Skip to main content

Southern literature often focuses on masculine identity, as seen in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and in Lillian Hellman's Toys in...

Julian in Hellman's play Toys in the Attic and Mitch in Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire are similar in that they are both devoted to female members of their families. Julian's two sisters, Anna and Carrie, dote on him and sacrifice for him, and Mitch is oddly connected to his elderly mother. Mitch explains during a poker game, "I gotta sick mother. She don't go to sleep until I come in at night" (Scene 3). He doesn't enjoy going out at night because he worries about his mother, and, similarly, Julian's ties to his sisters bring him home after his marriage to Lily. Both characters seem superficially sensitive to the women in their lives.


However, neither man is truly sympathetic. Julian is careless with the money his sisters give him. To tell them about how he's lost the shoe factory he invested their money in, he says, "Oh, that shoe factory. It's gone" (page 22). While he is off investing in a failed shoe factory, his sisters wear worn dresses, about which he thoughtlessly remarks to Anna, "The same dress?" (page 21). Mitch is similarly not as sensitive as he first appears. While a sense of guilt brings him home to his mother, he is actually insensitive. When Blanche tells him that the inscription that a dying girl wrote on his cigarette case is touching and that sick people have "deep, sincere attachments," Mitch responds, "that's right, they certainly do" (Scene 3). Mitch appears to be sensitive, but he is actually too unimaginative and commonplace to really feel sensitivity.


Mitch and Julian are different in that Julian is far more imaginative than Mitch. After he returns home with money, he wants Gus to buy a farm and tries to encourage his sisters to go abroad. He says, "Ah, can't I be romantic for a month" (page 53). Unlike Julian, Mitch is not imaginative. When he is faced with the reality of Blanche's past and her age, he deserts her. He is not a romantic like Julian and is swayed more by societal ideas about Blanche than by his sense of devotion to her.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.
Post a Comment
Read more