Recently I’ve been studying and comparing two seemingly very different plays – The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. The first is a mid 16th century play, the second a mid 20th century one, but the similarities between their attitudes to insanity are worryingly similar in some ways.
There are fundamental differences between the treatment of madness in The Duchess of Malfi and A Streetcare Named Desire, of course, but it is the similarities which I found so striking. It made me wonder if attitudes had really changed that much in the three hundred years between the two eras, and if they are still the same now. Bedlam of 16th century London and psychiatric hospitals which lobotomised patients in ‘50s America both exhibit the same fundamental impulses towards mental illness. We fear it. We are uneasy around it. We see the chaos that surrounds it. We would like to put it out of sight and forget it. Authors use it now, as they always have, to create an alternative view of the world, to say what can only be said by those outside of society’s norms. They use it to warn, but also to entertain and excite. I don’t see that human reactions are much different now than they have ever been.
Williams’ tenderness for those who suffer the flying apart of reality, those who hide behind fantasy and illusion to protect themselves from the glare of reality is, however, quite different from Webster’s cold, perhaps even judgemental, depiction of the mad. Williams’ sister was taken to a mental hospital and lobotomised; it is hard not to see a parallel with the fragile, vulnerable Blanche who could no longer confront life’s hard realities. During the play, Stanley who is on the side of the real and the sane, is depicted as brutal, wilfully dismantling Blanche’s constructed fantasies revealing the cowering, broken woman beneath. The pathos of the weak woman who is destroyed by life and its cruelties is at the very heart of what the play shows us. Webster’s detached, clinical charting of the descent of the corrupt and perverse Ferdinand into madness and death is of a very different character. Ferdinand has tortured and killed the beautiful, vital and loving Duchess, either for his own gain or for more twisted perverted motives; the audience are not likely to have much sympathy for him as he wrestles on the floor with his own shadow and can no longer see the world as it is, but as it appears to him in his head. Despite the differences in the audience’s reaction, the way these authors view madness is not as diametrically opposed as you might suppose.
Both characters, Blanche and Ferdinand, become mad as a result of the dissidence between what society wants, expects and requires of them and what they can and wish to give. Blanche is supposed to be the perfect Southern Belle. She certainly tries to play that part. But despite her dissembling, it is very soon obvious that she drinks to excess and is sexually promiscuous. Neither of those things can be tolerated by her society. Her life is ruined by the ruin of her reputation. Having slept with the soldiers on the army base as well as men in the town, she finally comes down to having an inappropriate affair with a seventeen year old student of hers at the High School. She is turned out of town for that and there is no way back. However much we may sympathise with why she has slid down this slope, society can not accept that a woman should behave this way. (The sympathy we feel as a modern audience is stretched thin here too – she is preying on the weak as much as she is preyed upon.) In the same way, Ferdinand’s sexual desires are unacceptable. He desires his sister – or at least the play can certainly be interpreted that way. His graphic description of his imaginings of his sister having sex with a succession of sexy, working class men would certainly seem to suggest he has some inappropriate impulses.
F-Talk to me somewhat – quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.
C-With whom?
F-Happily with some strong-thighed bargeman,
Or one o’th’wood yard that can quoit the sledge
Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire
That carries coals up to her privy lodgings.
You can imagine that he longs for the money and power he can have if his sister is gone, and also you can imagine his rage when he is not obeyed and considered in his sister’s plans. But, for me, the most compelling reason he kills the Duchess is that he cannot face his own desires and kills his sister to escape them. Ferdinand and Blanche are both outside society’s expected norms when it comes to their sexuality. Is it a coincidence that madness results?
Both Ferdinand and Blanche also feel guilt and have suffered trauma – this seems to be the root of their madness. Blanche’s husband kills himself when she says she is disgusted by him (when she discovers he is homosexual) and she never recovers from that. As the play advances, the music of the Varsouviana plays to signal the memory of her husband is triggered. As it becomes more intrusive and sinister, her madness advances. Ferdinand orders the killing of his sister, but when he sees her dead, he is overwhelmed. “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.” It is from this moment that we chart his full descent into madness. The wolf he believes he is has its hair on the inside – to torture him as he tortured the Duchess. Although we may be able to forgive Blanche’s fatal lack of understanding of her husband, and fully blame Ferdinand for his murderous and bloodthirsty killing of the Duchess, they have both suffered traumas and both feel guilt and grief. They have both lost the one they love – through their own fault.
Webster’s society looked on madness as inexplicable and terrifying, but it also had a weird fascination. It could entertain, it could be used to comment on society and its ills, as we see in Webster’s madmen in Act IV of The Duchess of Malfi. They are meant not only to torture and frighten the Duchess, but also to entertain the audience with their comments on contemporary society (the tailor driven mad by the fast changing English fashions; the lawyer driven mad by the madness of the law). Williams, on the other hand, showed interest and understanding without the horror and amusement we see in Webster. The fact, however, that one contemporary audience cheered Stanley’s rape of Blanche might show that he and his audiences had startlingly different perspectives.
We might like to think that twenty-first century society has moved past that desire to laugh at the mad, or to categorise them as ‘other’ so that the chaos they bring can be safely put aside. I wonder how far this is the case. We make progress, perhaps, but our lack of understanding of the diseases of the mind, and our fear of becoming less ourselves and losing control over our perception of what is and is not real, these things remain.
Essentially, the reason why we still watch and read The Duchess of Malfi and A Streetcar Named Desire is that they look at things which still concern us, fascinate us and terrify us. If we had found an answer to the problems these plays discuss, we might not still want to watch them. As a society, we still don’t know how to respond to mental illness, and so the plight of Blanche, and even of Ferdinand, are still relevant.
Enjoy English 