Stanley even physically abuses Stella. It seems difficult to overlook the brutality of such an event or blame it on the situation, but there is evidence in the text to suggest that Stanley exercises his power because he desperately loves Stella and fears losing her. Stanley's need to control his wife can be interpreted as a way of protection. When he is with his friends, he needs to show his strength and prove to them that his wife is his alone. There are instances in both the text and the movie that show Stanley's deep affection for his wife. The scene that follows this, made famous by the movie, is where Stanley shouts “Stella!” from the ground, hoping his baby will come back to him. This scene exposes Stanley's vulnerability. He is subject to his wife. He is at her mercy. We see how much he loves her because he is willing to break character and put his pride aside. Stella is the only person who can expose this side of Stanley. Obviously men don't usually abuse their wives out of protection, but we do see that under Stanley's tough exterior lies a deep, susceptible love for Stella. Stella is the only one who truly understands Stanley and is willing to overlook his offenses. She takes him back, and then later defends him to Blanche, saying “It wasn't anything serious as you seem to take it. In the first place, when men are drinking and playing poker anything can happen...he didn't know what he was doing. He was as good as a lamb when I came back to him and he's really very, very ashamed of himself.” She understands Stanley's true dynamic and recognizes the impact of the situation on his actions.

We also see Stanley's character developed by the way he repeatedly takes Stella in his arms. A specific instance where this occurs is when Stanley is defending himself for treating Blanche coldly at her birthday celebration. In the play, “Stanley turns slowly back toward his wife and takes her clumsily in his arms.” Stanley is somewhat beastly, acting on animal instincts. This is shown and referred to throughout the play and we see a glimpse of it now because he is awkward in embracing Stella. However, the embrace ultimately represents his love for her. Other times where Stanley draws her in, Stella is more resistant and pulls away. This sort of juxtaposition shows both his controlling aspect and his softer side. He loves Stella, but at the same time he feels the need to dominate over her.

Another case where is personality is developed is in his overall treatment of Blanche. He is rude to Blanche, tries to expose her true character, and even buys her a ticket to leave and gives it to her as a present. Even though he is rude to Blanche, she really brings it on with her incessant, ignorant facade. Under it all, Stanley's just wants the house back to himself and Stella. When Stanley is defending the way he treated Blanche, he says “Stell, it's gonna be all right after she goes and after you've had the baby. It's gonna be all right again between you and me the way that it was.” Stanley realizes that the tension between himself and Blanche has brought out the worst in him, but he wants her to leave so they he and Stella can go back to their old way of life. While his treatment of Blanche is harsh, he does have justified reasons for doing so.

It seems that Stanley is mean and brutish, but that his love for Stella overpowers this. The many aspects of their relationship, from Stanley's need to exert power over Stella to his tenderness and desire for her, all point towards Stanley's underlying softness and vulnerability. He shows his love for her in the little things like calling her “Stell,” and even his forcefulness and violence can be interpreted as a selfishness to have Stella all for himself.

Paralysis of Will and Revelation

“Araby” is a classic example of how James Joyce uses two literary techniques, paralysis and epiphany to give insight to his characters. In the case of “Araby,” the reader experiences the epiphany along with the character. “Eveline,” also written by Joyce, presents a similar paralysis and epiphany at the end of the story.

The story “Araby” is centered around an adolescent boy, who is smitten with a girl on his street. His affection for the girl is somewhat childish; he has never spoken to her and “yet her name was a summons to all his foolish blood.” His affection was paralyzing. He wished to speak to the girl, he wished to have a part of her heart, but he was too afraid to act on this. Instead he watched her through the blinds every morning and followed her to school.

Another instance where he is paralyzed is when she first speaks to him. He says, “When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer.” When she asked him if he was going to Araby, he did not know whether he said yes or know. He was in a sort of trance, paralyzed with what he believed to be love. He continues to walk around in this trance in the days leading up to the event. He could not focus on his schoolwork as her image drifted between him and the page.

