Beyond Pity and Fear: Echoes of Nietzsche's the Birth of Tragedy In

Beyond Pity and Fear: Echoes of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

George Crandell

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the twenty-first century is fast becoming the Age of Terror. Similar attacks on civilian targets in world capitals – Madrid, London, and Moscow – coupled with bombings in India and Pakistan, contribute to the sense that terrorism and its attendant tragedy have become commonplace throughout the world. Even despite increases in safeguards against terrorism, the United States is not immune from tragedy, whether it stems from conspiratorial plans (such as the destruction of the World Trade Center), natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina for example) or the actions of crazed or misguided individuals. The use of the word “tragedy” to describe real-life events is now swift and commonplace; witness how quickly the news media described the shooting of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords (and the murders of six innocent victims) as the “Tragedy in Tucson.” By tragedy, I mean the pity that we feel for the innocent victims of senseless violence, and the fear that we feel every time we board an airplane, enter a subway station, or shop for groceries. Unlike the feelings of pity and fear supposedly aroused by tragedies of an artistic kind, these feelings are genuine, as much as the events are real and the consequences of them irreversible. Whereas in art (at least according to Aristotle), tragedy results in catharsis, a purging of feeling, tragedy in life has as its result an intensification of feeling, often expressed as anger, as outrage, or sometimes in reciprocal acts of violence. Tragedy in life often leads to a heightened sense of awareness but not necessarily to a sense of enlight- enment or edification. For this reason, “real” tragedy is often described as “senseless,” that is to say, without meaning. Tragedy today, as these examples illustrate, is used much more frequently to describe real-life events than works of art, even though originally tragedy referred only to an ancient Greek art form. Perhaps because we are now inundated with real tragedies, tragedy as an art form has ceased to be popular among audiences and critics, supplanted by the drama of events (witness the proliferation of reality-based television productions) or, on stage, by the ubiquitous and almost always uplifting Broadway musical. Even in critical circles, as Terry Eagleton writes in his monumental study, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003): “[t]ragedy is an 92 George Crandell

unfashionable subject these days” (ix). Another more extreme view is that tragedy as an art form is dead. Expressing this view in 1929, Joseph Wood Krutch observed that “[w]e read but do not write tragedies. The tragic solution of the problem of existence, the reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit is ... now only a fiction surviving in art” (142- 143). Thirty years later, George Steiner offers his own post-mortem on the subject in The Death of Tragedy (1961): “From antiquity until the age of Shakespeare and Racine, such accomplishment seemed within the reach of talent. Since then the tragic voice in drama is blurred or still” (10). In retrospect, however, the assertions of the death-of-tragedy theo- rists, among them Krutch and Steiner, now seem like a failure of critical imagination. Countering the views of the critical coroners, Raymond Williams, in Modern Tragedy (1966), identifies no less than five different kinds of modern tragedy, written by more than a dozen artists, among them Anton Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, August Strindberg, Leo Tolstoy, and Tennessee Williams. Not only have tragedies been written since Krutch’s short-sighted prognostication, but three of the arguably best American plays of the twentieth century belong to the genre: Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Although at the time of A Streetcar Named Desire’s Broadway debut (1947) perceptive reviewers and critics immediately recognized the play as tragic in genre, their attempts to classify it, using terminology borrowed from Aristotle’s Poetics or from popular definitions of tragedy, led them to overlook a possible and probable source for Williams’s tragic world- view in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.1 A look at some of these early responses to A Streetcar Named Desire reveals how critics struggled to make Williams’s masterwork conform to popular definitions of the genre. This examination, coupled with a comparison of A Street- car Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy reveals how much more effectively (than Aristotle’s Poetics) Nietzsche’s philosophy explains the tragic forces at work in some of Tennessee Williams’s plays. Among the many critical responses to A Streetcar Named Desire, a number of early critics addressed the question of the play’s genre: “Is A Streetcar Named Desire a tragedy?” By far, the majority of critics who responded to the question replied in the affirmative. Brooks Atkinson (1947), in one of the earliest reviews of the play, calls it “almost un- bearably tragic” (32). Howard Barnes (1948) describes it as a “somber Beyond Pity and Fear 93

