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<\/a>Still from A\u00a0<\/em>Streetcar Named Desire.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois\u2019s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em>. This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams\u2019s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand\u2014that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it. And if she is the ultimate actor, she possesses the ultimate stage prop: her trunk. This object is baggage, furniture, and character all at once, a heavy and unwieldy onstage presence that mirrors Blanche\u2019s own frail but nonetheless steely physicality.<\/p>\nIn the opening scene of Elia Kazan\u2019s 1951 film adaptation\u2014he had also directed the Broadway production of the play with Jessica Tandy as Blanche, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947\u2014Vivien Leigh\u2019s Blanche emerges from the steam in the railway station carrying only a small purse and a large, round box (possibly a hatbox). She walks forward tentatively, as if afraid of something unseen. The soldier who helps her onto the streetcar passes the box up to her, and she clutches it as she walks through the streets of New Orleans, dodging people and noises. Blanche doesn\u2019t travel with her trunk; it follows her. She travels light, and indeed, she is light\u2014Mitch (Karl Malden) will refer to her as \u201clight as a feather,\u201d an observation that links her with the fluffy sartorial contents of her trunk. She boasts to Stella (Kim Hunter) that she hasn\u2019t put on weight in ten years, but, as she will remind her sister later, she still feels a sense of heaviness: she carries the burden of the family\u2019s plantation, Belle Reve. For Blanche, Belle Reve is a beautiful white Southern dream of an ancestral estate that has been reduced to ruin, lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blanche repeats the word lost<\/em> a number of times in reference to the family\u2019s home: it is a lost place, a no place, like all nostalgic dreams. But its traces are not lost. They are hidden away in the compartments of her trunk. When the trunk appears in the film, strapped to the back of a car, Stanley and another man unload it, and the other man interprets its weightiness: \u201cLooks like she\u2019s fixing to stay a while.\u201d Although the film tends to stay close to the play, the opening scene at the railway station and the arrival of the trunk by car are filmic elements that emphasize Blanche as a traveler\u2014\u201cjust a visiting in-law,\u201d as she calls herself in scene 1. Ultimately, Stanley demonstrates the most interest in the trunk\u2019s contents. As Blanche bathes offstage in scene 2, he presses Stella for details about how Belle Reve was lost, and she insists that it\u2019s best not to talk about it. She opens the wardrobe trunk, which stands like a small closet in the middle of the room, and takes out a dress for her sister. As Stanley demands information about a lost home, Stella helps Blanche to unpack in her new temporary home.<\/p>\nBut Stanley isn\u2019t interested in helping his sister-in-law settle in. Eight scenes before he will attack Blanche\u2019s body, in the infamous rape scene, he attacks her trunk, throwing its contents all over the room. Blanche is not her baggage, but her baggage is <\/em>Blanche, a transference he instinctively understands as he violates its contents and, by extension, her memories and her body. Later, in scene 10, he will refer to the rape as \u201csome rough-house,\u201d which is an apt description of how he treats her personal possessions in this scene too. Standing over the trunk, Marlon Brando\u2019s Stanley grabs Stella\u2019s arm and yanks her toward the trunk, ordering her to look through it and demanding to know how Blanche purchased such \u201cfine feathers and furs\u201d on a teacher\u2019s salary. (The stage directions in the play indicate that he \u201cpulls open the wardrobe trunk \u2026 and jerks out an armful of dresses\u201d and \u201cjerks open a small drawer in the trunk.\u201d Moments later, he will kick the trunk partly closed when Stella begs him to close it before Blanche comes out of the bathroom.) His language tends toward hyperbole as he rummages through her clothes and jewels. In the film, he asks, \u201cWhat is this article? That\u2019s a solid-gold dress, I believe!\u201d and identifies \u201ca genuine fur fox a half a mile long.\u201d Her trunk is \u201ca treasure chest of a pirate,\u201d and she is \u201ca deep-sea diver.