This state of trance leads up to the boy's epiphany at the end. He is at the bazaar, looking hopelessly for something to buy the girl. “Gazing up into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” In an instant, he sees the vanity of what he is doing. He has been driven by this vanity, like a powerful force, to go to the bazaar and purchase something for the girl of his dreams. But at this moment he sees that it is pointless. It is a transparent, meaningless gesture. It meant the world to him, but the trinket meant little to the girl. He saw this and was angry at himself, angry for being driven by such vanity, angry that he ignored the girl's indifference and mindlessly wandered around under her charm.

The paralysis, epiphany sequence in “Eveline” is much shorter and possibly less dramatic. Eveline planed to run away from her abusive father and elope with a sailor whom she has been forbidden to see. Just as they were about to board a ship for Buenos Ayres, she changed her mind and stayed behind. The state of paralysis came when she was in the station. All of the sudden she was gripped with a paralyzing fear. She wandered around passively, almost unsure of what she was afraid of, and prayed to God to tell her what to do. Her lover tried to take her hand; he beckoned her to come but she stood unmoved, rigid, grasping the railing. Her epiphany is revealed in the final sentence. “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.” This seems to indicate that not only does she have no love for him, but she never really even knew him.

Both stories give insight into the characters, but the epiphany in “Araby” is stronger. Eveline simply had a moment doubt and realizes that she does not know or love the man she is about to run away with. However, if you look at the entire story, she never really loved him. She was excited by the danger of the relationship and grew to “like” him. The boy in Araby, on the other hand, had a revelation about himself. He was charmed by a girl. He lived under her charm for a long time, religiously peering through her window and following her to school. But in one moment, he realized that his actions were nothing but vanity. He fancied that the girl loved him in return because she accepted his promise to bring her something, but he instantly realized the hopelessness of his desires and was bitterly angry at himself for following them.

From Petrus

A scene from Petrus' point of view—pg. 118-120

Petrus has emptied the concrete storage dam and is cleaning it of algae. As he glances up to wipe the sweat off his brow, he spots David walking towards him.
He sees that David has his feet crammed into Lucy's boots and scoffs, slightly humored by the idea that a man who has never done a day of work that required a pair of boots should be of any help to him. He was slightly annoyed that David had come to help him. 'Probably sent by Lucy,' he thinks. He can feel David's presence heavy in the air, bitter with pride, the pride of a white man. He is the worst of his kind. Petrus wishes to work in silence, but David speaks.
'Do you know, Petrus,' he says, 'I find it hard to believe the men who came here were strangers. I find it hard to believe they arrived out of nowhere, and did what they did, and disappeared afterwards like ghosts. And I find it hard to believe that the reason they picked on us was simply that we were the first white folk they met that day. What do you think? Am I wrong?'
Petrus feels a rush of heat running over his heart. He reaches in his pocket, calmly takes out his pipe and stares into the open country, hoping to avoid David's eyes. He chooses his words carefully, trying to show indifference, trying not to give an answer at all.
'The police must find them and put them in jail. That is the job of the police.' He hopes this will end the conversation, but David continues.
'But the police are not going to find them without help. Those men knew about the forestry station. I am convinced they knew about Lucy. How could they have known if they were complete strangers to the district?'
Petrus was not sure what to say. He did not want to say anything. Instead he continued to work, hoping that this would silence David. But David continued.
'It was not simply theft Petrus,' he persists. 'They did not come just to steal. They did not come just to do this to me. They came to do something else as well. You know what I mean, or if you don't know you can surely guess. After they did what they did, you cannot expect Lucy calmly to go on with her life as before. I am Lucy's father. I want those men to be caught and brought before the law and punished. Am I wrong. Am I wrong to want justice?'
Petrus wishes with every bone in his body that David would shut his mouth. David knows not the things he speaks of, yet he babbles on stupidly. The way of a white man—they think the more they speak, the wiser they sound. Davids words will draw nothing from Petrus, who has that rare way of detaching his body from his heart. He is nothing but hard, callous, indifferent. There is nothing David can do to break Petrus. Petrus is older than David in a way, wiser, more experienced. What of the world does David know from his city life? What does he know of how the country operates? How the real world operates, the world that he and his fathers have worked to create? Petrus would not give David the response he sought. He did not want to satisfy him like this.
'No, you are not wrong.'
Petrus cannot help but feeling a twinge of pride as David claws at the ground stupidly.

