LOA
Mas not as an innate strength, but as a brash and confrontational construct designed to mask profound male insecurities. Initially, the male characters project a macho identity to obscure their fragile selves and fear of not appearing assertive enough. However as the play progresses, this performance hardens into a dogmatic and dictatorial identity, enabling Stanley to act as a sovereign who expels those, like blache, who threaten his worldview. Because mas is such an integral part of the male personality, Williams perhaps forces us to ponder: why is masculinty not found in its ability to maintain peace, but rather by its power to dominate others and suppress its own fragility?
- Masculine performance is an over-compensation for deep-seated insecurity
Context= a phenomenon sharpened by the post ww2 context where returning soldiers sought to reassert patriarchal dominance in a domestic sphere that had learned to operate without them.
Plays setting on ‘ELYSIAN FIELDS’ establishes an immediate irony that frames the play’s central conflict on masculnty. The Elysian Fields represents a masculine utopia where ex-soldiers would go to symbolcially greet the gods and ask for eternal blessing. But thr irony is that this paradise is located on a cramped, decaying street in New Orleans which greatly contradicts this utopian mas fantasy. Revealing that this masculine is not noble, but weathering, eroding and just ‘brutal desire’. Thus, masc is a flamboyant facade masking a ‘decay(ing)’ spirit.
This exgerrated performance is also found in the scene 3 poker night game. 7 card stud. ‘Lurid primary colours’ contrast how the men (bar Stanley) actually play the game with a degree of meekness and carefulness. Steve enquiries about everyone else’s cards= insecure about his stats in the game, pablo’s attempt to pause the game with a Chinese takeaways fear of losing.
Staley’s excessive bravado posturing hides his insecurity about losing the game which he has set up and uses his slanderous rhetoric as a shield to hide his self-conscious anxiety about not coming macho enough in front of his peers.
Reinforced by the roar of the locomotive to aggressively magnify Stanley’s assertiveness and control, over compensating his fear of being emasculated by being loud and hostile
Sociological petri dish
- Hyper-masc is inherently volatile, severely distorting the psyche and legitimising violence against the vulnerable
Threatened ego triggers a violent reassertion of dominance, blinding Stanley to the humanity of his own wife.
‘This is my house’ ‘this game is spit in ocean’
Is enough to create an emotional turbulent powder keg for someone like Staley to explode with fury. The challenge to his domestic and social power leads to Stanley quickly seeking a physical outlet (domestic violence against his wife) to relief his destabilised psyche from losing face and power. This precisely illustrates the danger of hyper-masculinity which blinds the human psyche from distinguishing who is wife and who is foe. Thus, hyper-masculinity is not only blinding as it leads to Stanley ‘strik(ing)’ his pregnant wife
The distorting power of this deadly brand of masculinty extends further, warping even the victim’s perception.
Stella ‘alsmost narcotised tranquility’ juxtaposes Blanche’s dishevelled state. Thus, this unsettling contrast implicates Stella in the system of male aggression, suggesting its potency can psychologically disarm the vulnerable, normalising the abuse in a manner akin to Stockholm’s syndrome
- MAs is a dictorial identity that grants men ultimate power within their sphere of influence
‘Kowlaskis and Dubois have differnt notions’ as Stanley notices that Blanche is not ‘a woman who lays her cards out on the table’ fuelling this class warfare.
‘Common and bestial’ ‘even something ape-like.. subhuman about him’ fuels vendetta
Bring back poker game to show Stanley’s final cards to Blanche as th ultimate referee in his household.
‘Bus ticket back to laurel’ and peripeteia shatters the last of Blanche’s illusions in her rape (contemporary audience actually cheered by GI Bill) historical defeat of the OS. Act is not merely personal but symbolic; it is the dictatorial eradication of a threatening ideology, reducing the OS to a palimpsest and paving the way for his own version of the American dream, thus, proving that his MAs is defined solely by the power to dominate and destroy
