- In my view, the feminist belief that society is sexist
and homophobic in fact masks a subversive elite campaign against heterosexuals.
One of the most celebrated plays in American Literature, "A Streetcar
Named Desire" (1947) depicts men as "subhuman", and heterosexual
family and society as frauds. The play, produced by Irene Selznick, contributes
to the "modern" sense that human life has no inherent dignity,
value or purpose.
-
- There is also a starling similarity between Tennessee
Williams' homosexual perspective and the modern feminist one. As we shall
see, guilt and self-loathing motivate both.
-
- Feminists have made common cause with homosexuals by
promoting a gender less society. In "The New Victorians" (1996),
Rene Denfeld writes that feminists regard heterosexuality as the source
of all oppression and homosexuality as the remedy. "For many of today's
feminists, lesbianism is far more than a sexual orientation, or even a
preference. It is, as students in many colleges learn, an ideological,
political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual
tyranny..." (45)
-
-
- MALE AS "SUBHUMAN"
-
 Long before feminists
portrayed all men as rapists, Tennessee Williams depicted the male icon
Stanley Kowalski in these terms. Stanley drives his sister-in-law Blanche
Du Bois insane by raping her while his wife Stella is in the hospital bearing
his son. Blanche is portrayed as a tragic heroine; Stanley as the symbol
of a brutal male-dominated society; and the traditional family as a fraud.
-
- Blanche Du Bois has been driven out of her hometown for
her immoral ways. Sick and broke, she takes refuge with her sister's archetypal
traditional family.
-
- Stanley, carrying the "red stained package from
the butcher's" is the male protector and provider (Signet, p. 13).
The pregnant Stella, nurturing and malleable, is the epitome of the feminine.
She / believes/ in her husband: "it's a drive that he has" (50).
The couple is madly sensually in love.
-
- Nevertheless Blanche/Williams is determined to make heterosexuality
appear pathological. Immediately on arrival, Blanche refers to Stella's
home as "this horrible place." (19) She reproaches Stella for
not saving the plantation: "Where were you? In bed with your Pollack!"
as if this were wrong (27). When Stanley and Stella exchange blows, like
a counselor at a womyn's shelter, Blanche urges Stella to leave her husband,
open a shop, and become independent (67).
-
- Stanley is genuinely repentant for hitting Stella although
today this would be discounted as part of "the cycle of violence."
In fact, Blanche has made the pregnant Stella criticize and defy her husband
for the first time. Now like her feminist sisters, the envious Blanche
hopes the resulting violence will shatter the family altogether.
-
- Stella ignores Blanche's appeals, and while cleaning
says: "I'm not in anything that I want to get out of," she says
(65). Blanche persists: "Stop! Let go of that broom. I won't have
you cleaning up for him!" (66)
-
- The feminist tone is again heard in Blanche's dehumanizing
of Stanley. "There's something downright bestial about him! ... He
acts like an animal, has animal's habits! ... There's even something subhuman
something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something ape-like
about him, like one of those pictures I've seen in anthropological studies."(71)
Can you imagine a modern play in which a man says this of a Jew, a woman,
an African American or a homosexual?
-
- Stanley overhears this conversation, yet this supposedly
ape-like creature does not react violently. He patiently tolerates Blanche
although she has been living with them in a two-room apartment for six
months.
-
- Blanche, a demented pitiable woman, appeals in the name
of progress and civilization. "God! Maybe we are a long way from
being made in God's image, but Stella my sister; there has been some progress
since then! ... In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching
. . . Don't hang back with the brutes!" (72)
-
- At the end of the play, Williams has achieved his unconscious
goal: destroying the heterosexual male and family. Stella must ignore her
sister's claims of rape in order to preserve her family. "I couldn't
believe her story and go on living with Stanley," she says (133).
Nevertheless, her family is bereft of moral legitimacy. In the movie version,
Stella becomes a single mother. She leaves Stanley vowing never to return.
-
- HOMOSEXUAL SELF HATRED
-
- There is more to this picture than meets the eye.
-
- First, Tennessee Williams often said that /he /was Blanche
Du Bois. The similarities are clear. Like Blanche Du Bois, Tennessee Williams
was neurasthenic, lusted for Stanley, and was very promiscuous. In the
play, Blanche warns herself not to seduce the newspaper boy, "I've
got to be good and keep my hands off children."(84)
-
- Second, Tennessee Williams hated himself. Gore Vidal
who knew the playwright said: "He is still too much the puritan not
to believe in sin. At some deep level, Tennessee believes that the homosexual
is wrong and the heterosexual is right. Given this all pervading sense
of guilt, he is drawn in life and work to the idea of expiation, of death."(Ronald
Hayman, "Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else is an Audience," 1993.
p.xviii)
-
- The guilt-ridden Williams/Blanche wants to be destroyed
by Stanley to expiate his sins. (Blanche calls Stanley "my executioner"
before she even knows him.) But, in this psychodrama, Williams doesn't
have the integrity to confess his guilt feelings and admit his death wish.
He postures as a hero by identifying Blanche's defeat with the cause of
goodness and culture. Thus he transfers to Stanley and society the hatred
he feels for himself.
-
- Robert J. Stoller, an eminent psychiatrist and UCLA Professor,
described these processes in his book, /"Perversion: The Erotic Form
of Hatred"/ (1975).
-
- "Homosexuals, taught self-hatred in childhood, persist
in attracting punishment because in part they agree with the cruel straight
society; they provoke attack in order to be humiliated . . .Revenge energizes
aspects of many homosexuals' behavior, erotic and otherwise. In order
to salvage a sense of value from the foci of despair, they must strike
back at all who have qualities like old enemies of their childhood (201-202)."
-
-
- CONCLUSION
-
- Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire"
is an example of how the elite used a homosexual playwright to negate the
family and twist the way heterosexuals think about themselves and society.
Since heterosexuals have derived their meaning from family roles for
millennia, Williams contributed to the malaise that characterizes the
modern era.
-
- Williams' example indicates that this destructive impulse,
which feminists seem to share, may spring from a deep sense of envy, failure,
and self-loathing. Having missed the Streetcar of Life, they now want
to blow up the tracks. ----
-
- Henry Makow Ph.D. is the inventor of the game Scruples
and author of "A Long Way to go for a Date." His articles exposing
fe-manism and the New World Order can be found at his web site www.savethemales.ca
He enjoys receiving comments, some of which he posts on his site using
first names only. hmakow@gmail.com
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