Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  But Hollywood, as the paramount cultural presence of the twentieth century, radically changed the fortunes of this play. The movie camera, with its pans and close-ups as well as such film-editing techniques as the jump-cut, have reshaped our expectations about drama. We now feel the full power of Shakespeare’s directorial conception in Antony and Cleopatra—his breathtakingly spacious establishment of the world-stage and his zooming intimacy with the erratic, up-and-down emotional intensities of his enamored stars.

  Furthermore, Hollywood, in its restoration of the pagan pantheon, has reeducated the world about sexual woman. Shakespeare’s willful, ambitious, moody, charismatic Cleopatra is familiar to us from her cinematic sisters, who have specialized in formidable femmes fatales. A constellation of modern personae passes before us when we see Cleopatra on stage, from Theda Bara and Marlene Dietrich to Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sharon Stone.

  The interpretive task facing the actress who plays Cleopatra is how to capture her multiform physicality, which Shakespeare presents as a principle of vitality comprehending far more than the sexual. Cleopatra as queen is identified with Isis, who as goddess of fertility brings life out of the sun-baked Nile mud. Cleopatra as hoyden has a charming prankishness, gamboling in the streets and offering spontaneity and fun to her Roman lovers from a more dour milieu. Cleopatra as virago is commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces, as well as a rash pugilist quick with fists or dagger.

  To bring all these elements together is a daunting challenge—even more so when we recall that it was a boy actor who premiered the role. Most modern actresses have gravitated toward one extreme or the other, playing Cleopatra either as a rowdy, capricious vixen (like Bizet’s Carmen) or as a cerebral dignitary whose mood changes seem like passing fits of dyspepsia.

  The real-life Cleopatra was not particularly beautiful, but she was known for her mastery of languages as well as for her shrewd conduct of foreign policy. Her fascinating uniqueness is shown by the fact that two quite different types of men fell in love with her—the stoical, censorious, teetotaling Julius Caesar and the flamboyant Mark Antony, with his hedonistic conviviality.

  The question of female leadership is very much on our minds today, as we urge women to break through the “glass ceiling” to the apex of business and politics. Antony and Cleopatra makes us ponder how much femininity a woman can or should retain as she assumes command. Does a woman’s overt sexuality strengthen or destabilize her hierarchical authority?

  In the Aeneid, Vergil recast Antony and Cleopatra, who killed themselves a year after Actium, as the legendary Aeneas and Dido, whose adulterous love affair ended in the latter’s suicide. The Phoenician queen, overseeing the construction of Carthage, is given Cleopatra’s managerial flair. Aeneas, a Trojan refugee, falls under her spell just as Antony did with Cleopatra.

  Like Vergil, Shakespeare shows woman as an obstruction to the male mandate of Roman destiny. “The personal is political,” contemporary feminism likes to say. Antony and Cleopatra asks if a person charged with ultimate public responsibility can ever live fully as a private person. When does true love or sexual adventurism distract, delude, and disable? And in the case of Caesar, can we confidently trust the design of society to career administrators who elevate the material and the general over the emotional and the specific?—like those in our own century who see life as pure economics, unleavened by spirituality or art.

  From the Roman point of view, Antony has become a dominatrix’s boy toy. Is this the irrational, misogynous prejudice of patriarchy? Or is it a painfully accurate perception of men’s sexual vulnerability to women? Most feminism has not seen how the boudoir and the harem become the nursery, where the weary male seeks swaddling, the all-forgiving tender touch of maternal consolation.

  Antony and Cleopatra’s love is magnificent but volcanic. It reaches great heights but sinks to terrible depths, which destroy the lovers as well as the political independence of Egypt. In seeking her own power, has Cleopatra, like Lady Macbeth or some American First Ladies, covertly used her man as proxy? Beloved by her maids and aides, perhaps Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is guilty of governing by coterie: on the battlefield of world politics, the family model breaks down—which may be one reason women have yet to achieve equality in leadership.

