Blanche
The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams's Greatest Creation
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
A penetrating consideration of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring character—Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire—written by the co-author of The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters and Furious Love.
Ever since Jessica Tandy glided onto the stage in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947, Blanche DuBois has fascinated generations of audiences worldwide and secured a place in the history of literature, theater, and film. One of Williams’s greatest creations, Blanche has bedazzled, amused, and broken the hearts of generations of audiences. Before the Covid pandemic, the stage classic was performed somewhere in the world every hour. It has been adapted into a ballet and an opera, and it was satirized in an episode of The Simpsons. The final twelve words Blanche utters at the play’s end—“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”—have taken on a life of their own. Endlessly fascinating, this indelible figment of one of America’s greatest midcentury playwrights garners nearly universal interest—but why?
In Blanche, Nancy Schoenberger searches for the answer. An exploration of the cultural impact of Blanche DuBois, Schoenberger’s absorbing study examines Tennessee Williams's most enduring creation through the performances of seven brilliant actresses who have taken on the role—Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Ann-Margret, Jessica Lange, Patricia Clarkson, Cate Blanchett, and Jemier Jemier Jenkins—as well as the influence of the playwright's tragic sister, Rose Williams, the person he was most haunted and inspired by. In examining various Blanches from throughout the decades and their critical reception, Schoenberger analyzes how our perception and understanding of this mesmerizing figure has altered and deepened over time. Exploring themes of womanhood, sexuality, mental illness, and the idealized South, Blanche is an engrossing cultural history of a rich and complex character that sheds light on who we are.
Blanche includes 20-30 color and black-and-white photographs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this illuminating portrait, Schoenberger (Furious Love), an English professor at William & Mary, explores the cultural significance of Tennessee Williams's bewitching, doomed Blanche DuBois—a "rich, multifaceted" character in A Streetcar Named Desire who evolved "through the psyches of the many actresses who played her." Inspired by Williams's high-strung, mentally ill sister Rose and perhaps his own alter ego, Blanche was born of "the Old South, land of terrors and of dreams," and was emblematic of both the "exaggerated... femininity of the Southern belle" and the darker legacies it masked. Refined, English-born actor Jessica Tandy highlighted Blanche's canny, schoolmarmish qualities when she played her in 1947, though she was sometimes outshone by costar Marlon Brando, while mentally fragile Vivien Leigh's bipolar illness "began to assert itself" as she played the character on the London stage in 1951. Ann-Margret's 1984 TV Blanche was a self-confident steel magnolia, while Jessica Lange's 1992 portrayal brought out the character's tragic, deluded loneliness. Black actor Jemier Jenkins's 2018 depiction was fueled by a fragile, fighting spirit, and spotlighted "how Blanche helps us ‘unpack' " different ideas of feminism: Blanche is "a mess, but she wants better," Jenkins said. Schoenberger's detailed account is packed with vibrant cultural specifics and trenchant analysis, and she keeps up a brisk pace that will have readers turning pages. Theater and pop culture fans, take note.