tragedy” (34). The title of John D. Hurrell’s collection, Two Modern American Tragedies: Reviews and Criticisms of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire (1961) also helped to solidify the case for A Streetcar Named Desire’s tragic status. To Jordan Y. Miller (1971), however, belongs the most exuberant defense of A Streetcar Named Desire as Aristotelian tragedy. Streetcar, he argues, “comes as close to genuine tragedy as any modern American drama,” adding that “[i]f a single character in contemporary American stage literature approaches the classical Aristotelian tragic figure, it must surely be Blanche DuBois” (11). Overlooking the fact that Blanche is a woman, which would immediately disqualify her as one of Aristotle’s tragic protagonists, Miller writes:

Deceptive, dishonest, fraudulent, permanently flawed, unable to face reality, Blanche is for all that thoroughly capable of commanding audience compassion, for her struggle and the crushing defeat she endures have the magnitude of tragedy. The inevitability of her doom, her refusal to back down in the face of it, and the essential humanity of the forces that drive her to it are the very heart of tragedy. No matter what evil she may have done, nor what villainies practiced, she is a human being trapped by the fates, making a human fight to escape and to survive with some shred of human dignity, in full recognition of her own fatal human weaknesses and increasing absence of hope. (11)

Some of the blame for these misguided categorizations of A Streetcar Named Desire as Aristotelian tragedy belongs to director Elia Kazan, who conceived of Streetcar as tragedy in the classical sense and cast his directorial influence on the play and subsequent critical interpretations of it. In his “Notebook for A Streetcar Named Desire” (1963), Kazan asks: “If this is a romantic tragedy, what is its inevitability and what is the tragic flaw?” He answers: “In the Aristotelian sense, the flaw is the need to be superior, special (or her need for protection and what it means to her),” concluding that this “tragic flaw creates the circumstances, inevitably, that destroy her” (368-369). With this conception of Blanche’s flawed character in mind, Kazan emphasizes her faults both in the Broadway production and in the subsequent film (1951) that he also directed. Early reviewers didn’t miss the point, chastising Blanche especially for immorality, but also for stealing 94 George Crandell

Stanley’s liquor, for drinking too much, for trying to break up her sister’s marriage, and, not least of all, for what John Mason Brown (1963) referred to condescendingly as Blanche’s “pathetic pretensions to gentility” (92). Intending to model Blanche after classical, tragic protagonists, Kazan may have done more to undermine her tragic stature than to support it. As the many productions of Streetcar over the years have demonstrated, an overemphasis on Blanche’s faults can shift the delicate balance of audience sympathy from Blanche to Stanley. As Anthony S. Abbott (1989) observes, “both the director and the cast have the responsibility of creating a fine balance in the audience’s sympathies between Stanley and Blanche, for unless we see Blanche as a tragic figure, ... then the play loses its im- pact” (143). Relying as they do upon definitions of tragedy that actually have limited power to explain the workings of modern tragedy, Kazan and Miller are constrained to emphasize some defining characteristics and to ignore others altogether. Taking into consideration the elemental forces present in tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche actually provides greater insight than Aristotle “into the impulses and tensions that give birth to a tragic art,” especially that of Tennessee Williams.2 When we compare Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy with Williams’s tragic plays, we see that A Streetcar Named Desire owes much of its binary structure to the Nietzschean dynamic continuum, at the opposite poles of which are the Greek deities, Apollo and Dionysus. This dynamic continuum helps to explain not only the forces that collide in the figures of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski but also the conflicting energies within characters that threaten to fragment their already divided selves. The same binary continuum accentuates some of the themes in Williams’s plays that have their source in Nietzsche’s characterization and description of the two Greek deities: dreams and reality, sobriety and intoxication, the calm and the ecstatic, the individual and the collective, the civil and the barbaric. Even more importantly, and what has gener- ally been overlooked by critics, Williams also adopts a tragic world-view approximating Nietzsche’s – evident in A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending – that ultimately affirms the inexhaustible spirit of life. According to Nietzsche (1967), tragedy springs from the opposition of two artistic energies that Nietzsche identifies with two art worlds, each represented by a different Greek art deity. On the one hand, Nietzsche links the art world of dreams (or representation) with Apollo, the Greek god of sculpture. Apollo is thus the “ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy” (35). From this connection stems Apollo’s Beyond Pity and Fear 95