  Shakespeare’s England had recently emerged from a long, bloody period of civil wars. The playwright was born and entered professional life during the reign of a headstrong queen who kept sexuality at sword’s point. Antony and Cleopatra was first staged a few years after Elizabeth’s death, when British politics seemed sunk in the cynical mire.

  Our justifiable modern animus toward imperialism should not blind us to Shakespeare’s quite different premises. Because he had seen, in the anxiety-ridden transition from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean eras, how a lack of direction and vision at the top spreads to the nation at large, Shakespeare’s portrait of Caesar is more sympathetic and discerning than has usually been acknowledged. Shakespeare knew that the weakening and breakdown of social controls may at first seem to bring personal liberation and Dionysian ecstasy but can end in chaos—to which there is a predictable authoritarian reaction.

  I have learned more about politics from Antony and Cleopatra than from any Marxist or post-structuralist critique of society. The play integrates a subtle Freudian view of unconscious impulse and instinct with florid Baroque grandeur, the glamorization of personality found in Italian opera or Rubens’ historical paintings. Like Thucydides, Shakespeare elegiacally charts the waxing and waning of political hubris and the failure of lofty national dreams.

  As a feminist, I find Shakespeare’s harshest lesson to involve military preparedness. From Cleopatra’s disastrous misjudgments at Actium—where she forced the veteran army man Antony to fight by sea—I draw my belief in the urgent need for massive reeducation of women politicians. Compassion and caretaking are not enough to lead a nation. Conservative women have more easily reached the top—like Margaret Thatcher, who decisively went to war to protect the Falklands. All women who seek power must deeply study the history and art of warfare.

  Antony and Cleopatra balances the claims of nature and culture and explores the dark, swirling undercurrents in male and female sexuality. Shakespeare’s plays seem to change over time because each period brings its own assumptions to them. Caesar and Cleopatra look larger or smaller depending on the weight we assign to order or freedom. But Antony, torn between Rome and Egypt, remains much the same, a complex, tragic portrait of humanity’s irreconcilable differences.

  * [Program notes commissioned for a production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman at the National Theatre in London, October 20–December 3, 1998.]

  33

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE*

  1947, December 3

  Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire premieres at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York

  “Hey, there! Stella, Baby!”

  Marlon Brando, carrying a “red-stained package” from the butcher and sporting blue-denim work clothes as the lordly, proletarian Stanley Kowalski, ambles insolently onstage at the opening of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. “Bellowing” for his adoring yet tart-tongued wife, Stanley is the strutting male animal in his sexual prime. The setting is a seedy tenement in the multiracial French Quarter of New Orleans, whose picturesque verandas open to the humid air. Street sounds and sultry, insinuating jazz riffs float in and out.

  The exotic location, boisterous energy, and eruptions of violence in A Streetcar Named Desire were a startling contrast to the tightly wound gentility of Williams’ prior hit play, The Glass Menagerie (1944), whose fractured family is cloistered in a stuffy St. Louis flat. Streetcar exploded into the theater world at a time when Broadway was dominated by musical comedies and revivals. At the end of its premiere, the audience sat numb and then went wild, applaudin
g for thirty minutes. Critical responses ranged from positive to rapturous, with dissent coming only from Wolcott Gibbs and Mary McCarthy. Streetcar won the Pulitzer Prize and other major awards and ran for two years in New York before touring the country. European productions won enormous acclaim, except in England, where the verdict was split.

  Brando as Stanley was a volcanic force of nature. Leering, brooding, belching, mumbling, scratching himself, and smashing crockery on the floor, he exemplified a radical new style of naturalistic acting, “the Method,” which Brando learned from Stella Adler and which would gain public attention through Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York. Focusing on emotional truth and painful personal memory, the Method was developed in the 1930s by the leftist, ensemble-oriented Group Theater, which was following Konstantin Stanislavsky’s precepts for productions of realist plays (such as Chekhov’s) at the Moscow Art Theater. Brando, along with his friend Montgomery Clift, would transfer the Method into movie acting, as in the 1951 film of Streetcar, which was directed, like the play, by Elia Kazan. The repercussions from Brando’s performance in that film are still being felt among contemporary American male actors, who often do Brando without being aware of it.

