It’s always tempting to categorise characters in a novel or play.  I feel we have a tendency to want them to be ‘baddies’ or ‘goodies’.  We want to love them or hate them.  No wonder the dramas where we can give this desire full reign are so popular. Comic book heroes and villains (like Batman and the Joker, Superman and Lex Luther), fantasy fights between good and evil (like Harry Potter and Voldemort) are so loved whole-heartedly by millions. It is not only for this reason, but it is a relief not to have to check yourself and say, ‘I’m sure they have their good points’, or ‘They can’t be all good – they must have their flaws’. We can just blindly embrace the caricature in simplicity and naivety. I love these black and white battles as much as anyone, and I also appreciate that many incarnations of these stories are introducing more nuanced characterisation, but I can’t escape the feeling of safety these stories give you. In these stories, there is no way of mistaking who is good and who is bad. If only life were like that!

Novelists and playwrights who have a desire to draw more from life and search for psychological realism cannot give us this warm, safe feeling. They wish to discuss life, what is important in the human condition, and we know that life is not as simple as this black and white division. Duncan, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ironically states that ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face’ when he discovers that the Thane of Cawdor has betrayed him.  Obviously, this is ironic because he bestows the title on Macbeth who will go on to murder him and take his crown.  But he is right. Not only can we not tell by someone’s face, but it is also hard to tell their character from their demeanour. An older source says, ‘By their fruits you shall know them’. Perhaps this is the only true way to judge a person accurately, but this takes time, insight and wisdom to discern; most of us lack at least one of these attributes!

Finding out who is good and who is not is, however, a fruitless task, because, as we all know, very few of us are truly either.  Most of us are a grey mixture of hopes, good intentions, selfish impulses and careless self-centredness. There may be a few of the human race who we may fairly say, whatever their good points, they are too overshadowed by evil for us to care about their virtues. Opinions may differ, but perhaps Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Jack the Ripper and Fred West may be amongst these.  The rest of us, though, are neither perfectly good, or perfectly evil. The best literature acknowledges this.

Tennessee Williams put this idea into words when he wrote:

I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.

When studying A Streetcar Named Desire students often can’t wait to make Blanche the heroine and Stanley the villain. It simplifies a complex world. Stanley wins and Blanche loses. The society they move in determines that. The New South with its new and hard expectations damns Blanche, so Stanley’s shining of that cruel light on her vulnerable frailties destroys her. You can imagine, though, the ‘Polak’ Stanley at Belle Reve in an earlier time, being destroyed by Blanche and her kind and their snobbish distain. I am not saying that I don’t sympathise with Blanche.  I do.  Her life has been hard and she has found no refuge from the realities of death, isolation and loneliness. Her personality began to disintegrate and, as she crumbled, she sought help from her sister, only to be destroyed by her sister’s husband. She does not deserve the fate that awaits her at the end of the play. Williams’ sister was incarcerated in an asylum, and the tender feeling he has for the vulnerable may well stem from his personal experience. But Blanche is a promiscuous alcoholic who has preyed on a young man, using her position to form a relationship based on sexual need rather than love and respect. Her disgust at her young husband’s homosexuality is what ultimately drove him to commit suicide. Her guilt, and her need to hide it, contribute to her descent into madness.

Stanley, a war veteran who, no doubt, witnessed atrocities at Salerno during the Second World War, shines the light of truth on Blanche to discover her lies and fabrications. In another story, he might have appeared to be the hero. Instead, his violence, towards Stella who he loves, and then towards Blanche who he hates, makes his truth seem like brutality. He is a bully, not only of his wife, but also of his friend Mitch, whose vulnerability is easy prey to this ‘man’s man’. He shows no compunction in stripping away Blanche’s shell to reveal her faults and weakness. He has no empathy, not even for the pregnant Stella as he beats her, only to cry in remorse immediately afterwards. The coldest of all, he rapes Blanche. His prey, down and bleeding, must be finished off. He takes his pleasure, destroying her in the process.  He also betrays his wife by cruelly torturing her sister to assert his masculinity.

Neither Blanche nor Stanley is unflawed. We may root for Blanche and hate Stanley, but each is vulnerable and destructive. Each is dependent on their environment for their power. Blanche’s environment is dying – the corrupt Old South was in decline. Stanley’s is in the ascendant.

As an audience member or a reader we need to have sympathies for the characters, or else why bother to watch or read?  But in the end, it is the flawed, desperate human beings that attract us most. They tell us about ourselves, in all our ‘tainted glory’.