connection with art. The artist is an “aesthetically sensitive” individual, who reflects upon illusory images of dreams and derives from them an interpretation of life (34), a description that might well apply, in another context, to Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Drawing upon the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also ascribes to Apollo the “principle of individuation,” meaning that which is unique or distin- guishes persons as individuals (36). On the other hand, Nietzsche links the art world of intoxication with Dionysus, the Greek god of music. Whereas Apollo is associated with dreams and fantasy, Dionysus is linked with quotidian reality. Whereas Apollo represents the individual, Dionysus stands for the collective group in which individuality is supplanted by primordial unity and oneness with nature. In Nietzsche’s account of the birth of tragedy, these energies, openly at odds with each other, “incite each other to new and more powerful births” until at last “they appear coupled with each other and through this coupling ... generate an equally Dionysian and Apollonian form of art – ... tragedy” (33). In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois is the figure most clearly identified with Apollo and the world of dreams. Blanche comes to New Orleans from a plantation called Belle Reve, or beautiful dream, located in Laurel, Mississippi. Not incidentally, the laurel was the sacred tree of Apollo. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche never fully reconciles the oddity of the link between Apollo, a sun god, and the nocturnal world of dreams. So, too, in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is described (in the same stage direction!) as both attracted to and repulsed by light. On the one hand, she is described as moth-like in appearance. Comparable to the moth, she is strangely attracted to that which has the power to destroy her. On the other hand, “[h]er delicate beauty must avoid a strong light” (245).3 To avoid it, she dresses naked light bulbs in paper lanterns, and when she goes out, with Mitch for example, it is always at night. The beautiful dream is that which enables Blanche to endure the horrors of existence. To survive, Blanche attempts to mask this reality with a more pleasing appearance. When she arrives in New Orleans, for instance, she dresses up the Kowalski apartment by sprinkling it with powder and spraying it with perfume (398). To keep up the façade of Apollonian tranquility, Blanche drinks to calm her nerves, but conceals from others just how much she drinks. From men in particular, Blanche hides the details of her past, especially any evils done or “villainies practiced.”4 In scene 9, when Mitch rips away the paper lantern, the veil that masks reality, Blanche responds defensively, with an Apollonian 96 George Crandell

apology that both asserts the value of dreams and aligns the audience’s sympathy with the woman willing to sacrifice herself for the dreams she believes in: “I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” (385). At this moment, Blanche most clearly resembles what Terry Eagleton, after Nietzsche, describes (unfortunately, in gender specific terms) as “Tragic Man”: “Tragic Man is he who is brave enough to en- dorse the beauty and necessity of illusion, in the teeth of the Platonists who would peer peremptorily behind it.”5 At the same time, Blanche echoes, in poetic terms, a dictum of Nietzsche, summarized by Eagleton: “we can act purposefully only through certain salutary myths which by masking the obscene chaos of existence, lend the self a life-sustaining illusion of purpose.”6 The description of “Tragic Man” applies equally as well to Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, who gives birth to the lie that she is pregnant, thereby creating a beautiful illusion that revives a sense of purpose in Big Daddy. Likewise, Lady Torrence, in Orpheus Descending, resurrects the wine-garden of her father, as an affront to her stone-hearted husband, who would destroy her and her dreams, just as he murdered her father. Blanche resembles Apollo not only in her faith in dreams but also in her appreciation for the arts and the refinements of civilization. In scene 4, Blanche stops to remind Stella about their upbringing and how much more Stanley Kowalski approximates a beast than a gentleman. Since the time of creation, she asserts, there has been some progress: “[s]uch things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of new light have come into the world since then!” (323). Wrapped up in her dreams, Blanche separates herself from others and so comes to represent also the principle of individuation that Nietzsche associates with Apollo. Soon after her arrival in the French Quarter and immediately after Eunice ushers Blanche into the Kowalski apartment, Blanche wants to be left alone. She has no desire to participate in the “easy intermingling” that characterizes life “in the old part of town” (243). Then when Stella returns to the flat from the bowling alley, Blanche tact- lessly comments on the “horrible place” where Stella lives, the first of many insulting comments that serve to alienate Blanche from her sister and the audience (251). Similarly, in every encounter with Stanley, she keeps her physical distance, recognizing in him her Dionysian destroyer. As Blanche says to Mitch (in scene 6): “The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy Beyond Pity and Fear 97