  In its taboo-breaking style, Streetcar belonged to an oppositional strain that emerged in American culture following World War Two. The near-universal patriotism of the war years, galvanized to defeat German and Japanese imperialism, continued in mainstream American society and media for nearly two decades. But it was countered by an underground variously represented by abstract expressionism, bebop, and the Beats, as well as existentialism imported from Paris. There was a touch of the cynical hipster in Brando’s impudent delivery of Stanley’s brusque, satirically deadpan lines. Brando’s raw primitivism was also a jolting departure from the slickness of the prettified glamour boys of the Hollywood studio, and it prefigured the youth rebellion of the 1950s, including rock ’n’ roll—to whose iconography Brando would contribute through his role as the black-leather-clad leader of a motorcycle gang in a low-budget 1953 film, The Wild One.

  The rude, crude Stanley Kowalski, with his iconic white t-shirt and his immigrant ethnicity, was evidently based on two men: a St. Louis factory worker of that name and a Mexican boxer, Pancho Gonzalez, who was one of Williams’ butch lovers. Stanley has a tinge of “rough trade,” a gay male staple—the street hustler, hot and dangerous. In Streetcar’s rowdy scenes of men playing poker, bowling, cursing, and brawling, Williams is gazing longingly at male bonding from his distant outsider’s position. (An earlier title for the play, which was partly inspired by a Van Gogh painting of a billiard hall, was The Poker Game.) Williams was a small, effeminate gay man (his adult height was 5'6") who had been called “sissy” by neighborhood boys and “Miss Nancy” by his bullying, rejecting father. Williams would immortalize his father’s bumptious authoritarianism in the garrulous, overbearing Big Daddy of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

  The shocking frankness with which Streetcar treated sex—as a searingly revolutionary force—was at odds with the dawning domesticity of the postwar era and looked forward instead to the 1960s sexual revolution. Williams drew much of his philosophy of sex from D. H. Lawrence, whose wife Frieda he visited in Taos, New Mexico, in 1939, when he was planning to write a play about Lawrence’s death. What distinguishes Williams from other American playwrights of leftist social realism, such as Arthur Miller (whose Death of a Salesman made a sensation in 1949), is his florid Romantic emotionalism and love of beauty, as well as his Romantic reverence for barbaric, elemental nature. Emotional expressiveness is so central to Williams that Irene Selznick, the producer of Streetcar, refused to produce his next play, The Rose Tattoo, because she said it was an “opera,” not a play.

  Streetcar’s historical background, embodied in the fluttery, flirtatious Blanche DuBois, is the decay of the agrarian Old South and the rise of gritty, prosaic urban industrialism. All of Williams’ plays, until The Night of the Iguana in 1961, were set in the South. (The latter play takes place in a ramshackle hotel in Mexico.) Like William Faulkner, Williams portrays the psychological landscape of Southern decadence, with its guilt, squalor, and self-destructive fantasy. But Williams has greater faith in the sheer mesmerizing power of human personality. His major women characters are flamboyant, instinctive actresses—sometimes literally so, as with the aging movie star Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

  The ultra-theatrical Blanche is one of Williams’ relentless, nonstop talkers. Other examples are Amanda Wingfield, the suffocatingly overprotective mother in The Glass Menagerie, and Violet Venable, a malign New Orleans aristocrat in the 1958 one-act play, Suddenly Last Summer. (Violet was played by Katharine Hepburn in the stunning movie of Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and released in 1959.) All these women were inspired by Williams’ own overpowering mother, with her pretensions of Southern refinement and her pathologically incessant talking, which one visitor described as a “nightmare.”

