How Does Tennessee Williams stage and subvert notions of Southern identity in A Streetcar Named Desire ?
The first question which needs to be asked is what is Southern identity ? In this essay question the notions of Southern identity are not only about the characters' identity and personality but beyond that what embodies the Southern dimension in a literary work. In the American literature the Southern is said Gothic, and so has a Romantic heritage. What are the elements which built a Gothic fiction ? The first themes which come in mind must be the grotesque, fantastic tales dealing with horror and mystic such as ghost, the monstrous, and frightening notions as doppelgänger. In the American Gothic literature the genre deals with themes like social class, sexual orientation and race, slavery or gender ambiguities are often the main topics of a Southern fiction. The atmosphere is often gloomy, warm and anxious. As Fred Botting wrote, the Southern Gothic characters must be “gloomy, isolated and sovereign, they are wanderers, outcasts and rebels condemned to roam the boarders of social worlds, bearers of a dark truth or horrible knowledge, (…) transgressors who represent the extremes of individual passion ans consciousness. (…) inhabit a violent world of fire and struggle. (…) In the throes of excessive feeling and tormented consciousness Romantic subjectivity is mystified as the shadowy image of the grander forces of natural creation and destruction of the mysterious power of the imagination.”1. The question is to know how does Tennessee Williams in his play 'A Streetcar Named Desire' stage this notions of Southern identity and on the same way subvert it. To answer it elements of Gothic literature in the play will be study and analyse through some theorists' ideas such as Fred Botting, Houston A. Baker and Dana D. Nelson, Matthew C. Roudane, Philip C. Kolin and David H. Goff.
One of the main symbols of the Gothic literature must be the House. Indeed in...