me,” an obsession that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (351). Even in her dealings with Mitch, with whom she shares a close affinity, Blanche asserts a fictitious moral superiority that ultimately drives Mitch away. Blanche thus affirms her individuality but at the price of her sanity. Stanley Kowalski is the Dionysian antithesis of the Apollonian Blanche DuBois. As much as Blanche is the representative of dreams, Stanley is the emissary of quotidian reality. His Napoleonic Code and the State of Louisiana are the realistic counterparts to Blanche’s more ephemeral Belle Reve. Whereas Blanche values civilization and its refinements – art, poetry, music – Stanley indulges in more primitive pleasures – eating (bringing home meat from the kill); drinking, to the point of intoxication; and sleeping with women. He knows what his pleasures are and indulges them, often to excess. He enjoys life to the fullest – “be comfortable is [his] motto” (266). In his drunken paroxysms, he easily forgets himself, and becomes one with his buddies. He is, for the most part, spontaneous and unselfconscious. In a rare moment of insight for Stanley, and only at the moment when he is about to rape Blanche, it occurs to Stanley that their destinies are inevitably linked. Speaking to his inert victim, Stanley says: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” (402). Just as the dynamic continuum shapes the conflict between Blanche and Stanley, it likewise defines the range of conflict within other characters. The subordinate characters, Stella and Mitch for example, exhibit some of the characteristic energies of both Apollo and Dionysus. Although Blanche, as we have seen, knows something of the Dionysian world (she drinks to forget), she nevertheless finds it hard to believe that Stella readily admits enjoying the pleasures of Dionysian ecstasy. As Stella remarks, “I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night” (259). Even though Stella delights in these nights of Dionysian pleasure, she more often exhibits the calm repose of the sculptor god, Apollo. In the first scene, she attempts to calm her agitated sister. In the stage directions preceding scene 4, Williams suggests that “[h]er eyes and lips have that almost narcotized tranquility that is in the faces of Eastern idols” (310). In her calm serenity, amidst the violence and upheaval that swirls around her, Stella is like the sailor, described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, who “trusts in his frail bark” (36) even in stormy seas. Stella is calm when others around her are not. When Stanley, for example, has one of his many violent outbursts, Stella blinds herself to his rage. After an appropriate interval, she always welcomes him back into her arms. The Apollonian desire for safety and security brings her back to him 98 George Crandell

