The Technique of a Memory Play

- Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire -

1. The definition of a memory play

*A term coined by Tennessee Williams himself, in order to

describe The Glass Menagerie (1944):

"Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some

details; others are exaggerated according to the emotional
value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated
predominantly in the heart. (...) The play is memory. Being
a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is
not realistic."

*A memory play has three parts:

1) a character experiences something profound and usually painful.

2) an amount of time ellapses, or, as Williams says, there is an "arrest

of time" in which the consciousness of what has occurred forms.

3) the re-living of the same painful experience over and over again,
until the character is able to reach redemption.

"Blanche certainly proceeds through Williams' memory

play structure; however, we do not discover whether or
not she finds, in her insanity, psychological freedom from
the tormenting memory of her husband's death."(Darryl E.
Haley: Promiscuity and Penance: Sexual Outcasts in A
Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus
Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Confessional)

2. The position of memory play in the tradition of realism

* The play is realistic insomuch that it deals with a specific time

and place (New Orleans, mid-twentieth century etc.) But, for Williams'

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characters themselves, mere reality is not enough, or, as one critic
says, they are

"characters who themselves distrust the real until it is

transformed by the imagination."

Williams rejected the mere mimetic representation of reality

and considered that only through imagination or memory can events
become significant. He says that everyone

"should know nowadays the unimportance of the

photographic in art [because] truth, life, or reality is an
organic thing which the poetic imagination represents […]
only through transformation."

3. The devices used to signal a change of atmosphere

* Williams makes use of such stage effects as light, music,

scenography, sounds to create the atmosphere of memory, which often
leaves out, transforms, distorts, or puts heavy accent on one detail or
another from one's past.

* Light: Blanche has an aversion to light and only feels secure

when the light is dimmed. The lighting is dim and the light bulbs are
covered with lanterns just like memory is a kind of lantern that
presents the past in a modified way.

* The polka or the Varsouviana: Williams says that "In memory

everything seems to happen to music."

The polka is the melody that was playing at the dance during
which Allan killed himself. You as a reader always have it written in
the stage instructions that a polka starts to play every time that
Blanche starts thinking about the past events that haunt her. This
polka is actually a signal, a warning, a sign that an avalanche of the
past is to ensue. So the polka takes you into the reality of Blanche's
memories of the past. The first actual introduction of the polka:

"STANLEY: You were married once, weren't you?

/The music of the polka rises up, faint in the distance/"
(SND, scene 1)

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 From then on, every time Blanche starts to remember
something from her previous life, the Varsouviana is heard. It gets
more and more often and more and more intense as the play
progresses and as she starts fading into madness gradually.

Conversely, every time someone pulls her back into reality, you
see the stage-instructions of the polka stopping. Like Mitch ringing
the doorbell in scene 9.

"You've stopped that polka tune that I had caught in my

mind." (SND, scene 9)

Blanche is only free of the sound of the polka once she hears a
gunshot:

"/A distant revolver shot is heard. Blanche seems

relieved./
There now, the shot! It always stops after that.
/The polka music dies out again./" (SND, Scene 9)

4. Blanche's re-invention of her own history

* All the stories about Blanche's past truly do take the "poetic
license" that Williams mentions. She tries to forget the fact that she
was once a prostitute, and instead she still thinks of herself and plays
the role of a southern belle (the white dresses that she wears, her
conduct, her refined speech, her insisting on no sexual intimacy with
Mitch).

In scene ten, where Mitch comes to confront Blanche about her

past, she tells Stanley that Mitch came back, which, of course, you, as
well as Stanley, know is not true.

"He came to see me tonight. (…) And to repeat slander to

me, vicious stories that he had gotten from you! I gave
him his walking papers. (…) But then he came back. He
returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness! He
implored my forgiveness." (SND, Scene 10)

Blanche is supposed to be a Southern belle, an angel of the

house who is gentle, romantic and classy, she the stage instructions
upon arriving at Stella's house are that she is:

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 "/She is daintily dressed in a white suit with a fluffy
bodice, necklace and earrings of pearl, white gloves and
hat, looking as if she were arriving at a summer tea or a
cocktail party in a garden district./" (SND, Scene 1)

5. Memory play on a collective level

* Blanche's story = the story of the Old South

* Blanche's two essential problems are also the problems of the

American South, because the American South in the first half of the
twentieth century was such a sharp contrast to its previous glory. It
was decaying, the old and respectable families like the DuBois were
fading, they were poor and only had their name left. The economy was
bad, heavy urbanization was starting, there was nothing left of the old
southern chivalry. Basically, those two problems are:

1. living in the past

2. and the inability to cope with the present and the changes → a wish
to constantly remember the past and suit it to an image you want to
project for other people → the essence of the memory play.

6. The ending

"Whoever you are, I have always depended on the

kindness of strangers."

→ she continues to act as if the Doctor was a Prince Charming or the

Shep Huntleigh she's been waiting for all her life. Proof that Blanche
never actually reaches the third stage of the memory play but keeps
deluding herself?