This conversation is told from Petrus' point of view. He does not like David “drilling” him, but feels that David is ignorant to the ways of South Africa and will never be able to get Petrus to speak because of this. He shows a prejudiced attitude towards whites and their entitled ways. Petrus feels himself superior to David, because he thinks that despite Davids intelligence, he is blind to the ways of the South Africa and apartheid. This can be seen in Petrus' response to David's accusations of the boy. In the conversation between David and Petrus on pg 118-120, Petrus is very dismissive of David and says that the police will handle the situation. In his mind (and also in Lucy's), the crime done to Lucy was a consequence of apartheid. The men were somewhat justified in their ways because of everything that the whites did to Africans. For this reason, Petrus continually backs up the boy. At the party he tells David that the boy “says he does not know what you are talking about” (132). Petrus is also very dismissive of David because he thinks he will never get the justice he wants, which is likely true. Petrus knows the climate of South Africa. He knows that apartheid is over and that the punishment of these men will not be with the justified hatred that it would have been in an earlier time.

Petrus is obviously biased against white men because of apartheid, but he also seems to exude an attitude of superiority. On page 202, Petrus says "I will marry Lucy." He does not say this as if he is waiting for her reply. He acts with the same entitlement that David did, that he can get whatever he wants. He got his land from Lucy and now he will get her too, along with all of her own land. He feels that he deserves this and that he deserves three wives. He derives his sense of power from this. No one questions him. Despite the prejudice against blacks, Petrus has built up his "empire," and this gives him a constant source of pride and superiority.

This Is Just To Confess

Today I squashed
an ant
that was in
the walkway

I hope
he wont harbor this
against
me always

Maybe I
should go to penance
wipe this violence
off my chest.

The Windeby Girl

Heaney's poetry is concerned primarily with historical themes of Ireland. His poems also tend to mirror social and cultural divisions in contemporary Northern Ireland.

In 1952 the owners of a little bog near Windeby, in the vicinity of Schleswig, Germany, discovered the corpse of a 2,000-year-old girl, aged 14 at her death, as they cut up the peat for sale. Birch branches and a large stone covered the girl when alive, weighing her down so that she drowned in the bog. Photographed, analyzed, her well-known remains now rest in the Archäologisches Landesmuseum in Schleswig, vivid testimony that that bog people of northern Europe enforced their moral code with capital punishment.

Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob published a book in 1965 about the teenager, by then named the Windeby girl.

Heaney was attracted to P. V. Glob's 'The Bog People,' that deals with preserved Iron Age bodies of men and women that had been ritually killed. Heaney had been drawn to this book because it both served to focus a number of his traditional interests, and also offered him a particular frame of reference and set of symbols he could employ to engage with the present conflict in Ireland and its history. 'Punishment' is perhaps the most unsettling poem in North and describes a photograph of a young woman, the Windeby girl, who had most likely been shorn, stripped then killed and thrown into the bog as some form of punishment.

Why was the girl executed? The Roman historian Tacitus in his Agricola and Germania, indicates the reason in his description of how Germanic tribes punished adultery. Not only was the Windeby girl's hair cut off, but the position of the stone block, and the way her body is contorted, may show that she was put in her shallow grave to be stoned before being drowned. A punishment like that the Windeby girl suffered exists now in Nigeria.

Heaney projects a historical pattern of violence that unites the ancient victims with those who have died in contemporary troubles.

The Troubles (1969-1997) was the name given to a violent religious-political conflict that was centred on Northern Ireland and emerged as a result of perceived socio-economic inequalities between the two communities of Northern Ireland.

The poet expresses a sense of identification and empathy with the victim but soon becomes a voyeur and takes pleasure in the woman's exposed and subjected body. The conflict of emotion is given further expression in the poet's direct address to the dead woman 'My poor scapegoat', / 'I almost love you / but would have cast, I know the stones of silence'. Heaney juxtaposes pagan ritual punishment with Christian retribution. Focusing the killings of the past with the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland.

