The Article ‘Authorizing History: Victimization in A
Streetcar Named Desire’ by Anca Vlasopolos is a very interesting reflection on
the play A Streetcar Named Desire. It talks about the fact that if A Streetcar
Named Desire had been written by Shakespeare, it would have been called a
problem play. The problem comes from the strategies that these plays deploy to
implicate the viewer in their violent processes of historiography – the processes
of constructing a narrative of the character’s pasts – instead of purging the
viewer of emotions associated with crises.
The article points out that the play has been critizised as
being a failure in achieving a unified generic tone or the main character as separately
functioning unit of the performance, but I don’t agree with that. I don’t think
that there is a ‘failure’ at hand at all. If Blanche was consistent throughout
the play, there wouldn’t be a story. The changing tone is what makes the play
interesting in the first play.
Another idea suggested in this article is that the course of
history makes the main character’s displacement inevitable and that her
violation and expulsion are natural, which I would rather agree with than with
the idea that the play is typical of the failure of tragedy in the modern age.
There is just the right amount of drama in this play and the audience is taken
by surprise over and over again. If anything, the dramatic effects and actions
of the characters enhances the idea of a successful tragedy, even though one doesn’t
necessarily feel sad or disappointed when done seeing or reading the play. The play
has just the right amount of comedy mixed with dramatic elements.
Authorizing History: Victimization in "A Streetcar Named Desire"
Theatre Journal , Vol. 38, No. 3, Performance of Textual History (Oct., 1986), pp. 322-338
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3208047
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