\u201d Every object becomes more than it is, and all of them are suspect. He reads them as indications that he is being \u201cswindled,\u201d indications that something is not right, indications that Blanche is not who she seems to be. Of course, he is right in some ways, but he is also wrong, for he fails to see that what he identifies as signs of wealth are actually the opposite. Blanche\u2019s clothing is not so much clothing as costume, the means by which she performs a version of traditional Southern-belle femininity that is both an asset and a burden.<\/p>\nThe powerfully present contents of the trunk also become absences, as Stanley asks Stella, \u201cWhere are your fox-pieces? \u2026 Where are your white fox-furs?\u201d Keenly aware that his disturbance of the trunk is a violation, Stella is desperate to replace the things that Stanley throws about. She wants to protect her sister, an instinct that will fade by the end of the play. She also provides a counternarrative of the trunk\u2019s contents. She understands the material value of the objects to be meager. The trunk holds things that are real, including Blanche\u2019s love letters and documents about Belle Reve, and things that are fake, such as her costume jewelry. This distinction is lost on Stanley. He forcefully pushes Stella away\u2014she holds her wrist to indicate that he has hurt her\u2014as he handles the strands of pearls, unable to see that they are just copies of the real thing. When Stella identifies the tiara as rhinestone, he asks, \u201cWhat is rhinestone?\u201d to which she responds, \u201cNext door to glass.\u201d His invocation of his \u201clawyer acquaintance\u201d\u2014\u201cI have an acquaintance who deals in this sort of merchandise, and he\u2019s coming in here and making an appraisal of this\u201d\u2014underscores his inability to understand that the value of the trunk is not material but sentimental.<\/p>\n
Blanche\u2019s entrance into the room from the steaming bathroom mirrors the train station at the beginning of the film, suggesting that she is in a perpetual state of displacement, a figure without a home. Indeed, her last home was a hotel; she was a paying customer. Now she is a guest, robbed of all agency and entirely dependent on her hosts, a dynamic that resonates tragically with her famous last line. That Stanley has rummaged through her trunk is the first sign that she is not welcome and that he views her as a threat. Her distress is visible as she surveys the trunk, observing that \u201cit looks like my trunk has exploded,\u201d to which Stanley responds that he and Stella were \u201chelping you unpack.\u201d Her attempt to control, and deny, the hostility of the scene by flirting with Stanley is unsuccessful as he deems himself immune to her version of \u201cHollywood glamor.\u201d (Stella, meanwhile, has gone to fetch Blanche a \u201clemon-coke\u201d). Blanche insists that the clothing and jewelry were gifts from men, establishing the trunk as proof of her own desirability, as well as her status as a lady\u2014virgin, not whore\u2014even without her estate. Stanley\u2019s characterization of these objects as \u201cHollywood glamor stuff\u201d takes on a metafilmic resonance that redirects the viewer\u2019s attention to Blanche as actor, a role she accepts in her assertion that \u201ca woman\u2019s charm is fifty percent illusion.\u201d The trunk is both a material reality and an unreality, a thing that embodies illusion, that allows for illusion, that is illusion.<\/p>\n
The trunk represents not only Blanche\u2019s complex relationship to artifice and performativity but also her lost home. It is<\/em> Belle Reve on stage, in debased form, and to Stanley, the papers it contains promise an explanation of what happened to that ideal place. When he asks to see them (to prove that he has not been cheated out of his wife\u2019s fortune), Blanche says, \u201cEverything that I own is in that trunk,\u201d delineating not only the limits of the trunk\u2019s contents but also of her life. He starts to open its compartments, but she intercedes, producing a tin box filled with \u201cthousands of papers stretching back over hundreds of years,\u201d which she hands over to him angrily. \u201cHere all of them are, all papers! I hereby endow you with them! Take them, peruse \u00ad\u00adthem\u2014commit them to memory, even! I think it\u2019s wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve should finally be a bunch of old papers in your big, capable hands!\u201d The house is no more than a pile of papers, and Blanche knows that the reader of these papers will not understand them.<\/p>\nShe sees Belle Reve as a legitimate and legitimating heritage that stands in opposition to her sister\u2019s husband and his friends. And while the trunk contains the story of Stella and Blanche\u2019s family history\u2014a history of how \u201cour improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications\u201d\u2014it also holds her own romantic history with her \u201cboy\u201d husband whose ghost shadows the play. The estate is lost, and so is her husband, but she is far more protective of his textual traces: her \u201clove-letters, yellowing with antiquity.