  Blanche is a dreamer who lives by language, the medium of the playwright’s art. She creates poetry and illusion through her flights of rhetoric, which transform the harsh, bare environment. Blanche is literally a conduit of Romanticism: we hear that she taught Poe, Whitman, and Hawthorne to resistant high-school students in the country. It is through words alone that she re-creates the vanished world of Southern chivalry. She cries, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” Blanche’s love of imagination and artifice clashes with the humdrum routine of the practical, utilitarian world, embodied in Stanley’s curt, deflating minimalism. (Williams derives great humor from the two characters’ competitive conversational rhythm.) As the play proceeds, the number and speed of words begin to increase and cloud the air, signaling Blanche’s hallucinatory memories and descent into madness. Blanche’s aggressive talking and baroque fantasies will live again in the caustic termagant Martha in Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).

  Williams said of his work, “I draw every character out of my very multiple split personality. My heroines always express the climate of my interior world at the time in which those characters were created.” Elia Kazan claimed that Blanche DuBois was Tennessee Williams. She has his sexual hedonism, restlessness, and love of illusion, as well as his chronic alcoholism (he also abused pills). The enterprisingly nymphomaniac Blanche is Williams’ champion in his self-proclaimed war against American puritanism. Williams attributed his mother’s hysteria and his sister Rose’s mental instability to sexual repression: “They were both victims of excessive propriety.” (Rose, who was lobotomized at a state hospital in Missouri, was the model for Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.)

  Like Blanche, Williams was uprooted from his Southern birthplace and became a refugee. He spent his first seven “idyllic” years in Mississippi before his family’s traumatic move to St. Louis. He would live in sixteen different houses before he was fifteen. Williams became a compulsive traveler. Though a millionaire from the movie rights to his work, he lived in hotel rooms and would die alone in one. He said in his 1975 memoirs, “I live like a gypsy, I am a fugitive.” Amid his bleak St. Louis surroundings, he developed a nostalgia for what he imagined to be the grace and elegance of the antebellum South. An enormous early influence on him in Mississippi was his family’s black servant, Ozzie, who told him and his sister African-American and Native American folk tales.

  Williams understood that the Southern claim of aristocracy, enabled by the atrocity of slavery, was built on lies. Hence in Streetcar the ancestral DuBois plantation, lost to creditors, is called Belle Reve—that is, “beautiful dream.” But the dream was always a patchwork of illogic: the French noun rêve is masculine, so the estate’s name should properly be “Beau Reve.” Williams had already used “Belle Reve” as the title of an adolescent poem where he fantasized about living on a Missouri plantation with his parents. The name was evidently suggested by a shrine of St. Louis snobbery,
the Bellerive Country Club (meaning “beautiful riverbank”), where his mother strove for social acceptance and where, as a teenager, he would slip on a diving board and knock out all of his front teeth. (He had to wear dentures for the rest of his life.) Hence Bellerive/Belle Reve was a beckoning mirage that led to failure, humiliation, and mutilation.

  The archetypal Southern belle whom Blanche so desperately plays, eighty years after the Civil War, would have been instantly recognizable to audiences from Scarlett O’Hara of Gone with the Wind, the blockbuster film (based on Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller) that had been released in a tremendous burst of international publicity just eight years earlier. (Coincidentally, a British actress, Vivien Leigh, would win two Academy Awards for Best Actress for playing both Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois.) Belle Reve is partly Tara, the family plantation for which Scarlett fights tax collectors and carpetbaggers. But it is also (as Williams attested) the cherry orchard in Chekhov’s 1904 play of that name, a precious patrimony that is mortgaged and seized by vulgarians.

  A residue of Williams’ transsexual self-projection into the archly predatory Blanche is perhaps discernible in her seductive exchange with the newsboy, toward whom she directs such blatant come-ons as “You make my mouth water.” Williams said that Blanche, soliciting the startled newsboy, has become Allan, her young gay husband, whom she shamed into suicide. A Streetcar Named Desire was unusually forthright about homosexuality at a time when the subject was bowdlerized or demonized by Hollywood movies. Homosexuality was explicitly forbidden under the Motion Picture Production Code: These Three, for example, a 1936 film based on Lillian Hellman’s hit play, The Children’s Hour, substituted a heterosexual triangle for the central plot motif of lesbianism, which was expunged.