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Notes on tragedy in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (Edexcel English A Level)
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Detailed notes on what makes Williams' 'A Streetcar Named Desire' a tragedy. Very useful for context and AO3 in exams.
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TragedyAristotle watched many tragedies and in his ‘Poetics’ wrote about the features which
distinguished them.
➢ Hamartia: protagonist’s error of judgement
➢ Tragic flaw: flaw in the psychological make-up of the protagonist
➢ Anagnorisis: recognition of a tragic error of judgement
➢ Hubris: excessive pride which brings down divine punishment
➢ Megalopsychia: ‘greatness of soul’; not totally good
➢ Unities - time, place, action: time of action should be limited, as should the location
➢ Catastrophe: ‘turning upside’, a calamitous outcome
➢ Peripeteia: protagonist changes situation from seemingly secure to vulnerable
➢ Nemesis: the inevitable punishment or cosmic payback for acts of hubris
A.C. Bradley:
➢ Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)
➢ Tragic flaw is the psychological makeup of the character, not to be confused with
Aristotle’s notion of hamartia, which is a matter of action rather than character.
➢ ‘What we do feel strongly, as tragedy advances to its close, is that calamity and
catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men, and that the main source of
these deeds is character.’
Where does the tragedy of Blanche lie? Her defeat, her eventual institutionalisation or
elsewhere?
Is Blanche the heroine, aggressor or victim?
➢ Her bravery lies in her ability to go on and continue life outside her sphere of the old
south.
➢ She is all three.
19th century interpretations:
➢ Georg Hegel
➢ Tragedies dramatise the conflict between competing value and belief systems
➢ Downplays the audience’s emotional reaction to a character’s suffering
➢ Blanche is a victim of Stanley as well as what he represents
➢ The suffering of an individual was an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of a
battle of ideas
➢ Friedrich Nietzsche describes an archetypal struggle between restraint (Apolloanian)
and passion (Dionysian) in the human condition.
➢ In Blanche, there is a struggle between the restraint she is taught by her old south
background and her inner Dionysian side
➢ Battle between the superego and the id
➢ The superego is developed last and is what you show the outside world, while the id
consists of animalistic urges and childish behaviour
➢ Her id shows in the scene when the young man visits her, and when she finds the
whiskey
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