"Punishment" famously compares the Windeby girl with Catholic girls in Northern Ireland, her "betraying sisters" (38), who consorted with British soldiers. Facts on File (1971) reports that "Outraged Londonderry women Nov. 10 tied Martha Doherty, 19, to a lamp post, shaved her head, and covered her with tar for dating a British soldier. She subsequently married the soldier. Two other girls were seized by women in Londonderry and publicly humiliated Nov. 8 and Nov. 10 for dating British soldiers." One newspaper photograph shows a teenage girl tarred, feathered, and tied to a light standard in Falls Road, Belfast. Heaney lived there and, having just read Glob's book in English translation, must have associated the two girls, one with a face tarred by her sisters, and another with a tar-black face from the bog, both punished for adultery.

This paradoxical poem, it will occur to many, helps explain Ireland and its centuries-long "trouble," where Christians, in killing each other, simultaneously feel revulsion and sorrow, and vindictive triumph.

Where Does It Go From Here?

What is a dream deferred? We all have goals and things we strive for and when first setting a new goal, we likely feel excited and motivated. But dreams do not become reality in the blink of an eye. They are something we have to work at, something we are continuously looking up to and striving for. Many times, we wait for so long without our work paying off that the dream doesn't hold the luster that it once did. This is the message that Langston Hughes conveys in his poem, “Harlem, A Dream Deferred.” Each stanza is a metaphor—a rhetorical question—that offers the possibilities of what happens to a dream deferred. The order of the stanzas in the second paragraph represents the progressing stages that the dream goes through.

The first thing that can happen is that the dream will “dry up, like a raisin in the sun.” This phase comes when a dream is not reached immediately. After the initial surge of motivation, people will start to peter out, realizing that a dream requires time and investment. This is what distinguishes those who are willing to work for a dream from those who just hope for it and wish it would happen. The phrase “a raisin in the sun” can have slightly different meaning depending on whether the raisin started as a grape or if it was already a raisin when it was set out in the sun. If we assume it was a grape, then the dream that was one fruitful, promising, and lively has dried out. It has become stale. All the life has been sucked out it and it is no longer appealing like it once was. If the dream was already a raisin, the meaning is still similar, but it suggests that the dream was delayed even longer. It was already fairly dead, and the sun took the tiny ounce of hope it had left in it and wrung it dry.

After this, the dream becomes like a festering sore. It is a source of pain, and it is also a constant reminder. There is the idea that because the sore is festering, the pain stays there as an active reminder that the dream has not been achieved.

The next line, which suggests that the dream “stinks like rotten meat,” is a stage of resignation. The person has completely given up on the dream and it has gone bad. If the dream is “rotten,” it has been prolonged for so long that it is invalid. Not only is the dream no longer good, but there is a pungent stench radiating from it. It is definitely not worth striving for anymore; in fact, it is worth getting away from. It is a source of humiliation because the person worked for the dream, but their work wasn't good enough.

The next phrase comes as a bit of a shock, suggesting that the dream “crusts over like a syrupy sweet.” This is the most stark contrast between phrases and is clearly a contradiction to the other, rather odious things that can happen to a dream. This phase represents a gradual change in thinking, that only comes after very extended periods of time or may never come at all. Possibly, a dream that was sought in youth has gone through all of the stages above. As the dream ages, or rather the person ages, the dream becomes more of an objective idea than an active goal. When this change occurs, one can look on the dream more favorably because is represents the persons past—challenges they have faced, overcome, and moved on from. It is almost a nostalgic view of the dream. There is a subtle longing for something that has never become a reality, which makes it sweet, but the dream is so old that it has crusted over. The person can no longer interact with the dream, but they can look back on it as a part of them or just as a sweet ideal.

After this come two other possibilities—that the dream either sags like a heavy load or explodes. Neither of these are included in the progression, but are offered as alternatives to the previous, more positive outcome. By ending the poem on a negative note, Hughes seems to suggest that the more hopeful outcome does not really occur, but rather the dream always remains a heavy burden. Through political ties with the city of Harlem, Hughes also suggests that the dream “explodes.” Like Harlem, which once was busy and alive, the dream gets to a point where it can never be restored, never have a hopeful essence, and it simply explodes into nothingness.