time and time again. Conceivably, it is this desire that compels Stella to disbelieve Blanche’s story and to trust that Stanley did not actually rape her sister. As Stella remarks to Eunice, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley” (405). Confronted with the horror of Blanche’s story, Stella, like the ancient Greeks, believes in a fiction, a vital lie, that enables her to go on living. Offering a commentary comparable to that of a Greek chorus, Eunice replies: “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going” (406). Williams reaches a similar conclusion in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Maggie says to Brick: “life has got to be allowed to continue, even after the dream of life is – all – over” (57). Mitch, like Stella, also moves along the continuum between the poles of Apollonian and Dionysian energies, displaying from the start some discomfort in the role of intoxicated Dionysian reveler. Because images of his sick and homebound mother keep intruding upon his thoughts, he can neither enjoy himself nor forget himself by drinking Dionysian drafts. When Blanche first observes the poker players (in scene 3), she perceives immediately that Mitch is somehow different. “That one,” she observes to Stella, “seems – superior to the others” (292). His “sensitive look” (292) is indicative of someone, like herself, who has cared for the sick, who has known sorrow in his life, and who has found small comfort in things beautiful. He carries with him a cigarette case inscribed with a quotation from Blanche’s favorite sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Resembling the gentleman caller in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Mitch appears to be “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for” (145). He is to Blanche, her Rosenkavalier. For a brief interval, as Blanche and Mitch move closer to one another, they share a beautiful Apollonian dream, expressed somewhat awkwardly by Mitch in the form of a proposal: “You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be – you and me, Blanche?” to which Blanche positively replies, “Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!” (356). Blanche’s ineffectual invocation of the Judeo-Christian God is here, however, an ironic testament to the powerlessness of her Christian faith, with its focus on other-worldly rewards, to offer solace to those still on Earth. Blanche’s dream of salvation by God’s grace proves to be no more real than her hope of rescue by the distant Shep Huntleigh. The dream that Blanche and Mitch briefly share, if it could be lived, would allow both of them to enjoy “[t]he little there is that belongs to people who have experienced some sorrow” (298). But, even as it was in Greek tragedy, the veil of the beautiful dream exists only to be torn away. Beyond Pity and Fear 99

In Williams’s tragedy (as the examples of Stella and Mitch illustrate), the Apollonian and Dionysian forces ebb and flow along the continuum between two poles. In scene 3, Mitch assists Blanche in creating the Apol- lonian dream by hanging a paper lantern over a bare light bulb. In scene 9, he returns to tear it off. Mitch is to Blanche as Eagleton’s Platonist is to his Tragic Man, someone “who would peer peremptorily behind” the mask.7 Having learned the “truth” about Blanche from Stanley, Mitch reappears as Dionysus the destroyer, intent upon exposing Blanche to the naked light of truth. The scene foreshadows Blanche’s later confrontation with Stanley. Earlier that evening, Mitch failed to show up for Blanche’s intimate birthday party and so, upon his tardy entrance, she mildly rebukes him for his “utterly uncavalier” behavior (379). Intoxicated and dressed in “uncouth apparel” (380), Mitch no longer resembles the gentleman whom Blanche thought was superior to the others. Storming past Blanche and meaning to have a good look at her, Mitch “tears the paper lantern off the light bulb” (384). By exposing Blanche to the light, Mitch aims to strip her of her dignity. In response to the harsh light of Mitch’s gaze, Blanche “cries out and covers her face” (385). Naked, in a figurative sense, before Mitch’s eyes, Blanche appears to him not as a woman but as an object of scorn. Mitch comes over intending to claim that which he has been “missing all summer” (389). But Blanche repulses his fumbling embrace and thwarts his ill-conceived rape attempt by screaming “Fire! Fire! Fire!” (390). It remains for Stanley, in the following scene, to ac- complish the inevitable. In Nietzsche’s tragic world-view, the individual inevitably suc- cumbs to the collective and the principle of individuation gives way to the primordial life force. If we follow the path of Blanche DuBois’s descent – from the mythical heights of Belle Reve to the realistic depths of the French Quarter, we see that A Streetcar Named Desire illustrates the gradual collapse of the principle of individuation and the triumph of the primordial life force that Stanley represents. Blanche’s flight to New Orleans is an attempt to recover the calm Apollonian repose that she once enjoyed. Gradually, the dreams that sustain her life are stripped away, first by Mitch Hubbard and then by Stanley Kowalski. Mitch tears away the paper lantern and exposes Blanche to the harsh light of reality. Stanley exposes Blanche by revealing her history in Laurel to Mitch, and catching her in her own lies. As Blanche desperately tries to contact Shep Huntleigh, for example, Stanley cuts her off: “There isn’t no mil- lionaire! And Mitch didn’t come back with roses ‘cause I know where he is – ... There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination!” (398). Stripped 100 George Crandell of her life-affirming and life-sustaining illusions, Blanche stares blankly and silently into the face of her executioner and sees in his visage the immanent prospect of her own destruction. At this moment, the forces represented by Apollo and Dionysus collide, signaling not only the climax of the play but also an inevitable new beginning. Immediately before he rapes Blanche, Stanley confirms what both of them have known all along: “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning!” (402). “Date” here refers to the inevitable and violent intersection of two powerful energies, one Apollonian and one Dionysian. The collision and union of forces precipitates Blanche’s final descent into insanity and spiritual death. Once her life-preserving dreams are exposed to the naked light of truth, she loses the fight to preserve her individuality. As the victor in the encounter with Blanche, Stanley authorizes the fictional history of what happened the night his child was born. In the absence of witnesses, Stella and the others choose to believe Stanley’s story. Their enabling fiction is what allows life to continue, affirming what Nietzsche refers to as the “inexhaustibility” of life.8 Conditioned by Aristotle to expect a cathartic effect even in modern tragedy, audiences and critics have typically overlooked a parallel between the conclusion of A Streetcar Named Desire and the tragic world-view described in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. The similarity is made even more apparent by considering the ancient story of King Midas and Silenus that Nietzsche recounts in The Birth of Tragedy. According to legend, King Midas desired to ask of the wise man, Silenus: what is “the best and most desirable of all things for man”? (42). When at last Midas finds him and asks the question, Silenus laughs and replies:

Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon. (42)

Despite the pessimism of the Greek world-view, Nietzsche uses the narrative to explicate the apparent paradox of a tragic, but nonetheless life-affirming world-view. In response to “the terror and horror of existence,” the Greeks created the “radiant dream birth of the Olympians” (43), and from this creation, the Greeks derived a more affirmative view of life on Earth. In that the gods live and enjoy life, they serve to “justify Beyond Pity and Fear 101

the life of man” (43). Thus, by means of dreams, the wisdom of Silenus is reversed such that “to die soon is worst of all ... the next worse – to die at all” (43). From this example, Nietzsche reasons that suffering is necessary to beget the dreams that are, in turn, necessary to make it possible to endure the “terror and horror of existence” (42). In other words, the Dionysian depends upon Apollonian dreams to mask the horror and terror of existence. The Apollonian, in turn, relies upon the Dionysian to annihilate the illusory world of dreams in order to reveal the horror of existence and to restore the isolated individual self to a sense of oneness with one’s fellow human beings. In A Streetcar Named Desire, the figures of Apollo and Dionysus have their dramatic counterparts in Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. They wage a bitter territorial war until, ultimately, the Dionysian Stanley triumphs over Blanche, affirming the tragic world-view articulated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. Just as dreams and illusions must be stripped away, so too the horror and terror of existence must be exposed. The beautiful dream (Belle Reve) and the suffering individual who defends it, Blanche, must be destroyed, to pave the way for a new, more exuberant reality, represented by the birth of Stanley and Stella Kowalski’s child. Early critics rightly concluded that A Streetcar Named Desire is tragic, but mistakenly believed that it best conformed to Aristotle’s defi- nition of the genre. On the contrary, Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof more nearly resemble the kind of tragedy that Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy. The conflict in each of these dramas moves along a dynamic continuum punctuated at each end by Apollo and Dionysus, and while both of the plays conclude with the death of a major player (the spiritual demise of Blanche and the impending death of Big Daddy), each of the plays also ends with the birth of a child, thus affirming life’s enduring power. Comparable to Stella and Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, the major characters, Brick and Maggie, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, exhibit characteristic traits of both Apollo and Dionysus. Both characters, acting as Dionysus, play a part in the destruction of individuals, and likewise, taking after Apollo, participate in the creation of dreams that affirm the value of life. The first casualty of honest revelation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is Brick’s friend, Skipper, whom Maggie destroys by convincing him of the truth of his homosexual desire for Brick:

– When I came to his room that night, with a little scratch like a shy little mouse at his door, he made that pitiful, 102 George Crandell

ineffectual little attempt to prove that what I had said wasn’t true … – In this way, I destroyed him, by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told? – From then on Skipper was nothing at all but a receptacle for liquor and drugs. (59)

