Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Authorizing History: Victimization in "A Streetcar Named Desire"

1986; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3208047

1086-332X

Anca Vlasopolos,

Theatre and Performance Studies

In a remark characteristic of judgments passed on modem drama, a critic notes that if Shakespeare had written A Streetcar Named Desire, it would have been called a problem play.1 Like Elizabethan and later problem plays, themselves so dubbed because term gives least offense, A Streetcar Named Desire raises questions about genre and ethics, as well as about performance and audience response.2 While the ideology of dramatic genre conceals the victimization inherent in tragic and comic form, both the problem plays of earlier centuries and the crisis plays of the twentieth tend rather to unmask the violence involved in victimization. This unmasking has disturbed critics and audiences alike. The problem comes from the strategies that these plays deploy to implicate the viewer in their violent processes of historiography the processes of constructing a narrative of the characters' pasts instead of purging the viewer of emotions associated with crises. A Streetcar Named Desire makes explicit an issue announced, but still undeclared, in earlier problem plays, namely, the narrative authority of history-makers and story-tellers versus the dramatic representation of the victims of that authority.