Sexuality and Violence

            Except for periods of eating and sleep I spent all day Tuesday preparing for my English exam. We had been given six possible essays questions out of which four would actually be on the exam. I had already written about a page each on each question but on Tuesday I expanded on two of my favourites, the first was the one about female sexuality:

            A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in an afterlife following the death of the old south, which when slavery collapsed lost an entire genteel culture that had been maintained by it.  In the Elysian Fields of New Orleans is a classless society where the races intermingle and where white gentility is no longer a commodity. Blanche Dubois arrives and presents herself in this setting as the last of the southern belles but she is out of place in a world where women must be able to catch a man’s meat. Blanche has not reconciled herself to the deaths in her old life, neither the death of the beautiful dream of her heritage nor the suicide of her young homosexual husband for which she blames herself.

Blanche struggles to be recognized as a lady as she was in the old world. Her sister Stella has found love with Stanley, a man that is not a gentleman but she does not care. Stella’s sexuality is free from the bonds of the expectations of gentility. Blanche wears a mask for Stella so as not to reveal that she is no longer the lady that her sister remembers. Since her fall from the grace of Belle Reve, Blanche has been forced to manoeuvring the world with her sexual wiles but she has been out-manoeuvred by the world. She balances gentility with promiscuity and appears fragile and broken because of it.

            Blanche is an unmarried woman of a class that no longer exists, with no property or prospects. Using her sexuality to survive is considered low and predatory, while to be a sexual predator is considered acceptable behaviour for men. If she were stripped of nothing but sexuality Blanche would be nakedly vulnerable and so she maintains her manners. Blanche is a paradox in insisting on carrying herself in the manner of a lady while at the same time having engaged in sexual behaviour that is not considered ladylike in the eyes of society. A woman has to be married to be a lady and to be sexual. All of her gentility is put in question when she takes control.  Blanche had no power to save Belle Rêve because it was in the power of the men to ruin. Blanche is the personification of Belle Rêve. She is a beautiful dream that cannot be maintained in modern reality.

            Like “A Streetcar Named Desire” the world of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” can also be seen as a type of afterlife, but New Carthage is a kind of stagnant, infertile purgatory in which nothing new can grow. In colloquial terms, Martha is a ball buster. She is a predator who makes use of her sexuality in the service of her father who is the unseen king of this domain. The sterile, unproductive environment in which she lives with George allows them both to behave like children emotionally, even though they are intellectually and sexually adults. Like Blanche, Martha is a product of her past but for Martha the world of her childhood is not dead. Martha’s father is still very much alive and in control and Martha’s sexuality is empowered by her father’s authority. Martha is the only sexual person in the play. Honey, by contrast exudes no sexuality whatsoever and seems more like a child than a woman. Martha uses her sexuality to fulfill the wishes of her father but also as a weapon in her continuous conflicts with George, which are not merely the result of a breakdown in their marriage but rather the very glue that seems to hold it together. George and Martha’s battles are foreplay.

            George is disgusted by Martha’s overt sexuality because it is predatory and bent on conquest. He rejects her advances because he does not want to be conquered since then he would lose the contest that is their marriage. He must defeat her through her pretence of being a mother. In George’s imagination she even has sex with their imaginary son and so he must kill him to defeat her.

            The second was on how violence operates:

 Violence often operates in “A Streetcar Named Desire” to bring about the end of a scene at the culmination of a crescendo of tension. The first act of violence reveals in its aftermath that violence plays a role in the sexual dynamic between Stella and Stanley. His physical attack pushes her away but that distance elevates her to power and leaves him in a needy, emotionally childlike state, on his knees and physically lower than her when she comes back to him. While it is suggested that Stanley’s violence towards Stella is not an uncommon thing in their normal life together, every act of violence within the play has to do with what Blanche represents to him in terms of class, even though she is only the victim of one direct attack. Stanley’s violent feelings toward Blanche are unconscious acts of class revolution. Stanley’s rape of Blanche happens outside of Stella’s civilizing influence.  It is this sex without intimacy that effectively kills Blanche.

In all cases of violence there are no negative consequences for Stanley. He always wins Stella after every instance and even his rape of Blanche results in a victory for him in his efforts to push Blanche out of his home. He is losing at poker until he hits Stella and after raping Blanche he wins at poker.

Similarly to “A Streetcar Named Desire”, the violence in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” also operates to break the tension that an argument has built up and to increase the sexual tension between George and Martha. After thinking that George was going to kill her, when she finds out it was a joke, she is aroused by his violent play. As with Blanche and Stanley there is also a type of class conflict between Martha and George. She continuously flaunts her disappointment in George’s lack of administrative ambition and it is her expression of contempt for his long ago defeated attempt to be an artist that finally drives him to physically attack her.

The violence between George and Martha is more psychological than physical, so much so that actual violence serves as somewhat of a relief from their poisonous dialogue. That being said though, the violence in the Williams play is more frightening because it feels more real. The actual physical violence of Stanley Kowalski results in devastation that can be seen in the world around us. It is disturbing because we see that things could have gone differently. George and Martha’s intense bickering, while disturbing and exhausting, is what Albee’s play is about. It is so much a part of the play that the most surprising thing is the lack of it in the end.

The violence between George and Martha is normal for them but not normal for most people and so its continuation throughout the play renders it somewhat comic. The intensity of the arguments is muffled by its increased absurdity as the play lurches towards its conclusion. In the beginning Honey and Nick serve as anchors to normalcy for the audience and so their reactions to George and Martha’s violence mesh with that of the viewer. But when the young couple reveal themselves to also be bizarre and latently violent it pushes the play more into unreality and makes George and Martha harder to take seriously. All of the violence and violent imagery in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” come from George while all of the psychological torture with the intent to humiliate George is instigated by Martha. George’s novel involved the murder of parents by their son, who might actually be George.

George and Martha’s imaginary son is killed in a violent clash between modernity and nature on the road in George’s mind. The violence is George’s way of hanging on. It is self-defence. With George and Martha their violence is mostly verbal and their physical violence serves as punctuation. They face off like drunken gladiators and they seem to need an audience for their Punic war in New Carthage. They never agree (except ironically on conflict), they never give in; they never surrender. The only option is for one of them to be defeated.

I had just begun to expand on a third question about the operation of humour when I was too sleepy to continue and went to bed an hour early.