Brick’s alcoholism is a sure sign of his place in the Dionysian world of intoxication, and he, too, like Maggie, plays the role of Dionysus the Destroyer. When he inadvertently lets slip, in Big Daddy’s presence, that his father is dying of cancer, he makes Big Daddy the second victim of honest disclosure. Were it not for Maggie, Brick might well be the third casualty in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a victim like Skipper, of his own self-destructive behavior. By falling in love with “Echo Spring,” Brick joins a host of characters in Williams’s plays for whom alcohol masks the horrors of existence. As Williams writes in his “Notes for the Designer” of the set for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the liquor cabinet that Brick so often frequents “is a very complete and compact little shrine to virtually all the comforts and illusions behind which we hide from such things as the characters in the play are faced with” (16). Comparable to the Apollonian Blanche, Brick stands apart from the others, preferring the company of his tumbler to companionship with others. As Williams characterizes him, Brick “has the additional charm of that cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle” (19). Unlike Skipper, who kills himself, and Big Daddy, whose illness has “gone past the knife” (142), Brick can be redeemed and brought back into the Dionysian fold. Maggie, for example, works to penetrate the cover of indifference that shrouds him, insisting that he come to terms with his relationship with Skipper:

When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shut- ting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant. (31)

Similarly, Big Daddy, functioning like a Dionysian destroyer, exposes the lie that precipitates Brick’s voluntary withdrawal from life’s struggle: Beyond Pity and Fear 103

Anyhow now! – we have tracked down the lie with which you’re disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.

You! – dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it! – before you’d face truth with him! (124)9

Only after Maggie and Big Daddy succeed in revealing the truth to Brick about why he drinks does he again participate in life by joining with Mag- gie to create an Apollonian dream that makes life worth living:

BRICK: You heard what Big Daddy said. This girl has life in her body.

MAE: That is a lie!

BRICK: No, truth is something desperate, an she’s got it. Believe me, it’s somethin’ desperate, an’ she’s got it. (212)

The character in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof most closely associated with Apollo and the world of redemptive dreams is Maggie. Related in kind to Blanche, she is fearful of poverty and homelessness. She aspires to a life of wealth and security, similar to what Blanche once knew at Belle Reve before the “epic fornications” (284) of her relatives drove her to New Orleans. Unlike Blanche, who comes from wealth and loses it, Maggie rises from poverty to wealth (by marriage to Brick) and aims to hold on to what she believes is rightfully hers, an inheritance from Big Daddy. In Brick, she has found the means to her end and the satisfaction of her joy, provided that she can persuade him to love her again. Again like Blanche and Terry Eagleton’s “Tragic Man,” Maggie recognizes the necessity of illusion and so creates the dream that makes life possible to endure, by asserting a lie as if it were the truth. Claiming to be pregnant, she announces, “I have Brick’s child in my body, an’ that’s my birthday present to Big Daddy on this birthday!” (208). The assertion, which Big Daddy wants to believe, he affirms to be true: Uh-huh,“ this girl has life in her body, that’s no lie!” (208). By giving Big Daddy a dream to believe in, Maggie offers him hope and gives meaning to the horrific struggle he 104 George Crandell

has endured. Similarly, Maggie takes hold of Brick, and by discarding his alcoholic dreams for the promise of new life, attempts to reintegrate him into life. Stripped of their illusions, both Brick and Big Daddy find in Maggie what they want and whom they need for a redemptive view of life’s possibilities. As Maggie observes: “Oh, you weak people, you weak, beautiful people! – who give up – What you want is someone to – take hold of you. – Gently, gently, with love!” (165). Owing more allegiance to Nietzsche than Aristotle in his conception of the tragic, Williams repeats a now familiar pattern in Orpheus Descend- ing: an individual man or woman endures suffering, creates illusions to endure the pain, and then has the dreams stripped away. And even though an individual is destroyed, there is still reason to celebrate life. Of the three tragic protagonists who meet with destruction, Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending suffers as much if not more than all of them. She endures the heartbreak of lost love, the painful torment of an abortion, and the indignity, unknown to her, of marriage to the man who murdered her father. Even so, briefly before death, she experiences joy. After the fashion of Blanche and Maggie, Lady creates a beautiful dream in the form of a confectionary, a new place that reminds her of her father’s wine-garden where young lovers met to experience the joy of love, of each other, and of life. When Lady learns of Jabe’s role in her father’s death, the wine-garden becomes a symbol of her desired revenge:

