Intercourse (10 page)

While Williams persistently parodies the refinements of ladies, their yearnings for the ineffable, their pretensions of civilization and culture against the voraciousness of their sexual appetites, he is also on their side—on the side of art, a sensibility; and the question is, how does a person with a sensibility survive being driven by the excesses and demands of that very sensibility into sex? Stanley’s animal sexuality leaves him virtually untouched by the meaning of any experience because he has no interior life, he is invulnerable to consequences, he has no memory past sensation. He is ordinary. Despite the radiant intensity of his sexuality, despite his wife’s genteel refinement, despite the intensity of the sex between them, they are like everyone else. “When we first met, ” Stanley says to Stella, “me and you, you thought I was common. How right you was, baby. I was common as dirt. You showed me the snapshot of the place with the columns. I pulled you down off them columns and how you loved it... And wasn’t we happy together... ”
¹⁸
They have a habitual life of fucking and violence that blends into the common neighborhood life around them. They are not marked by sex; they are not outsiders; despite what is intended to be the staggering sexual appeal of the actor who plays Stanley, they are not different. They conform perfectly to the patterns of the married people around them. The couple upstairs will have the same drama of battery and fucking in the course of the play; Stanley and Stella are a younger version, not different in quality or kind. Blanche is different. Blanche is marked, stigmatized, by her capacity to feel inside; by loneliness, vulnerability, despair; by her need for sex in conflict with her capacity for love; by her need for sex in conflict with what are the immediate needs of survival—passing as a real lady, not someone shopworn and used up, and marrying Mitch, Stanley’s staid companion. Blanche is a displaced person, a refugee in a solitary migration, driven from where she was by the cacophony of men she had—and their voices follow her now, reaching Stanley, damning her as a whore; she is displaced by the desire that carried her to
^"
[w]here I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be.”
¹⁹
Being stigmatized means being marked by an inner capacity for feeling; put against Stanley’s animal sexuality, it emerges as a distinctly human capacity for suffering the internal human consequences of sex and love, especially loneliness and remorse. There is an indelible sorrow, perhaps a distinctly human incapacity to heal, because some kinds of pain do not lessen in the human heart:

Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan—intimacies with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with.... I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to another, hunting for some protection— here and there, in the most—unlikely places...
²⁰
[first ellipsis Williams’s; second ellipsis mine]

Blanche’s desire had always set her apart, because she always wanted a lover with a sensibility the opposite of Stanley’s, not traditionally masculine, animalistic, aggressive; she always wanted someone in whom “some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! ” She was always Stanley’s enemy, the enemy of the ordinary, however unrepressed the ordinary was. And it was this opposition to the ordinary—to ordinary masculinity—that marked her: that was her sexual appetite, her capacity to love, the anguish at the heart of her desire. At sixteen she fell in love—“[a]ll at once and much, much too completely. It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow, that’s how it struck the world for me. ”
²¹
The boy was gentle, nervous, beautiful, with “a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking. ”
²²
He wrote poetry, and she loved him “unendurably. ”
²³
One night she found him kissing an older man; that night he killed himself, because she told him she had seen the kissing and that he disgusted her. The opposite of death, says Blanche, is desire; desire for the soldiers camped near the family land, Belle Reve, while her mother was dying; desire for other men in the wake of Allan; desire for a seventeen-year-old boy when she was a teacher, resulting in her being fired; and now, holed up with Stella and Stanley, where the streetcar named Desire has taken her, trying to trap Mitch into marriage, desire even for the newspaper boy collecting for
The Evening Star: “Young man! Young, young, young man! Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights? Well, you do, honey lamb! Come here. I want to kiss you, just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth! Now run along, now, quickly! It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good—and keep my hands off children. ”
²⁴
The death facing her now is the death of all her possibilities: the end of youth, already gone; no more hope and heart, both needed to pick up men; no chance of marriage except for Mitch; being “played out. ”
²⁵
Her job gone because she was found morally unfit, having had sex with the seventeen-year-old student; her land gone, eaten up by debts and the slow dying of her mother and funeral costs; her vagabond relationships with men in cheap hotels also at an end, because she is too worn, too despairing; she wants to marry Mitch—“because you seemed to be gentle—a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in! ”
²⁶
She has always wanted gentleness; now she needs gentle refuge; instead of clawing at the rock of the world, she needs to be hidden inside it, safe, not on her own, not having to barter herself away over and over, time without end. The marriage to Mitch depends on her maintaining the lie, the illusion, of gentility: of being a lady, not having ridden on that streetcar named Desire, being younger than she is, not used. “You’re not clean enough to bring into the house with my mother, ”
²⁷
Mitch tells her, when she confirms Stanley’s stories about her. Mitch humiliates and abandons her. She needed one man so as not to have to continue to navigate through many. Once the hope of trapping Mitch is gone, she is at the end of the line, nothing left her but embellished memories of a desperate sexual past and a fantasy future of self-worth and self-respect:

Physical beauty is passing. A transitory possession. But beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart—and I have all of those things—aren’t taken away, but grow! Increase with the years! How strange that I should be called a destitute woman! When I have all of these treasures locked in my heart.
²⁸

With Stella in the hospital having their baby, Stanley rapes Blanche.

