The idealism is illusionary; Alma is unable to translate it into positive action. Her mother leads her to self-pity. She is bitter because she has not gotten anything for her self-sacrifice, not even recognition. Her life tied to duty; Alma has a dream about what she would do if things were different (Bernhard, Southern Women 74). She says to John, “Most of us have no choice but to lead useless lives! But you . . . have a chance to serve humanity. Not just to go on enduring for the sake of indurance, but to serve a noble, humanitarian cause, to relieve human suffering” (Williams, The Theatre 154).
This need of escape branches from Alma’s ancestry is Cavalier and Puritan- her mother wears a plumed hat; her father is a preacher. She cultivates social graces, romanticizes sex, and in a manner dictated by her genteel code immediately sets out to satisfy her desire for John. At the same time, she admires Gothic cathedrals, has faith in “the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach” (Williams, The Theatre 197). Culture and power in both traditions have produced Alma- and the South. At the end of the play she has not so much tempered beautiful illusion with mundane reality as she has shown herself ignorant of any historical perspective. Her decision to take what gratification this earth has to offer- giving little though to the consequences- is a playback of the South’s history (Kolin 184). So long as the soul of the South refused to face reality, it had no future.
Illusion may be a world of reality these southern belles are forced to live in, but this illusion can come from or grow more intense as a result of rape or conquest. Rape stood for ultimate domination and subordination. It is a symbol of power encompassing that onto the belle and onto the South. In a male-dominate society, women were a weaker class. After the Civil War, however, plantation owners had to adjust to an economic order no longer based on slavery (Stokes 23). The patriarchal South had made white men the dominant group in terms of their superior status, their access to lucrative economic roles, their autocracy in sexual roles, and their aggressive temperament. Women and blacks, on the other hand, were deemed subordinate in status, role, and temperament. A woman’s status depended upon her father or husband, her economic role was that of a marriageable alliance maker before marriage and a homemaker after marriage, her sexual role was that of a chaste maiden or faithful wife (so that the legitimacy of the male’s line could be preserved (Bernhard, Hidden Histories 65).
Rape as the ultimate act of domination results when the male feels denied the privileges he assumes are his right. The right to copulate whomever he pleased was long assumed; restrictions placed on him by societal taboos or laws were in no way as severe as those placed upon white women. During and after World War I, the North began to dominate the South, imposing industry and materialism as well as greed, inflicting an emphasis on money. It is reminiscent of the not-forgotten Civil War (Abbott 34). To no avail, Blanche (the Old South) threatens Stanley (the North) and screams, “So I could twist the broken end in your face!” (Williams, Streetcar Named Desire 130). After proclaiming “let’s have some rough-house! He springs toward her, overturning the table. She cries out and strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist . . .We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning! She moans. The bottle falls. She sinks to her knees. He picks up her inert figure and carries her to the bed” (130). It is implied and not directly stated that she is raped.
If it is assumed that Blanche is representative of the Old South, she is being conquered metaphorically by the North as they did in the Civil War and again in the Industrial Revolution. The belle herself is presented as the repository of the southern values; the rapist is an outsider who represents the antithesis of these values. The rape of Blanche and other southern belles is a symbolic action that represents the “violent disordering of a harmonious society” (Kolin 137).
Obviously, Alma was not raped, but conquered– by John Buchanan Jr. After “the tables have turned, yes, the tables have turned with a vengeance,” Alma has compromised her spiritual side, her “soul”, for the sensual side of John (Williams The Theatre 247). She has to an extent faced reality, but at a price. His sensual side conquers Alma who “died last summer- suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her” (243).
Buchanan, despite his upper-middleclass status, is another Stanley, a man who believes in the fundamental morality of a primitive existence. Like Stanley, he expresses contempt for the abstractions of the historical, cultural, and traditional past. Later though, John finds love and hope through Nellie (Bloom 67). Alma is forced to begin to turn her head away from her windows that lead to the Buchanan house, and towards other men, “so we are able to keep on going?” (Williams, The Theatre 254).
Friction evolved from two opposing clusters of images. One of rural, semi-rural life enriched by tradition, religion, stable and predictable social behavior, and feeling of individual worth. And the other a chaotic, frenzy of industrial way of life. This is the atmosphere of the South following World War I. The violence and exploitation existed side by side with the genteel refinement of the South. According to Ms. Abbott, southern myth disintegrated for several reasons whether it be the failure of individuals to pursue their ideas or the inability of southerners to resist contamination by materialists who do not believe in the southern code of behavior, the southern belles, the South, lost. (77).
Amanda, Blanche and Alma are vehicles for views of Tennessee Williams of the South. Common themes exercised through not only Tennessee Williams’ plays, but through much of southern literature are narcissism, memory/illusion and rape. They illuminate the reader of common themes of the South’s history and present state. From George Bagby to William Faulkner, the belle represents a human ideal, now regarded as antique while eliciting a paradox between living in the past and present congruently. Although, this way of life should not be encouraged in the real world, as a literary figure, her day is not over.
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Works Cited
Abbott, Shirley. Womenfolk: Growing Up Down South. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.
Avia. Southern Belles WebRing. 1997. 1 Nov 1999.
Bernhard, Virginia Eds. Hidden Histories of Women in the New South. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.
Bernhard, Virginia Eds. Southern Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
Bloom, Harold Ed. Modern Critical Views: Tennessee Williams. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Bynum, Victoria E. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Chaphill Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Dillman, Caroline Matheny Ed. Southern Women. New York: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1988.
Jackson, Esther Merle. The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Jacobus, Lee A. Ed. The Bedford Introduction to Drama Third Edition. Boston: Bedford Book, 1997.
Kolin, Philip C. Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Roudane, Matthew C. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet Book, 1947.
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Williams, Tennessee. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams Volume Two. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971.