I want that man to see the wine garden come open again when he’s dying! ... It’s necessary, no power on earth can stop it. Hell, I don’t even want it, it’s just necessary, it’s just something’s got to be done to square things away to, to, to – be not defeated! You get me? Just to be not defeated! (329)

Lady’s greater joy, apart from her desire for revenge, comes from the knowledge that she is pregnant, not by her husband, but by Val Xavier. Her announcement and confession, to Val, of new life beginning resembles that of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “True as God’s word! I have life in my body, this dead tree, my body, has burst in flower! You’ve given me life, you can go!” (Orpheus 337). Lady’s joy is short-lived. Acting as the Dionysian destroyer of Apol- lonian dreams and individuality, Jabe puts an end to her celebration and to her life – and the new life in her body – with a pair of bullets. For Williams, as for Nietzsche, even momentary joy is cause for celebra- Beyond Pity and Fear 105

tion. What brief joy Lady Torrance experiences in Orpheus Descending matches what Nietzsche describes as the “Dionysian” in The Twilight of the Idols:

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest prob- lems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. (121)

In sharp contrast with the Aristotelian response to tragedy, audiences who view Williams’s tragic plays do not experience catharsis but instead witness an affirmation of life’s regenerative power, even as the “highest types,” those held up as tragic heroes, are reduced to nothing by insanity or death. Nietzsche makes the contrast even more apparent:

Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus Aristotle understood it –: but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction. (121)

All three tragic plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Orpheus Descending, celebrate life and its joy – even in the destruction of their greatest heroes: Blanche DuBois, Big Daddy, and Lady Torrance. Each of them echoing the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, together they share an affinity with the tragic but affirmative world-view described in The Birth of Tragedy.

Notes

1 Joseph N. Riddell (1963), the first to acknowledgeThe Birth of Tragedy as a possible source for A Streetcar Named Desire, credits Williams with misunderstanding Nietzsche, arguing that “Williams borrows from Nietzsche in great chunks, often undigested, using his sources with that liberal freedom that has become characteristic of the American artist in search of a theme” (421). Williams’s tragic plays suggest otherwise. To date, the documentary evidence demonstrating the extent of Williams’s familiarity with Nietzsche’s work is limited to a notebook entry, dated September 22, 1936, in which Williams quotes from Nietzsche’s Daybreak, suggesting that Williams read Nietzsche at a relatively young age; see Williams (2006: 55). The editor of Williams’s Notebooks, Margaret Thornton, adds that Williams copied passages from the same source onto the 106 George Crandell endpapers of a book found in the Williams family collection at Washington University (2006: 54 n.84). Thornton also notes that Williams makes reference to Nietzsche in two short stories, written at about the same time as the notebook entry: “Season of Grapes” and “Ironweed.” Conceivably, Williams studied some of Nietzsche’s work in an introductory philosophy course in which he enrolled at Washington University in 1936 (2006: 54, n.84). 2 N. Joseph Calarco (1969: 6). 3 All quotations from Williams’s plays, respectively, are from the published Theater of Tennessee Williams series by New Directions. 4 Jordan Y. Miller (1971: 11). 5 Eagleton (2003: 53). 6 Ibid., p.53. 7 Eagleton (2003: 53). 8 Nietzsche (1990: 121). 9 Brick and Blanche may both be said to function as Dionysian destroyers in that Brick brings about Skipper’s death just as Blanche “brought about the boy’s [Allan Grey’s] suicide by her unqualified expression of disgust”; Leonard Berkman (1967: 253).

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