Stella cannot believe Blanche and keep living with Stanley, so Stella does not believe Blanche.

Not being believed breaks Blanche’s already fragile hold on reality.

Stanley has Blanche taken away, institutionalized as mad, in the world of Tennessee Williams the worst consequence of sexual knowledge, the worst punishment, crueler than death.

Because Stanley has no interior life of feeling, he has no remorse; the rape is just another fuck for him. It takes a human consciousness, including a capacity for suffering, to distinguish between a rape and a fuck. With no interior life of human meaning and human remorse, any fuck is simply expressive and animalistic, whatever its consequences or circumstances. Blanche pays the price for having a human sexuality and a human consciousness. She has been raped; she knows it. There is nothing in the text of the play, despite the way it is sometimes staged, to suggest that she wanted it all along. In fact, there is a pronounced and emotionally vivid history of her wanting its opposite—a sexuality of tenderness and sensitivity. She is taken away, locked up, because she knows what happened to her. The madness that becomes the only refuge left on earth for her is not a merciful madness, one that will soften the harsh colors, because she will be incarcerated, human trash in an institution for the broken and thrown away. She is punished for knowing the meaning of what Stanley did to her because her capacity to know and to feel is his enemy. The rape itself was a revenge on her for wanting more than an animal fuck delivered by an animal masculinity: for feeling more, wanting more, knowing more. For her, sex was part of a human quest for human solace, human kindness; she genuinely did not want to
“hang back with the brutes. ” Stanley, ordinary, unrepressed, was the natural enemy of sex with any dimension of human longing or human meaning, any wanting that was not just for the raw, cold, hard fuck, a sensual using without any edge of loneliness or discontent. Blanche is marked, finally, by madness, jailed; not for her sexuality but for his, because his sexuality requires the annihilation of her aspirations to tenderness. Her human integrity is broken, destroyed, because her sister prefers believing she is mad to facing the truth: a paradigm for women. Her sister’s complicity is the deathblow to her mind.

Having an interior life of wanting, needing, gives fucking human meaning in a human context. “All my life, ” Williams wrote, “I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. ”
²⁹
Without that inner fragility and fear, fucking is likely to become, as Williams wrote in a later play, “quick, and hard, and brutal... like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle... ”
³⁰
Being stigmatized by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

chapter four

COMMUNION

I
n Amerika, there is the nearly universal conviction— or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right: morally right; a sign of human health; nearly a standard for citizenship. Even those who believe in original sin and have a theology of hellfire and damnation express the Amerikan creed, an optimism that glows in the dark: sex is good, healthy, wholesome, pleasant, fun; we like it, we enjoy it, we want it, we are cheerful about it; it is as simple as we are, the citizens of this strange country with no memory and no mind.

The current argument on sex between the Right and the Left is not about the nature of fucking as such. It is strictly about whether or not this good thing is good outside marriage or between persons of the same gender (however they manage it). “In other words, ” writes Marabel Morgan, interpreting Scripture no less, “sex is for the marriage relationship only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese. ”
¹
Marabel Morgan’s
The Total Woman
(a manual for wives who want to get their husbands to fuck them and maintain a cheerful attitude and a belief in God all at the same time) spawned classes all over the United States, including in churches, to teach conservative, Christian women how to act out the so-called fantasies of their husbands with costumes and props. The Left prefers many partners to one; and
Hustler's
meat-grinder cover, in which a woman is fed into a meat grinder and comes out as ground beef, expresses its food preference. On both Right and Left, a citizen had best be prepared to affirm her loyalty to the act itself. Ambivalence or dissent impugns her credibility; a good attitude is requisite before she is allowed to speak—in magazines, on television, in political groups. The tone and general posture of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders set the standard for a good attitude; not to have one is un-Amerikan and sick too. The social pressure to conform is fierce, ubiquitous, and self-righteous. Lost in the simple-minded prosex chauvinism of Right and Left is the real meaning of affirmation, or any consciousness of the complexity—the emotional tangledness—of a human life. “It is really quite impossible, ” writes James Baldwin, “to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn’t, by an act of imagination, made one’s own. ”
²
There is no imagination in fetishlike sexual conformity; and no questions are being asked in political discourse on sex about hope and sorrow, intimacy and anguish, communion and loss. Imagination is both aggressive and delicate, a mode of cognition unmatched in its ability to reveal the hidden meanings in reality now and the likely shape of tomorrow. Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which is only—pathetically—a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses. The paring down of the vocabulary of human affect to fuck-related expletives suggests that one destroys the complexity of human response by destroying the language that communicates its existence. “Sex-negative” is the current secular
reductio ad absurdum
used to dismiss or discredit ideas, particularly political critiques, that might lead to detumescence. Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are “sex-negative” without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste. There is an awful poverty here, in this time and place: of language, of words that express real states of being; of search, of questions; of meaning, of emotional empathy; of imagination. And so, we are inarticulate about sex, even though we talk about it all the time to say how much we like it—nearly as much, one might infer, as jogging. Nothing is one’s own, nothing, certainly not oneself, because the imagination is atrophied, like some limb, dead and hanging useless, and the dull repetition of programmed sexual fantasy has replaced it.