Patriarchy and Female Dependency: Blanche, Stella, and Eunice in A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

The paper examines how Women's dependency in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is depicted as an outcome of the existence of patriarchy in the post-war American society rather than due to individual weaknesses.The paper suggests that the three women of the play (Blanche, Stella Kowalski and Eunice Hubbell) represent three different approaches to the system of male domination—a resistance/destruction approach, a calculated accommodation for survival approach, and an unquestioning complicity approach.However, in order to take account of various important critical views on the play, including that of Kathleen Lant, who reads the play in a misogynistic way, and Anna Vlasopolos's counter-reading of misogyny as critique of patriarchy, as well as the subsequent feminist readings by Ian Todd, Salma Haque and Yasin Sharif and Yan Huang and Ananya Boruah, the analysis shows that critical disagreement over the play is reflected by the range of attitudes towards patriarchy in the play itself.The paper concludes that Blanche, Stella, and Eunice, when read in conjunction, make more fully apparent the mechanics of patriarchy's dependency than does any one character.