\u201d This romantic history is connected to what Stanley eventually discovers about her professional situation: that she was deemed \u201cmorally unfit\u201d and fired\u00a0from her job for engaging in a sexual relationship with a student. This student doubles not only as her \u201cboy\u201d husband but also the young man who comes to collect for the Evening Star<\/em>. But this history with the student is gossip. Stanley learns about it by word of mouth. Like her time at the Hotel Flamingo, it leaves no paper trail.<\/p>\nIn scene 11, which opens with Stella packing Blanche\u2019s things, the trunk becomes a crucial prop in Blanche\u2019s ultimate performance: her preparation for her imagined trip with Shep Huntleigh, a man who never appears and is replaced by the Doctor. As she contemplates which dress to wear, she worries that her clothing has become crumpled in the trunk, or marked by her mobility. \u201cThat cool yellow silk\u2014the boucl\u00e9,\u201d as she says to Stella. \u201cSee if it\u2019s crushed. If it\u2019s not too crushed I\u2019ll wear it and on the lapel that silver and turquoise pin in the shape of a seahorse. You will find them in the heart-shaped box I keep my accessories in.\u201d The seahorse pin prefigures Blanche\u2019s vision of her own death several moments later: \u201cI\u2019ll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard\u2014at noon\u2014in the blaze of summer\u2014and into an ocean as blue as my first lover\u2019s eyes!\u201d Here, she transforms herself into luggage: a clean white sack, a shroud. This future is a doubling of the past and the white sack a double of the trunk itself. In the rape scene just before, Stanley blocked and limited Blanche\u2019s movement as she cried out, \u201cStay back!,\u201d attempting to defend herself with a broken bottle. Her trunk is an enclosed space. The apartment is an enclosed space. Blanche is trapped in, defined by, enclosed spaces. But in her vision of her death, she sets herself free, released in annihilation. No longer dressed and powdered to perfection, she becomes a kind of nothing, her \u201cclean white sack\u201d not a tragic love letter or estate document but a blank page.<\/p>\n
At the end of the film, when the Doctor leads her away, her trunk is left behind. Blanche seems to have forgotten something, but Stanley assures the Matron that \u201cwe can send it along with the trunk.\u201d But this promise rings hollow. It is unlikely that Blanche will see her trunk again. In the end, her secrets\u2014and her self\u2014aren\u2019t really in the trunk. Even if one were to go through all of its contents, all the letters and documents and fake jewelry and cheap furs, these things wouldn\u2019t tell the whole story. This is what Blanche means when she says to Stanley that she has \u201call these treasures locked in my heart.\u201d Unlike her trunk, her heart is something she can lock, something she can keep safe. It is private, and indeed privacy is what Blanche wants. Leigh understood this preoccupation with interiority, I think. Blanche\u2019s real secrets are behind her eyes, in the demure look that is one of her signature moves: a vision of wide-eyed, ladylike innocence that hides a true self under layers of artifice. This look is meant to manipulate, to control. But this is not the most interesting thing about it. More than anything, Leigh\u2019s look is opaque, and this is how her Blanche protects herself, or tries to, in a way that she cannot protect the contents of her trunk. The trunk can be violated. Blanche\u2019s body can be\u2014and is. But Leigh\u2019s look hides the past. It hides the self. It is what secrets look like.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Susan Harlan\u00a0is an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University. She is the author of<\/em> Luggage and<\/em>\u00a0Memories of War in Early Modern England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois\u2019s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire. This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams\u2019s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1377,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32740,3882,10410,32737,32738,32739,8850,32742,10409,1754,32741,32736],"class_list":["post-120418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-belle-reve","tag-blanche-dubois","tag-elia-kazan","tag-jessica-tandy","tag-karl-malden","tag-kim-hunter","tag-marlon-brando","tag-stanley-kowalski","tag-streetcar-named-desire","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-the-evenin-star","tag-vivian-leigh"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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